(What a) Load Management

The Mets won Sunday’s game by three if you’re counting high-leverage relievers rested.

Brooks Raley? Rested.
Adam Ottavino? Rested.
David Robertson? Rested.

Yup, that’s three. Each pitcher pitched some on Saturday, and one of them (Raley) pitched on Friday, and you know what they say about relievers’ arms falling off should you try to use them a second or third day in a row in a game you lead and it would behoove you to hold onto. I mean, I suppose somebody guarantees those arms will fall off if you push them a little further than you’d prefer. What do you think the Mets’ hierarchy talks about in their councils of state — Turk Wendell? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their bullpen usage/rest, just like everybody else does.

Thus, it’s not about trying to win the game in front of you on Sunday. It’s about resting 38-year-old David Robertson and 37-year-old Adam Ottavino and soon-to-turn 35-year-old Brooks Raley so they’ll be available for the Milwaukee series that starts Monday night, weather permitting. Those are your workhorses, your high-leverage assets. A game against Philadelphia hanging in the balance with a chance to take a series, something the Mets haven’t done in weeks, pales by comparison. Raley, Ottavino and Robertson each answered the bell on Saturday after the Mets got pretty much the best they could expect from mega-co-ace Max Scherzer. Max went six.

On Sunday, Carlos Carrasco went four. Seventy-eight pitches. They weren’t the most effective pitches, but they got as much of job done as Carrasco’s manager and pitching coach and anybody else consulting believed viable. Carrasco left with a 3-2 lead. The Mets’ bats were taking it to Old Friend™ Zack Wheeler. Pete Alonso blooped a well-placed single with the bases loaded to score two. Brandon Nimmo poked a ball to right to bring in one. Then, post-Carrasco, All-Star finalist Francisco Lindor hit a long fly ball that just kept going to put the Mets ahead, 4-2. Eventually, after the Phillies’ starter departed, the Mets held a 6-3 lead, the sixth Met run coming on Pete’s solo home run off Jose Alvarado, a high-leverage reliever who wasn’t infallible, because no reliever is every time out.

After Carrasco left, the Mets used Dominic Leone for an inning that can be described as Could Have Been Worse (one run built on Trea Turner walking to first, then pretty much strolling home via two steals and a bad throw) and Grant Hartwig for two innings, one of them defense-aided (sweet throw from Tommy Pham to nail Alec Bohm at second on what looked like it was gonna be sure double), both of them scoreless. We get to the bottom of the eighth with a three-run lead and the manager of the Mets calls on one of his less tested relievers, Josh Walker. The manager has been in similar if not wholly alike situations before. In June of 2022, there was a game that stands as the shiningest example of how everything the manager did that year showed how resourceful he could be or maybe that sometimes your least-desired option can surprise you. Against the mighty Dodgers, in Los Angeles, having already used his highest-leverage relievers that very day (Ottavino, Edwin Diaz, Seth Lugo), the manager turned to Adonis Medina in the tenth inning, which meant a runner was on second to stress the rookie righty even more than he was already stressed. The batters Medina was tasked with facing were Mookie Betts, Freddie Freeman, Trea Turner and Will Smith. That’s stress incarnate. The pitcher, nowhere on anybody’s depth chart on Opening Day, got the job done in June, and the Mets beat the Dodgers in the game that guaranteed those Mets were every inch a championship contender. “For this team to have that trust in me at that moment, it’s a big deal,” Medina said afterward. It was the kind of year, one when leverage, smeverage, sometimes it helped to be a lucky Buck.

This year is the kind of year when everything the manager touches turns to Showalter.

Turning to rookie lefty Josh Walker to get outs with a three-run lead didn’t work out. At all. A walk. A single. A walk. An exit. The Mets still lead by three. The manager brings in Jeff Brigham, a veteran righty who was surprisingly consistent in earlier innings in earlier weeks of this season, a little less so has time has gone on. Still, Brigham bounces the first batter he faces, Bohm, to third base. That could very well be a double play ball. All the third baseman, Brett Baty has to do is field the ball cleanly and throw it quickly and accurately. But he doesn’t. He double clutches, he throws low to second, everybody is safe, every base is occupied and a run has scored.

