MLB closers deal with uncommon pressure

MINNEAPOLIS — Jonathan Papelbon knows the price of a loss.

This is the price of a loss in June, not one down the stretch in the final days of the season. This is the price of a loss to a better team, the Rays, a loss that's hardly a matter of life or death.

For Papelbon, that kind of forgettable, mundane loss is worth $5,000.

At least, that's how much the Phillies closer offered to pay any teammate who could break a 6-6 tie in the June 23 game he'd blown in the top of the ninth inning. It's how much he allegedly forked over to Jim Thome after the slugger hit a walk-off home run in the bottom of that same inning.

Papelbon's first blown save was in the books, but after Thome's shot, the closer came away with a win rather than his third loss of the season. He'd paid $5,000, but it must have seemed like a steal. That kind of game, the end of perfection at a position where success can be so fleeting, means more than a scribbled check to a player like Papelbon.

He knows how much his job matters. He's been subject to the mental pressure of it for years, but still, to deal with his first blown save and a loss in the same night — that would have been a lot to take in.

"It's mental pressure," Papelbon said. "It's the game pressure. It's you happen to go out there and get the hardest outs in the ballgame. There's a lot of things that go into that equation, why it's so tough. People don't realize to go out and lock down 40 games a year, getting the hardest outs of the ballgame night in and night out, is not easy."

In 2012, being a closer is not just the most stressful job in baseball, but perhaps in all of sports. Just think about it: In what other game is a player expected to come in cold during its final minutes and decide the ending? We criticize LeBron James for his inability to close out games in the NBA and he might be the best player in basketball. He's able to loosen up throughout the game, to hit his stride when it matters most and he still can fail. Closers get little more than a few warmup tosses in the safety of a bullpen, maybe an arm rubdown and a pat on the butt before they're out there, expected to make the equivalent of a 3-point shot as the clock ticks down.

Welcome to the game. You haven't had any effect until now, but it's on the line and you are going to decide the outcome.

The spotlight is at its brightest. Fans are standing, cheering, booing, yelling, stomping. It doesn't matter if a closer has three outs remaining or one pitch — just an errant throw is all it takes to be completely undone.

"You're the only guy that knows when you come to the park that if you have a bad day, you're team's not going to have a good day," former closer Jason Isringhausen said. "That makes it fun. You want to come to the park; you want to have that adrenaline flow everyday as a closer."

Now, five years removed from his last consistent closing job in St. Louis, Isringhausen can look back on it fondly. He remembers the nights he fed off the pressure instead of his 10 blown saves in 2006. It's easier to call it fun now, when Isringhausen can look at his World Series ring from that season without the visceral reminder that rookie Adam Wainwright took his job in the playoffs.

Now a reliever with the Angels, Isringhausen misses the stress. That's what marks him as a closer, once one of the league's best. In order to excel at the position, a player has to accept it for all it entails and embrace the difficulties. He has to be able to internalize the boos — because even one blown save can earn them in some cities — and to know that they can be unwarranted. He has to know he's the whipping boy, that he's under the microscope at all times.

"It's gone on for a year and a half straight . . . since I blew the opening day save last year, people were asking for my throat," Brewers closer John Axford said. "I didn't have a great start of the season, but then after that, all the sudden, things kind of came together and rolled for me, and everyone was on my side. And then I blew one save, or a couple saves on back-to-back days like I did recently, and everyone's asking for your head."

"It doesn't matter what happened the rest of the day, you're either the hero or the goat."

It's a position where so much lies out of a player's control. It's all about tiny decisions, about intentional walks and matchups. There are times when a closer might disagree with what he's told to do, but he has to accept that he's the arm, not always the brain. Some of the strategy is best left to managers, and really, that makes sense. With the hisses and the cheers, the emotion of it all, a closer has enough to contend with mentally.

This season, though, there's another glitch. After two straight years of injuries and struggles among closers all over the league, there's now a nagging thought in the back of many closers' minds. It's louder than the cheers some days, rarely silenced by the boos. Could I be next? What injury is coming, what tiny, accidental adjustment that might render me useless? If Mariano Rivera can fall, so can anyone.

