Britton injury finally bites

[Nite]

So instead of winning two of three, 2 blown saves and the bullpen just doesn't seem to gel atm. Hopefully whenever he's back he is the same and the bullpen gets back to what they are. Because right now they are eck...

On a side note we also really need Tilly back and in form. Bundy and Miley have really shown they should be good so year, and hopefully Tillman is able to join them. After that Gausman is an ok 4th and figure out the 5. 

 

I like where this team could be this summer, if we can get healthy.

[Rene88]

Blowing an 8 run lead didn't bite?

[Nite]

3 run lead in the ninth, Britton probably nails that down. Plus everyone else is shuffled back to their spot and once Nuno throws the granny they probably keep it at being up by 4. We'll never know.

[Ori-Al]

Why did Buck switch the order of Brock and O'Day?  One bad appearance by Brad?  Darren isn't a closer.  I was worried when I saw Brad in the bullpen for the eighth-inning.

Darren didn't even go after Headley.

[sportsfan8703]

Well we should remember this stretch when thinking that we could just trade Britton and be fine. We've been spoiled by going a whole year with no blown saves in the ninth. 

[Aristotelian]

50 minutes ago, Ori-Al said:

Why did Buck switch the order of Brock and O'Day?  One bad appearance by Brad?  Darren isn't a closer.  I was worried when I saw Brad in the bullpen for the eighth-inning.

Darren didn't even go after Headley.

I am sure it was dictated by match ups. Brach is much better than O'Day vs LH and the Yankees had a bunch coming up (Didi, Gardner, Ellsbury). If you are going to use O'Day, it makes more sense to use him the next inning (Hicks, Holliday, who had homered off of Brach in the series, Castro and Judge).

[OFFNY]

1 hour ago, Nite said:

 

3-run lead in the ninth, Britton probably nails that down. Plus everyone else is shuffled back to their spot and once Nuno throws the granny they probably keep it at being up by 4. We'll never know.

 

o

 

Also, Showalter may have gone to Givens one batter sooner than he did had Britton been in the mix after Nuno loaded the bases, and Ellsbury's grand-slam home run might have been averted, or perhaps at least minimized to a sac-fly.

Not having one of your big guns in the bullpen can have multiple effects on the decisions that a manager makes when managing it.

 

But the Orioles have been able to get off to a great start in spite of not having Britton and Tillman, specifically by just going out and playing the games without making any excuses ...... ) Next man up. ) 

 

o

[Aristotelian]

^I meant it was Castro who homered off Brach

[sportsfan8703]

This team has a good record but our bullpen has been getting over exposed and over worked already. We really need Tillman to replace Ubaldo in the rotation. A healthy Britton back. Plus we need another middle relief arm to step up. Maybe Steve Johnson can be that guy. 

[Sanfran327]

Man. We're really spoiled in Baltimore, I guess. Over a year of near perfect bullpen support, and we're rolling over on them after a rough 3 days in New York. 

Good stuff.

[Tx Oriole]

16 hours ago, Nite said:

So instead of winning two of three, 2 blown saves and the bullpen just doesn't seem to gel atm. Hopefully whenever he's back he is the same and the bullpen gets back to what they are. Because right now they are eck...

On a side note we also really need Tilly back and in form. Bundy and Miley have really shown they should be good so year, and hopefully Tillman is able to join them. After that Gausman is an ok 4th and figure out the 5. 

 

I like where this team could be this summer, if we can get healthy.

It sure was frustrating the pitching didn't come through on Friday.

[clapdiddy]

This weekend really stressed the importance of a closer.   I know, I, for one, have thought that a specified "closer" is overrated.   Not any more.

[spiritof66]

7 minutes ago, clapdiddy said:

This weekend really stressed the importance of a closer.   I know, I, for one, have thought that a specified "closer" is overrated.   Not any more.

To me, the lesson of the last few days isn't about the value of a "specified" closer. Specified closers blow leads all the time. What I take out of it is this: (1) there is a highly visible difference between the elite, almost-always-reliable closers -- Britton, Kimbrell, Chapman, Jansen, and a couple of others -- and other closers, and (2) Brad Brach is not now ready to join that group.

While the difference that an elite closer makes is highly visible, it's difficult for me to assess the value of a reliable closer. Lots of games get won, for the most part, by contributions made early in the game: one or more key hits, a great fielding play, a strong performance by the starter, a pitcher getting key outs, etc. I don't always think about what players' performances led to a win, and when I do (sometimes prompted by discussion in a game thread), it's usually not too rigorous or complete. When a closer succeeds, he obviously isn't solely responsible for the win, but at least some of the other contributors are lost in the shuffle. We try to measure their contributions by WAR and its relatives, but we don't say on a game-by-game basis, "Jones had three hits, knocked in a couple of runs, made a great catch and a couple of strong throws. He's about 23 percent responsible for the win, more than any other guy on the team," and we certainly don't keep track of who contributed to wins and losses over the course of games, other than by the statistics we keep and recollections we store.

The conventional wisdom in baseball used to be that there was one guy you could point to as largely responsible for each team win or loss: the starting pitcher. Despite the flaws in that approach (the largest one, of course, being that it's possible to pitch very well and get a loss or to pitch not very well and get a win), looking at the starter that way made some sense when starters usually completed games. In that context, the starter was like a quarterback or a goalie; he didn't determine the outcome by himself, but he usually had a lot to do with it. Now, with so much of the game going on after the starters have been pulled, it makes even less sense to focus on the winning pitcher and losing pitcher as determining the outcome.

