Inside Baseball: The Best of Tom Verducci (22 page)

“I joke about it now,” Gossage says. “People go, ‘God, Goose, you looked so mean!’ I was scared to death. Fear of failure is a big motivator. When you’re a closer, every game is huge. You’re out there on the mound s------- down your leg, the game is on the line, you’ve got all this adrenaline running through your body, and somehow you’ve got to get ahold of your emotions.

“When you fail, it’s awful. Sometimes I drank. Sometimes I just sat around the clubhouse. You go home, you have trouble sleeping. First thing when you wake up, you feel that sinking feeling in your stomach. It’s like waking up to a disaster, almost like a sickness in your family. It’s almost too much to take. Sometimes the pressure did get to me. Sometimes I’d be short with my family. They suffered.”

The physical demands of the closer’s job have eased since pitchers like Gossage were asked to put out fires in the seventh inning and finish the game. Today’s closers might throw little more than half the innings of their counterparts of 20 or 30 years ago, who often did more than 100 innings of heavy lifting in a season. The evolution of specialized layers of relief pitching also has turned the closer’s job into such a well-insulated one that the term
fireman
has disappeared from baseball vernacular. The typical closer doesn’t answer distress calls anymore. He usually enters a game with no one on base and is asked to pitch no more than one inning. For instance, Antonio Alfonseca of the Marlins led the majors with 45 saves last season and never entered a game with the tying run on base. Ryan Kohlmeier of the Orioles, who is 23 years old and has 19 career saves, is treated like a sultan; he hadn’t worked more than one inning at a time until last Saturday, when he pitched 1
¹
/
₃
against the Expos. Jeff Shaw of the Dodgers pitched exactly one inning in 28 of his first 30 appearances this season.

As closers have moved more deeply into the realm of highly specialized labor, the mental toll has become greater than the physical one. A closer will pitch only about 5% of his team’s innings over the course of a season—and spend the other 95% of the time waiting, like a storm chaser, for the confluence of events that requires him to go to work. Surviving the nightly anxiety, and those inevitable episodes of abject failure, are the most difficult parts of the job.

There is an old saying among closers that the most important qualification for the job is a short memory. “I learned from Lee Smith,” Angels closer Troy Percival says of the alltime saves leader, whose major league career ended in 1997. “I’ve seen him give up a game-winning grand slam, and 10 minutes later in the clubhouse you’d never know it. He’d be his usual self.”

“I get over the bad games right away,” says the Yankees’ Mariano Rivera, who shows as little emotion as any closer in baseball. “Sometimes I’ve let it go even before I’ve left the mound. That quick. Why? Because it’s over. What can you do about it? Nothing. The only thing you can do is fight if you’re still in the game. After that you can do nothing.”

Closers like Benitez and John Rocker of the Braves, whose engines always redline, are increasingly rare. Baseball executives fear that those emotional, maximum-effort pitchers will flame out the way Rob Dibble did. The former hard-throwing Reds righthander blew out his arm and was finished as a closer at 29. He saved 20 games in a season only twice.

Rivera, lean, perpetually calm and clean-shaven, is the cutting-edge übercloser. There is nothing intimidating about him, other than a hellacious cut fastball and a 0.38 postseason ERA. “The best there is,” Percival says. Like Rivera, Hoffman, Percival and Robb Nen of the Giants all project an even temperament. All four served apprenticeships as setup men before proving they had the fortitude to close games—and they are the only active pitchers who have saved 30 games in each of the past three seasons.

“Some guys don’t have the stomach for pitching the ninth inning,” Twins manager Tom Kelly says. “They’re great in the eighth but don’t want anything to do with the ninth. You have to find out. It might take a while, but you’ll find out.”

The jury is still out on Kelly’s 28-year-old closer, LaTroy Hawkins. The righthander failed as a starter for all or parts of five seasons with the Twins. Last year he was shunted to the bullpen and, around the All-Star break, auditioned as a closer. Suddenly he’d found his niche, converting 30 of the 32 save opportunities that followed. Easy, right? Somebody named Matt Karchner tied a White Sox record by converting 20 consecutive save chances over the 1997 and ’98 seasons. He was traded to the Cubs on July 29, 1998, but didn’t record a single save during the parts of three seasons he spent with them and disappeared from the majors. Hawkins, like any aspiring closer, won’t know if he’s fit for the job until he slumps.

