In the last segment of our complementary greats series, I took the time to talk about the roles of a reliever, and how relief duties have shifted throughout baseball’s history. The left-handed reliever we ended up choosing was Mike Stanton, a setup man and occasional lefty specialist with the late ‘90’s and early ‘00’s Yankees.
The right-hander selected to join him in our bullpen pitched before the time of closers, when the save wasn’t even an official statistic. It was a time when the usage of a top reliever was primarily influenced by high-leverage situations, regardless of what inning those situations happened to arise.