The Red Sox Pay For Saves, Dearly

From 2006 to 2011, the Boston Red Sox never had to worry about the closer position. Across those six years, Jonathan Papelbon saved 219 games with a stellar ERA of 2.30 and nearly five strikeouts for every walk. Across those six seasons, Papelbon was, according to WAR, the most valuable closer in baseball. Yet when he became a free agent, Boston wisely let him walk, letting the Philadelphia Phillies make the mistake of signing a relief pitcher to an outrageous $63 million contract. The Red Sox played the Papelbon situation perfectly -- extracting his best, prime seasons at a reasonable cost, winning a World Series with him in tow, and wishing him farewell almost immediately after he turned 30.

But the search for Papelbon's replacement? That's an entirely different story. The Red Sox have executed three trades for supposedly-elite closers since Papelbon's departure, and completely botched all of them. Here are those trades, conveniently ordered by both chronology and ascending levels of egregiousness:

Trade #1, December 14th, 2011: Red Sox acquired Mark Melancon from the Houston Astros in exchange for Jed Lowrie and a minor leaguer.

This deal may have been the least egregious of the three. However, it does reveal how strongly Boston's front office bought into the mirage that is The Myth of the Closer. Melancon had been a solid, unspectacular reliever for Houston in 2011. A 2.78 ERA in 74.1 innings as a 26-year-old was very nice, but he didn't have much of a track record at all, and his 1.22 WHIP didn't exactly scream dominance. What he did have, though, were saves. Melancon saved 20 games for the 2011 Astros. So when the Red Sox examined him as a trade target, they valued those saves as proof that Melancon could be a shutdown, late-inning reliever. He was a CLOSER. Of course, saves don't tell the whole story. In reality, Melancon was really just a solid middle reliever temporarily thrust into ninth inning duty thanks to the poor quality of the players around him.

Melancon's first four appearances with Boston in April of 2012 were impossibly disastrous. He got six outs and gave up eleven runs. That came out to a 49.50 ERA. He was demoted to the minors on April 18th and didn't return to Boston until June. Not pretty.

To get Melancon, the Red Sox dealt away an injury-prone middle infielder named Jed Lowrie. He's hit a solid .263/.346/.439 with 19 home runs in 142 games since leaving Boston. His WAR during that span has been 2.7. Comparatively, Melancon gave Boston negative-0.5 WAR.

In a vacuum, trading for Mark Melancon is fine. But treating Mark Melancon like an Elite Closer just because he saved some games for the Astros is the furthest thing from 'fine.'

Trade #2, December 28th, 2011: the Red Sox acquired Andrew Bailey and Ryan Sweeney from the Oakland Athletics in exchange for Josh Reddick and two minor leaguers.

Unlike Mark Melancon, Andrew Bailey is an elite reliever. In three seasons as the A's closer, Bailey's ERA was 2.07; his WHIP was 0.95; he struck out exactly 174 batters in 174 innings. Andrew Bailey is a really good pitcher.

But there's a catch: Andrew Bailey can't stay healthy. He had Tommy John surgery way back in 2005 when he was still in college. After throwing 83.1 innings in 2009, he threw only 49 in 2010 and 41.2 in 2011, thanks to a mish-mosh of injuries that included elbow surgery and a forearm strain. Bailey's dominance doesn't mean much when he's sitting on the disabled list half the time.

On paper, Boston's trade for Bailey was excellent because it provided them with another Proven Closer and bumped Melancon back into the eighth inning. The reality: Bailey got hurt, because that's what he does. Thumb surgery limited him to just 15.1 innings last year, and he's already been back on the disabled list this season for biceps inflammation. In just 29.2 career innings with the Red Sox, Bailey has surrendered 15 runs.

The most notable player Boston sent to Oakland in this trade? Outfielder Josh Reddick, who happened to hit 32 homers for the Oakland A's last year and was paid just $510,000 for those services.

Trade #3,  December 26th, 2012: the Red Sox acquired Joel Hanrahan from the Pittsburgh Pirates in exchange for Mark Melancon and three minor leaguers.

