Your Best Reliever Shouldn't be the Closer

It's the bottom of the seventh inning and you're facing runners on second and third with nobody out. The score is 4–2 them and this game puts you one step closer to clinching your division. Your starter has run out of gas and, as the manager slowly walks towards the mound, you wonder who he's going to put in the ballgame.

Who do you want him to call down from the pen? Wouldn't you want the best reliever on the team to come in and try to snuff out this rally?

Of course you do, but most managers don't do that. They've fallen into the trap of designated their best reliever as "the closer," and that guy doesn't come into the game until at least the 8th inning.

Which means you're putting a guy into the most crucial part of the game that, while be may be very good, isn't the best. Which I think is dumb.

The Carlos Marmol Effect

At the start of the 2009 season, Cubs manager Lou Piniella decided that Kevin Gregg would be the closer over the young flamethrower Carlos Marmol. A lot of Cub fans were upset because they thought (correctly, in my opinion) that Marmol was the better reliever. Therefore, he should be the closer.

Whatever Lou Piniella's reasons were for picking Gregg as the closer (and Marmol's occasional control problems probably had something to do with this), his decision allowed him to bring in Marmol whenever he wanted, which I thought was brilliant.

The downside, of course, is that Kevin Gregg is the closer. And he has not been very good. But I'd rather see him be "not very good" with nobody on base in the ninth inning than with runners on second and third and nobody out in the 7th.

The problem is Gregg is doing so poorly that he won't last as the closer and this whole experiment won't work. Pretty soon you'll be seeing Kevin Gregg (or Angel Guzman) coming into the toughest game situations in the 7th inning instead of Marmol.

Which just goes to show you how scared MLB teams are to try something new, regardless of how much sense it makes.

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