We had some great discussion about closers at Mantle’s with Lenny Melnick, Paul Greco and Adam Ronis from Newsday.com. Yes, that is me in the Yankee Jersey.

Before I go get killed at work this week I wanted to get up a post summarizing my appearance on the Live From Mickey Mantle’s show on Friday. It was a great show with some fantastic guests. I had the unenviable task of following Mike Easler as a guest, who called in from Florida.

My segment primarily focused on closers, and there is a key principle that I discussed that I wanted to address here. There are always closers who vault to the job based upon a season dominated by good fortune. This is a problem with minor leaguers also; in both situations guys get promoted to jobs based upon some good fortune in hit rate or strand rate or HR/FB rate, and these players carry great risk when their fortunate performance is not recognized.

What happens is that the correction in their stats occurs in high leverage and high visibility innings, leading to the belief that they are not qualified for the job. In many cases they are completely qualified, but it is only the correction in their performance that perverts an evaluation of their performance.

Here are a few examples of guys that are qualified for the job but might lose it just on standard statistical regression:

George Sherrill Sherrill is a fly ball pitcher in a park that is favorable to right handed power hitters. Last year was the first time in his career that he showed ability against right-handed hitters, but that was only in 76 ABs so it could be a statistical fluke. He had a 25% hit rate and an 80% strand rate, both of which will regress significantly. He has a rising FB rate and yet was still lucky on his HR/FB ratio last year. These are all large risk factors; don’t go treating him as a rock solid closer.

Carlos Marmol Another pitcher that is very similarly profiled to Sherrill. He is clearly good enough to keep the job but was also lucky last year. Like Sherill he had a 28% hit rate, which is not too crazy, but had an 89% strand rate which will start regressing hard and often. That rate is simply not sustainable. He also is an extreme fly ball pitcher, with rates over 50%. I may be the only fantasy player who would prefer Joe Borowski to these two, but there you have it in writing. I did officially take this position on Sunday’s radio show.

Brian Wilson Unlike Sherrill and Marmol, Wilson is only marginally qualified to be a closer in my view. His 24% hit rate and 77% strand rates will regress, and he is an extreme ground ball pitcher. Unlike the case of fly ball pitchers, whose main concern is extra homeruns, with Wilson the sheer number of ground balls combined with his lucky hit rate bode very poorly. This is because ground balls are far more likely to be hits than fly balls. Letting up tons of ground balls while seeing your hit rate increase by 5-10% is not a good formula for a rock solid closer.

Tony Pena The general expectation is that Pena will get the job at some point, but he carries risk as well. Taking it to a second level, the risk here is that when he regresses he will never actually get the job. If his regression comes early then he will fall down the pecking order so that when Lyon flops Pena doesn’t get the job. He is not a better pitcher than Juan Cruz anyway in my view so perhaps that will be justice.

He has a K rate of only 6.6 and a BB rate of 3.3 for an uninspiring (for closers) 2-1ratio. He had a hit rate of 24% and a strand rate of 73% and an xERA a full run higher than his actual ERA. His entire resume is really a lucky 44 IP through June when he had an 18% hit rate. The second half saw his rates normalize to 29% and 69%, which are almost the exact benchmarks, and he put up a 4.61 ERA.

I could go on as there are lots of pitchers that fit this profile. Make sure that you don’t fall into the trap of viewing these types of pitchers as rock solid closers.

If you want to hear the show I sadly cannot put up a link because of computer problems on my laptop. But you can go to Blog Talk Radio and search for the Live From Mickey Mantle’s show; it was a three hour show and I came in at about the 2:15 mark.

Edit: As the Associate Editor, I feel it is my duty to save Patrick from his computer problems. Here’s the link to the radio show- Live From Mickey Mantles. Enjoy! –Mike Podhorzer