If Jonathan Papelbon can't escape Philadelphia by chewing off his own leg, he might as well have tried grabbing his own crotch.
We've all heard the story of the animal so desperate to escape a trap that it chews off its own leg. On Sunday, Phillies closer Jonathan Papelbon attempted exactly that, except it involved grabbing his own crotch at the Sunday Philadelphia afternoon crowd. Fortunately, chewing off his own genitals was apparently not an option. The NFL provides enough grotesque visuals for all the major sports put together, thanks, although from a flexibility perspective it would have been fascinating to see him try. "Take that, fickle fans!"
Note the emphasis on grabbing his own crotch. Grabbing a stranger's crotch tends to be frowned upon by society. Having said that, what actually happened is a matter of some dispute, or is if you're particularly gullible. On his way off the field after a disastrous, four-run inning against the Miami Marlins, Papelbon roughly hiked up his reproductive equipment in the general direction of the booing home crowd behind the dugout. After he was ejected by umpire Joe West for making said gesture, Papelbon insisted he was just adjusting his cup, but if that were the case then it was the most dramatic north-south adjustment of a cup in baseball history, as if the protective groinwear had suddenly slipped down around Papelbon's knees.
As self-immolating gestures go, this was not quite as clear as Jack McDowell's "Yankee Flipper" moment in 1995, when he gave the middle finger to roughly 21,000 fans after getting bombed off the mound by the Chicago White Sox or as literal as Scott Proctor setting fire to his uniform after a tough outing in 2007, but your willing suspension of disbelief has to stretch fairly far to accept Papelbon's explanation. There was an especially pathetic moment in Phillies manager Ryne Sandberg's discussion with Papelbon after the former sought clarification from West -- Sandberg returns to the dugout and, seemingly by way of explanation, hitches up his belt like a farmer saying, "Ayup."
Good try, Ryno. Solid effort. Although that too might have been a coincidence. Actually, the whole season might add up to "good try, Ryno," because when your managing a team that has been eliminated and you pitch your closer for the third day in a row and let him throw a season-high 38 pitches (fourth-highest total of his relief career and his most in four years), you have clearly lost sight of your priorities. He put Papelbon in a position to fail, then let him go right on failing. Ayup.
Smilin' Jon Papelbon at his inaugural Phillies press conference, 2011 (Len Redkoles/Getty Images).
The real problem here isn't that Papelbon had the inning from hell at the tail end of what has been a very good season overall. Watch the frame and you'll see that he was undone by a combination of solid hits, a walk, a wild pitch, and a couple of balls that a second baseman younger than the 35-year-old Chase Utley might have had, although to be fair to the future Hall of Famer, he still gets around pretty well for a second baseman his age and one of the balls was hit into the DMZ between the pitcher's mound and second base that even Eddie Collins or Bill Mazeroski could not have covered. In any case, it was just one of those days where Papelbon didn't have his best command, got some bad breaks, and the whole game went to pieces. Even Mariano Rivera had a couple of those.
Rather, what we saw on Sunday was the culmination of Jonathan Papelbon being caught in a trap of his own making, or his and Ruben Amaro's making. In November, 2011, free-agent Papelbon jumped from the Boston Red Sox to the Phillies for a four-year $50 million contract that also included a fifth-year vesting option worth $13 million that looks pretty darned sure to vest (Papelbon has to finish 55 games in 2015 or 100 between 2014 and 2015; he's halfway there now). According to the salary data at Baseball Prospectus, Papelbon now has the third-highest salary of any reliever in baseball after Oakland's Adam Dunn and Washington's Rafael Soriano.*
*No, Adam Dunn isn't a reliever, but that's what the table says and I'm sticking with it.
Papelbon spent seven years with the Red Sox. In that time, the team won 90 or more games five times and never posted a losing season. They went to the postseason four times and won the World Series in 2007. The Phillies weren't too far off from that pace during that time, with four seasons of 90 or more wins, five postseason appearances, and a World Series win of their own in 2008.
If Papelbon only looked at surfaces, he had every reason to think he was making a parallel move, jumping from one organization that had it all figured out to another. The problem was the Phillies were ancient, bound to some amazingly ill-considered contracts, had traded away a great many prospects in pursuit of their win-now plans, and were as doomed as the dinosaurs. Papelbon's big-money contract, which began with his age-31 season, only added to and accelerated that process.