In modern baseball, there's one guy whose performance can be looked at as deciding, most of the time, whether his team wins or loses: the closer. The closer's effect on games is highly visible and is reflected (again, for the most part) in his saves and blown saves. We know those are not perfect measures of performance: a closer can let up a run or two in an inning and still get a save. He can be victimized by his fielders or bad luck, or pitch well but let an inherited runner score, and get a blown save. But these statistics reflect pretty closely the effect of the closer's performance on the outcome: a save means his team won, and a blown save means it lost the game or lost the certainty of winning.

Obviously, the reason for the visibility of a closer's impact, as well as for the close tie between his performance and the team outcome, is that a save or blown save occurs at the end (or what would have been the end) of the game. When the closer (or replacement closer in the Orioles' case) fails, we want to do this because he has moved us from imminent victory to defeat (or, like yesterday, the risk of defeat, which at the time usually seems certain and imminent). But a lot of factors bring a team to that result: hitters who failed with men on base, catches that weren't made, the runs given by the starters. Let's say that Rickard went 0-for-4 and stranded 6 runners. We don't know what course the game would have taken if Rickard had gotten a hit in the fifth with two outs and a man on third. We certainly don't know what would have ensued. The hit might have led to a big rally. Or the other team might have brought in a reliever who would have been more effective than the starter. And the hit would have plated just one run; what difference would it have made if we lost by 3? If Hardy booted a routine grounder, leading to a bunt by Gardner on which he was thrown out but the runner who reached moved up and later scored, we don't know how much the error contributed to a loss. Maybe without the error Gardner would not have bunted and instead would have hit another homer. And how can we compare Rickard's crummy performance at the plate with that of other, better-hitting LFers? Would we have won the game if we had Benintendi playing left instead of Joey?

One reason that we have trouble weighing the effect of most players' contributions is that most of them occur during the game, and therefore when the outcome is in doubt because, as we all know, anything can happen in baseball.  There may be exceptions for extreme cases, like a complete-game 1-0 shutout, or a Bad Ubaldo pitching performance, or when two hitters drive and score all a team's runs, or a tie-breaking HR or two-out RBI late in a game. But in most instances, we don't really know how much an individual's better or worse play (or gameful of them) affect the outcome of a game -- just that it helped or hurt the team at the time. Sometimes, what seems like a hugely influential  play, like Trumbo's grand slam the other night, does not contribute to the team outcome at all.

It's different with the closer. Most of the time, he either preserves the lead and we all go home happy, or he blows the save, the game is lost and we go home mad blaming him, or the blown save leads to a tie and we can measure what happened against what would have happened if he's gotten the save. And, unlike the difficulty we have with figuring out whether we might have won a game or games with a better hitter in LF or a better fielder at 2B, we can compare a closer's failure to the performance of the elite closers. Our closer (or surrogate closer) blew the save and we lost the game, while an elite closer almost certainly would have gotten the save -- they almost always do -- and we would have won the game.

Finally getting back to the OP, I can't figure out is whether the visibility of a closer's effect on a game, and the ease of comparing a closer's performance with that of the most successful closers, is the same as the importance of the closer's performance and hence the value of an elite closer. I think that's the crux of the ongoing discussion as to whether the impact of the closer is overrated, underrated or neither, and the reason (or one reason) why it's so hard to assess definitively. It's a matter of how you compare the value of positive and negative contributions made over the course of games, influencing the outcome in ways that are hard to measure in part because you don't know what would have happened in the absence of that contribution, with the ability of a closer to send you home happy (or, when brought in when the score is tied, avoid sending you home unhappy).

I think the difficulty MLB managers have with this issue underlies the question of when to use a closer. It's hard for me to take too seriously the argument that you can use your best one-inning pitcher only in the ninth inning (or later) because closers are creatures of habit and that's what they're used to; they get paid to help the team win, and if a closer understands that his pitching using earlier than the ninth inning is best for the team he should be eager to do that. Here's what I think is really going on, and maybe this has been said but I haven't read or heard it. The home team is ahead 4-2 in the top of the sixth. The visitors have the bases loaded with one out and their 3-4-5 hitters coming up. Lots of non-managers argue, and a few managers might decide, that the game is on the line right here (it's the game situation presenting  the "highest leverage,"  and bring in the closer.

I have to think every manager agrees that you bring in your best short-stint pitcher, your closer, when he's best positioned to affect positively a game's outcome (the highest-leverage situation). But most managers, I am guessing, think that time always comes when their team is ahead in a close game (or tied if they're managing the home team) in the ninth inning or later. And that's because they believe that, right up until the end of a game, anything can happen in baseball. So even if you bring in your setup guy in the tough sixth inning-situation I described and he gives up 3 runs, or 6 runs, you might come back and win the game. And if you bring your closer in and have him record three strikeouts (sorry, punch-outs), you might give up more runs later and lose the game, maybe because your closer wasn't available. You can only tell in hindsight, after the game is over, how important, how highly leveraged, that sixth-inning situation was. But a manager knows that if he's ahead in a close game in the ninth inning, the game is on the line. By definition, that is for most managers the time of the highest leverage. If his closer saves the game, he reaches the time in baseball when it's no longer true that anything can happen.  

[sportsfan8703]

Overall I'd say our pen stepped up with Britton out. We only had the two blown saves in NY, but we did win one of those. We won a couple extra inning games too without him. 

Buck said after the game Britton would be activated today. Probably means Bleier or Wright is going down. With Asher going tonight the LR spot is pretty important to protect the top guys in the pen, in case Asher gets knocked out early.