MLB: Rays rely on the “opener” – revolution out of necessity

The Tampa Bay Rays entered Relief Pitcher Sergio Romo twice in a row against the Los Angeles Angels last weekend. An absolute rarity in modern times, which caused a sensation among traditionalists and innovative minds alike. But the Rays did not voluntarily initiate this revolution.

It has been clear for some time that the Rays would be banking on an unusual form of a four-man pitching rotation this season. Not simply with four starters, but with four starters and a bullpen day, on which exclusively relievers would come on the mound. The connoisseur knows this as “Johnny Wholestaff”.

But this weekend against the Angels the Rays went one step further. While they had previously relied on rookies like Ryan Yarbrough or Andrew Kittredge to celebrate these bullpen days, manager Kevin Cash sent Sergio Romo, a former star-reliever, onto the mound on Saturday – Romo was the closeer of the Giants, who won the World Series in 2012.

Romo started in the MLB for the first time ever and collected three strikeouts in a perfect inning before Long Man took over Yarbrough and allowed only one run over 6 1/3 innings. The trick: Cash used the real strength of his opponent to his advantage: The first three hitters of the Angels – Zack Cosart, Mike Trout and Justin Upton – are right-handed and against them Romo allows a.196 Batting Average – left-handed Yarbrough is not bad against Righties either (.205), but by this measure the rookie certainly got through the lineup a lot easier than if he had to take on people like superstar Trout once more.

The action was a complete success and the Rays beat the Angels 5:3 with the help of five pitchers. Again, Romo was allowed to get into it from the beginning and came back on three strikeouts. There would have been even more, but some control problems kept him at 1 1/3 innings and two walks. Afterwards Matt Andriese gave two unearned runs over two innings and finally the Angels won 5:2.

The point, however, was this: The Rays relied on Romo and may even have found a viable model that could certainly bear fruit in their current situation.

That situation is also the point! The original plan to start the year with four starters only worked out as long as Nathan Eovaldi was part of it. But the right-hander injured his elbow and reduced the number of good starters in the rays to three. Then rookie Yonny Chirinos surprised everyone with his great career start. So there were quickly four starters again.

But even Chirinos did not last long and injured his forearm. So he should be out by the beginning of June. And since super talent Brent Honeywell had already signed off before the season with an elbow injury, there is no need for a real replacement from the farm system.

The Rays have a payroll of around 76.3 million dollars, for them the second highest ever since the team was founded – only slightly more than 76.8 million in 2014. So what can we do if we are not in a position to strike on the free agent market, which certainly still offers alternatives? Get creative, for example!

The path they have now taken with Romo makes Brian Kenny of the MLB Network sit up and take notice. He had already mentioned this concept in his book “Ahead of the Curve” in 2016 and called such a relief “The Opener” in contrast to the Closer pitching the last inning.

But the idea didn’t come spontaneously to the Rays either. “We’ve been actively discussing having just a more flexible pitching staff and potentially a better way to organize it for a while,” General Manager Erik Neander told The Athletic: “I’m still not sure this is gonna work, but we like to talk about it.

If it goes to Kenny, then there should be no prefabricated wheels for pitcher – starters or any subdivision of the job of the relief – any more. Instead, he would prefer that pitcher could be used variably.

However, Kenny, the leading sabermetrician in the MLB Network, is considered – if you like – a great theorist. Neander admitted: “There are some things that can make sense in theory. But when you apply it in practice, you are dealing with people and they react differently to stress and schedules that are different from what they are used to. These are the challenges that go with it. “And you really don’t know what they look like until you try them out and experience them.”

The experimenter for this experiment, Cash, was a bit reserved afterwards: “As a manager it was quite nerve-wracking,” Cash told reporters on Sunday morning, before Take 2, “Our goal is to put players in a position where they can succeed. We ask Sergio to do something he had never been given the opportunity to do before. “That must have been a mental challenge to him, but I couldn’t have been more impressed by how well he took it on.”

Cash didn’t want to hang the experiment, which was successful for the moment, too high either: “I’m glad that Saturday evening worked out. To be fair, it could have easily gone wrong. But the special thing about this organization is that we do not form strong opinions from small samples. I’m sure we’ll see this concept much more often this year.”

Kenny addressed Romo’s upcoming start on Friday in his show “MLB Now” and came to the conclusion that the process that led to the decision was more important than any results. His colleague, network expert Tim Flannery, responded to these statements via Twitter. The bottom line of his comment was that it’s easy to get creative when you’re bad.

This is also a special aspect of these rays: They are not bad at all! They have a score of 22-23, which may be negative, but they are third in the AL East ahead of Blue Jays (22-25) and Orioles (15-32) and only four and a half games until the second AL wildcard (Seattle: 27-19).

Neander admitted, however, that he would have nothing against a more conventional approach to pitching: “At the end of the day, you want your best pitchers to pitch as much as possible while being responsible for their health.

In concrete terms this means: “There are people who can pitch 190 to 220 innings and even very well. It would be a bad decision to take innings away from these people. But at the same time, there aren’t that many guys who can do that. At the moment we are looking at our Pitcher Group. Not that we consider them bad, but we take the load off them a little and don’t ask for quite as much from five starters,” the GM continued. But: “If we had five top pitchers, we would of course very much welcome this.”

But they do not grow on trees and cannot be financed by the Rays. So they rely on experiments like the double Romo, the “Opener”. And who knows, maybe this concept will make school and the opener a conceivable option for the future.

This article was published without previous view by the Major League Baseball.