Detroit Tigers: The Problem with Francisco Rodriguez and Proven Closers
By Matt Snyder
The Detroit Tigers shouldn’t be surprised when aging closers like Francisco Rodriguez or Joe Nathan have the worst seasons of their careers.
The Detroit Tigers are off to another bumpy start with another new veteran closer. Francisco Rodriguez was handed a 3-0 lead entering the bottom of the ninth inning of Wednesday’s game against the Kansas City Royals, but he still managed to take the team for a roller coaster ride.
Rodriguez did eventually notch the “save” and the Tigers hung on to the victory, but not after two solo home runs and two walks put the tying run in scoring position and the go-ahead run on first base.
It wasn’t a comfortable moment for fans, or the team, as the Fox Sports Detroit cameras continually cut between a rattled K-Rod (who was bouncing pitches to the plate) and a dugout full of clearly anxious players and coaches.
The Tigers always have trouble with closers, it seems, and the ninth inning has rarely been comfortable no matter the lead. Leaving aside Jose Valverde‘s 49-49 save season in 2011, the Tigers have struggled to close out games with regularity (at least that’s the perception).
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Since 2012 the club is 19th in save-to-blown-save ratio at 2.2 (the Yankees are tops at at 3.4). That’s an imperfect measure of the closers’ performance because it lumps in saves that are blown in the earlier innings as well, but it does indicate the Tigers are worse than average at closing out games.
In that time span the Tigers have entered seasons with Valverde (age 34), Phil Coke (30), Joe Nathan (39-40), and K-Rod (34) as the primary closers. Valverde was passable in 2012 with 35 saves and a 3.78 ERA (with lots of white knuckle outings), but the rest have been rather disastrous. Joaquin Benoit (35) took over for Phil Coke rather quickly in 2013 and did a fine job with 24 saves and a 2.01 ERA.
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The Tigers’ overarching problem, though, has been their typical insistence of finding a “proven closer” to take over the job. Coke is sort of the exception here, but he was coming off a rather dominant 2012 postseason run in which he (basically) wrestled the job away from Valverde.
Even going back to the Todd Jones days, the Tigers have preferred closer experience over raw talent (like Joel Zumaya perhaps). The problem here is that it takes time to build experience and the acquisition often involves free agency. In other words, it’s very, very difficult to find a “proven” closer who’s also both available and under 30 years of age.
Aging pitchers over 30 can still have good seasons (see Nathan and Rodriguez before coming to the Tigers), but it’s unreasonable to expect them to continue being good ad infinitum. The expectation of any pitcher over the age of 30 (or even 28, for that matter) is that they’ll be worse than they’ve ever been in their career. Not necessarily bad, like we saw from Nathan and so far Rodriguez, but worse than their career norm.
Baseball analysis website FanGraphs has done some work on pitcher aging curves and the trends aren’t friendly to pitchers over the age of 30. Velocity and strikeout rate tend to decline sharply while walk rate, home run rate, and hits allowed on contact continue to rise.
Proven track records are not a bad thing but the Tigers (and fans) should know it’s not K-Rod’s track record they’re getting. It’s a version of K-Rod that’s probably a bit worse than that. How much worse is not known, that’s the expectation when you bring in an old guy: you’re probably getting the worst year he’s ever had.
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It’s still early in the season — and perhaps Rodriguez will bounce back and have a fine year — but it doesn’t bode well that he’s trying to get by with a fastball at 88 mph and a changeup at 82 mph. There’s just not much there to fool opposing hitters.