FanGraphs Baseball: Introducing the Carter-Papelbon Scale

One of my enduring memories of watching the All-Star game as a child — a child who became a baseball fan in a time before high-speed internet, social media, or even interleague play — was learning about all the players I’d been unable to see throughout the regular season. That included the American League and West Coast stars, but also a parade of forgettable pitchers, and yes, it always seemed to be pitchers, from crappy teams.

For some reason, Royals right-hander José Rosado is the guy who sticks out in my mind. Rookie of the Year vote-getter in his age-21 season, All-Star at 22 and 24, done in the majors at 25. If he hadn’t shown up in pregame intros between Justin Thompson and Jeff Cirillo that one time, I might never have been aware of him.

Ever since then, the token All-Star has fascinated me. The rules dictate that each team must have one representative, and as someone who grew up rooting for a team that frequently could not muster more than one good player a year, I am a rabid supporter of this rule. Even if it throws up a proverbial curveball every so often.

The tragic thing about baseball is that an individual player can be really good and still be unable to pull his team out of the basement. So when a team musters merely a single All-Star representative, sometimes the player in question deserves to be there on merit. Most of the time, even. Especially when it’s a starting pitcher or a position player.

But sometimes the fans, the players, the managers, and — in case of last resort — the commissioner and his functionaries will look a last-place roster up and down and go, “Man, these guys stink!” So they’ll hold their noses and pick the reliever with the lowest ERA on the team and send him to the All-Star Game. Relievers only throw 30 or 40 innings in the first half anyway — surely someone in that bullpen must’ve BABIP’d his way into a non-embarrassing ERA in that small a sample.

Since the strike, there have been 27 All-Star relievers (well, 26, including Brad Hand twice) who were the only representative of a team that finished with a winning percentage of .450 or worse. I was going to pick on the Pirates here, because I was so scarred by early-2000s Mike Williams and so tickled by 2010 All-Star Evan Meek. Meek, for those of you who don’t remember — and why would you? — had one awesome year and represented a 105-loss Pirates team at the All-Star Game. That’s the only season in his brief career in which Meek threw 50 or more innings in the majors. We are shadows and dust.

But the Pirates, while recidivists, are not an outlier. They’ve sent a token reliever from a bad team three times since 1995, but so have the Phillies and Rays. The Padres have done it a league-high five times, including, again, Hand twice. The Royals and Tigers have both sent different token relievers in consecutive years. It’s a pretty common thing, it turns out.

You know what? Let’s just see the list, with each player’s first-half stats from the year he got picked.

We’ve got two this year — Tanner Scott and Mason Miller — and both are there on merit. Miller in particular is about as exciting as an inexperienced closer from a noncompetitive team can be. This list includes a Hall of Famer, at least one Hall of Very Good-er, and several players who were consistently among the best closers in the game for a number of years. Nobody would blink at those pitchers making the Midsummer Classic. But the list also includes, well, some Evan Meek types, the ones you’ll forget until the time comes to Remember Some Guys.

To pull back the curtain a little, at some point yesterday afternoon I started mixing Stathead and Excel again, and my fun little thousand-word blog about Scott and Miller started to get weird. I came up with a rubric to measure the quality and notoriety of these token All-Star relievers. I call it the Carter-Papelbon Scale, for reasons that’ll become clear when you see where Lance Carter and Jonathan Papelbon grade out.

What I tried to capture in the fame section is how familiar your average fan would be with this Charlie Brown-iest type of All-Star representative. Has he been an All-Star before? Does he play for a big team, or has he in the past? Has he pitched in the playoffs, and if so, has he recorded the last out of a World Series clincher and been etched into the public record as the first layer of a championship dogpile?

In-season saves count for both quality and fame because they’re a measure of, if not actual skill, then at least achievement and All-Star worthiness by established standards. But they also make a pitcher famous. Even closers for bad teams get noticed by people who check leaderboards or play fantasy baseball.

The All-Star Game is both a reward and an exhibition, so you want players who are recognizable, good, or ideally both. This chart features all 27 token All-Star reliever seasons since the strike, and I’ve highlighted this year’s two examples, as well as three historical outliers.

