BSN Exclusive: Wade Davis explains the most important stat for the Rockies' bullpen

DENVER – On the first game of the Colorado Rockies’ most recent road trip, viewers bore witness to something unusual in the game of baseball. It was a game in which the player most responsible for delivering the win was relief pitcher Antonio Senzatela.

It had been since 1980 that a Major League baseball team won a game by the score of 1-0 with the relief pitcher driving in the only run.

Winning the game isn’t usually a part of the reliever’s job description.

But it is absolutely worth noting that every time closer Wade Davis has entered a game this season, the Rockies have won.

That isn’t to say he’s been perfect every time out.

He has given up four earned runs scattered across four different games, blown a save, and was on the verge of completing an epic collapse in New York in his second-to-last outing.

But Davis has come to learn through his years in Kansas City, Chicago, and now Denver, that the most important thing isn’t how many hits or runs you give up or even how many saves you collect or blow, but how many losses you take.

It may sound odd to frame it in the negative for someone who must be constantly on the aggressive attack, but Davis sees the job of a bullpen guy as a simple one; don’t lose the game.

“That’s one of the biggest things I’ve talked about in the past,” he told BSN Denver. “The bullpen talks about the loss column. Win column is not a big deal for a reliever. Sometimes it’s not a big deal for a starter. ERA and all that stuff is whatever, but the loss column is a big deal. That’s when you’re in the game and you’ve affected the outcome of the game dramatically probably more than anybody.”

There is an old sports slogan about playing to win as opposed to playing not to lose. But that’s a fine line for a player whose job seldom brings glory, often draws ire, and can create some of the most extreme emotional highs and lows in a game made up of them.

“You get in those moments,” says Davis. “I’ve always thought about that, ‘Don’t lose the game.’ It’s gonna happen, but I think that thought process is just kinda… You give up a home run, now it’s a tie game, that’s even more of a reason…You gotta step on the gas instead of getting deflated. In the past, I know I would get deflated when you start to give up runs and stuff starts going bad. Just trying to stay in the moment and understand that we’ve still got a chance to win this game and it’s a big deal.”

When things aren’t going your way on the mound, it becomes easy to start defeating yourself as much as the opposition is. If you define your job by how many saves you stack up, blowing one means that you’ve already failed. The mind, even subconsciously, can give up now that the task at hand is impossible. But that’s not the task, says Davis:

“That’s kinda what I’m getting at,” he says about the lure of hunting for saves. “That’s a big part of it. The whole save thing is just an individual stat. It’s nothing that going to benefit you in the long run. You win 125 games, everyone is going to have a job next year. That’s the thing: just keep winning games.”

And that can be tough when you have one inning to work with and the margins for error are so small. Where a starting pitcher might be able to find his best self over the course of a game, relievers have to walk a very fine line between trusting their stuff, and not waiting to make adjustments until they’ve already kicked the game away.

“You try to find something quick,” Davis said. “Find at least one thing to go to. Sometimes you don’t, sometimes you’re hoping to get lucky. But most of the time you end of finding something you can go-to to rely on, at least to get another out or two. It might be a timing thing, just one individual pitch, it could be a lot of things. Just kind of give you a little confidence for the next 10 minutes.”

Quite an existence, living by the seat of your pants, 10 minutes at a time.

Different players over the years have developed different tactics for tackling the unique issues that closers face. Some limit their arsenal to a two-pitch mix (usually fastball/slider) that they can master and eliminate worrying about anything else. The greatest closer of all time, Mariano Rivera, used just one pitch—the cutter—to literally cut through the noise.

But Davis has taken the opposite tack, using a four-pitch mix that has had his back in a pinch more than once.

“I think it definitely helps my mind knowing that if one of them has just awry, then I’ve got two more chances to figure one of them out,” he says. “Having a few that I feel really good about, pretty much all the time, and if I can’t get one of those to work on that day, we’re probably not going to win.”

He makes no illusion of the fact that the game is almost always riding on his shoulders. His job isn’t to win it. It’s to not lose it. Racking up the 14 saves have been nice for Davis, but it’s those games that he doesn’t just cruise through a 1-2-3 inning with a couple of strikeouts that tell you much more about who he is.

Relievers have a tendency to break once bent. So far in 2018, when Davis bends, the opposing offense still, eventually, is the one that breaks.