YOU CAN PROBABLY GUESS WHERE I’M HEADED WITH THIS ONE
It was a tougher weekend for the Yankees than I envisioned when I wrote last Friday’s entry. I expected the batters to adjust to Brett Cecil and Ricky Romero quickly rather than not at all and put Brandon Morrow down for three or four walks, not one. During Sunday’s broadcast, my colleague John Flaherty said, “Good pitching will stop good hitting,” but that eliminates either the chicken or the egg from the poultry farm. I prefer Casey Stengel’s version, “Good pitching will stop good hitting and vice-versa.” It’s not always clear where to draw the line between the pitcher’s stuff and the hitter’s treatment of it, not to mention the various lucky and unlucky bounces you get on balls in play. Still, all credit to the Jays for keeping up their end.

I have but one complaint about this weekend’s action, and you can probably guess that it has to do with Saturday’s game. After Andy Pettitte was done for the day, Joe Girardi called on Joba Chamberlain, Damaso Marte, David Robertson, Chan Ho Park, and then lost the game with Chad Gaudin, who has been hammered all season long -- he wouldn’t be a Yankee again if he hadn’t been. Conspicuously absent from this parade is the one Hall of Famer in the bullpen, Mariano Rivera. Once again, the Yankees lost a game with their big gun rusting in its holster.

Here’s what Girardi said about using Rivera:

"We have a 40-year-old closer. I don’t have a 22-year-old closer. I have a 40-year-old closer that has logged a lot of innings. He’s been down for 10 days already. Closers are used for when you’re winning games or are tied at home. That’s how you do it. If Mo extends the game, then someone else is going to have to close. If that guy gives up a run, then you say, 'Why didn’t you wait to use Mo as the closer?'"

When someone says “That’s how you do it,” your ears should perk up. There is no “that’s how you do it” in baseball. There are only folkways, mores, received wisdom, traditions waiting for a brave manager to come and break with them. In this case, Girardi actually provides the answer to his own argument when he says, “If Mo extends the game then someone else is going to have to close.” Extending the game is the whole issue here. If you don’t extend it, you head back to the hotel with a loss. If you extend the game, anything can happen. You might score 10 runs in the inning and Mickey Mouse can close and you still won’t lose. As long as the game goes on, there are possibilities. If you use your worst pitcher, there’s a high chance the game will be over and you’ll never get a chance to see what would have happened.

Managers make these kinds of arguments all the time, but they inherently don’t make sense. The record bears this out. Going back to last season, about 10 percent of games are tied going to the bottom of the ninth. If my figurin’ is correct, about a quarter of them end in regulation. I have a list of who the visiting team used in those ninth innings, and the closer was only used once in 70 games (it was Bobby Jenks last August). As for extra-inning games, the home team is 147-124 going back to the beginning of last year. That’s a little bit worse than the overall home winning percentage for that period, but not by much. Whatever visiting managers think they’re achieving by saving their closer, they’re not doing it.

Joe Girardi is one of the brightest young managers out there, one with a championship to his credit at 45. He is correct that he has to use his aging closer carefully, but no one was asking him to use Rivera for over 40 pitches, as Jerry Manuel did with Francisco Rodriguez last week at San Diego. All he needed was on inning so he could stay away from the dregs of his pen for one more time at bat. The problem is that he’s succumbed to the conventional wisdom that envisions your best reliever as a “closer” instead of the more appropriate original designation, “fireman.” The Yankees didn’t need a closer in that game, they needed a fireman. Girardi didn’t call one, so the game burned down.

MORE OF ME
• Over the weekend, I posted a quick bit on the Orioles and the historical misery of their record over at BP (free).

• I’ve got a new original song co-written by myself at CO music.net, “Storm Crow”,  about wanting the one who will destroy you. It’s a free download or audio stream, and feel free to leave a comment if you dig it.