[h=1]Hanrahan proves closer myth[/h][h=3]The newest Red Sock helps illustrate why closers are made, not born[/h]By Dan Szymborski | Baseball Think Factory
ESPN INSIDER
In the only big transaction during this holiday lull, the Boston Red Sox acquired Joel Hanrahan from the Pittsburgh Pirates in a six-player trade that saw, most notably, Stolmy Pimentel, Jerry Sands, and Mark Melancon go the other direction. The Pirates immediately announced that Jason Grilli would step into Hanrahan's role as the closer for the Bucs in 2013. And just as quickly, a portion of the pundits predicted gloom for the Pirates because they lost their closer.
The truth of the matter is that closers are made, not born, and Hanrahan himself helps prove this.
<offer>The current closer paradigm is essentially a product of the late 1970s, a fairly small amount of time in the past for the creation of the whole closer mythos. Herman Franks, the manager of the Chicago Cubs rarely used Bruce Sutter when the team was behind, and the modern closer was born.
Very quickly, the reliever evolved into a ninth-inning, save machine role, with mixed results. As closers devolved into mostly pitching a single inning and racking up easier saves, the leverage index, which measures the importance of a situation based on the base situation, inning, and score, has also declined somewhat for closers. Sutter had a leverage index of 2.0 or greater for seven consecutive years. Gossage pulled off the feat 11 times, and Sparky Lyle managed seven such years. Nowadays, only a handful of relievers hit 2.0 in any given season.
As the closer became even more ingrained in baseball strategy, the mythology developed. Already starting in the '70s, closers didn't just have to be good relievers, they had to combine the tenacity of a bulldog, the determination of a 1940s comic book hero fighting the Nazis, with maybe a little dash of ninja sprinkled in. It also helped to have a cool nickname or a beard that resembled that of a Civil War general. All of this despite the fact that David Smith of Retrosheet.org wrote a research paper for the 2004 SABR Convention and found that despite the changes in reliever usage in recent decades, teams didn't do any better a job at holding leads.
<!-- begin inline 1 -->[h=4]Trade breakdown[/h]ZiPS projections for all the players involved in the Red Sox-Pirates trade.
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<!-- end inline 1 -->To take Dave's research one step further, I took the roughly 3,000 pitchers over the last 30 years who were primarily used as a reliever and pitched 30 innings in two consecutive seasons, to see how changes in bullpen role affected expectations and results. For expectations, I used Tom Tango's Marcel projections, which is an easy source of historical projections. (My projection system, ZiPS, only goes back to 2002.)
Overall, middle relievers converted to closers tended to outperform their expectations in year two, a trend which disappeared when looking at closers that remained closer. This is to be expected as players that are improving are more likely to be trusted with additional responsibilities. This is what we call selection bias.
Going through players who received at least 10 more save opportunities after a season of fewer than 10 saves, the players that fit that storyline of "good reliever, can't cut it as closer" are damned few. I found only 10 that underperformed their projected ERA by at least a run and when you knock out the ones who turned out to be just fine in future seasons (C.J. Wilson, Dave Veres, Ron Davis) and the ones that were injured, you essentially end up with Mike Perez, Matt Herges, Cliff Politte, and Matt Lindstrom. Frightfully few for a 30-year period, even being nice and throwing in LaTroy Hawkins, who doesn't quite fit given that he handled the job admirably for a whole year before melting down.
Searching more deeply for the Loch Ness Closer, I ended up with the same results using other methods. Surely, given that no projection system takes into account moxie and mojo, the correlation between Marcel-projected ERA and actual ERA was no worse for middle relievers who got chances at closing than for middle relievers who didn't: 0.13 vs. 0.16, dreadfully small numbers. (And that low correlation is not a surprise given that reliever ERA jumps around more than Derek Jeter fielding a grounder in the hole.)
Mariano Rivera and Trevor Hoffman were two of the best closers of this generation not because of a label or a job assignment, but because they were damn good pitchers. Rivera has succeeded because of a cutter that makes grown men cry and Hoffman succeeded because of a changeup that violates the gravitational constant of the universe. Why not just leave it at that?
In the end, the Hanrahan trade can best be evaluated on the basis of how good the players involved are, without the mumbo-jumbo. Lest we forget, Joel Hanrahan was a middle reliever just two years ago, rather than emerging from the womb as a ninth-inning closer. Hanrahan's job title has little bearing on the whether this trade turns out to be a good one or not for the Pirates.
Hanrahan and Grilli is a better combination than Hanrahan and Mark Melancon (Hanrahan's 3.66 projected ERA in Boston was 3.13 in Pittsburgh, due to park and league differences), but in return, the Pirates save money that they could use on a higher upside player (Francisco Liriano) and pick up a project in Pimentel (that 105.1 projected IP is if he played in the majors in 2013). The Pirates, with a tighter budget, need the higher-upside players, while Boston, with a bigger bankroll and other signings meant to compete in the short-term, can take the safer path with Hanrahan. A fair trade for both sides, and no mythology required.
