There is a lot of talk about the Red Sox not having a bonafide closer to start the season. I am going to go on record here and say that it doesn’t matter. There are no more than a dozen great closers out there who perform every year (Rivera, K-Rod, Nathan, Ryan, etc.). Most teams, including World Series champs, had a different guy at the end of the year than the beginning. Let’s take a look at champions in this century:
2001 - Diamondbacks: Kim is closer in World Series - Matt Mantei was supposed to be the closer that year. Leaving camp, Kim was an unproven 22 year old Korean pitcher.
2002 - Angels: Percival - At the time, he was one of the top 3 or 4 closers in baseball.
2003 - Marlins: Braden Looper gets his 29th save on Sept. 9 - Urbina saves 4 in the post season.
2004 - Red Sox: Keith Foulke, all year long, and nearly MVP of the world series.
2005 - White Sox: Takatsu starts the year as closer and fails, Hermanson does well for a while, Jenks becomes World Series hero
2006 - Cardinals: Isringhausen is a premiere closer opening the season, gets hurt, and Wainwright closes out the world series.

Thats only 2 out of 6 champs who had their world series closer coming out of spring training.

Don’t worry about it - we’ll have a closer when it counts!

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This entry was posted on Thursday, February 8th, 2007 at 12:13 pm and is filed under General Postings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.