Current Relief Roles
Pitching staffs on MLB teams have grown from 9 or 10 to as many as 12 or 13 pitchers, due to the increased importance of relief pitching. The staff generally consists of five starting pitchers, with the remaining pitchers assigned as relievers. A team's relief staff usually contains a closer who generally pitches the ninth inning, a setup pitcher who generally pitches the eighth, and a left-handed specialist whose job is to retire left-handed batters. The rest of the bullpen then consists of middle relievers who are used in the remaining situations, and perhaps additional left-handed or right-handed specialists.
The closer is usually the best relief pitcher, followed by the setup man. Players typically get promoted into later-inning roles as they succeed. Relievers were previously more multipurpose before becoming one-inning specialists.
Read more about this topic: Relief Pitcher
Famous quotes containing the words current, relief and/or roles:
“Reputation runs behind the current state of affairs.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“We realize that we are laggards from the past century, still living in what Marx kindly calls ‘the idiocy of rural life,’ and we know that our rural life is like that of the past, not like that of much of the present.”
—For the State of Vermont, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“Productive collaborations between family and school, therefore, will demand that parents and teachers recognize the critical importance of each other’s participation in the life of the child. This mutuality of knowledge, understanding, and empathy comes not only with a recognition of the child as the central purpose for the collaboration but also with a recognition of the need to maintain roles and relationships with children that are comprehensive, dynamic, and differentiated.”
—Sara Lawrence Lightfoot (20th century)