Defending Roberts

Dave Cameron defends Dave Roberts bullpen usage.

In the fifth and sixth innings, Verlander showed that riding your dominant starter is no guarantee of success, and that great pitchers give up runs sometimes. It happens. It’s baseball.

But we don’t get to just wave away Verlander’s failures while acting as if Jansen’s were somehow written on tablets the moment Roberts pulled Hill after 18 batters faced. Tonight, both an elite starter and an elite closer blew leads. If anything, the story of tonight’s game is there is no perfect way to manage, and that no matter what you do or what they’ve done previously, no one can be counted on to perform in a certain way every game.

If Roberts sticks with Hill, perhaps he gets another scoreless inning out of him, or perhaps Altuve and Correa hit their monstrous home runs five innings sooner. We’ll never know. We can’t know. And pretending that it was clear that Hill would have rolled through four guys who just destroyed left-handed pitching this year, the best hitters on the best offense in baseball, is silly.

That game is a great reminder of this cartoon.

Randomly, someone is going to have a bad night once in a while. John Smoltz, during the broadcast, pointed out the bigger danger of going to your bullpen early. The more relievers you use, the higher the probability of one of them having a bad night.

Note that A.J. Hinch ran into a similar problem. Ken Giles tired, and Hinch did not pull him fast enough. The big lesson from last night is that it’s much tougher for a closer to get six outs than three.

from baseballmusings.com http://ift.tt/2iDXbrC