But maybe there's a bigger fear, one more haunting even than the prospect of a freak injury. Maybe we're doing this all wrong. Maybe this isn't working. Maybe the modern closer isn't as viable or effective of a role as we all are conditioned to believe.

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So how did we get to this point, where a simple win can be worth that much to Papelbon? How did baseball become a sport in which Axford can receive hateful messages on Twitter one night and professions of love the next?  To answer those questions, look back nearly half a century.

In the 1950s and 1960s, teams didn't always have closers. In fact, it was a rare designation. In 1950 Phillies reliever Jim Konstanty was named the National League's Most Valuable Player with a 16-7 record with an NL-high 22 saves out of the bullpen for the 1950 "Whiz Kids". In 1960, Pittsburgh's Elroy Face became the first pitcher to save at least 20 games in multiple seasons. Face became the archetype of the modern closer, and soon other teams caught on.

"There were only three or four guys in all of baseball that were actually used (as closers)," former Pirates closer Kent Tekulve said. "Everybody else just had a couple guys sitting in the bullpen that couldn't start, and they'd put them in use when they could."

Pittsburgh was at the forefront of innovation in the bullpen in those days, and by the early 1970s, the Pirates had settled on an even more defined bullpen, with a closer and a setup man. Beginning in 1971, Ramon Hernandez set up Dave Giusti, who in 1971 had 30 saves, second-best in the majors. Teams saw the Pirates' success that season, and they started to contemplate adding a setup pitcher to their bullpens.

Since then, the closer has trended more and more toward a one-inning job, and Tony LaRussa with Oakland in the 1980s is considered the father of the modern bullpen, which boasts a setup man and a closer who almost always only pitch when a team is ahead.

This is a different world than Jim Kaat joined in 1958. Kaat still remembers Warren Spahn's advice that when the game is tied in the seventh inning, it's really just starting, and a starter should learn to be his own reliever. At the time, that was a common mantra.

"I can recall (player-manager Jack McKeon) coming to the mound in the seventh inning with a couple of men on, and he'd say ‘Well kid, figure out a way to get out of it,'" Kaat said. "Some days you would. Some days you wouldn't."

Now, a starter expects his night to end in the middle innings of a game unless he's pitching spectacularly. It's not his turn anymore. It's time for the setup man, then the closer. That's the routine, the rigid structure that has come to define pitching today.

No sport is more defined by routine than baseball, no position more than pitcher. It's been decades since the strict roles of the bullpen were implemented and players today don't know anything different. They're the children of routine. Many can barely remember watching Hall of Famer Goose Gossage, who would pitch multiple-inning saves as often as three-out appearances as one of the best closers in baseball in the 1970s and 1980s.

"Pitchers are routine-oriented people," Papelbon said. "When you get out of that routine, it's tougher to get back in it, and that routine is what keeps you grounded. It's what keeps you successful. For me, that's a big factor."

However, in a season in which only 13 teams have been able to use the closer they anticipated in the offseason without him seeing a significant injury, it looks like something is wrong with that routine. This is about the money — baseball is paying a collective $53,161,750 to pitchers who were intended to close this year but are unlikely to do so for the remainder of the season — as much as it is about the havoc such instability can wreak upon a team. That $53 million figure doesn't include the salaries of players who were called up or moved temporarily into the closing spot before losing the job or ceding it back to the player it was intended for. Teams are shuffling desperately to find their late-inning pitchers, and under the current circumstances, the options sometimes aren't there.

One of the biggest problems with the current bullpen setup is that it's based on flawed assumptions that can easily lead to injury when they don't hold. Closers are supposed to pitch only when their team is ahead (ideally by no more than three runs) in the ninth inning. That can mean days without pitching or a rapid succession of save situations. Closers are accustomed to a certain pitch count, and sometimes, remaining under that threshold is impossible. In addition, it's become a power position, based so much on throwing ever harder.

All that combines for the worst kind of consequences for a pitcher's arm.

"It's like on the gas, off the gas, on the gas, off the gas," Tekulve said. "It's much more difficult on the engine than to just keep on going at a steady pace."

