The Evolution of Pitcher Usage - Dennis Eckersley

by Lincoln Mitchell

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NOTE - This article comes from Lincoln Mitchell's Substack page, Kibitzing with Lincoln . Please click HERE to follow Lincoln on Substack.

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The 1978 Red Sox were one of the most memorable teams in baseball history. As most knowledgeable fans know, the Red Sox ended the regular season in a tie with the Yankees, for the best record in the AL East, and indeed all of baseball, after blowing a lead of 14 games. The Sox then lost a dramatic one game playoff to the Yankees who went on to win the World Series. Most fans associate that team with Jim Rice, Fred Lynn, Yaz, Carlton Fisk and Luis Tiant, but the best pitcher on that team, who had second most WAR of any Red Sox player that year, was Dennis Eckersley, who went 20-9 with a 2.99 ERA and 16 complete games.

From 1975-1985, through his age 30 season, Eckersley was one of the best starting pitchers in baseball, winning 145 games, with an ERA of 3.59, good enough for 43.5 WAR. He was on track to have a strong Hall of Fame candidacy, but then he had an off-year in 1986 for the Cubs and many in baseball thought he was finished. Then, the second half, and for our purposes more interesting, part of Eckersley’s career began.

From 1987-1998, Eckersley, other than two games started in 1987, was a full time reliever. During that period, pitching mostly for the A’s, he saved 387 games, was a four-time All Star, and finished in the top ten in both Cy Young and MVP balloting four times, winning both awards in 1992.

Eckersley, who was inudcted into the Hall of Fame in 2004, was a great pitcher during those years-although today he might be most remembered for this-but what makes him relevant to the story of pitcher usage is that he was used differently from the firemen of the Marshall-Gossage-Fingers generation. Beginning in 1988, Eckersley’s manager with the A’s, Tony LaRussa would use Eckersley almost exclusively in save situations. Pitchers used in this way quickly became known as closers. Within a few years most teams had adopted the closer approach to their bullpen.

One way to see the closer role is that from 1988-1992, Eckersley’s prime years as a closer, he averaged an impressive 44 saves a season, but with only 62 innings and 297 batters faced. In his 1992 MVP season, Eckersley faced 309 batters over 80 innings while pitching in 69 games, so averaged just over an inning per game. By contrast, the last relief pitcher before Eckersley to win the MVP was Willie Hernandez in 1984. It was only five years earlier, but Hernandez faced 548 batters in 140.1 innings in his MVP year.

In part because Eckersley was so good, the closer quickly swept through baseball. No longer did the best relievers enter the game in a key situation, with runners on base in any late inning. Instead, they were reserved for the ninth inning. There was an obvious illogic to this. Two runner on base with your team leading by one run in the 7th or 8th inning could be the obvious turning point of the game, but your team’s best pitcher was being held back for the ninth.

To counter this illogic, several things happened. From the closer emerged the set-up man who was also known as the bridge to the closer. The set-up man often put up better numbers and pitched more innings than the closer, but was rarely recognized as much. Less rationally, a sort of mystique around the ninth inning-that only a special kind of pitcher could get through the ninth-emerged. This was largely nonsense, but it grew to be a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy as only closer were used in the ninth inning.

One broad-brush statistical description of a closer is somebody who saves 40 or more games while pitching fewer than 100 innings. The first player to do that was Jeff Reardon in 1985, but Eckersley did it four times. The height of the closer period was from roughly 1991-2014.

During those years, there were frequently five or more, sometimes more like eight, pitchers who reached those numbers. The most extreme, or pure closer, year might belong to Francisco Rodriguez who, in 2008, saved 62 games-still the record, while pitching only 68.1 innings and appearing in only 76 games.

Anybody who can save 40, let alone 60, big league games in a season is a very good pitcher, but that was what made the closer era so frustrating. The best pitchers were rarely used and frequently brought in to cruise through a weak spot in the other team’s order to preserve a two-run lead. This seems like an odd way for a team to deploy one of their best pitchers, particularly one as good as Eckersley.

By the mid-1990s, the closer approach to pitcher usage was so widespread that it took on a strategic life of its own. There became a bureaucratic logic to using closers that probably cost teams some very important games, but kept some managers in their jobs. During the closer era, no manager was going to get fired for saving his best reliever for the ninth inning, even if that meant losing the game in the seventh because a second tier reliever couldn’t get a couple of key outs.