In 1960, The Sporting News began publishing Holtzman's "save" leaderboards. Then came Jerome Holtzman, a young sports writer who proposed a formula to reward relievers. He also saved 22, though nobody knew that at the time. He threw 152 innings, all in relief, and won 16 games. In 1950, Jim Konstanty became the first relief pitcher to win an MVP award. Starting pitchers completed fewer games each year, and the prestige of relievers grew with each generation. They learned first the value of a fresh arm, then that pitcher performance was better in short stints, and then that certain mediocre starters - max-effort ones with limited repertoires, for example, or lefties who couldn't get righties out - were especially suited for this role. When a game needed to be saved, he jogged in as a fresh arm.Īfter substitution rules were liberalized in the 1890s, managers spent decades tweaking relief tactics: They used their aces in relief when they weren't starting, then they leaned on dedicated relievers to rescue struggling starters, then they used those relievers to protect narrow leads, then they combined different types of relievers into a bullpen of specialists. In the 1870s, the Boston Red Stockings made pitcher Jack Manning the first great "saver," as sports writers at the time called him, by playing him in the outfield. He did this many times and with devastating effect - and if that's not relief pitching, I don't know what is."īaseball's original rules prohibited player substitutions, but it didn't take long for the sport's strategists to discover how powerful Napoleon's battle plan could be. At a key moment in the battle, with everyone else in the field barely able to stand, he would release into the fray a few hundred fresh and alert troops, riding fresh horses and with every piece of their equipment in good repair.
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On the day of a battle he would take two or three regiments of crack troops and sequester them a distance from the shooting, eating and sleeping and trying to stay comfortable. "YOU KNOW WHO invented relief pitching?" Bill James asked in his 1985 Historical Baseball Abstract. Andrew Miller is the great pitcher who will reshape the history. The history of the reliever has shaped many great pitchers' careers - Trevor Hoffman's and Mariano Rivera's and Aroldis Chapman's, to name just a few. I'm telling you this because I want to convince you that Miller is the perfect protagonist in a much larger story about one of baseball's biggest wastes. Here the subject is Miller the metaphor is the air mattress and the concept is his willingness to humble himself for the greater good. We tell stories like this to make a point, to establish a metaphor that can fit a complex subject into a simple concept. My sister-in-law said we weren't real parents because Andrew was too easy." "I worked every other weekend, and my husband and his friend David would load him in the back of the car and go riding on the hunting property, and Andrew would just go along with it. "The word I keep coming back to is 'adaptable,'" Kim says, remembering a story about Andrew's childhood. And he could, of course, afford to coddle himself: He was a millionaire weeks away from debuting in Yankee Stadium. He had dealt with back issues as a teenager - after he had grown 9 inches in 12 months - and she worried the mattress wouldn't be good for his body. His mom, Kim, a nurse, pestered him to find a better place to sleep. The closet got no light, so his roommates would rustle him awake to keep him from sleeping through an afternoon. Miller's clothes hung above him while he slept. It was exactly big enough to hold a queen-sized blow-up mattress, which a previous tenant had left behind in the house. The club suggested he could live in a room that had recently been vacated, but Miller soon discovered that the room was actually a closet in teammate Kevin Whelan's bedroom. Detroit gave him $5.45 million to sign - the most of any first-round pick that year - and promised to let him join the major league roster in September.įirst, though, he would spend the summer in Lakeland, Florida, just a two-hour drive from his hometown of Gainesville, pitching for the Tigers' High-A affiliate. The baby-faced lefty was a consensus future star, a 6-foot-7 starter who touched 98 mph with his fastball and snapped off major league sliders from a steep, angular delivery. IN JUNE 2006, the Tigers drafted Andrew Miller out of North Carolina with the sixth overall pick. This story appears in ESPN The Magazine's April 10 MLB Preview Issue.
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You have reached a degraded version of because you're using an unsupported version of Internet Explorer.įor a complete experience, please upgrade or use a supported browserįorget the ninth inning - Andrew Miller is here to save the game
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