Edwin Diaz’s season-ending injury during the 2023 World Baseball Classic was no injury to celebrate, but it provoked an awkward question for fans of Timmy Trumpet and Diaz himself: do baseball teams really need a closer?
The loss of Diaz put an unwanted stake through the hearts of devoted Mets fans who worshipped the closer’s walk-out song that went viral in 2022, Diaz’s first good season since he came to Queens in the Robinson Cano trade. But his celebration injury after a Team Puerto Rico win during this year’s WBC crushed the blue-and-orange faithful hoping to see repeated success from Edwin in 2023, fresh off signing a new contract extension that made him one of the highest-paid closers in baseball history. Ironically, Jeff McNeil, Diaz’s teammate, got the contract extension that Diaz should’ve gotten given his bullpen position, so it seemed as though Steve Cohen was making solid moves with his dollars when looking at the bottom line, that is, until the injury.
Enter Mets free agent acquisition David Robertson, a veteran reliever whose most prominent years came with the Yankees during the twilight seasons of Mariano Rivera’s career. Robertson, 38 years young and in his 15th season in the Majors, has filled in for Diaz beautifully, posting a 0.53 ERA and seven saves through 17.0 innings pitched in 2023 in the makeshift closer role. Was he signed to be a replacement for Diaz? The one-year, $10 million price tag would say so, but not when you consider the fact that D-Rob was signed four months before Timmy Trumpet’s kin went down for the year. Perhaps the signing was just to lock up a semi-strong Mets bullpen that ranked 10th in bullpen ERA in 2022, or perhaps it was to beef up the very "position" of the "closer.”
Robertson’s success in Flushing comes in direct contrast to the Yankees’ closer problems to start 2023. Clay Holmes hasn’t been the same pitcher since last year’s All-Star Game and has a 4.61 ERA on the year entering Saturday, May 13. To counteract the sinkerballer’s troubles, the Yanks have used most of their relief core as makeshift closers. Six different Yankee bullpen arms have recorded at least four games finished in 2023, while five have recorded at least one save. The results have been quite surprising, to say the least. The Bombers rank as one of the best bullpens in baseball in 2023, currently coming in as the third-best in terms of ERA (the same place they finished in the category last season), and that’s with proven set-up men Jonathan Loaisiga and Lou Trivino out for the considerable future. In their place has been the surprise emergences of slambio-throwing Ian Hamilton and not-Franchy Jimmy Cordero.
The upstart Hamilton and Cordero along with the other no-named stars that make up the Yankees arm barn continue to elevate a discussion that I think baseball teams need to start having: a closer might not be necessary. Forward-thinking philosophy has done away with a lot of baseball’s odd strategizing in the past, so what’s to say that the closer position isn't next? The Yankees are using a hybrid approach to their bullpen, where they play the matchups with a diverse set of pitchers that can get consecutive batters out in different ways, and it's working. They keep teams on their toes through doing away with archaic tactics and instead using their intelligence and logic to achieve what fans want in the end: victories. It makes it ironic, then, that teams will go out of their way to make their designated closer’s entrance a spectacle, such as the Mets with Diaz, when bringing in the closer during a specific save situation might not be the best decision, given the matchups. This makes it pretty hard to justify monetary and principled investment in closers, and that’s coming from a Yankees fan who grew up idolizing Mariano Rivera. I mean, hey, Mo did play in an era when wins were an important stat. Thinking changes with the times.
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