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For years, baseball statistical experts from Bill James on down have been debating the role of the closer. Is it best to save your best relief pitcher for the ninth inning and the last three outs? Or should he be deployed in the middle innings, when it might be the actual critical moment of the game, say, with runners on in the sixth or seventh inning and the opponents’ heart of the order coming up? Most of the statistical analysis has concluded there’s nothing special about those last three outs and that your best reliever should be brought in at the critical moment, the way Napoleon used his reserves. At the same time, the conventional baseball book insists there is something to the “closer mentality,” closing out a victory.
“I think that’s just coincidence,” Kevin Goldstein of Baseball Prospectus said last week after the BP book signing at the DePaul Barnes & Noble downtown. “I think the fact was he wasn’t comfortable putting a rookie in the closer’s job. He was the best reliever, obviously, but he didn’t want to let him close.”