Brigham has been undermined by his defense but is still protecting a lead. He must face three batters in all. The second of them, Brandon Marsh, walks with the bases loaded. OK, not good, but the Mets still lead. Then Kody Clemens strikes out, which is much better. Hitting Kyle Schwarber…no, not very good at all. The game is tied. Then, upon Brigham’s fifth batter, Turner…another HBP. It is now Phillies 7 Mets 6. At last, Brigham is removed.

In favor of Vinny Nittoli, who like Medina in L.A. the year before, outpitches his reputation and gets two dangerous hitters, Nick Castellanos and Bryce Harper.

From the fifth through the eighth, the Mets have used five relievers: Leone, Hartwig, Walker, Brigham and Nittoli. Two of those relievers gave up no runs. None of those relievers was a Met on Opening Day let alone in 2022. Being a part of last year’s team isn’t a guarantee of success on this year’s team, we continue to learn, but it does seem telling that the quality that qualifies them most for a Met roster spot is options. The general manager engineered his bullpen depth based the ability to call up and send down relievers without fear of losing them on waivers. A couple of relievers previously counted on have, in fact, been lost to roster machinations. Stephen Nogosek and Tommy Hunter were designated for assignment, decided they were tired of Triple-A shuttling, and opted for free agency. The nerve of them not wanting to be yo-yo’d up and down. Nogosek and Hunter often got outs. They occasionally didn’t, just as the most platinum of closers sometimes implode. The state of reliever infallibility hasn’t changed since it was first invoked several paragraphs ago.

A reliever is in a game, he should be able to get an out or more. It’s not guaranteed. An eighth-inning three-run margin with the bases clean seems a plump enough cushion to show some trust in some kid who hasn’t been asked to ferry too many (if any) leads to the ninth inning. It didn’t work for Walker. Whatever was left for Brigham to brush aside didn’t work out either, no thanks to Baty, but also no thanks to his own control problems. From the distance of the television, a fan has no idea who really has that certain something that makes him the most solid bet on any given day, whatever the inning. Maybe we, or the organization, doesn’t really know whether Vinny Nittoli had a gut-check eighth inside him. But we can probably guess that Nittoli, like most of these guys, was in a Mets uniform because he had options.

“So I say, ‘Why don’t you call home and have somebody wire you the money? Or call your company and tell them the problem? Or, better yet, why don’t you take a personal check out of your checkbook, roll it up real tight, and then cram it!’”
“She gave me several options.”
—Customer service representative (played by Roseanne Barr) and customer (played by Phil Hartman), in an SNL credit card commercial parody that comes to mind every time I hear how important is to have relief pitchers with options

As for Raley, Ottavino and Robertson, in a Mets uniform specifically to maintain late-inning leads and extricate the club from late-inning jams (as would be Drew Smith if he weren’t serving out his sweat & rosin suspension), the manager wouldn’t think of using them. That, he indicated in his postloss comments, was a given. You might as well question an NBA coach who is sitting his superstars in the middle of January in the name of load management. Even if David Robertson isn’t exactly the baseball equivalent of Kevin Durant, a manager can make a straight-face case that you can’t always use relievers who’ve been used the day before, no matter that two of the relievers — Robertson and Ottavino — swore they were ready and willing to pitch, probably because they’re pitchers and they know they are in a Mets uniform to do so when needed most, which doesn’t necessarily include a bottom of the ninth that may never come if the bottom of the eighth isn’t navigated sans four runs scoring. Keeping them out of the game in the eighth almost makes sense on the surface, if one presumes there’s an epidemic of arms falling off over North America, and preventing another such incident is your goal as a major league manager. It makes less sense when a close, more or less must-win baseball game is in progress.

Say, wasn’t that Craig Kimbrel on the mound to nail down the Phillies’ 7-6 victory in the ninth? Joke’s on Rob Thompson. Sure the Philadelphia manager got to congratulate Kimbrel and the rest of the Phillies once his closer set down the Mets 1-2-3, but that’s one more inning of mileage on Kimbrel’s 35-year-old right arm, one that has saved 405 major league games, including 11 this year. Had Thompson gone with a lower-leverage, optionable reliever, Kimbrel might be fresher in September or October when the Phillies might be competing in a very big game.

Think how rested all the Mets, not just their highest-leverage relievers, will be by then.