MLB: Another look back at the top ten relievers

Assessing the MLB experts’ ratings of the best relievers of the divisional era

As part of its annual winter ‘Top 10 Right Now’ exercise, MLB Network debuted a new feature Monday night. Show host Brian Kenny and guest expert Bob Costas were tasked with ranking the top 10 relievers of the divisional era; that is, since 1969.

It’s a broad task, especially Monday’s since that show involved relievers. As Kenny, several times pointed out, the position is baseball’s most notoriously volatile, with performance values rising or falling seemingly by the season.

The task of ranking relievers over a half century period is made more daunting by the changing demands attached to the position.

For about the first decade of the divisional period, the best relief pitchers were “savers”; that is, guys who took over when the starter ran out of gas and often finished the job. They ran up workloads out of touch with today’s usage patterns and sometimes accumulated nearly as many wins as saves.

Beginning with Bruce Sutter in the late 1970s, the idea took hold of the reliever as closer. Sutter, Rollie Fingers, and others of their era would be saved for the late innings of a game their team led and record the final three, five, or seven outs.

When Tony LaRussa got hold of Dennis Eckersley in Oakland a decade later, he added a further refinement, saving Eckersley exclusively for the ninth. That was basically the beginning of the modern MLB closer use pattern.

Costas and Kenny agreed on the guy at the top of their list, Mariano Rivera. “Rivera by acclimation is No. 1,” Costas proclaimed. But is that true? And how well did either Costas or Kenny do in actually reflecting the best relievers across such a diverse period?

For the record, here are their respective top 10s:

                Kenny                   Costas

1              M. Rivera             M. Rivera

2              R Gossage           D Eckersley

3              R Fingers             R Fingers

4              T McGraw           R Gossage

5              B Sutter               T Hoffman

6              D Quisenberry   B Sutter

7              C Kimbrel             B Wagner

8              D Eckersley         C Kimbrel

9              T Hoffman           A Chapman

10           S Lyle                     L Smith

To actually assess who deserves to be on this list, in what order, and how good a job either Kenny or Costas did, we need some criteria. Probably due to time constraints, neither Kenny nor Costas specified their criteria, although in the case of Kenny and probably Costas as well you can assume they had some.

We’re going to apply four criteria designed to reflect the broad and changing range of demands placed on relievers across the decades. We’ve assessed 30 well-known relievers according to the four criteria and given them an ordinal score equal to their rank in each of the criteria.

Alphabetically, the 30 nominees are: Aroldis Chapman, Dennis Eckersley, Rollie Fingers, John Franco, Eric Gagne, Goose Gossage. Willie Hernandez, Trevor Hoffman, Kenley Jansen, Craig Kimbrel, Sparky Lyle, Mike Marshall, Roger McDowell, Tug McGraw, Jeff Montgomery, Randy Myers, Joey Nathan, Jonathan Papelbon, Troy Percival, Jeff Reardon, Mariano Rivera, Francisco Rodriguez, Dave Smith, Lee Smith. Huston Street, Bruce Sutter, Bobby Thigpen, Billy Wagner, and John Wetteland.

When all four categories are assessed, the player with the average ordinal score closest to a perfect rating of 1.0 is the winner.

The criteria are: 1. five-year peak performance with ERA+ as the yardstick; 2. Career ERA+; 3. Reliever-of-the-year awards won; 4. Relief innings pitched.