The Closer. No, not the show where the woman makes a whole bunch of people who are too stupid to get lawyers confess themselves into prison, but the ninth inning pitcher. The guy who is supposed to come in with the game on the line, throw the ball 98 miles per hour, and go away. A good closer makes a game unfair. He gives the other team 8 innings to win. A mediocre or bad closer is an exercise in terror for the fanbase. He comes in and he may be money, but his confidence quickly shatters if something goes wrong. Braeden Looper, formerly of the Mets, was an excellent example of the mediocre closer. Looper could come in and blow three guys away in a 1-0 game. If Looper walked someone, or inherited a runner from a previous pitcher, he was finished. Looper walking someone was nearly as guaranteed a loss as a walk-off homer.
Opposed to this, crosstown, you have Mariano Rivera. Rivera seems almost physically unable to feel pressure. He naps during the early innings. He has music because he’s supposed to and the fans love it, not because he needs to get pumped up. Mo gets up in the eighth, stretches, warms up, comes in and gets three guys out. He just does it. Like he’s pitching the first inning. If he blows a save, it doesn’t phase him, it’s just part of the game. He will come out the following day and blow three batters away again the next day. Yankees fans love him and Yankee haters usually begrudgingly respect him. He’s the greatest closer of the modern era and, arguably, of all time. Period.
I have heard the closer described as a strange, fragile creature by people on many occasions. I’ve heard it mentioned that the closer has to have a certain mentality. He has to be overly arrogant, confident, and have a swagger about him that no one else on the team can have. He has to know he’s better than who he’s facing. If he doesn’t, he’s finished. A baseball fan should appreciate Mariano more and more as the years go on. He’s a rock in the Yankees lineup (and I have argued him as the AL MVP for two years running) and he stays solid, even as other dominant closers have gone to the wayside.
The genesis of this column has been the self-destruction of Brad Lidge this season. Lidge is another closer who was created as a starter and just seemed to kind of fall into the closer role by 2005. In 2005 he converted 42/46 save attempts while racking up 2.29 ERA in 70.2 innings. In those 70 innings he gave up 5 homeruns, 58 hits, and 23 walks for 18 earned runs. So far in his 16.2 innings of 2006, he’s given up 3 homeruns, 17 hits, and 16 walks for 12 Earned Runs. He’s 2/3rds of the way to his Earned Run total of last season. What happened to Lidge?
Albert Pujols.
Pujols has broken a lot of pitchers already, but he’s shattered Lidge. In the NLCS last year, Pujols hit a homerun off Lidge that broke him. The series started normally, with Lidge saving games 2, 3, and 4. In game five, with 2 men on base and a 2 run lead with 2 men out, Lidge pitched to Pujols. At the time, I said it was a bad idea. I said, and I stick to it, that they should have walked Pujols. At Minute Maid Park, where a grandma can put a ball over the left field wall, Pujols blasted the ball over the train tracks. Lidge’s string of saves vs the Cardinals was over, and he hasn’t been right since. The next day, the Astros went on to win the series, without Lidge’s help, and advance to the World Series. Lidge wasn’t needed in a 5-1 victory for the Astros, but he should have pitched here anyway.
The Astros went on to get swept by the White Sox in four games, leading to a whole new round of “OMG! THE AL IS 10000000X BETTER THAN THE NL, LOSERS!!!11!” arguments. In game 2, Lidge came in the ninth with a tie, and proceeded to give up a walk-off homerun to Scott Posednik. In game 4, Lidge gave up the only run of the game to Jermaine Dye.
I was adamant as the weeks went by that the Astros should have walked Albert Pujols in that situation. For the record, I generally hate intentional walks, but in this situation you had:
1) The best hitter in the league staring you in the face
2) Who himself represented the winning run. Putting one more on base to get a better match-up would not had made the end result any worse.
3) That better match-up was Reggie Sanders and his 21 home runs and 54 RBIs in 2005.
I have heard many counter-arguments to walking Pujols, most convincingly being: “Lidge is your closer, you give him the ball in these spots.” Yes, you do… but not when the next guy is that much easier.
