FanHouse Dennis Eckersley

Here is a quick list of excuses to explain where The Dugout has been: our website is producing a code that angers Google and now nobody can look at or operate it properly, we got "busy with life stuff," popular video game or television show is addictive, we had softball practice, we realized baseball was boring and decided to change The Dugout into an endless blog about mixed martial arts, our favorite teams were all eliminated (in my case, "eliminated in April") and therefore we lost interest, our wives had babies, our grandmothers died, our pets reproduced via binary fission, and the most believable one, "we got distracted watching baseball."

Regardless of the excuse you believe, we're back, and tonight we play catchup by over-analyzing everything that has or could happen between now and the end of the season. Who's bullpen will be stronger? Will Guerrero bust out his wonky danger slide again? How many singles will Thome get in the 8th inning? All this and more in our intense playoff blog... thing, after the jump.

Tuesday, FanHouse had the opportunity to discuss the MLB Playoffs with Baseball Hall of Famer Cal Ripken, who currently serves as a studio analyst for TBS. TBS will be broadcasting all four Division Series and also the NLCS again this season. Ernie Johnson is the studio host while Dennis Eckersley and David Wells join Ripken as studio analysts for these playoff games.

Of all the things Ripken discussed Tuesday, the most intriguing subject, not surprisingly, was one Alex Rodriguez. A-Rod is an oft-maligned regular season superstar, in that he's put up extremely gaudy regular season numbers throughout his career, yet has never played in a World Series and has pretty sub-par numbers in the playoffs overall -- especially of late.

Hall of Famer Dennis Eckersley has been filling in for Jerry Remy in the NESN broadcast booth recently. Friday night was rough on him: during the Mets-Red Sox broadcast, he managed to commit not one, but two, off-color slip-ups.

We should be able to empathize, I think. To steal a thought from Daniel Okrent in Ken Burns' Baseball, the core nuances of a baseball game are predicated upon the absence of action. There is a lot of nothing going on, and for the broadcasters, there is a lot of space to fill. After a couple of hours in the broadcast booth, I think our verbal inhibitions would begin to slip as well.

Sunday's Dugout is after the fart.

Okay, so I've spent a lot of time over the last two days watching playoff baseball on TBS, and while there are plenty of things I'm not too thrilled about with their coverage, for the most part it hasn't been half bad. The studio show with Ernie Johnson, Dennis Eckersley, and Cal Ripken is a bit unwatchable at times, but they're still getting the feel for each other, so there's a chance for it to get better.

A quick fix would be to replace Ripken with Charles Barkley, but I'm pretty sure that it would be impossible to get him away from whichever golf course/craps table he's frequenting at the moment. So I guess I'll just have to deal with Ripken and cross my fingers he gets better. The one thing I know I can't take much more of, though, is Mr. Dick Stockton.

How does this man continue to get work with networks? The man butchers names on a regular basis, and half the time I'm not even sure he knows where he is. Dick was working the Cubs and Dodgers game on Wednesday, and before the first pitch was even thrown he'd already made two mistakes.

When describing how historic a matchup it was to have the Dodgers and Cubs playing a postseason series, he said "to say this is a big series would be an understudy." I think he meant to say understatement, but with Dick Stockton, who knows for sure? Maybe he really meant that it would be a great series that TBS can move to the primetime slot when they don't have a Red Sox/Angels game to show.

A minute later he referred to Cubs starting pitcher Ryan Dempster as Bryan Dempster. It's a tiny mistake, I know, but it's the kind of error Stockton makes on a regular basis. If TBS wants to make their baseball coverage better, the first move they should make is finding a replacment for Stockton.

The Cubs haven't won the World Series in 100 years. You may have heard this a few times already in 2008. And if you haven't yet, you will probably grow tired of hearing about it three innings into their first playoff game against the Dodgers.

The Cubs haven't even been to the Fall Classic since 1945, but there is a growing feeling on the North Side that at least one of those droughts will end this year.

Now we know who stands in their way. The aforementioned Dodgers, the Brewers and the Phillies represent major obstacles to Chicago. The funny thing about all three of those clubs is that, to varying degrees, they can all be characterized as losers too.

Oh, they aren't "lovable" like the ones in Wrigleyville. Now that the Red Sox and White Sox have won titles recently, the Cubs linger as the final franchise that's been seeking the promised land since before World War II. They'll most certainly be a sentimental favorite nationwide.

But don't let the Cubs' quest for baseball's Holy Grail blind you. They aren't the only team in the Senior Circuit with a chance to erase some frustrating history this October.

