I’ve never been a huge fan of baseball but I’ll watch Giants games if they get into the playoffs and I follow their regular season developement through newspaper articles.(I’m a pretty faithful home team fan so even if I’m not crazy about the sport I feel its my duty to keep up on the home teams…that is except the A’s)
That being said, its always perplexed me about the difference between relief pitchers and starting pitchers. Is there some fundamental difference there? Does the team just have a bunch of pitchers and then decides which ones are going to be Relief and which are Starters? Or does the designation happen earlier in the pitcher’s carreer? Do relief pitchers not have enough stamina to pitch seven or eight innings?
Most STARTING pitchers don’t have the stamina to go 7 or 8 innings. Most go about 100 pitches, or 5 or 6 innings whichever comes first. (That’s why it’s sometimes remarked that the pitcher threw a “complete game,” meaning all nine innings.) The relief pitchers are to make up the difference between then and when the closer comes in. The closing pitcher (in your case, Robb Nen) pitches the ninth inning (or in your case, the “Nenth” inning :rolleyes: ) when the team is ahead, and is usually expected to get all three batters out, boom, boom, boom.
Teams usually have 5 starting pitchers who pitch IN ROTATION, one or two (if they’re lucky) closers, and a handful of relief pitchers.
A shame about your not following the A’s this year. You missed an outstanding unassisted triple-play by Randy Velarde.
My question was more focused on does a relief pitcher come into being? I mean there’s a two kids that grow up together. They play little league and then pitch for their high school baseball teams. The college scouts like what they see and get the kids into their programs. After finishing school they’re good enough to play for a pro club’s minor league team. They pay their dues for a few years then get pulled up into the majors. The difference is one of them is a starter and one is a relief pitcher. How and when did that designation get made. Is it up to the kids? Did Kid A just decide on of those days to be a relief pitcher? Did his college program need relief pitchers more during his time there? Or was there something different about kid A’s style of play or athleticism that makes him better suited to being a relief pitcher?
Ever since the 89’ world series I had to choose a side and I went with San Francisco because I was living there and they were the most ‘home’ of the home teams. After getting spanked in that series the A’s have been on my shit list. I felt and feel the same way about the Raiders when they abandoned us for LA. But other than that I’m a bay area sports fan right down to the USF Don’s.
I suppose a kid would get designated as a relief pitcher if he didn’t tend to have good stuff for about 100 pitches, and if he was very successful as a reliever. Relievers have even won the Cy Young award. It also takes a bit of a special mentality to relieve well. You have to come in with all your concentration and skills on about ten minutes notice. Until that point, relief pitchers have been known to literally be asleep.
In addition to possibly lacking stamina, some pitchers have “stuff” better suited to relief work than starting work:
Often, such a pitcher will have only one or two reliable pitches, and, if he were to have to pitch to the same hitter more than one time in a game, might be more vunerable to the hitter the second time up. A starter usually has three or more good pitches, so he can use a different pitch or set up the hitter differently in subsequent at bats.
As to how a relief pitcher comes into being, generally the most talented pitchers on any team of college level or lower (high school, little league, etc) are the starting pitchers, while the relief pitchers are the ones not good enough to make the team’s starting rotation. For these teams, the starting pitchers get a disproportionate (relative to the major leagues) amount of the work, sometimes working in relief in games where they aren’t starting.
However, once a player reaches the minors, this isn’t as true. When a player is signed, a scout or group of scouts may look at a pitcher, and, general talent level notwithstanding, will decide he’s better suited towards being a reliever. (Again, lack of stamina or only having one or two good pitches being primary reasons.)
Baseball’s approach to relief pitching is completely different from what it was when i was a kid (I’m 39 now). In the late 60s and early 70s, when I first started following baseball, there were still very few real relief specialists (Ron Perranoski was one of the few I remember well). At that point, starting pitchers had FAR more prestige and FAR higher paychecks. A reliever was frequently an over-the-hill starter, or a guy who just couldn’t quite hack it as a starter. In those days, NO young pitcher WANTED to become a reliever- it just sort of happened.