Red Sox reliever Rod Beck, who has 263 career saves, tried to make that point to the team’s emerging closer Derek Lowe, while Lowe was converting 42 of 47 save chances last year. “I told Derek, ‘Listen, I don’t expect you to understand this, but you have no idea what this job is about.’” Lowe wound up pitching in 74 games and went 4–4. “I thought it was the greatest job in the world,” Lowe says. “This year I was 1–5 after 11 games! Self-doubt began to creep into my mind. I got beat three times on curveballs. I got beat on pitches in the hittable zone, whereas last year they were sinking out of the hittable zone. It hurt. Your team works all game long to get you the ball, and then you lose it. I’ve learned you have to push away that doubt. Now I’m trying to go out there and just pitch, and whatever happens, happens. I don’t want to feel as if it’s life or death.”

The Rangers promoted setup man Tim Crabtree to closer after John Wetteland retired at the end of last season. The 31-year-old Crabtree is a six-year veteran with a live fastball and a hard slider, the kind of pitches that baseball people like to call “closer’s stuff” because managers typically like strikeout pitchers to throw the last inning. (The theory is that the less often the ball is put in play, the less can go wrong.) After six weeks—including three on the DL with lower-back pain—and two blown saves, Crabtree lost his job closing. “You think you’re ready, but it’s something you’re not going to understand until you go through it,” Crabtree says. “As a setup man I pretty much knew when I was pitching. Jeff Zimmerman and I knew it was one guy on and the other guy off every night.

“What I found with closing is you have to recharge yourself every night,” Crabtree continues. “Every day you’re on call for that ninth inning. Mentally, that gets tiring. The other difference is when you blow a game. You feel like you let down 24 guys and seven coaches and management. It’s tough to look your teammates in the eye after they worked so hard to get a lead for eight innings over three hours and you lose it just like that. When you don’t get it done, it’s more frustrating than just having a bad outing as a setup man.”

In the 1992 draft the Indians used their first pick on righthander Paul Shuey with the intent of grooming him as a closer. Shuey is 30 and has still never been a full-time closer in the big leagues. The Indians have converted a succession of former starters and setup men—Jose Mesa, Mike Jackson and Steve Karsay—into closers in that time, and last year they traded a rising star slugger, Richie Sexson, to get another closer, Bob Wickman, but Shuey still has not graduated from pitching the seventh and eighth innings. “Shuey has power stuff, three ‘plus’ pitches that give him closer’s stuff,” Cleveland assistant general manager Mark Shapiro says. “But closing is not just stuff. Strike-throwing consistency is huge. He’s had problems repeating his delivery. That’s not unusual for pitchers who have violence in their delivery.”

Rivera has an easy motion, and his ability to throw strikes is yet another element that sets him apart. He is so efficient with his pitches that Yankees manager Joe Torre often uses him in the eighth inning, knowing Rivera can throw more than one inning and still pitch the next day. Through the first 10 weeks of this season he had pitched more than one inning to get a save six times, the most in the majors. Over the same period 17 closers, including Alfonseca, Benitez, Hawkins and Wickman, had yet to work more than one inning for a save.

The closer isn’t a modern invention, only a modern convention. Firpo Marberry saved 22 games for the 1926 Washington Senators without starting a trend. (The save rule was established in ’69; previous totals have been derived by researchers from box scores and game accounts.) Marberry’s “record” stood for 23 years, during which complete games were common and most teams used their starting pitchers out of the bullpen between starts. The success of the Yankees’ Joe Page, a mediocre starter, as a relief pitcher from ’47 through ’49 prompted other teams to employ a specialist who was summoned in close games, regardless of which team was winning. Roy Face won a record 18 games in relief for the ’59 Pirates in that manner.

Then, in 1979, Cubs manager Herman Franks came up with a novel way to use Bruce Sutter, his relief specialist, who was on the DL with a pulled muscle in ’77 and was arm weary in the second half of ’78. Franks lightened Sutter’s load by using him only if the Cubs were winning. Franks was ahead of his time (though he did resign before the end of that season and never managed again). In the late ’80s La Russa, then the A’s manager, refined the job further with Dennis Eckersley, who was used mostly when the A’s had a lead and only to start the ninth inning.

