Everyone Keep Your Pants on About Tampa Bay Using an Opener

The Tampa Bay Rays created a massive stir with their creative bullpen usage this past weekend. Instead of having their starting pitchers pitch the first innings of their games on Saturday and Sunday, as one would naturally assume, they sent reliever Sergio Romo to the mound to face the top of the Angels’ order. Romo struck out the side in his Saturday appearance, and while he was somewhat less effective in his “start” on Sunday, he still didn’t allow a run. The Rays, so it would seem, were vindicated in their use of what has been termed “The Opener.”

Thus began a maelstrom of debate surrounding The Opener as a viable strategy in baseball. Were we witnessing the start of a new revolution in bullpen management, a glimpse of the sport’s future? Could this be an option for other teams currently strapped for quality starting pitching? If anything, it was very successful in getting people talking about the oft-ignored Rays.

But there’s another kind of debate that emerges whenever some experiment or idea that is ostensibly analytics-based is floated in baseball: an extreme polarization of opinions that stifles actual debate and development rather than encouraging it. For an illustration of this dynamic, one need look no further than this alleged “discussion” hosted on MLB Network between their two commentators Chris “Mad Dog” Russo and Brian Kenny.

The arguments of each party in this debate are so discontinuous from each other that the two seem to having entirely different conversations—a fact that doesn’t dampen their respective commitments to their talking points. Russo seems enraged first because the Rays are apparently too bad a team to be pulling such hijinks, then because they should bring up a younger player to be thrown to the wolves, before finally settling on the idea that people won’t buy tickets to see games if The Opener catches on and spells the death of the ace.

Kenny, meanwhile, responds with righteous exasperation, playing the cool straight man to Russo’s rage, repeating “Dog. Dog.” like someone talking to a toddler having a tantrum. He closes the conversation by saying that The Opener is not only an already-successful innovation that should have been embraced long ago, but is, in fact, a beautiful invention.

There was something oddly similar in the ways that the two, diametrically opposed in opinion and demeanor though they were, approached this issue: with a firm and frustrating belief that their baseball opinion is the irrefutably correct one. Russo’s non-stop yelling was illogical, alienating and inherently unsympathetic, befitting the tenor of his takes. But that almost made it more more jarring to hear a dramatic declaration like Kenny’s, ostensibly made in the spirit of analytics, that The Opener as practiced by the Rays this weekend is without a doubt the opening salvo of a revolution that will bring about a brave new bullpen world built upon the ashes of the old order. This is a shocking degree of certainty to have about a baseball strategy that has been put in practice for all of two innings. Unsubstantiated fist-shaking about the way the game “should be played” deserves all the mockery it gets, but meeting it with an opposed form of unshakable certainty isn’t the way to effect a positive change on the culture of the sport.

The reactions, for example, to Zack Cozart expressing concern about both the effect that a hypothetical embrace of The Opener would have on gameplay and the possible salary-repressing motivations behind the Rays embracing this tactic were roundly dismissive, writing off his complaints as the sour grapes of a player who saw his job as a hitter on the verge of getting more difficult. Cozart’s initial assertion that The Opener was bad for baseball inasmuch as it made his life harder as a hitter was indeed a poor argument—if anything, it seemed to justify the Rays’ use of the strategy. His subsequent clarification of his worry that teams would use The Opener strategy to suppress payroll, though, made more sense. Lumping this valid concern about the effects an on-field strategy might have on players’ real lives off the field into the same category as old baseball men yelling at clouds seems disingenuous.

Moving from the mound to directly behind it, Russell Carleton of Baseball Prospectus recently published a thought-provoking piece of research on a previously unaddressed weakness of the infield shift—itself a focal point of similarly two-dimensional Tradition vs. Analytics arguments. Carleton’s research indicates that the number of walks that have taken place in front of the infield shift have on aggregate negated its run-suppressing effects. He suggests that perhaps proponents of the shift should have been listening all along to the large number of pitchers who, since the shift became accepted into the canon of baseball strategy, have expressed that pitching in front of it makes them uncomfortable.

Carleton’s incorporation of the human element to his data-based analysis—proposing that the way players react to various experiments in baseball strategy is an important element in evaluating the efficiency of said strategies—is a worthwhile development in baseball analytics, and is worth taking into account when considering something like The Opener. With all the issues it might pose in terms of bullpen management and player preparation, as well as the aforementioned payroll concerns, the human element of The Opener and the ways it would affect players remains worth interrogating.

Sergio Romo, for his part, seems to have embraced his new role with gusto, but it remains to be seen how players on different teams, in different situations, would react to widespread use of The Opener—let alone how teams might adjust their lineups to combat the advantages The Opener might bring. Maybe the majority of pitchers will, like Romo, find their new role invigorating. Maybe they’ll be uncomfortable. The lack of certainty is what makes the whole thing exciting, not finding out who was right all along.

The Rays’ experiment this weekend may very well end up being the beginning of a baseball revolution. Perhaps, 20 years down the line, Openers pitching the first inning of the game will be as widespread as closers pitching the ninth now are. Maybe The Opener will be used only situationally, or maybe this was just a one-off entertaining oddity. Whatever ends up happening, we certainly don’t know after only two innings whether this is the start of a glorious transformation for baseball, or a harbinger of its final ruin, or—most likely of all—neither.