Second only to the dreaded “vote of confidence” comes the nearly-as-dreaded “closer by committee”. Skippers feign confidence telling reporters “Yeah we’re gonna mix and match, play matchups…” and overlook the glaring reality: while you can name scores of individual closers who thrived, a much shorter list is the list of “closers by committee” that actually succeeded.
Now a good alternate title to this piece might be “Correlation Is Not Causation”. You could look at the data and conclude that going
to church caused the NFL to play football games, but while there is a clear correlation between the two one does not in fact cause the other.
Why does “closer by committee” so regularly fail? Remember that you only call on a group of relievers to “mix and match” because you don’t have a dominant reliever who stands out above the rest as clearly your best reliever.
If your “closer by committee” was mixing and matching Josh Hader against LH heavy parts of the order, Edwin Diaz for RH heavy parts of the order, and when Diaz was not available Robert Suarez to slot in, your committee would do just fine.
Instead, those committees tend to be made up of talented-but-iffy relievers, guys like, say, Hogan Harris or Elvis Alvarado or Scott Barlow…Alvarado in particular has “closer’s stuff” just not the requisite control, consistency or track record. If he shows all those qualities, he’s going to be anointed “the closer” and you won’t have a committee.
So you see why “closer by committee” doesn’t work? You only do it when you only have relievers you don’t especially trust or want to close — so you let a few guys take turns wobbling around, maximizing each of their strengths even if it really means minimizing their weaknesses.
Still, the overarching message here is “Beware!” anytime a manager announces, with fake enthusiasm and confidence, that he has decided “closer by committee” is the ticket to his team’s glory. The sooner a true closer emerges, the better.
How would you organize the bullpen as currently constructed? You can take your best shot with or without Jack Perkins in the mix, as the team continues to be non-committal around Perkins’ role. To avoid prejudicing the conversation I will offer my own “pearls of wisdom” in the comments later after the community has had a chance to weigh in. Play ball!
