The Post Save World

In Chicago, Cubs manager Lou Pinella has announced that Kevin Gregg, a reliever that the team acquired from Florida in the off-season, will now have the closer role. This is to some mild upset of fantasy owners who have drafted the electric stuff of Carlos Marmol, especially seeing how Marmol has been the best reliever in the Cubby pen for years now, but has seen the counting stat go to Ryan Dempster, Kerry Wood, and now Gregg.

Fun tangent for Not Cubs Fans: start a meme in Chicago sports radio and the Internets claiming that this is a race-based decision, since the other three men are all tighty whitey and Marmol is not, because what else could a decision in Chicago be?

In Seattle, top arm Brandon Morrow is going to the pen as another team decides to baby a talented young guy, rather than risk Dusty Baker-esque malpractice accusations later. Morrow is expected to eventually close, if for no other reason than the Mariners aren't going to win more than 65 to 70 games and want to have at least one guy who could be named to the All-Star Game if Ichiro craters this year.

In New York, I'd say something more here about Joba Chamberlain, but that would cause the Internets to break under the weight of people talking about Joba Chamberlain. Let me just cut to the chase here and say that if he were going to the pen because Mariano Rivera suddenly became unavailable, it would probably be a heck of a lot less controversial than having him take set-up innings.

In Oakland, fantasy players are prepared for a screwing as the A's deliberate on whether Brad Zieglar or Joey Devine should have the role. They've both been lights out in their time in the East Bay, but Devine is more of a strikeout guy and also more injury-prone. So it could go either way, and probably eventually will, just because Billy Beane and the ownership probably want to avoid paying for a counting stat more than they can exploit some other dumb team to pay for a counting stat.

And finally, in Boston, Jonathan Papelbon has the closer spot for something like the third or fourth straight year. What can I tell you, I don't feel like looking up the numbers and seeing when he got the job, because the blog's advertising revenue is not high enough for me to think about the Red Sox that much. Paps is getting paid and staying healthy despite slowly eroding numbers, so I guess it's working out for him. Moving on.

Which is all said in the manner of a set-up for the gist of this post: the market, at least in terms of how major league teams contemplate value, is moving beyond the save. Whether or not the Cubs want to admit this, Marmol is very likely to be a better pitcher than Gregg this year, and they are going to use him in the most valuable role that a bullpen has: men on base, protecting a lead, in the late innings. Which is more likely to be the seventh or the eighth, rather than the ninth, since the closer role now almost always involves working the full inning from the start.

Anyone who has seen the value of their home, 401K and employment crater in the past year knows this with painful certainty right now: market inefficiencies are eventually corrected with prejudice. Saves are, simply, a market inefficiency, one that is pointed out year after year by fantasy leaguers who spend their high picks on more stable roles and then patch or luck their way into treading water in the category. (Though, to be honest, I kind of hate the patch work, because it is a hideous timesuck in what is already a hideous timesuck. Give me three good ones that I don't have to worry about, and I'm happy, or at least, less miserable. But anyway...)

If you wanted to play in a fantasy league that best approximated real life competence, you would abandon the usual 5 x 5 category format. Typically, that is batting average or on-base average, home runs, runs, RBIs and steals for offense, and wins, saves, ERA, walks plus hits divided by innings pitched, and some measure of strikeouts, whether it's total, per nine innings or divided by walks.

Instead, you'd have *fewer* categories -- maybe just OPS for hitters (on base plus slugging percentage) and just ERA for pitchers, while keeping the position requirements to match a real team.

So you'd sweat out two catchers, back-up infielders, and the number of teams in the league being more or less equivalent to the number of teams in the real sport.

Finally, you would do a roto situation, which is to say year-long instead of week to week matchups, and you'd impose some kind of structure to limit moves, since real teams do not have the luxury of "streaming" players for small daily advantages.

There is a reason why people don't do this kind of league, of course, and that reason is that it would be about as much fun as maintaining an actuarial table. Counting stats like saves, wins, homers and RBIs are *fun*; they give you a definitive fist pump of joy from the fact that something of importance just happened, even if the importance doesn't quite match the value given to it by the system.

But I can tell you this: nature abhors a market inefficiency, and in a relentlessly competitive system like baseball, inefficiencies that cost you wins in the long term are not tolerated. We are moving with all speed to a world where the save counting statistic costs teams much more than it benefits them, and individual players, and their commission-aware agents, become aware of how they are getting hosed.

If you are Carlos Marmol, you know this, and most likely, you know it hard. If you are Brandon Morrow and the Mariners don't give you the glory job, it's going to play in your decision to take a deal to lock up your arbitration years, or just your long-term decision to stay in town. If you are Joba Chamberlain, you may be too drunk to think very hard about this, but your agent most assuredly has.

And if you are a very particular kind of geek, you are now wondering about setting up a 1x1 fantasy league for what passes for street cred in propeller-head circles.

(Please don't ask me to join it; I'm already in three leagues and more importantly, I might not ever be able to play in them if I join yours, for the fun of not worrying about saves.)