Last night, the Braves dropped an 11-inning decision to the Diamondbacks in Arizona. Closer Craig Kimbrel, freshly in the game to protect a 4-3 lead, gave up four straight singles, including a deflected grounder, to cough up the lead. Ironically, Kimbrel was in the game in the 11th because with a 3-2 lead going to the bottom of the seventh inning, manager Fredi Gonzalez had opted to eschew his normal set-up team in favor of old Joe Torre whipping boy Scott Proctor, who gave up the tying run on a walk, bunt, and two-base wild pitch.
From David O’Brien’s story:
Asked why reliever Eric O’Flaherty didn’t start the seventh, Gonzalez said, “When you’re on the road, you’ve got to push guys back a little bit, because you can’t use your closer on the road in the ninth inning of a tie ballgame.”
In saying “you can’t,” Gonzalez is obviously referring to the Old Testament, where it says in Numbers 32:23 that—wait a second, hang on—I just re-read the entire Bible, the Quran, the Talmud, the assembled wisdom of the ancient Greeks, and the collected sayings of Confucius. This is really strange, but… I can’t find where it says that you can’t use your closer in a tie game on the road! If you hang on a sec, I’ll just page through some books on John McGraw, Connie Mack, Casey Stengel, Earl Weaver… Funny, it’s not here either. Did I miss a class?
I’m not a general manager and will never be one, and there are good reasons for that, in part that I would probably fire a manager for making a statement like that, because he had just revealed himself to be a spectacularly limited thinker. Only someone missing half a lobe of their brain would fail to understand this very basic idea: saving your closer to protect a lead that might never come is like not taking a life-saving medicine because some day you might be sicker—if you don’t die.
I can give you one great manager on this subject. Leo Durocher said, “Never save a pitcher for tomorrow. Tomorrow it might rain.” We can paraphrase this to “Never save a pitcher for later—later the game might already be over.” In a tie on the road, the visiting team should have one goal and one goal only when on defense from the bottom of the ninth onward: keep the game alive so you get to bat again. If the home team scores, the game is over and you don’t get to try to win it. Saving your best relievers for some hypothetical save situation that you might never get to is idiotic.
Look, I’m not big on using negative, condemnatory words like “stupid” here at Baseball Prospectus or anywhere else. I give the nation’s baseball men a great deal of credit and in any case, I want to run a high-tone operation. Yet, it’s hard to think of an occasion that demands such language more than the manager of a major-league contending team with the illustrious recent history of the Braves repeating this kind of illogical nonsense.
Mr. Gonzalez: if you had just gone with your normal order of operations in a game in which you had the lead you might never have had to worry about using your closer in extra innings. Further—and this is just for future reference—if you should end up in a tie game on the road, go with your best option and deal with protecting a lead when you come to it. You never know—if the game goes on long enough, you might finally take the lead, and not a one-run lead, but a ten-run lead. Then it won’t matter if the bloody bat boy pitches the bottom of whatever-inning-it-is. Thing is, if you keep Scott Proctorizing yourself, you’re never going to get the opportunity to find out—and someday you will be remembered as the disappointing successor to a Hall of Fame manager, a footnote.
(H/T to J.C. Bradbury.)
Thank you for reading
This is a free article. If you enjoyed it, consider subscribing to Baseball Prospectus. Subscriptions support ongoing public baseball research and analysis in an increasingly proprietary environment.
Subscribe now
Charlie manuel did the same thing in the ninth against the cards keeping baez in a tie game over Madson.
Frankly, I doubt Gonzalez meant that at all; but I also doubt he worships at the altar of "No Closer in the 9th of a Tie Game on the Road." I thnk he's just giving the media a soundbite to cover for his players.
I think it's important to keep in mind that the ambition of most managers isn't to win games but to stay manager, and while the best way to do that is to win games, other things matter as well, including the way in which games are won and lost, player morale, etc. I believe that in cases where we routinely observe sub-optimal in-game decision-making it is driven by the manager's incentives diverging from maximization of single-game win probability. In this particular case, I would postulate that loss aversion has as much to do with closer usage patterns as the save statistic, and a lot more to do with it than manager IQ.
