The men in the middle

Sporting News, The, Oct 7, 1996 by David Falkner

Any baseball fan still residing on the planet surely recalls the seventh game of the 1991 World Series. Thirty-six-year-old Jack Morris pitched a 10-inning, 1-0 shutout over the favored Braves for the Twins' second World Championship. There are still people in the north country who, though they may have had their eardrums broken by the noise in the Metrodome that night, regard Morris as a mythic hero, baseball's Eric the Red or Ponce de Leon. But the most intriguing part of Morris' performance is that it took place at all.

One evening earlier, in Game 6 the Twins came within an eyelash of letting their improbable championship slip away before Morris ever had his chance. In the top of the seventh inning with the Twins up by one, the Braves, the odor of roses in their nostrils and earplugs in place, made their moves.

Mark Lemke led off with a sharp single to center. With light-hitting, right-hitting Rafael Belliard scheduled to hit, Atlanta manager Bobby Cox pinch-hit the left but even lighter-hitting Tommy Gregg against Scott Erickson, the American League's winningest pitcher that year and the Twins' best hope of getting to Game 7. Manager Tom Kelly, in one of the great silence-producing moments in Twins history, lifted Erickson and went to his bullpen--not to ace Rick Aguilera, who had 42 saves that year, but to middle man Mark Guthrie, a lefty who had been mainly an ineffective starter that season but had done well down the stretch and into postseason in the bullpen. Cox immediately countered by pinch-hitting for his pinch-hitter, sending up Jeff Blauser, who struck out. Guthrie then wild-pitched Lemke to second, walked Lonnie Smith and gave up an infield single to Terry Pendleton, loading the bases. With Ron Gant and David Justice salivating on deck, Kelly went to the bullpen again--for another setup man, righthander Carl Willis. Willis got Gant to hit into a force play, allowing the tying run to score, and then struck out Justice.

For two more innings--until the 10th, when Aguilera finally took over--Willis held serve. The Braves never again threatened, and finally in the bottom of the 11th with the world watching, Kirby Puckett homered to win the game and turn the Series and the ball over to Morris. But the real story of Game 6--and perhaps the Series itself--is that the Twins' unheralded middle relievers were the evening's actual heroes, the men who in the face of silence, made possible the noise of a championship.

What may have seemed implausible indoors five years ago is out in the open and no longer anyone's secret going into this posteason. Middle relievers count in the same way starters and closers do. No staff (that is, no successful staff) can do without them. They are the bridge from nowhere to somewhere, from peril to no-man's land to victories and championships. What is astonishing is that middle relievers are that important and that they are still so easily overlooked. Quickly, aside from Mariano Rivera, can you name the five top middle relievers and setup men among this year's postseason teams? If you can't, then don't panic. A lot of managers, as well as fans and experts, can't either.

"I haven't seen San Diego in so damn long I don't know what they've got," Cox confessed one mid-September day, "but they're good-looking. I know that their middle-relief pitching is good." Chances are he'll pay lot more attention if the Braves and Pads square off in the second round.

Until about 20 years ago, middle relievers usually were referred to as mop-up men. They were the dregs of a team's staff, the drones and water-bearers who were unable to make it as starters but nevertheless could be used to save the arms of better pitchers when games got out of hand. They also were available when starters had to be lifted for pinch-hitters or when, occasionally, extra-inning games turned into marathons.

But beginning in the '70s, roughly around the time the designated-hitter rule was introduced in the American League, things began to change. With no soft spot in the lineup, managers increasingly began focusing on "matchups" where one kind of pitcher was preferable to another in certain key spots in games. Relievers ceased being mop-up men and instead became specialists. For many years, these specialists were really roughly divided in two: long relievers and short relievers. The short man was really the specialist in the sense that he was called on in the late stages of a game when his team had a lead or a reasonable chance of winning. He was brought in not to record a statistical save but in a situation where he literally would save a game or preserve it. Pitchers such as Rollie Fingers and Sparky Lyle were not "closers" so much as finishers, men who could be counted on to carry their teams through the last two or three innings.

The rise of the modern closer, on the other hand, is a phenomenon of the past 20 years or so. The historian Bill Felber noted that in 1952, teams that led by a run after eight innings went to the bullpen only 17.1 percent of the time. In 1972, the year before the DH, that number had risen to 29 percent. But by 1992, the number had jumped to an incredible 66.1 percent. Even a casual look at the teams in the postseason will suggest that the numbers have continued to skyrocket. A one-run Yankees lead in the ninth? It's almost inconceivable that John Wetteland wouldn't be brought in to protect it. Ditto for Todd Worrell, Trevor Hoffman, Mark Wohlers, Jose Mesa, Dennis Eckersley and Randy Myers.