Stop, In the Name Of/For the Love of God

John Maine's excellent showing last night notwithstanding, the concept of "The Stopper" is bullshit and should be removed from the baseball vocabulary immediately.

You know, The Stopper. The Pitcher Who Ends Losing Streaks. Usually only with His Bare Hands and Green Lantern-Like Force Of Will. Every team has to have one, according to morons.

Curt Schilling is a Stopper, dontcha know.

"When we're on a losing streak," the Red Sox manager said, "he takes it personally." So it seemed Curt Schilling took the mound last night with a grudge -- the Royals had, after all, knocked around Sox pitchers for two games already. But Schilling's vendetta wasn't enough. He allowed 10 extra-base hits, tying the American League record set by Washington's Dale Gear in 1901 and Cleveland's Luis Tiant (againt the Red Sox) in 1969..."

Right.

Linda Cohn, on my 11 p.m. SportsCenter: "John Maine, looking to be the Stopper for the Mets last night against the Twins ..." Well, I guess. But not really. EVERY pitcher is looking to be the stopper after EVERY loss. There weren't any Stop attempts during the Philly series? El Duque wasn't looking to Stop the Yanks Sunday night on national television? (Don't answer that last one.)

With the Mets riding a 5-game losing streak, Oliver Perez was surely looking to be the stopper last Thursday night in the Bronx, and he was. But it came after a day off, so it might not have counted, or something.

Two quick and dirty problems with ever dubbing someone a Stopper, much less permanently.

1) Too much randomness

Starting pitchers have a) no control over when they pitch or who they pitch against, other than the rare and possibly counterproductive suggestion to the skip and b) no control over what happens in the games preceding or following their starts. If there's no losing streak, there can be no Stop -- if they're not in the right spot in the rotation, there can be no Stop. Hell, if they're about to snap a 15-game losing streak and a hurricane rolls in during the top of the fifth inning, there can be no Stop.

And the point would seem to be getting good pitching performances no matter what the circumstances, not glorifying individual and isolated efforts scattered throughout a 162-game season. A 7-inning, 2-hit start from Jorge Sosa tonight against Johan Santana in a 3-1 win over Minnesota would be extremely valuable, and a huge boost to New York (beating the best pitcher in the game and all that). Would it be more valuable had the Mets lost on Monday? The long and involved answer involves a lot of maybes and whatnots and wherefores and predicting what might have happened, but the honest answer is, "Of course not."

2) Too few chances

For all the reasons listed above, how many chances does any one starter get to Stop a losing streak during a season? Now, it's an early and lazy day here in Buffalo, and I'm going to go ahead and answer my own question without bothering to look up the answer, but it's just not that many. The losing streak should be significant (at least four games), so no pitcher on any decent team is going to get more than 3 or 4 chances to Stop during the course of a season.

No reputations should be made or broken based on the results of a couple of starts. It's pointless.

Now, Maine was awesome last night. As someone named Mike Puma (stage name alert!) pointed out in the Post, it was his best game in two months, the first win in almost a month, that sort of thing.

Even better, he threw exactly the type of game all of us want to see from the Maine Event -- one where his control was on point. Monday, he could have thrown a fastball through a soup can from 500 feet. He threw 77 of 115 pitches for strikes, first-pitch strikes by the bushel, got ahead of a rather free-swinging Minnesota team all night long.

Only four strikeouts, though. A lot of pitching to contact. We prefer that style from the kid, of course. In the long run, as a guy without a dominant out pitch or killer fastball, Maine's control will determine his fate. We don't want him to be a nibbler -- we want him to be pounding the strike zone at Citi Field for the next 8 years.

But in the short run, pitching to contact creates more opportunities for a team to put the ball in play, and opens the door to all types of randomness and luck. (This is true, incidentally, whether or not you're a big DIPS believer or not). In any given game, a pitcher can influence its outcome far more directly and reliably by trying to dominate the hitters, by not giving anyone anything to hit and hoping that your stuff is good enough to prevail. Nolan Ryan-style. What a Stopper.

Maine tries to do that occasionally, and the results aren't great. Monday night, he sat back, threw bullets and let the odds work in his favor. They did, and it was the right call all the way. It was a great way to snap a nasty stretch for the Mets, especially with ol' Johan pitching at Shea tonight. (Don't miss it).

But it weren't no Stop. Let's move on.