I disagree, because every mound is different.. The home plate backgrounds are different.
The blond MILF flashing you in the corporate box seats are different.
You need to feel comfortable on the pitching rubber.
You have to remember not a lot of bullpens look right onto the field. And I think most ballparks
sculpt the bullpen rubber areas to be matches or near-matches to the field mound rubber,
even if the bullpen mound by necessity isn't as large an area. I once had seats looking into the
bullpens in Angel Stadium and noticed how near-exact the rubbers in both bullpens were to
the field mound.
Aside from which, it's
very true that a relief pitcher just might have thrown up to four innings'
worth of pitches getting ready in the bullpen---assuming his manager has brains enough not
to sit him down, then an inning or two later warm him up again. If
that happens, the
guy's thrown the equivalent of a quality start before he even got into the game. You might
as well give him the rest of the day or night off because if you bring him in he's maybe less
than half the pitcher he should be when you bring him in.
I learned about things like that reading Whitey Herzog's memoir
Your Missin' a Great Game.
He really opened my eyes about relief pitching. He talked about managers who did as I just
described and basically ruined a lot of good bullpen arms that way. Two culprits in particular
that he singled out were Tommy Lasorda and Pete Rose: They'd warm a guy up, sit him down,
warm him up again, sit him down, then get him "ready" fast, bring him in, and wonder why
he had nothing left on the mound and just got himself killed out there.
(A
real smart manager pays attention to the other manager's bullpen use. So do real
smart hitters. They see a guy up and throwing, back on the bench, up and throwing again,
back on the bench, they're
praying that guy is brought in, because he'll have little
enough left that the hitter can start tabulating the lift in his on base percentage, his batting
average, maybe even the distance he's going to hit that home run off a guy who's gassed
when brought in at last.)
The White Rat wasn't just blowing smoke about it: he'd dealt some relievers to the Dodgers
and the Reds in those years and if they came back to him they'd tell him those guys were
messing their bullpens up that way. And Lasorda and Rose couldn't get it, they'd be asking,
"What's wrong, he ain't pitched in three days!" What did they think those relief pitchers
were
doing each time they warmed up? Answering their fan mail?
Herzog had a policy: if he warmed you up but didn't bring you in then or in the next
inning, you had the rest of the game off. He got a lot more miles out of his bullpens than
Lasorda, Rose, and other managers got out of theirs.
