Being a relief pitcher must be a really stressful job

I watch baseball rather casually. I'm not really a fan of any particular team even though the city I live in has 2 of them. I don't really ever contemplate going to games because unless it is a midweek game, the ticket prices just get more and more insane. I do look at the stats most games though and today I was watching a game live with an online friend of mine that is what I would call a superfan for the LA Dodgers. He was giving me a play by play sort of while it was going on and I noticed during this game, which the Dodgers ended up losing, that all of the blame ended up falling on a relief pitcher named Edwin Diaz despite the fact that he played very little of the game.

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Just a quick search revealed that all of the blame is landing on the head of Edwin Diaz with headlines like "Diaz meltdown blows Dodgers' lead" and "Edwin Diaz blows another save."

Now obviously the pitcher is the most important aspect of the game and perhaps Diaz really is choking, I honestly don't know enough about the guy to have an opinion about this but I would imagine that of all the jobs you can have in professional sports, being a relief pitcher has to be one of the most stressful.

You rarely start a game, you are only called into a game when things are looking really shady and often you are pulled into a game because the coaches are looking for a hero after they have lost faith in a different relief pitcher. Los Angeles used 6 pitchers in that game, but the only person that is catching any flak for the loss is Edwin Diaz.

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I was never a pitcher, so I can't really relate to their pain and sacrifice. Baseball was one of the sports that I was simply never good at. I do know that a lot of these guys make a ton of money though and perhaps that helps with the anxiety but when you look at just this one game between two of the better teams in MLB at the moment, there were a total of 10 pitchers that took to the mound.

It doesn't look like Tanner Scott even threw a pitch so I don't know what the hell is going on here but Alex Vesla for example, was kept in the game just long enough to throw to one batter. The Brewers were swapping guys in and out left and right as well.

Now before we boo hoo for Diaz too much I want you to know that the guy makes $23 million a year.

All that money for a guy that apparently barely ever plays (I.P. = innings pitched).

Of course he could have done better, he could have striked everyone out instead of letting 4 hits happen and 3 RBI's that resulted in the Dodgers blowing a 2 point lead in the very last inning of the game. But at the same time there was a whole lotta game that happened before dude even took to the mound yet the entire game is getting blamed on him.

The press and fans (such as my friend the superfan) are starting to question whether or not they should renew his contract and basically the entire baseball world is coming down on the guy, just for a couple of bad games.

Is there any other sport where someone can come on for 1/9th of the game and unless he does something that almost nobody in the world can do, they blame the failure of the entire team squarely on one person.

Batters fail more often than they succeed and people in the outfield can go entire games without ever needing to so much as run to a fly. Pitchers are really aggressively hated if they don't perform. Yet when a pitcher ends up getting a "save" in a game this is normally forgotten rather quickly.

I suppose this is true in all parts of life. Humans tend to remember the poor performances of someone, no matter what it is in relation to, rather than good performances. I suppose that is just the way people are wired.

I feel bad for the dude. I felt much worse for him before I looked up how much they pay him though :)