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Jeffy with an info-taining Eleven Thoughts On Charlie Furbush.  How does LL keep coming up with these completely new article templates?  I want the yellow sticky note on the side of your monitor there, captain.

He's more flexible, at the moment, than I am when it comes to Furbush's future career path.  So if you're saturated with the SSI Kool-Aid on Furbush's role in the 'pen, that will give you a va-cation from carbo-nation.

We'll recap SSI's position briefly.  As Dr. D sees it, the "starter's rhythm" is a key factor to consider when choosing roles; you want starting pitchers who can exploit their 3-mile run in order to obtain superhuman levels of finesse and precision as they face the same batter for the third time. 

Bill James put it another way -- three bucks a month, kiddies, for access to baseball's Aristotle -- 

Let’s go back to the issue itself now, the rights and wrongs of bullpen usage.   Even though my old ideas from fifteen years ago may have had nothing to do with the Closer by Committee, those ideas may still have been right, and they may still have been wrong.    Were there things I was wrong about, things that I didn’t understand back then?

                Well. …yeah, there were some things.   I’ll get to them in a minute.   There is a narrative about the failure of the Closer by Committee that goes like this. . .pretend you are hearing Tim McCarver.     It takes a special person to handle the pressure of being The Closer.  It’s one thing to get outs in the 7^th inning when you’re three runs behind.   It’s another thing to be out there on the mound when every man who gets on first is potentially going to cost your team the ballgame.   You’re going to lose the game for your team sometimes.   You have to shake it off and come back the next day and get people out.   Not everybody can handle that.

                To me, that argument is insulting to the players.   I have known very few major league athletes who couldn’t handle the pressure of failing sometimes.

                I reject that argument because I don’t like the argument, but I also reject it because I don’t think it’s generally true.   It’s true sometimes.   There are probably some pitchers who have difficulty with the psychological pressures of pitching constantly in game situations.   I didn’t believe ten years ago, and I don’t believe now, that this is why the Closer by Committee failed.

                As my friend Sam Reich used to say, "If you can pitch in the sixth inning you can pitch in the ninth inning."    But here’s what I really did not understand ten years ago, starting with the broader subject of the sprinter vs. the middle distance runner.  You can run a lot faster in a short sprint than you can run if you are running two or three miles. For the exact same reasons, most pitchers are more effective when they’re throwing 20 pitches in an outing than when they’re trying to throw 130 pitches.     Actually, they’re a lot more effective.  

                It is a simple point with far-reaching implications.    Seventy years ago, I don’t believe that anyone in baseball understood this difference or understood the full implications of it.    It may be that the first person who truly got the implications of this was Casey Stengel, in making a short-outing reliever out of Ryne Duren.

                In 1956, pitching for Vancouver in the Pacific Coast League, Ryne Duren struck out 183 batters in 205 innings.   Not a bad strikeout rate, but pitching for the Yankees in 1958 and 1959 (combined), Duren struck out 183 batters in 151 innings.    When he pitched fewer innings his strikeout rate shot up, even though he was pitching against better hitters.

                As a starting pitcher in the minor leagues, Dick Radatz had ERAs of 3.04, 3.69, 3.79, and 3.50.  Moved to the bullpen in 1961 at Seattle, his ERA dropped to 2.28, and he was on his way toward becoming The Monster. 

                The obvious implication of this is that some pitchers who are not very fast in a two-mile run can run really fast in a sprint.   Therefore, you can get more innings of quality work from more pitchers if you just ask them for a sprint.  

                While the implications of this may seem obvious, it took baseball generations and generations to overcome the resistance to it.    I might argue, radically, that even now we have barely started to overcome the resistance to it.   We still would prefer, if we can, to have one pitcher pitch seven innings—the same mindset that gave baseball, for many years, a preference for distance runners rather than sprinters.    Westill are not at the point where we are comfortable turning the pitching staff into a series of sprints, rather than a two-mile run with a couple of sprints at the finish line.  

                When I was writing the things that I wrote about relievers ten or fifteen years ago, I either did not understand this sprinter/distance runner dichotomy at all, or I had not come to terms with its implications. Sparky Anderson understood it in the 1970s; Whitey Herzog understood it in the 1980s; Tony LaRussa understood it in the 1990s.   The rest of us have struggled to come to terms with it.

