A series of struggles: meet a Kansas City Royals bullpen in search of routine

Before I tried playing the game, I thought baseball superstitions were silly. The idea that eating chicken for every pre-game meal or crossing the foul line at the same time every day had anything to do with what would happen in that night’s game struck me as absurd.

I was wrong.

Baseball is played pretty much every day from mid-February to early November and as a result requires and rewards consistency. It’s not what you do in one game; it’s what you do in 162.

But accepting what kind of player you are and sticking to the approach that gives you the best results over an entire season is a challenge.

If you’re best when hitting line drives to the opposite field, but get lucky and pull a fly-ball home run, does that get into your head? Do you start thinking you’re a home run hitter and change your approach?

That’s like finding a $20 bill in the gutter and deciding you should quit your job and start looking for $20 bills full-time.

According to more than one of his Royals teammates, when Willie Wilson hit a home run it worried everyone in the dugout; would Willie start trying to hit bombs and get away from the approach that made him a valuable player?

I was standing by the batting cage — far too close for a member of the media, but I was too dumb to realize it back then — when Wilson was hitting home runs in batting practice and Hal McRae offered him some advice: “You’re too light in the ass to swing a bat like that.”

When teams form batting practice hitting groups, smart teams keep the singles hitters away from the power hitters.

If a power hitter takes batting practice with a singles hitter, he will never think he should hit more opposite-field line drives. But a weak-minded singles hitter might try to copy what the power hitter is doing and that fly-ball pull swing that was used in BP might show up in that night’s game.

You are your own worst enemy when it comes to consistency.

That’s what all the chicken-eating and line-crossing are about; starting a pregame routine in the same way every day helps players maintain a consistent approach during the game that night.

This is who I am, this is what I do and no matter what happens tonight, I’ll show up and do the same thing tomorrow.

Good players strive for consistency and good teams help them achieve it.

Set roles vs. bullpen by committee

People who view the game solely through the narrow tunnel of statistics often promote the idea of a bullpen by committee: use your closer whenever he’ll do you the most good and if that’s the seventh inning, so be it.

But that approach has drawbacks; do it that way and none of the relievers are sure when they’ll be used or when they should start getting ready.

Imagine you have a job that requires you to show up at 9 a.m. on some days, but 6 or 7 on other days, and you don’t know what time you should be at work until you get a call saying your appearance is required in the next 20 minutes.

That’s what pitching in a bullpen by committee is like.

The people who play and manage baseball games usually prefer set roles. Everybody knows when to warm up and what their job will be once they get in the game.

If a pitcher knows he’s only pitching one inning, he can step on the gas and empty his tank for 15-20 pitches; if he knows he’s pitching more than one inning, he’ll hold something back.

Knowing his role helps the pitcher perform it well.

Psychological pressure

Some people think pitching is pitching and it doesn’t matter when you do it, but most of those people have never stood on a pitching mound. Baseball history suggests a lot of pitchers perform better in some roles and worse in others.

Kelvin Herrera is a better pitcher in the seventh inning than the ninth.

Pitch in the seventh or eighth — when his team had a chance to recover from any mistake he might make — and Herrera was terrific. But he would sometimes let the pressure of pitching in the ninth inning bother him.

Greg Holland on the other hand, was a bulldog. Holland’s arm could be hanging by a thread, his fastball a foot short and he’d still tell whoever came out to ask if he was OK to get the hell off the mound; he had work to do.

Holland is a better pitcher in the ninth inning than the eighth.

One guy might try too hard when closing; he wants an extra mile an hour or two on his fastball or more bite on his slider and those attempts to be better than normal backfire. The other guy is confident that his usual stuff will get the job done.

There’s a reason pitching coaches have been saying “trust your stuff” since they figured out Babe Ruth looked thinner in pinstripes. Good players don’t rise to the occasion, they have the ability to treat every occasion the same.

One of the selling points of analytics is that they’re based on logic, but refusing to admit there’s a psychological component to performing under pressure ain’t logical.

Who can handle what role?

There’s a saying in baseball: “The players make out the lineup.” The players’ performance — good or bad — dictates where they hit in the order or whether they’ll be in the lineup at all.

The same thing goes for bullpens.

Right now the Royals bullpen seems worse than it’s likely to be because Ned Yost is sorting through the pieces he has to work with and figuring out who can handle what role.

Yost has to figure out which guys need to start an inning and which guys can handle coming into a runners-in-scoring-position situation, which righties can get the occasional lefty and which lefties can get the occasional righty, who pitches well in a close game and who pitches better when things aren’t so tense.

And games can be lost while a manager is finding out what certain players can or can’t handle.

Fans can give up on players; managers can’t

Very few baseball fans have any idea how to make a struggling player better, so they say the guy sucks and give up on him. Get rid of that guy and get someone better, even though better players are hard to find.

That’s what Yost was ridiculing when he talked about replacing Mike Moustakas by picking a better third baseman off the third baseman tree.

Since every player struggles at some point and very few players have a complete game, managers can’t afford to give up on every player that doesn’t perform like an All-Star.

Maybe a pitcher looks lousy when facing hitters on both sides of the plate, but is an out machine when he just has to face lefties. Maybe a pitcher who looks shaky in the ninth is a world beater in the seventh. Maybe a starting pitcher who gives it up third time through the order is dominant when he only has to face hitters one time.

Sorting through what a player can and can’t do and then having the player do a lot of what he does well and very little of what he does poorly is what good managers do.

Right now the Royals bullpen looks bad, but Ned isn’t crazy when he suggests they could become a better unit. Once he decides who can handle what role, the relievers will have a routine to work with and set jobs to prepare for.

That doesn’t mean they’ll be good, but it gives them the best chance to be better.