Papelbon has been about what you would expect a closer to be in his three seasons in Philadelphia. His 2013 was rough in terms of converting saves as he pitched through a hip injury ("I felt like I had a broken hip all season," he said in July) but in 2012 and 2014 he's been at 90 percent. You can't really complain about that kind of conversion rate, however sloppily the pitcher gets it done or with a slowball instead of a fastball. To invoke the sainted Mariano once again, his career rate was only 89 percent.
Papelbon in a typical Red Sox-era pose (Getty Images).
Papelbon has made no secret of his desire to leave town, like now. Back in July, as rumors circulated that the Phillies were peddling their overpriced wares, Papelbon was asked if he was up for being traded to a contender.
"Yeah," he said. "I think it would be a no-brainer." While he said all the right things about having come to Philadelphia "for a reason" and praised the Phillies' improving bullpen (which must be something only he can see, or maybe he was referring solely to Ken Giles) as a reason to stay. Yet, wanting to stay with a losing team, Papelbon said, "That's mind-boggling to me."
It apparently wasn't mind-boggling to other teams, who reportedly refused to trade for Papelbon both during the 2013-2014 offseason and prior to this year's trading deadline. Maybe his outspokenness was at issue, or his declining velocity (his fastball, which hung around 95 mph with the Red Sox, is now down to 91 mph according to Fangraphs), but most likely it was the $39 million the acquiring team would have had to spend for 65 innings a year.
Even had the Phillies picked up some portion of the bill, spending that kind of dough on a closer is just not worth it below the level of perfection. The average major-league payroll this year is around $110 million. Every team has to get about 1,450 innings a season out of its arms. Arms capable of pitching high-leverage innings are not as rare as baseball traditionalists tend to credit them with being. Add it all up and it doesn't make a great deal of sense to spend 10 percent of your overall payroll on four percent of your innings.
I pause to note that, yes, every year there is a team or two that cannot find a closer or even a good middle reliever and blows lead after lead. I have seen the White Sox this year. I have seen the Rockies. I have marveled at J.J. Hoover going 1-10 for the Reds. Hell, I remember the Mets' Anthony Young with a kind of sad fondness. That these things happen doesn't say anything about the value of a Papelbon over Joe Anybody (or, in the Phillies' case, Ken Giles) just like the occasional times you misplace your car keys doesn't imply you have Alzheimer's. Sometimes a team just can't identify that guy or guys in a given season. It happens, you move on.
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Arguably, Amaro wasn't totally insane when he signed Papelbon to a huge contract. First, huge contracts are what he does, so we shrug and say we might as well blame a camel for spitting at you or Bud Selig for being a wilted, wispy, ethereal presence not unlike a living version of 19th century spirit photography. It's just who they are and what they do. What Amaro did perhaps see correctly is that most relievers, even closers, are more like Joe Borowski than Mariano Rivera, mixing in good seasons with mediocre or outright bad ones -- there's simply too much room for performance variation ever to trust the stats. Indeed, what made Rivera so special, along with his outstanding postseason work, was that he never had a Joe Borowski/Fernando Rodney/Jose Valverde breakdown year.
Papelbon has come close to that standard, with his off years, 2010 and 2013, being something short of all-out disasters. Unfortunately for Papelbon, teams can look at his declining velocity, his cranky attitude, and whatever prospects and/or percentage of his salary they'd have to pay and recognize that there is a good chance that in any deal, regardless of the parameters, they face a strong likelihood of getting took.
And so the Phillies and Papelbon are stuck with each other. That the Phillies were about to enter a dark place in the lifespan of a team when they would have little need for an expensive specialist, that neither Amaro nor Papelbon was capable of recognizing this -- and even as the Phillies won 102 games in 2011, the precariousness of their situation was widely noted -- is the tragedy of their relationship.
And so, a prisoner of Philadelphia and his own lack of foresight, Papelbon made what might be a career-defining "adjustment." In a certain sense, it was entirely appropriate. When you've screwed yourself, what is more appropriate than grabbing the organ that does the screwing? Then again, that's being too literal -- if Papelbon was honest about it, he would have grabbed his head.