Pat Lackey, in an awesome article for Fanhouse, examines Jim Tracy’s decision to let Huston Street face Ryan Howard last night.

As Lackey points out, Street is the Rockies’ closer, and so no one doubted Tracy. But Howard demonstrates a massive platoon split, and lefty Joe Biemel was available in the bullpen.

The whole concept of the one-inning closer makes no sense to me. It seems like the entire role has been developed to serve the save stat, and the save stat is an imperfect one. Is there anything more surreal than seeing the Yankees score a run to go ahead by four, instead of three, in the top of the ninth and watching Mariano Rivera stop warming up?

Check it out: In the 20-year period after Tony La Russa popularized the one-inning closer in 1988, teams won nearly exactly the same percentage of games they were leading in the ninth inning as they did in the 20 years prior.

It’s nice to have a closer that shortens the game, as they say, but all too frequently guys incapable of that job are pigeonholed into it for lack of a better option. And even worse, in the toughest situations — often in the sixth or seventh inning, when the starting pitcher has tired — teams frequently rely on their middle men, almost by definition the worst pitchers on the staff.

The problem is, the best relievers, obviously, want to be paid accordingly, and the way to do that is to accumulate saves. So relief pitchers demand to know their roles, and no pioneering team has yet had the nerve to tell them their role is to retire all the batters they face.

There now are stats that weigh the importance of a situation into which a reliever has been called and his ability to succeed in those situations. Stats Tom Tango creates, like Leverage Index and WPA/LI could help us understand the highest-leverage situations in a ballgame, and the pitchers who best succeed in them.

But I’m getting away from my point. There’s no reason the best pitcher in the bullpen should be limited to the ninth inning in games while his team is winning. Some shrewd team needs to break the mold and stop assigning so much importance to saves and the isolated ninth inning.

It won’t be the Mets, for sure, or likely any team so concerned about public perception. But it will happen eventually, once some smart GM decides not to pay such a premium for 70 innings and instead to find or groom a versatile reliever who can be equally effective in any situation.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: The era of the one-inning closer should end. It brought us one beautiful, awesome pitcher of transcendent greatness: Mariano Rivera. When he hangs ’em up, so should the entire institution.

In a column for the Philadelphia Daily News, Marcus Hayes rubs salt in the wounds of New Yorkers everywhere by comparing Chase Utley to Brett Favre.

OK, I’ll admit that Chase Utley is awesome. He’s a spectacular baseball player.

But a couple of things:

First, responsible members of the media must never, ever bring up Brett Favre when he is not directly involved in the story. Brett Favre is an overrated media jester who can cry on command. He gets too much attention as it is. Don’t fuel the stupid, nonsensical, fawning fire.

Utley’s ninth-inning heroics, celebrated here, were on account of dumb luck. Yes, he hustled, and for that we should all be very proud of him. But the ball was foul and the umpire botched it. That is not heroism. That’s good fortune.

John Harper, in today’s Daily News, channels Murray Chass to show how relying on numbers ruined the Red Sox last night.

Harper’s point is that Terry Francona elected to have Jonathan Papelbon walk Torii Hunter to get to Vlad Guerrero because Hunter had more success against Papelbon this season, and obviously Guerrero made the Sox pay.

I can’t speak for Francona or why he made the decision. It baffled the crap out of me at the time. But I can point to the great Joe Posnanski, who uses numbers to show why the decision was a terrible one.

Harper concludes:

And while Francona was just managing by the numbers the Red Sox love so much, you wonder if his gut would have made the same call.

Ugh. I wanted to put together a well-reasoned response to Harper’s column but I don’t have the patience right now.

Look: Francona made a bad decision, and he paid for it. When he was asked to justify it afterwards, he cited a stat based on a terribly, pitifully small sample size, and John Harper went to town.

But what Harper entirely misses is that the Red Sox likely wouldn’t have even been in the playoffs without loving those numbers so much, and wouldn’t have won two World Series in the past five years.

I have no beef with people who choose not to view the game the same way I do. When they’re smart about it, I love nothing more than engaging them in respectful debate about how to put together a team or fill out a lineup card. It’s fun, and I’m certainly willing to recognize that the numbers I trust are not the be-all and end-all of baseball analysis.

But nothing bothers me more than how anytime someone with some ties to the so-called “Moneyball” school of thought does something dumb, stodgy columnists come out of the woodwork to bash the entire concept. It’s cherry-picking at its worst, and it’s the same type of polarizing discourse that makes me hate politics.

Tito Francona makes a bad decision and John Harper wants to know, essentially, “where are your precious numbers now?”

But the numbers I hold precious show me that baseball is a hilariously random spectacle, and that a single at-bat is never, ever, ever reasonable grounds upon which to make blanket statements.

Or: How I spent my Saturday morning.

Last week I tweeted about the success of the Rockies’ farm system in developing actual Rockies. Anyway, I wanted to see if any other team had drafted and developed players as well as Colorado, so, using the 25-man Division Series rosters from MLB.com, I compiled the lists of players who have spent their entire professional careers with their postseason teams.

This includes international free agents, which I realize in the case of guys like Hideki Matsui and Daisuke Matsuzaka is not really about development. Plus, guys like Derek Jeter and Jorge Posada likely only stayed with the Yanks because of the Yanks’ unique ability to pay them. But whatever, it’s just an exercise.

Obviously it’s not a perfect way to assess a team’s farm system, as in many cases, prospects are dealt for players who will help immediately. These are just lists. Don’t read too much into them.

Please excuse the terrible formatting, I’m not great with spreadsheets or WordPress and I have someplace to be in an hour. Anyway, here we go:

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