The Futility Infielder

ESPN’s Buster Olney -- yes, my favorite whipping boy of late -- recently took an interesting look at bullpen usage, namely the pace at which the Yankees and several other teams are taxing their top three relievers so early in the year. Fifty-five games into the season (through Monday, June 7) -- one game past the 1/3 marker -- the Yanks have gone to Mariano Rivera 30 times, Tom Gordon and Paul Quantrill 29 times apiece. The combined total of 88 appearances among the three is second in the majors behind the Giants’ trio of Felix Rodriguez, Jim Brower and Matt Herges, who have combined for 92 appearances.

Olney runs down a usage pace list of no fewer than 18 teams, so if you're interested, chances are your team is in there somewhere. Here’s the portion of the chart pertaining to the Yanks:

Yankees   App Proj App   IP   Proj IP   Career High

Rivera    30     92     31.2    96.2    107.2 (1996)

Gordon    29     89     31.1    96.0     79.1 (1998)

Quantrill 29     89     32.1    99.0     88.0 (1997)

Yowzah! Ninety appearances and 90+ innings is a hell of a lot for any of these guys in this day and age, especially three guys with an average age of 35 years old. Rivera's been his usual dominant self, posting a 1.09 ERA and limiting opponents to a .543 OPS. Gordon has been excellent, yielding only a 2.27 ERA and a .542 OPS. Quantrill's 3.93 ERA and .680 OPS allowed conceal a dramatic swing to the negative: a tidy 2.70 ERA in April, an ugly 5.51 ERA in May. His gingerly steps since injuring his right knee in a collision on Opening Day in Japan certainly would appear to be cause for concern, but night after night, Quantrill keeps dragging himself out to the mound, with generally diminishing returns. He's averaged 81.7 appearances over the past three years, but only 79 innings; this is a heavy workload, especially for a pitcher who's less than 100 percent.

Lefty Gabe White is the only other reliever who's pitched in more than nine games, but with his 6.63 ERA in 19 innings, Joe Torre clearly would rather send him back to porn-star school or wherever it is that it's acceptable to wear thick gold chains and hair grease than give him any meaningful innings. Fellow lefty Felix Heredia (9.00 ERA in 8 innings) hasn't been much better. The burden is clearly on the Big Three.

How does Torre's reliance on this trio compare to his other Yankee bullpens? I took a quick look back at the Yanks during the Torre era to find the top three (or so) relievers of each season and their usage -- I'm not really looking at performance here except as an implicit measure: how often Joe calls the guy's number. The pitchers are ranked by innings, but when another pitcher had more appearances than one of the top three, he's listed too, and the closer, Rivera since '97, is always listed. Got that? Totals for appearances and innings pitched are tabulated separately based on the top three in each category, and all totals have had any starter innings removed:

1996      App     IP

Rivera     61   107.2

Wickman    58    79.0 (traded 8/23 to MIL)

Nelson     73    74.1

Wetteland  62    63.2

TOP 3     196   261.0    



1997      App     IP

Nelson     77    78.2

Rivera     56    71.2

Stanton    64    66.2

TOP 3     197   217.0 



1998      App     IP

Stanton    67    79.0

Rivera     54    61.1

Holmes     34    51.1

Lloyd      50    37.1

Nelson     45    40.1

TOP 3     171   191.2 



1999      App     IP

Mendoza    47    84.0

Grimsley   55    75.0

Rivera     66    69.0

Stanton    72    58.1

TOP 3     193   228.0



2000      App     IP

Grimsley   59    79.0

Rivera     66    75.2

Nelson     73    69.0

Stanton    69    68.0

TOP 3     208   223.2



2001      App     IP

Rivera     71    80.2

Stanton    76    80.1

Mendoza    54    91.0

TOP 3     201   252.0



2002      App     IP

Stanton    79    78.0

Karsay     78    88.1

Mendoza    62    91.2

Rivera     45    46.0

TOP 3     219   258.0 



2003      App     IP

Rivera     64    70.2

Hammond    62    63.0

Osuna      48    50.2

TOP 3     174   184.1

Skimming through here, one surprising thing that's often glossed over is how little Jeff Nelson pitched in the regular season. In 1998 and '99 he combined for only 70.2 innings, more or less one season's workload, and the mysterious appearances of the forgotten likes of Jason Grimsley and Darren Holmes on these lists are owed to his fragility. But Nellie was ready when the lights were the brightest, and so the vaunted Stanton-Nelson-Rivera combo which gave the Yanks a lot of jewelry is etched in memory even though they really only had two seasons -- 1997 and 2000 -- at the top of the Yankee bullpen pyramid on a full-time basis.

Looking at just the top 3 "totals":

         App     IP

1996     196   261.0    

1997     197   217.0 

1998     171   191.2 

1999     193   228.0

2000     208   223.2

2001     201   252.0

2002     219   258.0 

2003     174   184.1

AVG      195   227.0

2004*    259   280.2

If there's a trend here, it's that the Yanks have stopped winning championships since they've increased their reliance on a top 3. Torre's 2001 bullpen featured the exalted Stanton, Rivera and Ramiro Mendoza if they were tied or ahead, and the damned Jay Witasick, Mark Wohlers and Sterling Hitchcock when they were behind, with Randy Choate kind of floating in the middle. The 2002 signing of Steve Karsay gave them an effective quartet, but Rivera's shoulder woes required each of the other three to pick up some slack, and perhaps it's not a coincidence that none has ever been the same: Karsay missed all of '03 with rotator cuff surgery and is just now working towards a comeback; Mendoza signed with the Red Sox and has pitched so badly people have questioned whether he's still on the Yankee payroll; Stanton aged about five years just by moving across town to the Mets. Karsay's injury caused no end of disarray in last year's pen, and Torre did more mixing and matching than any season since '98, discarding many solutions -- including trio members Antonio Osuna and Chris Hammond -- on the way to the World Series in favor of late-season pickups White, Heredia, and Nelson. The result was lows in the top three innings and appearance categories for the Torre era, and it's not surprising that the Yanks decided to spend again over the winter to secure more reliable help. "We need a big three!" is apparently the mindset.

But now Torre appears to be running the risk of wearing his new horses out before the backstretch. This year's trio of choice is on pace to smash through both appearance and inning highs by a wide margin, and while it's likely that the pace will slow -- especially if somebody makes a trip to the DL -- it's almost a certainty that Rivera will pitch more innings than any season since he took over the closer duties (his existing high is 80.2 innings from 2001, though he did have the 107.2 as a setup man in '96). For him not to do so would mean pitching only 47.1 innings over the Yanks next 106 games, less than an inning every two days. This team's going to need to put up an awful lot of blowouts for that to happen.

If there's a culprit here, it's the Yankee starters, who have put up an ugly 4.87 ERA compared to the relievers' impressive 3.55. They're averaging only 6.0 innings per start compared to 6.54 last year and 6.36 the year before. A half inning per start translates to another 81 innings the pen has to absorb -- the workload, more or less, of an effective reliever. Whether it's Karsay or somebody else, the Yanks are going to need a lot more help in the pen before this is over.