Pinch Hit : Do Teams Need a Good Closer to Win?

Thursday, April 01 2004 @ 03:22 AM EST

Contributed by: Craig B

Bauxite Rob has taken a look at the famed "proven closer" theory, and has some thoughts on the subject. Thanks, Rob!

Do Teams Need a Good Closer to Win?
by Rob

It's simple in hockey. If you miss a save, a big red light shines above your head, and 19,000 people boo at you. You can make more than one save in a hockey game, hell, you'd better make more than one. A good goalie is vital to a team's achievement.

It's not so simple in baseball. Does every baseball team need a good closer? You can ride a hot goalie all the way to the Stanley Cup final, like Anaheim, but can you ride a hot closer to the World Series?

Most of you are thinking, "Sure, Mariano Rivera. Wasn't he pretty good in the playoffs?" Well, that's only if you consider a career postseason ERA of 0.75 good. I'm kidding, of course.

So maybe you do need a good closer to win. The following is a study of last year's statistics, to determine if a Good Closer (also known as a Proven Closer) is part of a team's overall success. The only statistics used are saves. I know, saves are useless. But the point of this is to see just how useless they are.

STARTING IDEAS

First of all, what is a "good closer"? Well, it should be someone who accumulates a large majority of his team's saves. Does that mean he gets 85%? Sixty percent? 95%? For simplicity purposes, let's call this number the save percentage (Sv%). I know, just like hockey.
Save percentage = Saves by saves leader divided by Total saves or

Sv% = (SbSL / TotSv) * 100%


Let's take 80, a nice, round number, and look at the closers who had a Sv% higher than 80. (All stats are from ESPN.com and Baseball-Reference.com)

Name, Saves Recorded
Eric Gagne, 55
Joe Borowski, 33
Eddie Guardado, 41
Keith Foulke, 43
Tim Worrell, 38
John Smoltz, 45
Billy Wagner, 44
Jorge Julio, 36
Lance Carter, 26
Troy Percival, 33
Mariano Rivera, 40
Rocky Biddle, 34

The only number that jumps out is Carter's 26 saves. The D-Rays only had 30 saves total, so perhaps they don't belong in the study. Nevertheless, 11 of the 12 pitchers here would be considered "good closers" by standard definition.

(Notice anyone missing? The only pitchers with more saves than the lowest save-getter here are Matt Mantei, with 29, Braden Looper with 28, and Mike MacDougal, 27. Triple-U had 26.)

So, we know whom Sv% defines as Good Closers. Now let's see if the winning teams had Good Closers. The Sv% for the top 10 winning teams in 2003.

Team (Wins), Sv%, Saves Leader
Atlanta (101), 88.2, Smoltz
New York-A(101), 81.6, Rivera
San Francisco(100), 88.4, Worrell
Oakland(96), 89.6, Foulke

So far so good. The four pitchers above listed were on our original list of 12.

Boston(95), 44.4, Kim
Seattle(93), 42.1, Hasegawa

Hmm...very low numbers. More on this soon.

Florida(91), 77.8, Looper
Minnesota(90), 91.1, Guardado
Chicago-N(88), 91.7, Borowski
Houston(87), 88.0, Wagner

Interesting. The World Series winners had the lowest Sv% of any of the Top 10 teams.

However, the only real outliers in that list were the Red Sox and Mariners.

First, Boston. Byung-Hyun Kim had 16 saves. The only other pitcher on the Red Sox roster to have more than three was Brandon Lyon with 9. Eight Red Sox recorded a save. Yet, they made it...well, we know how far they got. ALCS, Game 7, Pedro pitching with the lead, followed by a Little mistake.

Second, Seattle. Kasuhiro Sasaki was out for the better part of the season with a rib injury. He would likely have made most of Hasegawa's 16 saves had he been healthy.

The teams with the higher win totals, for the most part, had Good Closers in their 'pen.

"But wins don't mean anything! What about the 2001 Mariners?"

