Red Sox and Leverage

David Laurila spoke with John Farrell about using Craig Kimbrel in the eighth inning Monday:

After the game, I asked Farrell — prefacing my question by saying I agreed with the move — if it was something we can anticipate seeing more of this season.

“We’ve got roles established,” responded Farrell. “The seventh, eighth and ninth have been efficient. They’ve been successful. I think this was a little bit of a blip with Koji today. That bullpen group knows that they’re there to pick one another up in certain situations. The highest-leverage inning was clearly the eighth, and hopefully we don’t find ourselves in that spot too often.”

I hoped for a more definitive answer. What Farrell said about established roles, not to mention his “hopefully not,” suggested that this might be the rare case. At the same time, he did seem to leave a window open.

I used to agree with David on this, but the people management part of the job seems to be to define roles. Pitchers want to know the situations they will be used, and that usually means pitching the seventh, the eighth, etc, coming in at the beginning of the inning. It’s fine to use Kimbrel this way when a pitcher gets in trouble, but Kimbrel won’t want to be used this way randomly.

from baseballmusings.com http://ift.tt/1U3mGNd