                Closers are sort of "super-sprinters" who come into the game when the finish line is so close that you can smell it.    There are advantages that go with being a reliever, as opposed to a starter, and there are advantages that go with being a Closer, as opposed to a piss-ant reliever.   (My text editor is trying to change "piss-ant" to "puissant."  I don’t even know what "puissant" means.)  Anyway, the Closer is in a unique position because, more than anyone else, he knows when he will be coming into the game.   He can manipulate his adrenaline flow, his heart rate and his metabolism to peak at the moment when he is called on.    He can take a nap in the 3^rd and 4^th innings, stir around in the 5^th, play a little light toss in the 6^th, stretch in the 7^th, do some calisthenics in the 8^th, and be ready to fire in the 9^th.    Nobody else can do that.

                Also, the Closer has a more regular schedule than any other reliever.   If he has pitched the last two days in a row, he’s given the third day off (usually).   He knows he has the day off; the manager will tell the press that he probably is not available.    He won’t usually be asked to pitch three innings because the team needs him to.   If he hasn’t worked for a couple of days, he will be given the opportunity to get an inning’s work in even if the team doesn’t need him to.

                Other relievers are given these benefits as the opportunity allows the manager to bestow them, but Closers have priority on them.  This makes Closers different.

                Because they are different, some of them are super-effective.   Records are broken all the time, but there will never be a miler who runs as fast as Usain Bolt.  There are no starting pitchers in history—none—who are effective as Mariano Rivera or Jonathon Papelbon, adjusting for the era and the context.  Because they are sprinting only when they are perfectly prepared for a sprint (overstating it a little), those guys reach a level of effectiveness that no starting pitcher is ever going to match, even Verlander or Pedro Martinez.    Papelbon’s career strikeout rate, per batter faced, is a whopping 32% higher than Verlander’s.

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This means, of course, that in the bullpen you want pitchers CAPABLE of running faster for 1.0 innings than they can for 7.0.  Felix Hernandez probably would not pitch any better in the bullpen, for one inning, than he can in the 6th inning of a Yankee game.  Probably not as well, right?  Starter's rhythm.  Felix probably throws the ball better in the 5th innings of games than he does in the 1st.  With Papelbon, it's the opposite.

Sabermetricians don't fancy this territory:  "How do you create good seasons for your players?", but real baseball people can't afford to ignore it.

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I saw some reader at LL who wondered what Bill James' proof was, that Charlie Furbush has an unnatural, undesirable delivery.  That is a lot like asking what your proof is, that Kam Chancellor can deliver a tackle harder than Ichiro can.  When you are asking for something like that to be proven, you have taken one too many college philosophy classes.

There is such a thing as syllogism only for syllogism's sake, logic as a hobby.  Logic in and of itself is not a goal.  Logic is a means to an end.  Logic is the servant of Truth.  If something else gets you Truth, then use that.

..............

Furbush's delivery is royally fouled up on ten different levels, and if you have to ask you wouldn't understand.  In the rotation this causes him to be wild in the strike zone, meaning that he centers pitches accidentally.  You would predict that this would cause gopheritis.  In the rotation, Furbush actually has gopheritis.

In the bullpen, Furbush's max-effort delivery still causes him to center pitches, but a particular batter doesn't get 16 pitches that day to wait for one.  Also, in the bullpen Furbush only has to execute two pitches, so his execution is incomparably simpler and more consistent.

Furbush's history as a starter should be seen in one light only:  That he can deliver Scot Shields-type 3 IP outings out of the pen.  That is a huge advantage.  Yes, Furbush used to start.  Yes, Furbush has a rubber arm.  Yes, that means that we have a 3-IP reliever out there.  Yes, that's vunderbar.

.............

Okay, SSI is convicted on the matter, as are the M's ... the incredibly awesome website Lookout Landing would like to continue to consider the matter.  Fair deal.

Let's move on, though, and ask this question:  just how good IS Charlie Furbush going to be, as a left-handed Scot Shields?

Granted, there are closers who fan 10-12 men per game, and walk 1+.  Charlie Furbush is not like that.  Furbush absolutely will never have the PWR + PRCSN of a Kimbrel, Papelbon, or Nathan.  He is not that good a pitcher.

But on the other hand, Furbush is a 1.0 to 3.0 inning pitcher, and I think he would be perfectly fine throwing 100-130 innings per year.  And Furbush is LEFT HANDED.

It just hit me.  I'd probably rather have Charlie Furbush than Alexi Ogando.  And Scot Shields was probably the 2004 Angel that I was most jealous of.  I thought that Shields was the Angels' stealth MVP.

It's going to take a long time to get used to the idea that Furbush is a stealth Team-MVP candidate.  But in the bullpen, he could be that.