The MLB Closers Best At Cleaning Up Their Own Messes

The MLB Closers Best At Cleaning Up Their Own Messes
By Neil Paine

Filed under MLB
These days, New York Mets closer Jeurys Familia is saving everything in sight. On Tuesday night, Familia closed out the back end of New York’s doubleheader split against the St. Louis Cardinals for his 36th save of the 2016 season, the most in the majors. Toss out those pesky postseason stats, and Familia has successfully preserved Mets victories in 52 consecutive save opportunities, stretching back nearly a full calendar year — the third-longest streak in major league history.

But as any Mets fan can tell you, the sailing is not always smooth with Familia. Underneath his unblemished saves mark, Familia’s control can be erratic; the 3.4 walks he’s allowing per nine innings ranks 11th-worst among regular closers this season. As a result, he frequently pitches his way into varying degrees of peril before bearing down and escaping with a save.

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To put Familia’s — and other closers’ — habit of pitching dangerously into perspective, I compiled what I’m calling the “heart-attack index” for relief pitchers. One of the core concepts is leverage index: how important any moment of a game is (relative to average) based on how much it could potentially swing each team’s probability of winning. On average this season, Familia has entered the game when the leverage index is 1.71,1 which means these moments are about 70 percent more important than a typical at-bat. In the average Familia outing, that number balloons to 3.08 at its peak, meaning the pressure ratchets up more per appearance for Familia than it does for any other qualified2 closer

But pitching into trouble3 is only half the Familia formula — he’s also been masterful at pitching his way out of the jams he creates. To get a sense both for the holes that Familia digs and for his ability to climb out of them, I plotted the amount of win probability every reliever loses per at-bat before hitting the maximum leverage index of each appearance against his win probability added per at-bat from that moment onward:
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http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-mlb-closers-best-at-cleaning-up-their-own-messes/