Ah, the 2001 Seattle Mariners. 116 wins, 46 losses, Sasaki has 45 of the team's 56 saves that year, which are Good Closer numbers (80.4%). But, Seattle didn't even get to the World Series.
So maybe we should be measuring success by World Series rings. Some people certainly do, and that's why they make a trade they don't need to make for a shortstop they don't need and won't use at shortstop.

The past 10 World Series winners:

Year, Team, Sv%
2003, Florida, 77.8
2002, Anaheim, 74.1
2001, Arizona, 55.9
2000, New York, 90.0
1999, New York, 90.0
1998, New York, 75.0
1997, Florida, 89.7
1996, New York, 82.7
1995, Atlanta, 73.5
1994, Montreal, oh never mind...

[Note: Who had the low Sv% for the D-Backs in 2001? Well, none other than the 2003 Boston Red Sox Saves Leader, Byung-Hyun Kim. Before you start thinking BK attracts bullpens-by-committee wherever he goes, he had a SV% of 90 in 2002 with Arizona.]

Looking at these numbers, the median is 77.8, close to the Good Closer mark.
The average (mean) Sv% is 78.7. If you take out the highest and lowest values, the average is 80.4.
It looks like the arbitrary number I chose 545 words ago was almost dead-on. Winning teams have Good Closers, assuming that a Good Closer means something. Of course, I could have used raw saves, rather than a rate, to find a Good Closer. I decided to go with this measure, because it seemed more intelligent to use saves as a rate, as opposed to just looking at the numbers of each pitcher.


MIDDLE RELIEF FROM RANT

Take a break from the rest of the league -- I haven't mentioned the Blue Jays yet!
The 2003 Toronto Blue Jays had the third-lowest Sv% (38.9) of any team in baseball. Lower than BK and his boys in Boston. Lower than Selig's Sluggers in Wisconsin. Lower than, well, you get the point.

The Jays had 36 saves, Aquilino with 14 of them. Cliff Politte recorded 12. Kelvim Escobar had 4, Trever Miller had 4, and Josh Towers had one of the eight out variety. That leaves one more, and it was Jeff Tam. (He was the sixth pitcher in an 11-5 win over the White Sox, a game where Towers, Tanyon Sturtze, and Miller faced a combined 5 batters.)

Oh, right. The White Sox. If bullpens-by-committee were candy and nuts, they'd have about three Merry Christmases. 36 saves, 35 of which were courtesy of three pitchers: Tom Gordon (12), Damaso Marte (11), and some guy who was traded for the 2002 Rookie of the Year (11).

I didn't really include the Detroit Tigers in this study. Their record would have skewed the results. I'm sure the Tigers would have liked to be excluded from the 2003 season entirely. Besides, the original question asked was about winning, and Detroit didn't do much of that this past year. If you're interested, the saves leader for the 2003 Tigers was in fact two people: Franklyn German and Chris Mears, who both had...well, try to guess how many they had.

Did you guess 5?

It's hard to do a saves study on Detroit if the team had fewer wins than Billy Wagner had saves, Richie Sexson had home runs, or Keith Ginter had RBIs.


CLOSING THOUGHTS

After all that, do Teams Need a Good Closer to Win?

If you accept my definition of a Good Closer, then the answer is yes. We can debate the relevance of the Good Closer or saves until Ben Johnson's stanolozol levels come down, but here's something to think about:

Since saves became an official stat in 1969, the team with the most wins had an all-star closer from Japan, and the team with the most losses had...well, Frank and Chris.

I started this article talking about goalies making saves. It only seems right to have another hockey reference at the end. (This is baseball, after all.) The first thing I thought of when I saw "saves" and "Boston" together was a popular bumper sticker among Bruins fans in the 1970's:

JESUS SAVES, BUT ESPOSITO SCORES ON THE REBOUND

Thanks for listening. This work was dedicated to "Major" Tom Henke.

-Rob

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