Much will be written today and in the coming days about Tony LaRussa’s pitching changes and strategic moves in the eighth inning of World Series Game 5 on Monday night. Others here at FanGraphs will provide you will the gory details.
This post takes a look back at LaRussa’s bullpen management over the 16 years he’s been the skipper for the St. Louis Cardinals. It’s a follow-up post to the one I wrote last Thursday, aptly titled The Untold Story of LaRussa’s Bullpen Management. In last week’s post, I looked at the number of innings pitched by Cardinals relievers each season between 1996 and 2011 and found only four seasons where Cardinals relievers had pitched more innings than the National League per team average. I also examined the number of pitching changes called for by LaRussa during the 2004, 2006 and 2011 postseasons–the years the Cardinals played in the World Series.
I concluded, based on that information, that LaRussa’s reputation for over-managing the Cardinals’ bullpen was not fully supported by the facts. Several readers noted in the comments that looking only at total innings pitched by relievers didn’t tell the whole story. The issue, the readers noted, wasn’t so much how early LaRussa pulled his starting pitcher to get to the first reliever, but how many relievers he used to get from the starter to the end of the game. Or, to put it another way, what was the average number of innings pitched per Cardinals relief appearance as compared to the average for all National League teams.
I’ve now analyzed that data and agree that it paints a more complete portrait of LaRussa’s bullpen management style. Indeed, it confirms the view that LaRussa has been one of the most–if not the most–aggressive bullpen managers in the National League over the past 16 seasons.
Let’s take a look.
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