At the time, most teams still had 4 starting pitchers, and a pitcher was EXPECTED to pitch complete games.
By the mid-Seventies, a major turnaround was in effect. Most teams had a Mike Marshall, a Sparky Lyle, a Goose Gossage… and the credo became “Just give me 7 good innings, so I can bring in my relief ace to slam the door and win the game.”
By the mid-Seventies, teams were GROOMING their hardest throwing pitchers to be relievers, because quality relievers were now viewed as MORE important than good starters.
The best starting pitchers will always make more money than the best relief pitchers however. It’s worth it for a team to pay more money to a pitcher who pitches 200 innings as opposed to one who pitches about 60-70 (a typical season for a closer).
The concept of specialized relief pitcher didn’t start until the 1920s and it didn’t become a job anyone aspired to until the 1970s, when Sparky Lyle, Goose Gossage, and Bruce Sutter came on the scene.
Well, there’s different kinds of relief pitchers. Middle relievers are mostly just regular pitchers who aren’t considered good enough to be in the regular rotation. A team picks the top 8 or 9 “starting pitchers” in its organization to be on the major league team, and of those 8 or 9, the top 4 or 5 will end up in the starting rotation while the rest have to be content with pitching relief. Most of this type of relievers will have pitched primarily as starting pitchers in the minors and their school tenure. Also, being a middle reliever isn’t necessarily a permanent position by any means. It’s quite common for a middle reliever to move into the rotation if he’s been pitching well and there’s an injury to a starter, or one of the starters may be pulled from the rotation and made a middle reliever if he isn’t pitching well, in which case a middle reliever may step into the starting spot. (Recently there have been some guys who have excelled as middle relief specialists, but for the most part middle relievers are either pitchers who are waiting for a chance to start, or who had a chance to start but didn’t cut it and who have hung around as middle relievers.)
As has been pointed out, at one time that was pretty much the only kind of relief pitcher that existed, but over the years the jobs of closer, and to a lesser extent, set up man, have been created. These guys are specialized relievers who may have pitched exclusively in relief in the minors. Usually they’re picked to be relievers due to the kinds of pitches they can make, as DRY pointed out. Often (though certainly not always) closers will be fastball pitchers who don’t have 2 (or more) good other pitches to go with the fastball. The idea here is that it doesn’t matter how fast you throw, if you keep throwing fastballs to hitters at bat after at bat without showing much else, you may get the hitters out early by simply overpowering them but by the third or fourth time through the batting order the hitters are going to get the timing down, and are going to start hitting you (unless you literally have one of the fastest fastballs in the league, and even then it better have some wicked motion on it). Therefore, to be a successful starter, you need another couple of pitches you can throw reliably (and perferably for outs) to keep the hitters’ timing off, but to be a closer it’s enough to be able to come in, smoke the ball past three hitters and then leave the game. In addition, it’s probably easiest (in general) for fastball pitchers to get strikeouts, and since relief pitchers sometimes have to come in and pitch in situations where they need to get strikeouts (e.g. the starting pitcher has been pulled with runners on first and third and no outs in a tight game) that’s another reason why closers and set up guys tend to be fastball pitchers.
I think DRY put it best. Usually the better pitcher becomes the starter. On my 13-15 year old team I start. In all-stars thought we have another guy who pitches like 80 with a kick ass curve ball. Me, on the other hand, pitch low 70’s with a mediocre curve and a developing screwball. So you know how’s going to get the starting job, him. But or stamina is the same, I could go a whole game (which in my case is 7 innings) and not really get tired. It really depends on who you have backing you up in the in/outfield. If you have a crappy team behind you obviously you’re going to throw a lot more pitches, due to the fact that the rest of your team makes a lot of errors. You have to look at pitch count, not innings. A pitcher can go all 9 innings and maybe not even break 100 pitches (that’s pretty rare though). On the other hand a pitcher could go for 5 or 6 innings and be well over a 100 pitches. A good pitcher isn’t necessarily a pitcher who strikes out every guy who comes to the plate, because let’s face it that’s practically impossible. A pitcher’s job is to make easy plays for his infield and outfield, with the occasional strike out (unless you’re like Nolan Ryan). But all in all, usually the better guy gets the starting job. And your closers, are guys who have a couple good pitches (and generally they are fast, but not always) and can retire the side in the last inning well. Hideo Nomo, whom most baseball fans know, came over from I think Japan or something and was a really good pitcher. He probably would have made a decent reliever or closer, but he was a starter. Once everyone over here got used to his most unusual pitching windup they lit him up and Los Angeles shipped him out. I think he’s pitching with the Detroit Tigers now, and I don’t think he’s doing really hot over there. His first year with LA he was 13-6, with Detroit he’s 4-10. He’s had sort of an up and down career. His ERA has been on an up rise ever since he came over here from Japan. His SO’s have decreased every year too, that windup lost it’s effectiveness over the years. Anyway, I’m tired of talking about Hideo Nomo. Bye.
