Category: The History of Relief Pitching

Comparing baseball players from different eras is always an endeavor that requires we acknowledge that, in the history of the sport, some periods of time favored hitters, others favored pitchers. We also know that ballparks are different. You can put the best pitcher in baseball on the Colorado Rockies and he’s going to struggle to […]

(Photos: New York Times (Rivera) & Sports Illustrated (Fingers)) It’s a theme throughout this seven-part series, the importance of having a quality relief ace in post-season baseball. There is no role in which a player has the “hero or goat” possibilities more often in October than in the role of a closer. A position player […]

1988-Present Day: The Era of the One-Inning Closer   In this “History of Relief Pitching” series, we’ve talked a lot about the “Save,” a statistic first made official in 1969 but applied retroactively by Baseball Reference to every pitcher in history. During the glory years of relief pitching (the 1970’s and most of the ’80’s), bullpen […]

In Part Three of this history of relief pitching series, we’re going to delve into the golden age of relievers, when closers were multi-inning specialists. We’ll discuss the careers of Hall of Famers Rollie Fingers, Goose Gossage and Bruce Sutter. Although Dennis Eckersley also pitched in this era, his main claim to the Hall started […]

(Photo: Chicago Tribune) 1946-1968: The Emergence of the Bullpen Specialist In Part One of our seven-part series on the history of relief pitching, we chronicled how a significant percentage of the relief appearances in Major League Baseball were made by starting pitchers, coming out of the bullpen in between their starts. In the first 75 […]

There is no role in baseball whose value is more difficult to assess than that of a top relief pitcher, a closer, and this is especially true when deciding which relief aces are worthy of entry into the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. There are two schools of thought when it comes to […]