One of the more consistently welcome sights to ever emerge from the Atlanta Braves bullpen, Mike Remlinger salvaged a career and briefly became a gold standard for middle relievers. Throughout his career, Remlinger provided examples for both time-honored and modern lessons of the baseball world. With Remlinger was an ace at Dartmouth, leading the NCAA with a 1.59 ERA in his sophomore and following that up by leading the NCAA in K-rate (14 strikeouts per 9 innings) and making second-team All-American his junior year. The San Francisco Giants liked those credentials and selected Remlinger with the first pick in the 1987 draft.
Remlinger did not reward the Giants for their faith, pitching just 35.1 mediocre big-league innings after four largely unproductive years in the minor leagues. He bounced around the Giants, Mariners, Mets and Reds farm systems, pitching just 95.1 innings in the majors until he was over thirty years old. In 1997 the Reds finally gave Remlinger an extended look in the big leagues; he was again mediocre, then disappointed fully in his first full season, going 8-15 with a 4.82 ERA in 1998.
Remlinger’s career appeared to be winding down, dooming him to bust-y never-was status. His collegiate pedigree never translated to sustained minor league productivity. Pitching arms only deteriorate over time, and Remlinger’s hadn’t been fertile in the best of his professional days.
Nevertheless, the Braves called Remlinger to camp in 1999 and applied a blunt staple of baseball logic – starters that can’t cut it might work on the bullpen. Throwing one or two innings is much easier than throwing six or seven, for many reasons. Batters only get one look at middle relievers, while they face a starter two or three times. Batters can grow more comfortable with the starter’s mechanics and repertoire in multiple looks; meanwhile, relievers come in and disrupt that rhythm with a different pitching motion and style later in the game. Middle relievers also have the luxury of throwing their best stuff as hard as they can for most, if not all, of their outing; something starters can’t do - as Stephen Strasburg learned the hard way[1].
Remlinger ended the 1998 season as a starter on the brink of failure. He left Braves camp in 1999 as a smooth lefty reliever, and never looked back. Remlinger finished that season with a 2.37 ERA and 1.21 WHIP and a conceptually ludicrous 10-1 record. He struck out 81 batters in 83 innings, delivering on the K potential he’d shown at Dartmouth and briefly in Cincinnati New York City
Though 2000 was a bit of an off year for Remlinger (he still finished with a respectable 3.47 ERA and 1.26 WHIP) he was a stalwart out of the pen in his four-year run with the Braves. In 2001 he struck out 93 batters in just 73 innings. In 2002, he finished with a 1.99 ERA, 1.12 WHIP and his only All-Star selection. Ironically, in Remlinger’s (arguable) career year, he was probably just the third or fourth best arm out of the bullpen. That season, John Schuerholz put together a remarkable collective faction of ancient arms that was hands-down the best bullpen in baseball. Joining Remlinger in the middle were dual 36-year-old reclamation projects[2] Chris Hammond (0.95 ERA, 1.11 WHIP) and Darren Holmes (1.81, 0.97). Along with youngsters Kerry Lightenberg (2.97, 1.28), Tim Spooneybarger (2.63, 1.25) and Kevn Grybowski (3.48, 1.68), this group set the stage for newly converted 35-year-old closer John Smoltz, who saved 55 games with a 3.25 ERA and 1.03 WHIP that were actually largely inflated thanks to an early season drubbing from the New York Mets.
Alas, the vaunted bullpen never came into play in the deciding fifth game of that year’s divisional series. The San Francisco Giants’ fat ace Russ Ortiz stymied the Braves hot-and-cold offense in the deciding game and Barry Bonds’s Giants went on their way to a (refreshing), soul-crushing World Series collapse against John Lackey and the Anaheim Angles.
Hard as it may have been to watch at the time, the Braves again followed conventional wisdom and let big-spenders pick away at the bullpen. Chris Hammond took $2 million to join the New York Yankees and Mike Remlinger signed a $10 million deal with the Chicago Cubs (Smoltz stayed on for several more years of closing and starting, while Darren Holmes remained but regressed significantly).
Remlinger spent the next two years with mid-3 ERAs for the Cubs. He faced three batters in the Cubs 3-2 defeat of Atlanta
Remlinger could not escape controversy in some form or other during his Cubs tenure. Early in his ineffective final season with the Cubs in 2005, Remlinger was placed on the 15-day Disabled List, the team claiming his left pinkie was broken from being caught in a chair. The injury was dubious and many felt it was just an excuse to clear roster space without cutting Remlinger; “sitting in Remlinger’s chair” has became a jovial warning to slumping Cubs players. Remlinger was also in the Cubs’ bullpen in 2003, when Sammy Sosa’s corked bat exploded against a Geremi Gonzalez pitch in the first inning. Remlinger slyly snagged a piece of that corked bat, held it for seven years and put it to auction in 2010, which is great because any situation in which Sosa’s rampant cheating causes him humiliation is great.
Remlinger was traded to Remlinger was a rare lefty who actually fared better against right-handed betters, a feat that belies over a century of baseball knowledge. On all other counts, he fit the bill in terms of baseball lessons. He demonstrated the Moneyball motif of selecting proven college pitchers over riskier high school hurlers; the implication that college pitchers, even if they don’t live up to their billing, provide less risk long-term. This didn’t work for the Giants, but they also failed to heed the strategy of salvaging starter’s careers by moving him to the bullpen. Though effective for the Cubs, Remlinger also demonstrated why paying top dollar for middle relievers is rarely worthwhile; better to spend that money on several options from the scrap heap and play the odds that a Remlinger, Hammond or Holmes will emerge for a fraction of the cost.
More than anything, Remlinger was a four-year beacon of reliability in the Braves pen, a kindly salt-and-pepper bearded lefty with an accurate low-90’s fastball and a trap-door change-up. He had a concise, staid delivery that belied his strikeout potential, but not his reliability. We knew him in 1.1 inning increments, but we trusted him to hold the fort for a Braves bullpen that was all too often a danger zone. Remlinger’s All-Star selection may have been a symbolic nod to the entire 2002 ‘pen, but it had to be Remlinger, the original retread, to bear the torch for the trio of grizzled Phoenixes rising from the ashes of baseball’s past. Though he was far from an original Braves product, though it made no sense to pay a late-30s middle reliever four million dollars, it hurt no less to see him reap his rewards in foreign colors. Remlinger was our thrift store treasure, the little secret we discovered off the beaten path and displayed proudly in the seventh and eighth. Don’t stop the Chop.
[1] Strasburg was the Washington Expos first round pick and phenom who blew the league away in 2010, throwing 98 mile-per-hour fastballs into the late innings and striking out the world. Predictably, this strategy destroyed his elbow and he underwent Tommy John surgery before the season ended.
[2] Hammond
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