LaTroy Hawkins and Dave Cameron’s Radical Proposal

Dave Cameron made a radical proposal today aimed at teams thinking of moving away from the standard five-man rotation. He suggested that they essentially blur the lines of starters and relievers and simply assign an even number of innings (or batters faced) to each pitcher in the pen. “Each pitcher will be asked to face 10 batters per game, which translates to about 38 pitches apiece.”

Cameron advocates that teams target two-way players like Micah Owings, who are decent at handling a bat and also can throw average innings, and swingmen like Alfredo Aceves — mopup guys capable of taking a fair number of innings fairly frequently. That’s actually much more akin to the way that bullpens used to function in the days before hyperspecialization, except that in those days the majority of the important innings went to a “closer” like Roy Face or Bruce Sutter or Rollie Fingers, who pitched a lot more innings but had a lot fewer appearances than modern closers and setup men.

Cameron’s strategy makes pitchers more fungible. But teams would still want reliability. The best pitchers in such a system would be the ones who throw a lot of innings every year without fail. There aren’t many of those around: there are only two active pitchers in the top 40 on the all-time appearances list. One of them, Mariano Rivera, is out for the year and maybe for good. But LaTroy Hawkins is still going strong.

He’s busy climbing up the list of the most longevitous relievers in baseball history. His 839 appearances make him 38th of all time, and his 741 relief appearances make him 35th of all time. If he pitches another two seasons, he’ll be the age that Arthur Rhodes was last year, and he has a decent chance of passing Rhodes (839), Doug Jones (842), and getting within spitting distance of Billy Wagner (853), who is 27th on the list of most relief appearances. (No one’s catching #1 Jesse Orosco, who has 1248. Number two is Mike-not-Giancarlo-Stanton, who has 1177.)

The thing that makes Hawkins so amazing is the reliability of his arm. He wasn’t much of a starter and he wasn’t much of a closer, but from the moment that the Twins made him a full-time bullpen arm in 2000, he pitched ten straight years with at least 50 innings in relief. He’s just the 36th pitcher in baseball history to do so.

It’s a relatively recent phenomenon. The earliest reliever in baseball history with ten consecutive seasons of at least 50 innings was, rather naturally, Hoyt Wilhelm, who may be the best relief pitcher of all time; he had 16 such seasons. (Wilhelm is one of three Hall of Famers in the list, along with Sutter and Fingers. Goose Gossage and Dennis Eckersley didn’t manage ten in a row as relievers.)

Wilhelm’s total was only exceeded by that of Lindy McDaniel, who had 18 such seasons, 17 of them in a row from 1959 to 1975. Here is the complete list:

	first year in streak	last year in streak	# in a row
Hoyt Wilhelm	1961	1970	10
Ron Perranoski	1961	1971	11
Don McMahon	1958	1972	15
Ted Abernathy	1963	1972	10
Jack Aker	1965	1974	10
Lindy McDaniel	1959	1975	17
Clay Carroll	1966	1977	12
Darold Knowles	1969	1978	10
Paul Lindblad	1968	1978	11
Sparky Lyle	1968	1981	14
Dave LaRoche	1971	1980	10
Tom Burgmeier	1974	1983	10
Tug McGraw	1969	1980	12
Gary Lavelle	1975	1985	11
Bruce Sutter	1976	1985	10
Tippy Martinez	1976	1985	10
Rollie Fingers	1971	1982	12
Gene Garber	1973	1987	15
Kent Tekulve	1975	1989	15
Greg Minton	1979	1989	11
Dave Smith	1980	1990	11
Jeff Reardon	1980	1993	14
Lee Smith	1981	1993	13
Eric Plunk	1988	1999	12
Robb Nen	1993	2002	10
Steve Reed	1993	2004	12
Roberto Hernandez	1995	2006	12
Steve Kline	1997	2006	10
Mike Timlin	1996	2007	12
Todd Jones	1994	2007	14
Jose Mesa	1994	2007	14
Alan Embree	1998	2008	11
Trevor Hoffman	1993	2002	10
David Weathers	1998	2009	12
Guillermo Mota	2002	2011	10
LaTroy Hawkins	2000	2009	10

Running down that list, you can see many of the most reliable and most beloved relievers of the last half-century, if not necessarily the best-paid. (Mariano Rivera just barely missed the list, because he only pitched 46 innings in 2002.) If a team were to implement Dave’s proposal, they would want guys like the ones on this list: multi-inning closers like Garber, rubber-armed middle relievers like Weathers, year-in-year-outers like McDaniel.

Trevor Hoffman was viewed as a future Hall of Famer in his day, and his ilk of relief ace would be just as scarce under Cameron’s as they are now. But bullpen glue guys like Timlin, Kline, Reed, and Embree are often undervalued, because they are both good performers and extraordinarily healthy. Obviously, it’s easier to determine a proclivity for good health in hindsight. But it’s one of the most important determinants of a player’s value.

Pitchers like Hawkins are underrated in the four-starter and five-starter systems that they’ve pitched in. In Cameron’s no-starter system, they will be just as valuable, if not more so.