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Mets Bullpen: Why Willie Gets a Pass |
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Written by Joe Janish
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Sunday, 09 March 2008 |
 (Editor's Note) Do yourself a favor Mets fans, and visit MetsToday.com, a blog about your favorite team. Its author, Joe Janish, will be joining us from time to time here on Gotham to share his thoughts on all things Mets. Please join me in welcoming him yo Gotham Nation. - MH Throughout the 2007 season, many pundits (including myself) severely
criticized Mets manager Willie Randolph for the way he (mis)handled the
bullpen. After much thought and research, I’m willing to give Willie a pass. His
inability to keep arms fresh through a 162-game season is not entirely
his fault, because he learned about bullpen management in the dugout of
the New York Yankees in the 1990s and early 2000s – which we know now
as baseball’s “Age of Performance-enhancing Drugs”.
Underscored in evidence such as that from the Mitchell Report, PEDs were used by all types of ballplayers – not just the homerun sluggers. More to the point, many PEDs were not used for bulging biceps so much as for recovery – from injuries and ballgames.
No one has come out and admitted to the latter, but it’s an obvious use of drugs that increase testosterone. It looks a lot better for a player’s public image to say “yes, I used it (only once!) to help recover from *insert injury here*” We heard it from Brian Roberts, Rick Ankiel, Andy Pettitte, Scott Schoeneweis … the list will go on as the players come forward. It’s the de facto answer, because a larger portion of the fan base can swallow that justification. The guy was hurt, he wanted to earn his big bucks and help the team, and come back sooner. Beautiful story … brings a tear to my eye.
But of course injury recovery was not the only application of PEDs – despite what these “honest” and “team-centered” players tell us. Recovery IN GENERAL is the main purpose of all PEDs.
Don’t take it from me … head down to your local gym and talk to the musclehead at the squat rack. He’ll explain to you the great benefit of steroids and HGH: that it gives you the strength to work out, throwing up weight you never did before, every day. None of this three times a week garbage – you can challenge your body every day, because the PED gives you instant recovery.
Contrary to popular belief, steroids alone don’t give a person big muscles. There is a misconception that the needle “blows you up” (visions of a person attached to a bicycle pump come to mind). That’s not entirely true; to reach bodybuilder-like proportions, to gain 20-30 pounds of muscle in one offseason, one must work out very hard, nearly every day. No one should doubt the work ethics of Roger Clemens or Barry Bonds – both are the hardest-working players in baseball. But the reason they were able to work out at such freakish levels was indeed because of something superhuman – and it came in a syringe.
Which brings us back to the point: in the past, many pitchers were able to appear in 60, 70, 80 games a year because they had help with recovery.
 Willie Randolph saw this firsthand from the Yankee bench, as Joe Torre marched out the same two or three middle relievers nearly every single day. Pitchers such as Scott Proctor, Kyle Farnsworth, Ron Villone, Tanyon Sturtze, Tom Gordon, Paul Quantrill, Steve Karsay, Mike Stanton, Jeff Nelson, and others appeared in 70 games or more, year after year. I am NOT suggesting that all of those pitchers used PEDs; I am suggesting that at least a few of them had to – people with the ability to throw with Major League effectiveness on a nearly daily basis are not that commonplace. In the old days, those rare types were called “rubber arms”; Mets fans may remember Turk Wendell as an example.
To show the increase in demand – and supply – for rubber arms, I give you this: in 1990, there were 9 pitchers who appeared in 70 or more ballgames. In 2000, there were 29.
Again, I'm not saying ALL Turk Wendell types took some kind of "stuff". I am suggesting that the dramatically increased demands of relief pitching in the late 1990s and early 2000s led many pitchers to take PEDs. Because most baseball managers and officials have kept their head in the sand in regard to PEDs, they found nothing unusual about there being so many "rubber arms" in the game. Heck, if you don't think there's something nutty about guys hitting 60 homers on an annual basis, you're not going to find anything strange about pitchers appearing in 75-80 games with no breakdowns nor loss of effectiveness.
In my opinion, Willie Randolph and Omar Minaya believed sincerely that they had a strong bullpen in place for the 2007 season, and were naive to the drastic effect drug testing would have on relievers. Without PEDs, some (not all) pitchers cannot pitch effectively several times per week. With the help of HGH or steroids, many pitchers had superficially enhanced "rubber arms" -- hence, the ability to pitch at the top of their ability on back-to-back days, three days in a row, four times a week, if necessary.
So we're going to excuse Randolph and Minaya for believing the 2007 bullpen would succeed with only six main guys -- they were hoodwinked.
Of course, I don't need to point fingers or make false accusations. The entire world knows now that two of those six -- Guillermo Mota and Scott Schoeneweis -- have admitted to using PEDs. If not for the anti-drug policy, maybe the 2007 bullpen would have been fine. Mota and The Show might have kept their ERAs in the 3’s, and perhaps one of them would have introduced a "vitamin" to Joe Smith, the young rookie who burned out from overuse by the end of June.
It would appear that Minaya and Randolph have learned from their error – based on the number of arms brought in to spring training this year. They seem to understand that six unenhanced relievers does not a bullpen make; you need to have at least a dozen or more arms ready to contribute over the course of a 162-game season. That’s why you see the likes of Brian Stokes, Stephen Register, Nelson Figueroa, Ricardo Rincon, Joselo Diaz, and Nate Field getting plenty of innings. Some or all of those pitchers will be needed at some point during the season to help share the load, likely riding the “Heath Bell shuttle” between Queens and New Orleans.
Now that Willie Randolph has been given a surplus of arms, and may now understand that you can’t expect all relievers to pitch every day in the post-steroid era, we’ll see if he can figure out the best way to manage them. Judgment begins on March 31.
In addition to being a sought-after baseball instructor, Joe Janish is the author of MetsToday.com, a must-read blog on the New York Mets.
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Last Updated ( Sunday, 09 March 2008 )
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