And at the end, what have the Astros gained? A broken closer who walked three and gave up one earned run in 2/3rds of an inning before Dan Wheeler came in to get the save on May 11th who has, as of May 12th replaced Lidge as the active closer. Lidge’s story is a recurring one in baseball. A guy who, as the closer, is dominant for a year or two, then fades away. Of currently active closers, only Mo, Izzy, and Billy Wagner have held the position for a lot of consecutive years. Even the guy who holds the most consecutive saves in a row, Eric Gagne, is likely finished with the position after 3 years of being a closer. Right now, Papelbon looks like he’s the next big closer. The only question left is: what will happen to him when he blows it in a big spot?
So what, exactly, do the three guys with the most experience in closing have in common?
Attitude. With Mo it’s more of a silent confidence, but you can see it in him. When Mo comes out not only does he know he’s going to get the batter out, but generally, the batter knows Mo is going to get the batter out. Yes, I know Mo has some blown saves on his record. I also know he has a 0.89 ERA in the post-season. I know he’s converted 87% of his saves. I know he’s a first ballot hall-of-famer. I know he’s got an outside chance (barring injury or a break down) of having the most saves all-time. Every guy facing him knows, too. I’m not saying it has an affect on all of them, but it has an affect on some of them. Billy Wagner, in his interviews following blown saves this year, never gets riled about them. Wagner’s aloof attitude is annoying to fans, but it’s exactly correct. Wagner’s post-game interviews can be summed up with “yep, I blew that one. I’ll kill them tomorrow.” Last year, Izzy struggled toward the end of the season, so far this year, he’s blown one. Less than Mariano and Wagner.
Part of the attitude is shaking off the losses. At no point can a person find a blown save of these guys and say: “yep, that’s where they lost it.” You can’t even think about it because it’s never happened and, at this point, probably never will.
Stuff That Happens In Manhattan
For a while, when I first moved to the city, I was working at home every day. This was because my company was supposedly in the process of moving from their current office to a snazzy new office in lower midtown. There was no room for me to sit in the old office unless I either 1) stacked up with someone in one of the already crowded offices (my company doesn’t really believe in cubes) 2) Sat in one of the offices that only one person was using or 3) sit at the receptionist’s desk (because we don’t have one). Option 1 and 3 were not really appealing and no-one that had an office alone probably wanted to share it. Since we were going to be in the new office by November (I moved in October) I was only supposed to work at home for about 3 or 4 weeks.
4 weeks turned into about 3 months, and you kind of get used to it after a while. Sure, talking to only your cat and having no social interaction with other humans may SEEM like a bad thing on the surface, but my cat doesn’t talk back, she doesn’t whine when I pet her, and, every once in a while, she licks my face. You don’t get that in an office. If you did, you’d probably get fined, fired, or have to go to sensitivity training. I got comfy working on my own schedule and getting up pretty much whenever I felt like it and keeping my normal gym schedule by going down to the gym across the street on my lunch break and whatever. But, they gave me my own little wall office, so I felt I should start going in.
Mostly I’ve kept up with getting into the office about 4 days a week. There’s at least one day per week (Monday or Wednesday normally) where I just don’t feel like going, so I fire up the laptop at home. This is one of the benefits of working in a satellite office where you are the only person in your department. There’s really no one to impress by the whole “showing up on time” or “showing up at all” thing. It also doesn’t take much to convince me not to go to the office. Rain, snow, a fire in Brooklyn, or a Day Without Immigrants are all excellent opportunities for me not to go the office.
Back to my point, my office building has two banks of elevators. Three in the front door and two near the back door. The two near the back door are the freight elevators and routinely smell like spoiled ass. Every once in a while, the front elevators won’t go to my floor. I can press 4 until my finger breaks and it never lights up. 5, 6, PH… all the rest work fine. 4 just doesn’t. Whenever this happens, I have to go back to the spoiled ass elevators and use those. The 4 on those will work. I can’t use the stairs because, 1) I’m lazy and if God wanted me to use stairs he wouldn’t have invented elevators and 2) there are two locked doors between the lobby and my floor. One in the stairwell itself between the 2nd and 3rd floor and another actually on our floor.
I have always wondered why this front bank of elevators occassionally doesn’t work. I found out why today. See, we share our floor with some sort of Jewish aeronautics firm (I may be making that up, but their logo has a Star of David and a rocketship… so I guessed). In their contract with the building, for security purposes, the front bank of elevators must be locked from going to the 4th floor on days when their office is closed. Pretty secure… unless you WALK TO THE FREIGHT ELEVATOR AND GO TO THE FOURTH FLOOR ANYWAY!!!
I’m also convinced that the fifth floor of this building is a porn studio. More on that later.
Thanks for reading.
