On the Fascinating Desperation of the One-Pitch Playoff Reliever

I’m a giant fan of Tommy Kahnle for causes that don’t have that a lot to do with why the Tigers simply signed him to a $7.75 million contract this week. Kahnle flatters the stereotype that almost all of a baseball staff’s character resides in its bullpen. I can provide two succinct anecdotes in help of the concept Kahnle is somebody your grandmother may euphemistically have known as “a personality.”

The primary: His torrid however fickle relationship with the Philadelphia Eagles. (Go Birds.) Kahnle has been on and off the Eagles bandwagon and again on once more over the course of his profession. Kahnle put the Birds in timeout in 2020 over their firing of Doug Pederson, which — removed from being an indication of disloyalty — is definitely exactly the type of ferocious idiosyncrasy that makes Eagles followers the type of individuals you don’t let your self get trapped in a 1-on-1 dialog with. (Take it from me, I’ll discuss your ear off about how I believed Macho Harris was the subsequent Brian Dawkins.)

The opposite endearingly bizarre factor about Kahnle is how a lot he likes to throw his changeup.

Ben Clemens wrote about this in September of 2023, when Kahnle was lapping the sector in changeup utilization, throwing half as many changeups as guys like Chris Devenski. This previous October, Kahnle took it to a brand new stage. Over a span of 5 totally different appearances from ALCS Sport 2 to World Sequence Sport 3, Kahnle threw 60 consecutive changeups.

Kahnle was fairly efficient throughout the 2024 postseason, permitting a 2.08 ERA and stranding all three of the runners he inherited. Over the course of his all-changeup streak, Kahnle allowed three walks and three hits over 4 innings pitched, however solely a single unearned run.

I’ll all the time keep in mind this run partially due to how a lot John Smoltz, ordinarily the crankiest man ever to sit down behind a microphone, appeared genuinely delighted by its absurdity. I hope he received’t thoughts if I’m going as far as to say he appeared tickled by it.

As properly he ought to have! It’s ridiculous! The changeup is the one pitch in baseball that’s named for, and ordinarily outlined by, its opposition to one thing else. What’s it? No clue — we simply understand it’s not the default. Kahnle ought to should name it one thing else.

And he may, as a result of as Ben wrote in 2023, Kahnle’s changeup isn’t efficient due to the distinction in velocity to his four-seamer. That’s why he can throw it as usually as he does. Kahnle’s changeup bumps up in opposition to 90 mph when he’s actually feeling it, and has hellacious vertical drop in comparison with the sinkers in its velocity band.

As a lot as the cutter-to-slider-to-curveball continuum drives me up the wall, there’s an identical taxonomic conundrum for pitches with arm-side break. What’s actually separating a changeup from a splitter, which — if we’re nonetheless speaking about linguistic pedantry in pitch classification — was initially branded as a split-finger fastball?

By that logic, in the event you’ve bought a secondary pitch with upper-80s velocity and bat-missing motion, why wouldn’t you throw it on a regular basis?

Kahnle actually does.

This isn’t a standard factor. Kahnle is an outlier. However he’s not distinctive, particularly within the playoffs.

As you little doubt know already, the latest pattern towards heavy reliever use and shorter beginning pitcher outings solely will get extra excessive within the playoffs. If you happen to’ve listened to Smoltz on the mic within the postseason, you won’t know a lot else about baseball, however you’ll know this. And whereas I acknowledge that this reliance on relievers represents the cutting-edge by way of in-game ways, I don’t prefer it on an aesthetic or narrative stage.

I beloved the times of pitchers’ duels, of a single solitary man holding again the tide, inning after inning. When playoff video games weren’t simply chess matches however endurance exams. This ceaseless shuffle of more and more nameless and fungible relievers feels impersonal, sterile, antithetical to the game’s nice literary custom. It feels disrespectful to Bob Gibson and Lefty Grove and — you understand what? — even Smoltz, who took half in a single or two nice duels in his personal time. You may acknowledge that it’s the best way to win whereas nonetheless discovering it ugly.

