SportsHubLA

After Sunday evening’s crushing 5-2 loss to the Phillies, there was a great deal of attention given to Dodgers’ closer Jonathan Broxton, who has occupied- how well depends on whom you ask- the ninth inning role for the virtually automatic Takashi Saito since LA’s All Star went down with a sprained ligament in his right elbow in mid-July.   Last night, Broxton gave away a 2-1 lead for the Blue in an inning that included a four pitch walk to someone named Andy Tracy, a 34-year old who hasn’t had more than 55 AB’s in a season since 2000.   The natives were not pleased.

That game, combined with some ugly August splits, only intensified the Great Broxton Debate which has been raging over the last week or two as the hourglass that is the Dodgers’ season starts to get a little low on sand.  Two posts today around the blogosphere look at Broxton’s work, and the notion of whether or not he has “the stuff” to be a closer.

Jon Weisman at Dodger Thoughts is supportive:

…One of three things usually happens when Broxton pitches in a save situation: he walks a batter, he gives up a cheap hit or he blows a hitter away. Opponents are slugging a mere .322 against him in these situations this season, thanks in large part to them achieving a .378 batting average on balls in play. (With the bases loaded this season, opponents are batting .500 on balls in play.)

In 135 plate appearances, opponents have six doubles and one home run. This does not describe someone who is getting hammered when there’s a save to be had. The guy has not had great command or great luck.

For some, that’s no excuse - a great closer isn’t supposed to even allow bad luck to beat him. Broxton has been beaten; there’s no doubt about that. But he has hardly been beaten consistently - he has 10 saves in 12 opportunities since Takashi Saito was injured, plus a win and another two losses in non-save chances, and a one-two-three inning in his other game. He has allowed a minuscule .567 OPS in that time. In 16 innings, he’s allowed 21 baserunners while striking out 23. And by the way, he has successfully stranded all eight baserunners he has inherited from his teammates in that time. There is no fatal flaw - nor, if you argue for the fatal flaw, anything conclusive that it is mental not physical…

On the other side of things is Rob McMillan of 6-4-2:

 …There has been quite a bit of point-counterpoint over the last 24 hours regarding Broxton’s fitness for duty, and I wanted to address each of the relevant charges separately:

    * Charge: Broxton was just unlucky in yesterday’s game. Throwing a four-pitch walk to a AAA hitter does not qualify as “unlucky” in any reasonable version of pitcher evaluation I have ever heard of.
    * Charge: Broxton melts down in the second half. Viewed by itself, the answer is no, and in fact his career 3.20 first half ERA is actually slightly higher than his career 3.12 second half number. However, that said, Broxton has had atrocious Septembers (career 4.09 ERA), mostly a remnant of his 2005 and 2007 campaigns. The former we may dismiss as the first callup of a young pitcher, the latter no. It does seem inconclusive, though, given his 1.80 ERA in September 2006.
    * Charge: Broxton is worse in the ninth inning. It’s true; he has allowed a .259/.341/.351 in the ninth over his career, numbers that are appreciably worse than his .224/.302/.330 career numbers. Of course, he’s even worse in the seventh inning (.276/.358/.526), but nobody cares about that because of the focus on the ninth.
   * Charge: Broxton’s blown saves unfairly penalize him; his holds need to be included in the denominator to properly assess his work. Perhaps so. Much of this gets to the general unfairness of how the save is calculated; blown holds become blown saves, but it is not possible to earn a save in the eighth when your team’s closer comes in to nab it. Adding his holds into the equation, that means seven blown saves over 13 holds plus 17 save opportunities means he’s still blowing 23% of his save opportunities. That’s still a large number. Broxton may be a “good” closer for some definition of “good”, but he’s certainly not elite.

For me, one of the most compelling pieces of evidence that Broxton is, at least right now, not yet ready to close is the fact that he gets appreciably worse as the leverage situation gets higher; he allows a .248/.320/.377 line against. This year, he’s even worse, allowing a .288/.348/.375 line against. When the game is on the line, Broxton folds, and more so this year than ever before.

McMillan points out that, right now at least, the Dodgers have a bigger problem with run scoring than they do with Broxton, and Weisman makes it clear he’d have no problem giving the, or at least some of the, closer job to Hong-Chih Kuo.  Both make solid arguments, and what makes them particularly interesting when side by side is that the numbers they use are all dug up from the same place, www.baseballreference.com. 

Discuss: