What is a friend?

Henceforth, all relief pitchers will be called “friends” within House of Hurl. This is for two primary reasons:

• Brevity.
• Relief pitchers are friends to managers and starting pitchers. They help them out, try their hardest, travel with them and basically look to enrich lives.

It is also important to establish that House of Hurl will only focus on non-closers. We will not discuss Lee Smith, Dennis Eckersley, “Tall” Tom Henke or Mariano Rivera in much detail. Rather, the focus will be kept on middle relievers and set-up types. These are friends and from this post forward, a single season performance of a friend will meet these three pieces of statistical criteria:

• > 50 games in a single season
• < 5 games started in a single season
• < 10 saves in a single season
• 1980 or later. This is highly contentious but truly, the age of the friend didn’t “really” start until the 1980s (I blame Tony La Russa) so if you have a problem with that, we could settle our differences with our fists.

Pitchers who do not meet these four pieces of criteria will not be considered friends.