he isnt that great.
yeah, he has closed and has been great at times…but he has also lost his job twice.

we already have a closer who could probably do a reasonable job, almost as good as Fuentes

Signing Fuentes will probably cost around 10 mil, and our 1st round pick

what if he becomes ineffective again? We have a 10 million dollar lhp and no pick

anyone with a flaw is too flawed
anyone without one is too expensive

Nearly a run better, ERA-wise. He also gave up more HRs (10 vs. 8) in the second half of the season in almost 40 less innings.

FWIW.

That’s the thing I disagree with, too. This math is based on a closer giving up 9 runs less than the other guy to make one “win”. But if a closer gives up 9 more runs than another guy, there’s almost certainly going to be more than one loss added in the standings, no matter what the pythagorean xW-L record says the record should be.

I don’t believe in the innate ability of one pitcher to do better in the 9th inning than another, but I do believe that relief pitching is undervalued in sabermetrics.

If you look at all of the teams in the National League and take out our pathetic numbers, you will see that the remaining 15 clubs had a save percentage of 62.8. Comparing that to our 57.5 completion rate and 73 save opportunities, the Cardinals should have picked up app. 4 more saves to be considered league average, of which probably three would have prevented losses.

If you want to look a little deeper into our “save opportunities”, the Cardinals also amassed a league-leading 106 holds, meaning that our “real save percentage” was 82.7. Again going through the rest of the NL, the remainder averaged out at 82.8 – no significant advantage.

The average closer does not blow only 3-4 saves per year; that would presume that closers normally have a 90% save percentage. Trying to get an idea of what an “average closer” is, I started with the assumption that the closer would garner at least 80% of the team’s saves (sometimes the job changes hands, due to injury, trade or ineffectiveness). I then checked each NL team this year and grabbed enough relievers (in order by save totals) until at least 80% of the team saves were accounted for. Looking over those numbers, it appears that the “average closer” had 8 blown saves and an 81.2% save percentage.

Comparing that to the Cardinals, our top 3 guys (Franklin, Izzy, Perez) had blown 19 opportunities; switching to the league-average conversion rate above, this trio would combine for 45-of-55. Adding that to the 6 additional saves by the rest of the team, St. Louis would have led the league in saves – and still wouldn’t have caught the Cubs for the division lead. The team lost less than 2/3 of the games that were blown, so you could only safely assume 6 more wins in the ledger. (And you can’t focus on the closer for the 9th, then lump in the blown saves in the 8th at the same time; don’t cherry pick the stats.)

Another way to figure it is to look at it by WPA for relievers. Our bullpen WPA was -1.92, meaning the bullpen as a whole pushed our record basically two games worse in the standings (down from 88-74). Or even better, compare us to the Cubs bullpen, a similar bullpen performance with league-average save numbers; their WPA was +1.94, so that would improve our record by another 2 games (to 90-72) if we had their relievers.

No matter what way you add it up, there is no way that our bullpen problems realistically handed our deserved division title to the Cubs. We had plenty of problems in the pen, but not so much more than an average team.

“it’s completely stupid to spend on a closer when there are SO MANY good starters out there this offseason.”

Actually, isn’t that a reason TO spend money on a closer? The SP pool is deep, and there is likely to be a bargin or two lying around in January or February. So, you use the majority of your funds in an area where supply is low, and then use what’s leftover to buy something more readily available, and thus, cheaper….

but I think the concept is fundamentally flawed. I have real philosophical issues with WPA because of leveraging. We could get into a long drawn out discussion but, as you said, most managers aren’t effective (smart?) enough to truly leverage their bullpens to the full extent.

That’s kinda my point. A run is a run is a run. Until someone can show me that pitchers can control the distribution of the runs they allow, I don’t particularly care when they’ve allowed them in the past because it’s not indicative of what they’ll do in the future.

I can tell you that. Every day there’s one of these. A couple of days ago there was a long, drawn-out thing about Clinton or something. There are a million political blogs out there. Trust me; I was a pre-election regular. However, there’s no place for that here.

They are considered one of the best bands of all time if not the best. That is like say A-Rod is over rated. He might be over-rated but doesn’t mean he isn’t great

[blargh]

I don’t think you’re wrong, just confused. Very, very confused.

were they contemporaries? my sense of history before my lifetime is very foggy

then they would rank pretty low. I like to think of music as a mixture of sports and art

I’m an idiot. They replace Carpenter.

They replace Carpenter and if we get into May with 6 healthy starters, one gets dealt.

makes itself.

I don’t see how it isn’t happening.

I watched almost all of them. I don’t like that the assumption is that I didn’t watch the games since I developed a different opinion from a tiny bit of data than you did.

What I got out of watching Ankiel all year is that he took bad swings in almost every at-bat in any situation, that’s the kind of hitter he is. This close-and-late myth develops around every not-quite-superstar hitter with a distinctive style—people like Ben Grieve or Adam Dunn take too many pitches in the clutch when they need to put the ball in play, slap hitters won’t wait for a pitch to hit in the air when they need to, and Rick Ankiel swings at bad pitches when it’s a tight situation.

And because the situation is different people ascribe all of these personality traits and approach changes to very insignificant moments—one swing, four pitches—that they wouldn’t think to animate like that in the third inning or in the middle of July. But that’s just what they do all the time. If Ankiel goes up there and says “I’m going to wait for my pitch now, because it’s important”, he’s probably going to end up striking out looking, because as a hitter he just has bad judgment. If he could wait for his pitch and deliver more often he would probably try to do that all the time.

I don’t doubt that an effect might exist for some players, in some situations, but the number one problem I have with anecdotal evidence like this is that there’s no way to test it next year. If he hits .300 in close and late situations in 2009 people who called him a choker last year are going to assume he fixed it this year, even though it’s just as likely that he just had a good seventy at-bats in 2009 that he wasn’t lucky enough to have in 2008.