Where does Kirk Gibson's homer in the 1988 World Series rank? Top 10 baseball moments of all time? Top five? #1? Wherever you personally rank it: the drama is hard to deny. The greatest closer in the game -- Dennis Eckersley -- going toe-to-toe with a guy that could barely walk, but yet was the catalyst for the Dodgers' offense that season. Pinch hit, bottom of the ninth, 3-2 count. It really doesn't get any more dramatic than that.

So I welcome you to relive that moment -- with the tremendous Vin Scully on the call -- all with baseball cards. Up next? Recreating that infamous homer off Jose Canseco's dome. What say you, YouTube auteur?

Sabermetric types (baseball stat nerds, if you will) have long disputed the importance of a shutdown closer. After all, why save your best reliever for when you have the largest margin for error: the start of an inning with no runners on base and a 1-3 run lead? With that kind of cushion, guys like Todd Jones and Joe Borowski get the job done most of the time.

And now, the business folk at Forbes are jumping on the bandwagon, pointing out that investing in a high-priced closer doesn't make the most fiscal sense. The average MLB closer makes $3.9 million, which is more than both the Red Sox and Rockies pay Jonathan Papelbon and Brian Fuentes, respectively. That means they could afford to invest in other quality relievers, whereas teams like the Yankees who devoted over half of their bullpen budget to one guy lacked as many other options.

Forbes also asked the question: does having a specialized closer actually even help? They looked at the data since Tony La Russa and Dennis Eckersley popularized how modern closers are used and found some surprising results:

Yet in the 20 seasons since LaRussa's brainstorm, teams holding late leads have won at about the same rate they did in the 20 seasons before. Since 1988, teams leading after eight innings have won at a .951 clip, according to Baseball-Reference.com and STATS Inc., compared to .948 from 1968 to 1987. That adds up to less than one win per season per team.

How much added value can be expected from a guy who specializes in pitching the last inning, when there's so little room for improvement? Very little, though the perception of the ninth inning as overly important (do runs scored in that inning count more?) has made developing a track record as a last-inning specialist very lucrative.

I can accept the idea that guys in the bullpen perform better when they know their roles, but that doesn't mean the guy designated to pitch the ninth inning has to be the most talented, let alone the most expensive.

This is fantastic, folks. Just when you thought you had your fill of Red Sox obtuse pitches when Daisuke Matsuzaka arrived stateside with his gyroball -- or did you? -- Jonathan Papelbon has added a new one to his arsenal.

It's called ... the slutter.

The new pitch, as Papelbon was explaining it near his locker, had reporters in stitches.

Kyle Snyder stood behind him, mouthing the words, "Don't print that . . ." But Papelbon was serious. He spoke about how he throws it with his palm out and how he doesn't "pronate through the ball" when he throws it. He was very serious. He said it wasn't a true slider or a cutter because of the angle at which the ball travels.

The language is something out of Dennis Eckersley's vocabulary ("gas," "cheese"), but last night Papelbon became the first Red Sox reliever to record two 30-save seasons.

You know, Jonathan -- you sly dog you -- you could have just named this pitch the "clider" and this would be but a blip. But hey, it's more fun this way. And plus, one can only hope it inspires a quarterback this coming NFL season to start throwing to his receivers on a "tramp" route.

HT: Bugs and Cranks.

Earlier, we brought you one man's opinion of why Andruw Jones and Bob Wickman are overrated. Now let's discuss an Atlanta Brave who's underrated.

John Smoltz won his 200th game tonight against the Mets, and he did it in spectacular fashion with seven shutout innings. The third of the "big three" Atlanta pitchers from the 90's, we talk about Greg Maddux and Tom Glavine as virtual locks for Cooperstown with Maddux having blown past the 300 win mark, and Glavine approaching it. Smoltz probably isn't going to be thought of as a lock, but with 200 victories (and counting), and 154 saves (in the stretch of just three seasons), Smoltz should certainly be considered.

Outside of saves, Smoltz's numbers are very similar to Hall of Famer Dennis Eckersley. In roughly the same amount of innings pitched, Smoltz is just barely ahead of Eckersley in wins, has about 450 more strikeouts, and his ERA is about a quarter of a run lower than Eckersley. My only regret about Smoltz's career is that he wasn't crazy about closing. His split fingered fastball, when thrown as a closer, was harder and had more break to it than when he was a starter, and it would have been interesting to see how many saves he could have gotten if he had stuck with it.

Not that his stuff is chopped liver as a starter (tonight proved that as his nasty stuff had Mets hitters guessing all night). So one could say that Smoltz probably missed out on about 50-55 wins in his four seasons as a reliever. And if he plays until the age of 43, like Eckersley, 300 wins would have definitely been within reach. To me, a resume as unique as Smoltz's deserves to be recognized in Cooperstown.

And I'm not the only one who thinks so ... check out Sean Jensen's commentary, complete with quotes and more comprehensive reasoning.