Well, it's been interesting so far, hasn't it? The offseason, as has been written about at length, failed to produce a marquee closer. "That's no trouble," the team insisted, "we have plenty of options to choose from to close the ninth." In spring training, Blake Treinen was hyped as having the best stuff they'd ever seen. And, being in spring training, his stuff was also almost certainly in the best shape of its life. There was Enny Romero and his incredible heat, if it could be controlled. There was Koda Glover, whose name, if you squint, kind of sounds like Kid Closer. And to back all that up, they brought in Joe "Nails" Blanton and gave Joe Nathan an invite. What could go wrong?

Everything, apparently.

The bullpen is on many a slugger's shortlist to toss to them for the home run derby, should they get an invite. Blake Treinen's stuff may in fact not be in the best shape of its life, and, while he may have been credited with a hold in the 3-1 victory last night, that was short for Hold on to your Butts, an image which I don't think I'm ever going to be able to retire from the game threads if I wanted to, and has a proud and deep history dating as far back as Rafael Soriano, but if I had found it sooner, it probably would have been in use earlier.

With all that in mind, I turned to a recent FiveThirtyEight article, The Save Ruined Relief Pitching. The Goose Egg Can Fix It. One of the common arguments behind not getting one of those fancy pants closers was that they've racked up a lot of saves, which is a useless statistic unless you're an agent, and in that case saves are cash-money. The save, and by extension its kid-brother the hold, are relatively useless statistics, perhaps marginally better than the pitcher win, but not much.

So they invented a new one. I like new statistics. I am especially fond of spurious statistics that only allow one to make bad decisions if used in a serious context, but I didn't get that lucky, this one actually purports to do something useful.

The new statistic, the Goose Egg, is in honor of hall of fame pitcher Rollie Fingers Goose Gossage, who by pure coincidence (I'm sure) is also the all-time leader in the statistic invented twenty-some years after his last pitch. The basic gist behind it is that it quantifies how good of a job a reliever does of not screwing his team's chances of winning when he comes in a game late and close. A goose egg is defined as following:

A relief pitcher is awarded a goose egg for each inning in which the following is true:

1. It is the seventh inning or later;
2. At the time the pitcher faces his first batter of that inning
   1. The score is tied;
   2. The pitcher's team has a lead of one or two runs; OR
   3. The tying run is on base
3. No runs (earned or unearned) are charged to him in the inning and no inherited runners score while the pitcher is in the game; AND
4. The pitcher number of outs recorded by the pitcher plus the number of inherited base runners is at least three.

Pitcher       GE  BE  RE
Glover        4   1   1
Treinen       2   1   1
Kelley        2   1   0
Solís         1   1   0
Blanton       0   2   0
Pérez         1   0   0
Albers        1   0   0