A brief history of bullpenning

The weird thing the Oakland Athletics did Wednesday night wasn't that weird.

It seems weird, because for a century and a half baseball hasn't been played that way. The A's, using a "reliever" to start the winner-take-all wild-card game -- with no expectation that he would go past the first or second inning, and with an expectation that six or seven or eight pitchers would ultimately appear not by demand but by design -- were sharply breaking (as have the Tampa Bay Rays and other teams this year) with the established way we always did things.

But what's notable is baseball was never that far off from doing this weird thing. The history of The Weird Thing is that it was never that wild of an…