Ugh!  What is that vile stench? That’s right, it’s Sidney Ponson starts and the Mariners' offense polluting our pristine Run Expectancy and Win Expectancy Matrices. Before we write our congressman to apply for stimulus money for the cleanup, let's ask: How did it get this way?

In the article on the Archimedes Awards, we developed the metric BMAR (Bullpen Management Above Random) to quantify a key aspect of bullpen management: assigning the best pitcher to the highest-leverage situations. While it helped to isolate some of what we were looking for, especially when we normalized by "the best" that a manager could do with the UBBM (Upper Bound Bullpen Management) metric. The problem was that when one looked at the list, managers with consistent closers still seemed to rise to the top of the list. For gosh sakes, in 2008, Trey Hillman tied Ron Gardenhire for highest BMAR, mostly on the back of Joakim Soria.

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