There are exceptions to this perception, locations the place the reduction parade does one thing for me. And Kahnle represents considered one of them.

I shared Smoltz’s amusement with the age of the all-changeup repertoire, as a result of absurdity is normally humorous. However alongside that, Kahnle’s postseason appearances are resonant with tenacious desperation, just like the movies of Alexander Payne or the novels of Graham Greene.

Kahnle has been an efficient reduction pitcher for many of his profession, however he’s by no means been refined or exact. He doesn’t throw plenty of strikes, and he walks plenty of batters even for a one-inning setup man. Perhaps 15 years in the past, you might win a title whereas consigning all of the significant playoff innings to between 5 and 7 good pitchers: three or 4 starters, a more in-depth, and one or two reliable setup males. Now, all 13 pitchers should contribute one thing, and extra usually than anybody would really like, a reliever with one good pitch might want to present not simply outs however high-leverage outs, probably a number of innings’ value.

That is the fourth time by the order for the 2020s: There’s a one- or two-inning gap within the season, and if it’s not plugged, a torrent of runs are going to return pouring by. Not even the Dodgers or Yankees can conjure up sufficient elite starters and shutdown relievers to cowl each high-leverage inning.

So the supervisor turns to the very best man left in his bullpen, and typically, the very best concept that man has is to throw his one good pitch over and again and again.

The place 20 years in the past championships have been received and misplaced by whether or not Pedro Martinez or Josh Beckett may get by the eighth or ninth, now they’re received and misplaced right here. Each pitch is a possible season-killer, so there’s no wiggle room to set hitters up or climb the ladder or set up the fastball or no matter orthodoxy Aaron Choose or Shohei Ohtani would simply hit 450 ft.

Since 2017, there have been 15 postseason reduction appearances of 25 pitches or extra, the place at the least two-thirds of these pitches have been a single secondary (i.e. non-fastball) pitch kind. Kahnle and his changeup account for 4 of these outings. In whole, the Yankees bullpen had 4 such appearances throughout the 2024 ALCS, as Jake Cousins contributed two slider-heavy outings to associate with two Kahnle specials.

Not all of those have been desperation outings. Drake’s 2019 ALDS look got here with the Rays up a landing, for example. Others — for good or ailing — got here by the staff’s established nearer: Romano’s contribution to blowing an 8-1 result in the Mariners within the 2022 AL Wild Card collection, or a totally gassed Díaz getting kidney punched by Nick Castellanos and Bryson Stott in final 12 months’s NLDS.

Then again, Pressly’s five-out save in Sport 5 of the 2022 World Sequence was a little bit of unremembered heroism. Pressly’s most well-known second in that collection was closing out the mixed no-hitter the night time earlier than, however in Sport 5 he got here in for a five-out save with the tying run on third and the go-ahead run on base, and bought by the hardest a part of the Phillies’ order to finish the sport with out permitting a run. Failure would’ve despatched the World Sequence again to Houston with the Astros down 3-2 within the collection.

And talking of the Astros, there’s the good ancestor of the sort of look: McCullers’ four-inning save to shut out the 2017 ALCS, marked by a string of 24 straight curveballs. By the tip of that run, Brian McCann wasn’t even bothering to sign; he simply pounded his glove on the dust as a reminder to bury the deuce.

However for each McCullers outing, there’s Sport 5 of the 2019 NL Wild Card collection. Joe Kelly entered a tie recreation within the prime of the ninth inning, then stayed in for an additional body. The primary 15 pitches of his outing have been knuckle-curves, however Kelly’s command, as ever, wavered. He loaded the bases to start out the tenth, bought Howie Kendrick to foul off a curve that had simply sufficient break to drop out of the purple zone. The following pitch was a four-seamer, and Kendrick hit it over the middle discipline wall for a series-winning grand slam.

Regardless of the final result, the proposition is identical. We’re not out of concepts; we’ve got precisely one concept left. One pitcher, one pitch, time and again, till one thing provides. Given the selection, I’d reasonably return to having pitchers’ duels. However it is a fairly compelling substitute.