As for closers, any more a team sees a guy who can throw serious heat and tries to make him the go to guy in the ninth, often with disasterous results. Baltimore and Houston tried to make Curt Schilling a closer. Philidelphia thought different and finally made him a starter. The Story was the same for Pedro Martinez in LA.
The New York Mets were seriously concerned about Nolan Ryan’s ability to be a starter, but knew he could throw serious heat, and tried him out on occasion before trading him. The 100 mph fastball means closer mentality is why you still see Jose Mesa pitching at times when the games on the line (ok, not to often lately, but if Pinella’s closer can’t go, Mesa does). Not that Mesa is in the same league as Schilling, Martinez, or Ryan, baseball people think that way.
Heat equal closer. If you are left handed and don’t cut it as a starter, you are a lefty relief specialist (unless you have a blazing fastball) no matter how well you do against righties of even of you can go a couple of good innings. Baseball people just get ideas lodged in their head and they won’t go away.
One practice that was fairly common regarding younger pitchers that is rarely seen nowadays is Earl Weaver’s theory that the best way for a promising starting pitching prospect to get acclimated to the majors is by pitching “low leverage” innings in long relief. Weaver would break in a young future starter by letting him get his feet wet in relatively pressureless situations. I believe he did this with Mike Flanagan, Storm Davis and Scott McGregor, for example.
Nowadays, a young starting pitcher is almost always promoted to the majors and thrown into the starting rotation right away. However, Weaver’s practice is making something of a comeback, as Houston’s Scott Elarton and Philadelphia’s (formerly Atlanta’s) Bruce Chen spent much of their first months in the majors working middle relief, while they waited for rotation slots to open up.
Finally, roles can change even when there’s no long term plan to make a certain pitching prospect a starter, again, as Amok pointed out. A recent example is the Dodgers’ Matt Herges.
I think managerial preference and rotation openings play are big factors in whether a guy slated as a starter pitches first as a starter or reliever. When Mike Hargrove was manager, an Albie Lopez or Bartolo Colon could often find themselves in the bullpen at first. Now that Charlie Manuel is the Indian’s manager, several pitchers have made their major league debuts as starters (Tim Drew got scortched in his). Although injuries play a part, in the past few years the Indians have had some starting pitching problems (Jaret Wright has made several trips to the IR list over the last few years) and have often been lacking a fifth, or even forth starter. But usually a journey man (Jason Jacome and the likes) or an aging veteran looking for one last chance (Mark Langston, et al) got the nod before the youngsters.
And don’t forget, there are some middle relievers who can’t get either left handed or right handed batters out. These guys are largely useless in any other role than middle relief.
When I played ball, the relievers always seemed to be:
good pitchers who you wanted to keep, but not as good as the 4 (when I played there were only 4 starters, not 5) who were chosen as starters
good or great pitchers who didn’t have the stamina to go more than a couple innings
a pitcher who had one or two great pitches, but not much else (this was discussed previously; someone with curves, sinkers and sliders can confuse a batter more effectively than someone with just a great fastball)
a pitcher of equal talent as the starters may be better mentally suited for the pressure of coming in with the game on the line - this will often be your closing pitcher.
