By Yours Truly
http://throneberryfields.com/2018/02/16/mets-skipper-bans-dry-humping-no-not-that-kind/There will be no dry humping in the Mets’ bullpen this year if manager Mickey Callaway has anything to say about it. And, no, believe it or not,
he’s
not referring to players sneaking wives or girl friends into the pen for a little fully-clothed intimacy, either.
This one’s a little new to me, too. But in baseball “dry humping†refers to warming up and sitting down relief pitchers repeatedly before bringing
them into a game. “Dry humping guys is something I feel strongly about,†said Callaway, the former Indians pitching coach, on Wednesday. He
has no use for it, if he can help it. And he thinks he can.
“That’s a lot of wear and tear that is endless and if I haven’t prepared the right way, that will happen,†Callaway continued. “I have to make a
decision with good timing so the game doesn’t speed up on us and we don’t have somebody ready.â€
Callaway is only too well aware that dry humping means a gassed reliever before he’s brought into a game to face live hitting that’s liable to
assassinate him. And without knowing the usage of “dry humping†in that context, it’s an awareness I’ve had for years, thanks to Whitey
Herzog.
The Hall of Fame manager didn’t use the term “dry humping.†But in his splendid
You’re Missin’ a Great Game from 1999, Herzog argued extensively
and persuasively against the practise. I don’t know if Callaway has read the book, but if someone planted the proverbial bug in his ear about the
argument Herzog advances, it took.
Herzog’s policy for his bullpen when he managed was simple enough: if he warmed you up more than once but still couldn’t get you into the game,
you had the rest of the day off. The bad news is that, as he phrased it, some managers think that if you’re not actually in the game, you're not
pitching. Never mind that you might have thrown the equivalent of a quality start’s worth of pitches.
The White Rat singled two managers out in particular who were guilty of brain vapour when it came to such bullpen management: Tommy Lasorda and
Pete Rose. Lasorda in particular surprised Herzog because the longtime Dodgers manager began his own baseball life as a marginal relief pitcher himself.
He’d take a reliever and warm him up four or five times during a game and not use him; then, he’d do the same thing
the next day. The day after that, he’d put the guy in a game. He’d have nothing out there, and Tommy’d say, “Hell, you
ain’t pitched in two days, what’s the matter with you?†. . . f he’s tossing on the sidelines, man, he’s getting hot. Over
the years I dealt some of my pitchers to L.A. . . . and they always came back with the same report: Tommy was still
messing up the pen.
Rose, Herzog observed, had the same flaw and then some:
Wonderful baseball man, but he was impaired when it came to handling pitchers. Here he had three world class relievers,
Norm Charlton, Rob Murphy, and Rob Dibble, all in the same pen . . . With those three guys on your side, you shouldn’t lose
games after the sixth. Not too damn many. But Pete found a way.
He’d get Murphy up in the third; he’d warm him up in the fourth. He’d get Charlton up in the fifth. Sometimes I’d look down
there, and he’d have both lefthanders going at the same time. Why would you warm ‘em both up at once? You’re only going
to use one lefty or the other! Then, after he’d worked ‘em out three or four times, Pete would put one in the game and be
surprised he had no zip. “He can’t be tired,†he’d say. “He ain’t pitched in three days!†Somebody counted how many times
he warmed Murphy up one year and it was over two hundred. I like Pete, boy—but I loved managing against him.
Callaway’s Mets predecessor, Terry Collins, often caught heat for bullpen management. I respected Collins overall but his bullpen management left
plenty to be desired. Collins was a notorious dry humper with a lot of his relievers. In three of his seven seasons managing the Mets, a Collins bullpen
had the National League’s worst or second-worst ERA.
Joe and Jane Fan don’t always think about it. Most of the time they’re liable to react like Rose when a reliever gets turned into a
pinata after “he ain’t
pitched in three days!â€
But perhaps they should pay very close attention to how often a manager warms up a relief pitcher before bringing him into a game, if he’s brought
in the same day, and how long he lasts before he’s battered. Or, how often that pitcher’s warmed up without being brought in on two days running,
only to come in on the third day and be qualified to go to the Hague charging human rights violations.
Callaway is particularly acute about such things because he’s already working with a starting rotation that was decimated by injuries in 2017 if you
don’t count Jacob deGrom. Going to a bullpen-by-committee with no formally designated closer amplifies things for Callaway. Formally designated
closers normally don’t have to worry about multiple warmings-up before getting into their games; Callaway knows he’s challenging himself not to
make the multiple warmup mistake with the committee approach.
He’ll have to have men ready at the right time without overworking them in the pen, and he’ll have to be sharper even than the man who can and
does think three or four innings ahead contingent to the elements of surprise that are as common to baseball as the seventh inning stretch.
A man who embraces a challenge is a man to admire. But he still has to know what he’s doing when he embraces it. Callaway might feel more
comfortable with the old definition of dry humping. Catching your man having a love wrestle with his girl in the bullpen tunnel might be distasteful,
but it won’t lose you a ball game as fast as sending him into the game with pitches having less life than a corpse.
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