One of the more frequent complaints of those in the Sabermetric community about how bullpens are managed is a lack of flexibility that would allow a manager to use his best arms at the time in the game when they would be most useful for preserving a lead. Much of that criticism is generally focused on the notion that a teams best reliever should come in to get three outs to start the 9th inning in any game where the lead is between one and three runs. Beyond that, though, is the greater tendency of managers to lock guys into specialized roles and then leave them there despite the other circumstances that might arise.

Brewer fans that worry about such things will probably take heart in this line of thought from Manager Ken Macha:

"I will probably sit down with the bullpen guys and say, 'We've got one guy with a role here, and that's the closer,'" Macha said. "That's what I've done in my previous job, and the reason is that you might be going into the seventh inning and facing the heart of [the other team's] order. You might as well put your top guy out there in that inning because the game's on the line then."

So besides bowing to the bare minimum requirement of the LaRussian Bullpen, the closer, it sounds like Macha wants to keep his options open for where he's going to deploy his guys this year. If we believe that, there will be no "he's my 8th inning guy" excuses coming from the managers office like last year.

What is interesting is that the players don't seem to necessarily buy it:

So it came as no surprise to Riske that Macha was talking about being flexible with roles.

"That always gets said in Spring Training, and then they always end up working themselves out," Riske said. "The way people pitch is what slots them into roles, so I just worry about getting outs."

and

"I think the roles will always define themselves," Villanueva said. "As the season goes on, I think [Macha] will use certain guys in certain situations, but a guy can't pitch every day. If the guy who throws the eighth inning goes four days in a row, someone else is going to have to do the fifth day. Whether he assigns us roles or not, I see it working either way."

Riske is right about that. Managers do frequently say that they're not going to be a slave to some predetermined order which dictates they put X reliever into a given situation, and then cave. Macha's predecessor often said things along those lines, and then would relent and find safety in taking the decision out of his own hands by setting up roles for his guys. Ultimately, there is some safety for managers in creating roles and then sticking to them. It cuts down the second guessing that fans like to engage in when a manager brings in a guy who ends up blowing a lead, at least in the short term.

There is also the matter of the relievers themselves. Some relievers will swear that they pitch better when they know their role and can anticipate when they'll be coming into a game. Managers often use this as an excuse for creating and sticking to strict roles for the guys in their pen, and it's hard to say for sure that they're wrong to do so. As Villanueva points out, however, a manager can't stick to roles 100% because guys can only pitch so many days in a row and so many innings total. That mandates at least some flexibility.

The main problem with trying to stick to set roles in the bullpen is that it is very rare to have multiple relievers go through a season pitching well the whole time. Baseball is a game of ups and downs and no other role is quite as volatile as relief pitching. Often, by the time a guy has established himself as a solid and reliable option he has moved right through an upswing and will soon find himself out of that important role due to lack of effectiveness. The result is often a tail chasing exercise, where a guy pitches important innings not because he is currently pitching well, but because he was pitching well two weeks before.

If Macha is able to stick to his plan of using relievers flexibly from day to day, he probably can squeeze a little more out of the bullpen, though it may well be at the expense of some fan and player goodwill. So far, Macha has shown little interest in those things, so maybe he can pull it off. It will be one of the many interesting things to watch for this season with a new skipper at the helm.