Every good reliever needs a nickname. It’s a requirement, a legacy to carry with them after their playing days are done. This is especially important for relievers, who have a much shorter lifespan than most other players.
A good nickname, an exploding scoreboard/fire and brimstone/mall metal intro and you’re set. For now, too many good relievers don’t have good nicknames or gimmicks. We here at Getting Blanked need to address this injustice.
Let’s start with the man seen above, Mark Melancon.
Relievers. They’re certainly something. When we look at the amount of innings that a starting pitcher accumulates over the course of a season, and then compare it to the innings that a relief pitcher throws, assuming we’re of a sound mind, we’ll more often than not come to the conclusion that the contributions of starters outweigh that of relievers.
I wouldn’t dispute that. No one with any sense would. However, that doesn’t preclude relievers from being valuable members of a baseball team. With the recent popularity attached to looking into win probability added and measuring the leverage of situations on a game by game basis, we’ve come to understand that even though a relief pitcher is working less than a starter, his work tends to be in more stressful situations.
