CHICAGO — Jon Lester will start the first game of the National League Championship Series for the Chicago Cubs, and he will do so as one of the most accomplished postseason pitchers of his generation. He will be opposed by Kenta Maeda, who began the season as something of a curiosity and became a key cog for the Los Angeles Dodgers.
But as baseball’s final four have been determined, the focus on starting pitchers has waned, if only slightly. This series will still feature Lester, 2015 Cy Young award winner Jake Arrieta and this year’s ERA champ, Kyle Hendricks, for the Cubs, with all-everything Clayton Kershaw on the Dodgers’ side.
But when Kenley Jansen emerged from the bullpen in the seventh inning Thursday night in Washington, with the Dodgers holding a one-run lead against Nationals, it merely reinforced the idea that relief pitching is changing, and dramatically — particularly in the postseason.
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“I guess I didn’t envision Kenley coming in in the seventh,” said Kershaw, who eventually relieved Jansen to get the final two outs and close out the Nationals.
Get used to it. Jansen appeared in 72 games this season. Only eight times did he enter as early as the eighth. Never did he appear in the seventh. Until Thursday.
“The situation called for it,” Kershaw said.
Clubs moving their best relievers away from assigned roles — you pitch the seventh, you pitch the eighth, you’re the closer — and into the best matchups or most important moments has been a postseason trend for several years. Asking a closer who’s accustomed to getting three outs to get five or six instead is an October norm.
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But given how the Dodgers deployed Jansen and how the Cleveland Indians have used left-hander Andrew Miller and how the Cubs tried to get six outs from Aroldis Chapman in their division-series victory over San Francisco — there is the sense that this is a full-blown trend, more dramatic than the sport has experienced in years past.
“It’s turning the baseball world upside down, the way bullpens have been used lately,” Toronto Manager John Gibbons said Friday in Cleveland before his Blue Jays played the first game of the American League Championship Series against the Indians.
Well, not quite. That would take one more step – which we will get to.
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But look at the situation Dodgers Manager Dave Roberts faced against the Nationals. He pulled struggling starter Rich Hill in the third not for some mop-up guy, as he might have during the season, but for arguably his second-best reliever, right-hander Joe Blanton. The Nationals didn’t score off him. Up 4-1 in the seventh, Roberts turned to rookie left-hander Grant Dayton to face the switch-hitting Danny Espinosa, whom he walked. He then left him in to face right-handed pinch-hitter Chris Heisey, who ripped a homer that pulled Washington to within one. Roberts allowed Dayton one more batter — the left-handed-hitting Clint Robinson, who singled.
“You got to give ‘Doc’ credit for each one of those moves,” said Dodgers pitching coach Rick Honeycutt, speaking of Roberts. “For me, he was like, ‘I want Blanton ready if it gets to [Anthony] Rendon.’ And when it got to [Trea] Turner in that [seventh] inning, it was like, ‘I want Kenley ready.’
“For me, the pitching coach, I’m just like, ‘Okaaaaaay.’ When the [seventh] inning started, we were up 4-1. I’m thinking we can piece this thing together. It’s the seventh inning. He was like, ‘Right there, at the top of the order, I want my best in there.’ It was the right move.”
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The transformation now appears to be part of the postseason, and it will be interesting to see whether Chapman, who pitched just six times before the ninth inning all year, could be moved around by Chicago Manager Joe Maddon.
“You have to have guys that are valuable and amenable,” Maddon said.
Against the Nationals, Jansen was both. He allowed a one-out single to Bryce Harper in the seventh to put runners at the corners but struck out Jayson Werth, intentionally walked Daniel Murphy and then struck out Rendon. He worked around a leadoff walk in the eighth, then got an out before walking two in the ninth, giving way to Kershaw.
It was effective. And yet it’s not a strategy embraced by everyone.
“We’ll see how he comes out of it,” Nationals Manager Dusty Baker said. “I know there are a lot of theories on it, but you know, when he came in, they weren’t in trouble. He started out a fresh inning. . . . It’s not a trend that I’d like to be a part of.”
Fine. It’s optional. But it is here to stay in the postseason. “It’s the way it should be,” Maddon said Friday. The broader question, though, is: Could such bullpen usage become more the norm in the regular season?
“Things change,” Cubs President Theo Epstein said Friday at Wrigley Field. “You could develop relievers to pitch two or three innings, go back to the Goose Gossage days. It’d take time.”
That addresses one of the hurdles, the physical toll. Baseball players are accustomed to routine. Even relievers, with the most unpredictable jobs in the sport, need some parameters. Being used for 51 pitches, as Jansen was Thursday — nine more than his previous career high — with any degree of regularity isn’t practical.
“It would be difficult to do that during the regular season on a consistent basis,” Maddon said. “I think it would be much more difficult to be consistently successful by moving people around that often and having them throw that much.”
Perhaps more of a problem: finances. Relievers are paid for saves — particularly in the arbitration system, when they have between three and six years of major league service time and are paid according to what players with comparable statistics have earned. For, say, an established closer to be regularly asked to record three key outs in the eighth against the heart of an opposing lineup — and then let someone else pitch the ninth, technically getting credit for a “save” — clubs would have to be willing to pay for flexibility and leverage, and agents would have to understand and embrace an altered salary structure.
For October, that doesn’t matter. In tight games over the remainder of the month, when the bullpen door swings open, almost anyone could emerge in any inning. So enjoy the starters the rest of the way. But focus on the relievers — on when they are used and for how long.