Today, in a game so rich in strategic possibilities that half the fun is kicking around the what-would-you-have-dones, every manager agrees in Stepford-like fashion exactly how to run a bullpen. No manager dares use his best reliever to pitch to the middle of the order in the seventh inning—and seldom in the eighth—of a close game. No manager dares
not
to use his closer with a lead of three runs or less in the ninth, the main requirement for a save. Percival, in fact, will start warming for those situations without Angels manager Mike Scioscia’s even calling the bullpen. No other statistic dictates actual strategic decisions the way the save does. Indeed, if a home team adds a fourth run to its lead in the eighth inning, the closer will stop warming. Someone else will pitch the ninth.

“A good strategy is to try to build on a good year,” La Russa says about the three-run gimme save. “How does he get a good year going? By piling up saves, like a hitter hits .300 or a starting pitcher gets wins. So, if you have a three-run lead and your closer is available, you ought to get him that one because he’s going to have plenty of one-run leads.”

Bobby Thigpen of the White Sox set the single-season save record with 57 in 1990. Still, in this Age of the Specialized Bullpen, the irony is that, despite the “advances” made in establishing layers of relief pitchers, teams are no more successful at protecting late leads now than they were 10 or 20 years ago—in fact, they are slightly worse. According to the Elias Sports Bureau, teams taking a one-run lead into the ninth inning last season won 83.9% of the time. Given a one- or two-run lead heading into the ninth, they won 88.7% of the time. In 1990 those conversion rates were 86.4% and 90.7%, respectively. If you go back to 1980, a year in which only three pitchers saved 30 or more games (15 did so last year) and the idea of paying a setup man $4 million was absurd, teams cashed in 84.7% and 89.6% of such opportunities, a better rate than they do today.

Get the ball to the closer
has become the unchallenged strategy. No starting pitcher has ended a World Series with a complete game since Jack Morris of the Twins did it in 1991. No team that played a full season has won a world championship without a closer getting 30 saves since the ’88 Dodgers, who split the job primarily among Jay Howell, Jesse Orosco and Alejandro Pena. (They combined for 42.) “You want a guy who creates the feeling when he comes in that the game’s over,” says Scioscia, the catcher for that ’88 L.A. team. “You have to use your closer carefully, because you don’t want to burn him out, but you can’t be afraid to use him when a save situation comes up. You worry most about the mental grind with a closer, and that’s why you look for a guy with the mental makeup to handle the job.”

The ones who survive the anxiety and the failure usually forge their own kind of mental armor, tricks of their trade that become as unique as a family crest. “You have to treat every day the same,” Beck says, “until it feels like
Groundhog Day
.” Smith would nap on a training table for the first six innings. Percival would gulp down a six-pack of cola and a dozen cups of coffee every night—until a biochemist told him last winter that his body was grossly dehydrated because of all the caffeine. (Percival has cut his coffee intake to five cups, maybe three of which are decaffeinated, while drinking a gallon of water daily.) When Tom Gordon saved 46 games in 47 opportunities for Boston in 1998, he spent the early innings of every game chomping fried chicken in the office of manager Jimy Williams.

Hoffman spends most of the game in the clubhouse “developing a little quiet zone” while watching television, stretching and getting a massage. “If I time it right, I’ll get to the bullpen five or 10 minutes before I come into the game,” he says. Billy Wagner of the Astros throws four warmup pitches—and four pitches only, rather than the customary eight—when he enters a game “because I want everybody to know I mean business and I’m ready to go.” For three years Billy Koch of the Blue Jays has carried a stuffed goat, a gift from his sister in homage to his wispy goatee.

Facial hair, in fact, is to closers what masks were to Greek thespians. From Hall of Famer Rollie Fingers (handlebar mustache) to Gossage (Fu Manchu) to Al Hrabosky (horseshoe mustache) to Eckersley (swarthy mustache) to Doug Jones (push-broom-style mustache) to Kerry Ligtenberg (Edwardian sideburns) to Koch, closers have a long history of assuming an identity through the creative growth of facial hair, whether intimidation is their motivation or not. “Hey, I waited 27 years to grow anything on my face,” says Wagner, who sports a mustache and goatee. “I was trying to get out of that Billy the Kid phase.”