Oh goodness. The Melancon and Bailey trades were bad. But this one -- a botched attempt to rectify the mistakes made in Trades #1 and #2 -- really takes the cake.

After their disastrous 2012 season, the Red Sox needed to revamp their bullpen once again given Bailey's injuries and Melancon's struggles. So they decided Melancon was a sunk cost, and cut bait on him, packaging him with some minor league prospects to get Proven Closer Joel Hanrahan from Pittsburgh. In his previous two seasons, Hanrahan had saved 76 games as the Pirates' All-Star closer, striking out a batter per inning over that stretch. In theory, Hanrahan was the safest bet that the Red Sox had acquired. Unlike Melancon, he had a track record of dominance; unlike Bailey, he had a track record of health. But a trend within Hanrahan's numbers told an alarming story that the Red Sox apparently did not heed:

Hanrahan, 2011: 1.83 ERA, 1.05 WHIP, 2.1 walks per nine innings, 1 HR allowed
Hanrahan, 2012: 2.72 ERA, 1.27 WHIP, 5.4 walks per nine innings, 8 HR allowed

Between 2011 and 2012, Hanrahan completely lost his control. No elite reliever can walk over five batters per inning and be successful. It's a minor miracle that his ERA only rose to 2.72 last year. This is not a guy you go out of your way to trade for.

So it was hardly shocking when Hanrahan bombed spectacularly in Boston this season. In 7.1 innings as Boston's "closer," he was an utter disaster: eight runs allowed (including four home runs), six walks, ten hits, two blown saves, and a loss. He went on the disabled list in early May and recently underwent Tommy John surgery, knocking him out for the rest of the season. Between his dismal performance and his elbow injury, it would be amazing if Joel Hanrahan is ever a good reliever again.

Here's the cherry on top of this whole debacle: Mark Melancon, who the Red Sox quickly gave up on to get Hanrahan, has morphed into a dominant reliever in Pittsburgh. As the Pirates' setup man, his ERA is 0.69 in 26 innings. He's struck out 27 batters and walked just one. Should the Red Sox have seen this coming? Maybe. Melancon's first four April appearances for the Red Sox in 2012 were dismal, but he was much better after being recalled from the minors in June. By the end of the season, both his strikeout rate and walk rate had improved compared to his 2011 numbers as an Astro. If the Red Sox were confident enough in Melancon to trade for him in the first place, then giving up on him after 26 innings (of which only two were truly terrible) seems misguided to say the least.

The final tally on these three trades is depressing. Melancon has already been traded away, Bailey is a ticking injury time bomb, and Hanrahan is out for the season. As of today, the Red Sox have extracted a combined 63 mediocre-to-awful innings out of those three closers. In exchange for that underwhelming return, the Red Sox traded away Josh Reddick, Jed Lowrie, Melancon, and a handful of minor leaguers -- all of them young, cheap, and under team control for years to come.

The Red Sox have learned a very simple lesson the hard way: it makes no sense to surrender anything of value for a relief pitcher. As Melancon, Bailey, and Hanrahan have shown, relievers not named Mariano are too volatile and too unpredictable for any decent-sized commitment. But it's not just that. It's also the fact that good relievers are surprisingly easy to come by these days, given the relative ease of the job. The A's replaced Andrew Bailey just by paying Grant Balfour $4 million. The Pirates replaced Joel Hanrahan with 36-year-old journeyman Jason Grilli, who now leads the majors in saves. In Baltimore, Jim Johnson went from a no-name, sinker-balling middle reliever to saving 51 games last year. The Tigers plucked Jose Valverde off his living room couch in April and now he's closing games for one of the best teams in baseball. Heck -- the Tampa Bay Rays got 48 saves out of Fernando Rodney last year.

Yet despite all those examples of teams conjuring elite relievers out of nowhere, the Red Sox felt compelled to pay through the nose for three eminently flawed closers. There's no reason for any team to make those types of costly deals anymore. With the Melancon-Bailey-Hanrahan triple debacle fresh in their minds, it's unlikely that the Red Sox will forget that painful lesson anytime soon.