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This Call to the Bullpen Is Eroding My Stomach LiningThe cruel torture of watching the New York Mets' relief pitchers.

By Josh LevinPosted Thursday, Sept. 25, 2008, at 3:37 PM ET

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In 2003, Josh Levin called the Mets baseball's underachieving overdogs. Three years later, he penned an ode to Endy Chavez's (temporarily) game-saving catch in Game 7 of the NLCS. Tommy Craggs documented the improbable ascendance of the middle reliever, and Daniel Engber asked how relievers picked their entrance music.

The Cleveland Indians are the Rays' evil twin. After losing a tight AL Championship Series to the Red Sox last season, the Indians were a trendy World Series pick this year. Instead, the Indians started so poorly that, unlike the Mets, they never had the chance to disappoint their fans with a late-season collapse. One cause of the Cleveland cave-in: a bullpen that's gone from sixth in the majors in ERA in 2007 to 29^th in 2008. (The Mets rank 22^nd.) The Indians, perhaps the best-run team in baseball since Mark Shapiro took over as general manager in 2001, seemed to do everything right. The team dumped its perpetually disappointing closer Joe Borowski this year and gave more responsibility to a trio of up-and-comers (Jensen Lewis, Rafael Betancourt, and Rafael Perez) who'd blitzed through the American League in 2007. All three have performed worse this season than last, and the rest of the Indians' pen has been even worse.

The Mets didn't come into the 2008 season nearly as prepared as the Indians. As Chris Park wrote in Slate last year, "Clubs can reduce their risk of crushing bullpen failures by stockpiling young or undervalued arms and relying on whoever happens to be hot that year." New York had no relievers as talented as any member of the Cleveland trio, having used minor league fireballers like Heath Bell and Matt Lindstrom as trade bait in recent years. The team's major league roster was also cluttered with not-even-mediocrities like Scott Schoeneweis and Matt Wise. Even so, considering the year-to-year unpredictability of middle relievers, the Mets could be commended for refusing to patch their biggest hole with lots of money. Aaron Heilman and Joe Smith and Pedro Feliciano and Duaner Sanchez and even Jorge Sosa had all experienced bouts of goodness in recent years. Who's to say they couldn't do it again? After all, a similar patchwork strategy worked wonders for the Mets in 2006. That year, the team finished second in MLB in bullpen ERA thanks to a bunch of players with short résumés—Heilman and Feliciano and Sanchez, to name a few.

Of course, this type of dispassionate reasoning isn't particularly comforting when you're watching a succession of Schoeneweises fritter away the season. At this point, only something as ludicrous as installing Santana as the closer could change the Mets' late-inning fortunes. (Sorry, John Maine, I have a feeling you're just going to make things worse.) For Mets fans, one small point of comfort is that the one thing worse than suffering through a bad bullpen is going overboard to fix it. The 1997 Seattle Mariners were an offensive juggernaut (Alex Rodriguez, Ken Griffey Jr., Edgar Martinez, Jay Buhner) with a bullpen that makes the 2008 Mets look like a bunch of Mariano Riveras (closer Norm Charlton's ERA: 7.27). At the trade deadline, Seattle traded Jason Varitek and Derek Lowe to the Red Sox for Heathcliff Slocumb. The Mariners made the playoffs and lost the division series in four games; Varitek and Lowe became key members of Boston first's World Series winner in 86 years. The Curse of the Bambino? That's nothing compared with the Curse of the Bleeping Brutal Bullpen.