Update On Initial Closer Chances

Two seasons ago, I examined the chances the season’s initial closer made it the entire season without being replaced for any reason including injury. I went back and revisited the study and updated it with 2017 and 2018 results. While the initially calculated chances were low, the odds are getting even worse.

I posted to Twitter account my initial results for the last two seasons to make sure nothing was too far off. Thanks to everyone for the responses and here are the end results:

With this information, several pieces of information can be concluded. Thanks to “smada plays fantasy” since the work I planned on doing was done and then some.

also checked to see how often incumbent stays the same year to year. little less than half on avg pic.twitter.com/UVrcafgmCC

— Mat or Smada (@Smada_PLive) November 7, 2018

Two pieces of information are key to me in the table.

First, just over 60% of all Saves are from initial closers. While some of the other Saves came from closers who started the season on the DL, many continue to be found on the waiver wire.

Second, the odds of a closer having a job from the start to the end of a season has dropped from 46% to 17%. Teams are cycling through closers at a faster rate. The biggest change has been teams trading away their closer. In 2013 just one closer was traded with seven being traded last year.

Only four of the 21 being traded went into a new closer’s role. Most became setup men. If there continues to be an increasing gap between the haves anhave-notsts in the league, I don’t see this trend ending anytime soon.

In the previous article calculated a couple of formulas to calculate the chances of the closer keeping his job based on their ERA. I did a small update with the two new seasons and decided to lop off 2013 (and could have cut more).

With my goal to be simple and accurate, I grouped the pitchers in 0.50 ERA increments and found their chances of keeping the job an entire season.

Just a simple linear regression of these values comes up with an r-squared of .95. Perfect and I will just use this equation going forward:

Chance to keep closer’s role = -0.272 * ERA + 1.213

One final note. I observed while doing some of my in-season FAAB analysis that owners spent heavy early on to get closers. After going over the 2017 data, 10 closers lost their job by May 15th. The number dropped to two this past season. Owners may have been desperate for Saves in 2018 and once a player came up they jumped.

I’m wondering if owners will shy away from spending big in 2019 since recency bias says that Saves will be available and cheaper a bit later. As smada’s research has shown, about the same 40% of Saves is out there for the taking. The key is just trying to figure out how to get those Saves with the fewest resources.

I have another study to run about the conversion of draft picks/auction dollars to FAAB but that study will have to wait until another day. For, it’s just more and more digging into offseason topics with hitters who had Tommy John surgery and do second half velocity drops changes coming next.