But I'd love to see BP explore these kind of issues in more depth. I think it would bring a really unique angle to the site and help bridge the gap with the traditionalists.
If a manager does something out of the ordinary and it does not work, he gets criticized heavily.
If a manager does the expected and it does not work, people criticize the player, not the manager.
If something works, no one makes note of it.
It's a nice though that loss aversion has more to do with closer usage than yeh save stat, but that conflicts with the fact that closets are pretty much always used in a 3-run lead situation, which does trigger the save stat but shouldn't trigger loss aversion.
Historically, I'd love to see this question asked to ex-players: "Was (insert manager name here) really as dumb as he sounded when he said (fill in soundbite)?"
Let's go pound some Budweiser!
If Fredi doesn't follow the current book of not using your closer on the road in a tie game the second guessers have a field day. If it fails he gets criticized for being a boob. If it works he was "lucky". And when this happens you had best be winning a lot of ballgames (see Torre, Joe).
And the 2% of us who know he did the right thing don't count. The talking heads on ESPN and MLBTV have vastly more influence than we do.
The point is that he didn't use his 7th inning guy in the 7TH INNING of a game in which the Braves HAD THE LEAD because he was worried that if the DBacks eventually tied it, he would THEN need to use his closer in the 9th inning of a tie game.
So naturally the guy he brought in instead of the "real" 7th inning guy blew the lead. But at least he got to save his closer!
But there are also times when it makes sense to use your closer in a tie game in the 9th.
The bigger problem, to me, is that Gonzalez is saying "I will always, always, blindly follow a set guideline for how to manage my baseball team, without any regard for context or match-ups". That is the problem - that a manager think that an ironclad, "this is the way it should always be done" principle for managing is correct.
It's no exaggeration that Hillman cost the Royals about 8-10 wins back in 2009 by not bringing in Soria with a tie game in the 8th or 9th.
http://www.bostonredsoxshop.com/francona-%E2%80%98glad-we%E2%80%99re-playing-at-home%E2%80%99/
"Over his team’s last three games, Red Sox manager Terry Francona has become no stranger to dramatic finishes in Fenway Park, and he believes a lot of it is tied to the pros of playing at home in baseball. Had Thursday’s game been played under similar circumstances on the road, perhaps Crawford’s RBI doesn’t prove to be a game-winner because the Tigers would still have another chance to bat in the bottom of the inning. What’s more, Jonathan Papelbon wouldn’t have preserved the tie in the half inning before the winning rally because Francona would need to save his closer for a potential save in either the bottom of the inning or extra frames.
“I think I’m glad we’re playing at home,†Francona said. “You know how we feel on the road sometimes. You get into games like this [at home], and if there’s a mistake or something, you go home. That’s the luxury of playing home. And you can use your closer where you can’t normally on the road.â€"
Really, the best time I can think of for a manager to try unorthodox strategies is when a fringe contender is battling for a playoff spot down the stretch. If your strategies are successful, you're a hero. If not, well, you'd probably be fired anyway.
The anti-analysis crowd: manage your bullpen corps so as to maximize the amount of saves recorded by the designated "closer".
And yet, somehow, it is the pro-analysis crowd who allows their view of the game to be distorted by statistics...
The usual suspects may not be around for the whole season, so managers apparently feel the need to test guys under fire (at the risk of losing a game) in order to see if they have viable Plan Bs.
Fredi's quote had nothing to do with that, but that notwithstanding, there may have been some logic to his in game behavior anyway.
"Brian Fuentes ripped A's manager Bob Geren after the club's Monday evening loss to the Angels.
Fuentes, who has been acting as the A's closer through the first two months of the regular season, was thrown into a tie game Monday night and allowed Anaheim's go-ahead run. "There’s just no communication," he told reporters afterward. "Two games, on the road, bring the closer in a tied game, with no previous discussions of doing so. I don’t think anybody really knows which direction he’s headed.""