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I'd build a bullpen with Wilhelm, no question about it - but I'd have him just a shade behind Elroy Face. I haven't the actual figures, but my memory of the two tells me that Face was just a little bit better when it came to turning inherited baserunners into stranded castaways, and one of the real problems I have with the way relief pitching is viewed and used today is that we have tended to discount who can do what when they get in the game with men on base - we go for the lights-out, ninth-inning wonderboys, no disrespect to them intended, but I have noticed that the preponderance of those guys either don't get in with men on base or can't do it when they do come in with men on. (Eddie Guardado, the Twins' closer this season, has yet to come in with men on base; Danny Graves, the Cincinnati closer, by contrast has a terrible record when they bring him in with men on base; Trevor Hoffman went just over half the season before he got into a game with men on.)

Behind Elroy Face and Hoyt Wilhelm, now you're getting into the hard choices. I've always loved the finesse relievers, and whittling it down is a job, but my nickels go to Dan Quisenberry and Gene Garber. They were excellent when you brought them in with men on base and whipping out of the jam before finishing off the game. Goose Gossage was a good one for that job, too, but Quisenberry was just a little bit better in that situation. And I kind of like seeing Gene Garber get his props if only because of the (unwarranted, in my opinion) abuse he took for being the man who ended Pete Rose's hitting streak by putting Charlie Hustler on a diet of breaking balls. Rose bitched for years about it (he practically insinuated Garber had a "duty" to let him swing on a fastball or at least "challenge" him, as if Garber - whose fastball wasn't half as good as his breaking stuff in the first place - was supposed to just make himself a sacrificial lamb!), never once stopping to ask himself just why on earth a man who'd been hitting with his authority for sixteen years in the big leagues to that point suddenly couldn't get his bat on a breaking ball. Garber was a guy you could use in the middle or for the last couple of innings when you needed him; for a few seasons, he was certainly one of the five best relief men in the game.

Some relief pitchers I thought would last a little longer than they did included the two Cincinnati Reds relief aces of 1975-76, Will McEnaney and Rawly Eastwick. I should have realised that the Reds' starting pitching was so comparatively weak that Sparky Anderson in those years was bound to be as nightmarish for relief pitchers as Billy Martin ultimately proved with a good starting rotation, especially the 1981-83 Oakland rotation. But for a couple of seasons McEnaney and Eastwick looked like they were going to be the antecedents of the Nasty Boys of 1990 - and there was a lights-out bullpen which sure got broken up a little too fast. Exactly why Cincinnati thought it brilliant to break up Rob Dibble, Norm Charlton, and Randy Myers escapes me, except that Charlton developed arm trouble, Myers went through a struggle or two, and Dibble was just a flat psycho on the mound who was probably bound to blow out his arm prematurely. (In fairness, though Dibble and Charlton might have been headed for trouble even before Myers teamed up with them - when Pete Rose managed the Reds, he was so incompetent at handling his bullpen that the way you beat the Reds with him at the helm was make him warm up his pen: Rose had no concept of the idea that once you get a man warming up, you either bring him in or sit him down for the day unless you want him gassing himself. Rose would complain continuously about his pitchers telling him they were wiped and him retorting, "C'mon, you haven't even pitched." He had no clue that when you're warming up a man he's pitching, for God's sake. "I liked Pete," Whitey Herzog has said, "but boy, I loved managing against him.")