Every team wants a solid pitcher to finish the game. There needs to be a man to slam the door on the other team's offense in that final inning of play. If his team has a slight lead in the ninth inning, he is expected to preserve that lead. The man to do it is called The Closer.
The Closer is an uncharacteristically severe term in a sport that, as pointed out by George Carlin, is full of kinder, gentler nomenclatures. It's finality in a game defined by its open-ended perimeter and un-timed play.
And so with that in mind it sort of makes sense that closers themselves are an uncharacteristic bunch. Some guys are weirder than others. Some are outright eccentrics. Baseball is full of them. Rollie Fingers and his twirly mustache. Dennis Eckersley and his side-armed cheese. Dan Quisenberry and his submarined junk. Antonio Alfonseca and his twelve fingers. Ugueth Urbina, who is currently in a Venezuelan prison for taking a machete to farm workers before dousing them in gasoline. Endearing bunch of scamps, they all are.
And while eccentricities keep things interesting, it's dominance that's truly matters. A closer who can successfully seal the deal 30+ times a season is a valuable commodity. When Mariano Rivera enters the game, even before he records his three outs, everybody knows the Yankees just won. It's that automatic.
[As an aside, the broadest and most common way to measure a closer's effectiveness is the Saves statistic. A save is credited to a closing pitcher when he satisfies a very specific and somewhat arbitrarily defined set of circumstances. It's a poor measure of the pitcher's ability as it's dependent on several other variables. Poor fielding, which the pitcher has no control over, can blow a save opportunity. Or if his team sucks a closer might never get a good save opportunity to begin with. Conversely, even a poor pitcher can accumulate a substantial amount of saves if he pitches every night.]
The Mariners have had few eccentric closers in their history and even fewer dominant ones. The closest thing they've had to a consistent lights-out closer was JJ Putz. For two seasons -- 2006 and 2007 -- Putz was among the best American League closers. He had an off year in 2008 as he was sidelined a month due to injury, and during the off-season Seattle traded him away in a convoluted three-team deal that ultimately gave the Mariners very little in return. JJ Putz eventually regained his effectiveness and is now once again dominating the closer role, this time in Arizona.
Following the departure of Putz, Seattle's last effective closer was David Aardsma, who incidentally appears first in the Major League Baseball Encyclopedia (this is a tremendous trivia factoid). Aardsma was a very good closer in 2009 and a moderately good closer in 2010. He is currently recovering from elbow and hip problems and has yet to make a Major League appearance in 2011. The Mariners are still banking on him to return to the team later in the season, but they've had to use a filler in the meantime, and that brings us to...
Brandon League, Seattle's current closer.
I remember Brandon League from his Jays days, but since Seattle acquired him I haven't been able to keep tabs on the guy. This could be a good thing as he's always mildly irritated me.
His literal slack-jawedness bugs me. As he squints through his goggles to get the sign from the catcher his mouth will hang open. It doesn't effect my opinion of him as a person and it likely has no bearing on his pitching ability, but CLOSE YOUR DANG MOUTH.
More than that, though, at least as a member of the Toronto Blue Jays, I was always bugged by how often Brandon League screwed things up.
Apparently there were high hopes for League as he was to be the Blue Jays' future closer. Unfortunately for him he was never given many chances to close games for Toronto, mostly because he proved to be tremendously inconsistent. His season-to-season stats vary wildly, and even game-to-game his effectiveness was never a sure thing. It didn't help that he often had trouble throwing strikes. Consequently, by the end of his Toronto tenure, he was used primarily as a set-up man, the guy who sets the table for the closer.
I'll also mention that he got frustrated very easily. You could see it. Some pitchers control their frustration and get themselves out of a rough inning. League channeled his frustration into more frustration, throwing too wild, throwing too straight, making life difficult for himself.
After the 2009 season the Jays traded League and a minor leaguer to Seattle for Brandon Morrow, then also a closer-in-training. Morrow converted to a starting pitcher halfway through the '09 season and that is the role he continues today with Toronto.
Brandon League still had to prove himself with Seattle so in '10 he was once again relegated to the set-up role in front of Aardsma. League did moderately well, striking out twice as many batters as he walked and keeping his ERA at a respectable 3.42.
But then, as I mentioned before, Aardsma's body fell apart and rather than acquiring a quick-fix, the Mariners opted to use League as their closer, at least until Aardsma returned. And there he remains, slack-jawed, goggle-eyed, and in the role that's been denied him his whole Major League career.
I don't have much to go on besides his numbers, but he seems to be doing an adequate enough job. League has only walked four guys in 28 innings of work, which is actually quite impressive, especially for him. He also currently leads the league in saves. Batters are only batting .238 against him. These are all good things.
Something I would worry about are the number of games he's appeared in. League has made an appearance in nearly half of Seattle's games (and in fact leads the American League in games finished). He's proven the past two seasons that he can endure the heavy workload, but he's never done so in the high pressure closing role. There is always the burn-out risk, although if a healthy Aardsma gets his job back that will be a non-issue.
Another thing to watch out for is his moderately high ERA. Good closers keep their ERA under 4.00. The best keep it under 3.00. As of today League's is 4.18. League (and/or his teammates) are allowing late inning runs to score, and this will always come back to bite.
Also, there's that frustration thing. If he keeps his shiz together he should be okay. If not, pray for Aardsma.
