Well that is a fundamental disagreement. You agree with how current conventional wisdom treats relievers. The closer position is role invented by sports writers, just as the save stat is. I believe the the best reliever should pitch in the most important situation. There are only 2 stats in baseball that determine situations rather than the other way round: Wins and Saves. A manager will often leave his struggling starter in in the 5th inning so he can "get the win." Likewise, a manager often saves his best reliever for the 9th inning when ahead by 3 or fewer runs even though it might not be the most important inning of relief. I would put the use of the bullpen in the MLB and going for it on 4th down in the NFL in the same class. Both things are currently not optimally used by professional coaches. NFL head coaches should go for it more, and MLB managers should adjust their bullpen use. But if any coach actually did this, and it didn't work, the coach would be fired. Quickly. he would be crucified in the press. The reason these habits persist is because they are good for the coaches, not the team.
I could bring up the bullpen use again here. Is Jerry planning on having Nieve pitch in 100+ games this year? Edit: For the record, I actually don't think using Nieve here was a bad decision. He has been very solid so far. The bigger question is why wasn't Feliciano in to face Votto?
Lol, his career high for appearances in a season is 40 games, back in 2006. They just talked about how he enjoyed working back-to-back in 4 game stretches, ie, he likes working 4 days in a row. He just gave back-to-back HRs up though, tie game. Feliciano gets Bruce to ground to 2nd and end the inning. We should have kept that fucking 2 run lead.
Arroyo gave up 4 runs and was still able to give the Reds 7 innings. How come our pitchers always max out their fucking pitch counts in the 5th inning of every game??
Well, this IS John Maine pitching so you really can't expect more than 6 Innings, but still, when Johan and everyone else is pitching about 5...I feel bad for this bullpen.
Definitely true that when you starter doesn't go deep you are going to have to use a lot of the bullpen. But was it really necessary to use the guy during Sunday's debacle?
^^Before we gave up the back-to-back solo HRs in the 8th, I had a thought that if we went into the 9th with a save oppo for K-Rod, he'd blow it. Just a random thought/feeling with no real basis as to why. Hope I'm wrong tho. Let's go K-Rod.
Phils-Cards tied 1-1 in the 10th inning. If they lose we go back into first place. Pujols is up right now.