In addition, closers in 2012 are larger than they've ever been. The position has come a long way since the 5-8, 155-pound Face was the best in the league; now, a closer who isn't somewhere near 6 feet and 200 lbs. is a rarity. Size and the lower pitching mound make the mechanics of velocity more difficult, and it's easier to overthrow and become injured.

"They're more concerned, young pitchers particularly, with how hard they throw instead of finding sort of a cruising speed and some movement on their pitches," Kaat said. "They try to throw so hard to justify getting signed or getting a spot in the rotation and they end up breaking down."

In addition, the closer has become something of a hoarded treasure. He's supposed to be one of the best pitchers on a team's roster, yet he's limited to so few innings. Instead, teams put less talented pitchers on the mound, often sacrificing their shot at a win before closers can even begin to warm up. Closers aren't even allowed a chance to deliver the maximum returns of which they're capable, in many cases.

It's easy to see the advantages of a more flexible closer, especially on losing teams. The Twins, who have been mired at the bottom of the American League Central all season, have one of the league's more effective closers in Matt Capps. However, there have been times this year when he could have gone days between save opportunities, his arm growing cold in the bullpen. Manager Ron Gardenhire, though, has worked to minimize those situations, putting Capps in games that aren't save situations. Not only does that keep Capps in some kind of routine, but it also could give the Twins a better shot at winning.

In four of Tekulve's 15 full seasons in the majors, he had double-digit wins. In fact, in the four seasons in which he recorded his most saves, Tekulve had eight, 10, eight and 12 wins. That wasn't by accident; Tekulve's manager, Chuck Tanner, knew he was the best his bullpen had to offer, and he let him help the team in more ways than the narrowly defined position of closer now dictates.

Even Isringhausen, who's been in the major leagues since 1995, can't imagine that the game could be played any other way. Like many younger players, though, he recognizes the problems that closers have faced this year. It's not hard to see the injuries and breakdowns, but instead of questioning them, many players somehow accept that it's simply the way things must be. There's a common refrain among them of "I feel bad for the injured players" and "I'd love to know what's wrong" with just a vague worry that the same might happen to them. It's the older, retired players who can point out the bigger issues. Better yet, some can even see a solution.

It's not something that's going to happen tomorrow, maybe not in many retired players' lifetimes. But years of exposure to the game can allow players to begin to see trends, and the most pervasive trend in baseball is the bandwagon.

"It's the biggest copycat game in the world, because somebody will have the nerve to do something different, and when it works, everybody jumps on the bandwagon," Tekulve said. "The only problem is they all know how to jump on the bandwagon for certain things, but if it doesn't go right, I don't know that anybody has the nerve or the knowledge to know to how to jump back off the of the bandwagon."

Playing well relies on playing how one is conditioned to, and fixing the bullpen might require only a simple change in conditioning. When Nolan Ryan purchased the Rangers in 2010, he made an immediate commitment to reworking how his organization coddled pitchers. He wanted pitchers to toughen up, to compete like they did when he was the best in the game in the 1970s and 1980s. Retired players like Tekulve have taken note of Ryan's attempts, and they might be the best hope at steadying what looks like a time bomb of a position.

This is going to take years of going into the minor leagues and teaching pitchers to compete differently. They'll have to learn how to be flexible with their pitch counts and coaches will have to be comfortable allowing multi-inning saves. Pitchers will have to learn to fend for themselves, instead of falling back on endless matchup machinations. But if Ryan's methods work, or if another owner or manager begins to try something similar, it's not crazy to think that this could catch on. It's a copycat game, after all.

There's a reason Papelbon is making $11 million this season and it's not so that he can pay Thome for home runs. Papelbon is paid so well because he's one of the best closers in the game and perhaps the best pitcher on his team. He's valuable, the kind of player a team will write those hefty checks to acquire, and he's not the only such closer in the league.

It's frightening to think what a player like Papelbon could do for a team if he were allowed to contribute to the furthest extent of his abilities, likely in a different way than he does in 2012. The pressure would still be there, but it might be different. The scrutiny might subside if these players could remain healthy and consistent. The roles would change, and the problems would never fully subside. Still, there has to be a better way to do this.

There has to be a system in which those $11 million weren't always teetering on the brink of being thrown away, squandered by the questionable realities of a position.

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