</offer>
ESPN INSIDER
In the only big transaction during this holiday lull, the Boston Red Sox acquired Joel Hanrahan from the Pittsburgh Pirates in a six-player trade that saw, most notably, Stolmy Pimentel, Jerry Sands, and Mark Melancon go the other direction. The Pirates immediately announced that Jason Grilli would step into Hanrahan's role as the closer for the Bucs in 2013. And just as quickly, a portion of the pundits predicted gloom for the Pirates because they lost their closer.
The truth of the matter is that closers are made, not born, and Hanrahan himself helps prove this.
<offer>The current closer paradigm is essentially a product of the late 1970s, a fairly small amount of time in the past for the creation of the whole closer mythos. Herman Franks, the manager of the Chicago Cubs rarely used Bruce Sutter when the team was behind, and the modern closer was born.
Very quickly, the reliever evolved into a ninth-inning, save machine role, with mixed results. As closers devolved into mostly pitching a single inning and racking up easier saves, the leverage index, which measures the importance of a situation based on the base situation, inning, and score, has also declined somewhat for closers. Sutter had a leverage index of 2.0 or greater for seven consecutive years. Gossage pulled off the feat 11 times, and Sparky Lyle managed seven such years. Nowadays, only a handful of relievers hit 2.0 in any given season.
As the closer became even more ingrained in baseball strategy, the mythology developed. Already starting in the '70s, closers didn't just have to be good relievers, they had to combine the tenacity of a bulldog, the determination of a 1940s comic book hero fighting the Nazis, with maybe a little dash of ninja sprinkled in. It also helped to have a cool nickname or a beard that resembled that of a Civil War general. All of this despite the fact that David Smith of Retrosheet.org wrote a research paper for the 2004 SABR Convention and found that despite the changes in reliever usage in recent decades, teams didn't do any better a job at holding leads.
<!-- begin inline 1 -->[h=4]Trade breakdown[/h]ZiPS projections for all the players involved in the Red Sox-Pirates trade.
| PITCHERS | IP | ERA | BB | K |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hanrahan (BOS) | 59.0 | 3.66 | 27 | 66 |
| Grilli (PIT) | 53.2 | 3.19 | 21 | 68 |
| Pimentel (PIT) | 105.1 | 5.38 | 44 | 60 |
| Melancon (PIT) | 59.1 | 3.64 | 17 | 53 |
| HITTERS | BA | OBP | SLG | HR |
| Sands (PIT) | .236 | .304 | .394 | 16 |
| Holt (BOS) | .269 | .349 | .340 | 1 |
<thead>
</thead><tbody>
</tbody>
<!-- end inline 1 -->To take Dave's research one step further, I took the roughly 3,000 pitchers over the last 30 years who were primarily used as a reliever and pitched 30 innings in two consecutive seasons, to see how changes in bullpen role affected expectations and results. For expectations, I used Tom Tango's Marcel projections, which is an easy source of historical projections. (My projection system, ZiPS, only goes back to 2002.)
Overall, middle relievers converted to closers tended to outperform their expectations in year two, a trend which disappeared when looking at closers that remained closer. This is to be expected as players that are improving are more likely to be trusted with additional responsibilities. This is what we call selection bias.
Going through players who received at least 10 more save opportunities after a season of fewer than 10 saves, the players that fit that storyline of "good reliever, can't cut it as closer" are damned few. I found only 10 that underperformed their projected ERA by at least a run and when you knock out the ones who turned out to be just fine in future seasons (C.J. Wilson, Dave Veres, Ron Davis) and the ones that were injured, you essentially end up with Mike Perez, Matt Herges, Cliff Politte, and Matt Lindstrom. Frightfully few for a 30-year period, even being nice and throwing in LaTroy Hawkins, who doesn't quite fit given that he handled the job admirably for a whole year before melting down.
Searching more deeply for the Loch Ness Closer, I ended up with the same results using other methods. Surely, given that no projection system takes into account moxie and mojo, the correlation between Marcel-projected ERA and actual ERA was no worse for middle relievers who got chances at closing than for middle relievers who didn't: 0.13 vs. 0.16, dreadfully small numbers. (And that low correlation is not a surprise given that reliever ERA jumps around more than Derek Jeter fielding a grounder in the hole.)
Mariano Rivera and Trevor Hoffman were two of the best closers of this generation not because of a label or a job assignment, but because they were damn good pitchers. Rivera has succeeded because of a cutter that makes grown men cry and Hoffman succeeded because of a changeup that violates the gravitational constant of the universe. Why not just leave it at that?
In the end, the Hanrahan trade can best be evaluated on the basis of how good the players involved are, without the mumbo-jumbo. Lest we forget, Joel Hanrahan was a middle reliever just two years ago, rather than emerging from the womb as a ninth-inning closer. Hanrahan's job title has little bearing on the whether this trade turns out to be a good one or not for the Pirates.
Hanrahan and Grilli is a better combination than Hanrahan and Mark Melancon (Hanrahan's 3.66 projected ERA in Boston was 3.13 in Pittsburgh, due to park and league differences), but in return, the Pirates save money that they could use on a higher upside player (Francisco Liriano) and pick up a project in Pimentel (that 105.1 projected IP is if he played in the majors in 2013). The Pirates, with a tighter budget, need the higher-upside players, while Boston, with a bigger bankroll and other signings meant to compete in the short-term, can take the safer path with Hanrahan. A fair trade for both sides, and no mythology required.
</offer>