Miller is in yellow, Scott in light blue (the difference is subtle, but you can see it if you squint). The red dot is 2015 Papelbon, the brown dot is 2019 Kirby Yates, and the purple dot is 2003 Lance Carter.

Papelbon has the highest notoriety score, owing to the fact that by the time he lumbered out to carry the flag for a Phillies outfit that would go on to finish with the worst record in baseball, he’d been a top-two closer in baseball for almost a decade. He’d saved the decisive game of a World Series, he’d made five All-Star teams already, he’d been among the league leaders in saves every year, and he’d done the bulk of that work for one of the highest-profile franchises in baseball. Everyone knew Jonathan Papelbon by that point.

Just below Papelbon on the chart is 2002 Trevor Hoffman, who to that point was only halfway through a career that would end with him (albeit only briefly) as the all-time saves leader. Nevertheless, he’d racked up numerous accolades even to that point, including a second-place Cy Young finish on a team that won the pennant. Papelbon and Hoffman were stars no matter how crappy their teams were at the time.

It is at this point that I direct you to the purple dot, which is the aforementioned Lance Carter. I didn’t remember his being an All-Star. I do remember having a franchise mode save in MVP Baseball 2005 where I brought him into basically every tie game and he ended up winning 25 games and the Cy Young as a middle reliever. Otherwise this would probably be a new name to me.

Carter is dead last in both quality and fame. He ended up saving 26 games for a 99-loss Devil Rays team that year, but even at the break he was 15-for-21 in save opportunities with a 4.05 ERA and a K/9 ratio of just 5.8. Mason Miller this was not. This was Carter’s age-28 season, and he entered it with just 14 big league appearances under his belt. He had one more solid year after that for Tampa Bay, and was done in the majors by 2006.

And it takes some doing to get under the near-nonentity that was 2011 Aaron Crow. Crow might’ve been a bigger name if he’d come up today; he refused to sign with the Nationals in 2008 when they picked him ninth overall out of Mizzou, then got picked in the first round again by Kansas City a year later. (Washington got a compensation pick the next year and used it on Drew Storen, so the Nats came out ahead in the long run.) When Crow got picked for the All-Star team in 2011, he was a rookie setup man for a team that finished 71-91. He had a 2.08 ERA at the time, but that’s as good as it got for Crow, who did not figure on the Royals team that won a title in 2015.

The brown dot all the way to the right is Yates, who made his second All-Star team this week. But in 2019 — and I’ve been banging this drum for a while now — he was in the midst of one of the best reliever seasons of the 21st century. Don’t believe my back-of-the-napkin points system? At the break in 2019, Yates had a 1.15 ERA, 30 saves, and 60 strikeouts in 39 innings. At the time, opponents were hitting .163/.231/.230 off him. That guy makes the All-Star team if he’s playing for the Port Ruppert Mundys.

Miller hasn’t been quite that good, but he’s also in Texas on merit. I have him fourth in quality score, for whatever that’s worth. You don’t need me to tell you how good he is. And if anything, my rubric for fame undersells him significantly. Miller is the most visible member of his team in this GIF-happy world, and he’s familiar to fans of big-market teams because Oakland’s been dangling him shamelessly as trade bait.

Scott hasn’t been quite that good, but he has a 1.34 ERA, he’s won or saved 20 of Miami’s 33 wins to date, and he’s got an IOU from the baseball-industrial complex after he dragged the Marlins to the playoffs last year to relatively little fanfare. Besides, the Marlins have the worst offense in the National League and zero healthy, effective starting pitchers. And lest we forget, the whole premise of this exercise is predicated on the fact that the league has to choose someone from each team.

In fact, these pitiable seasons are harder and harder to find. The last real bummer of an All-Star reliever was probably Joe Jiménez in 2018. Tigers fans might feel differently, but even for a bad team, it’s much more fun when the All-Star representative is on a level with the stars from the big clubs. And that’s what we got this year.