Closing Costs May Be Higher in Boston

The New York Yankees, St. Louis Cardinals and Chicago Cubs opened the season without a bullpen closer simply because Mariano Rivera, Jason Isringhausen and Antonio Alfonseca were all on the disabled list.

The Montreal Expos and Tampa Bay Devil Rays opened the season without a closer simply because they don’t think they have anyone capable of filling that role.

The Boston Red Sox also opened the season without a closer, but they were the only one of those teams to do it by design.

The Red Sox are using a closer by committee (preferring to call it mixing and matching), a decision that their ace, Pedro Martinez, has sharply criticized. The plan also has raised skepticism among baseball people who contend that the only reason for a team not to use only one pitcher in the closer’s role is to avoid paying the high cost of a dominant finisher.

The Red Sox paid Ugueth Urbina $6.85 million to pitch 60 innings and save 40 games last year. Now, Urbina is being paid $4.5 million to sit and watch the Texas Rangers’ starting pitchers implode, and the Red Sox are saying, as Manager Grady Little did in spring training, that this was a decision that had been thought about at the end of last season and into the winter and was based strictly on personnel, not cost.

Whatever the reason, Boston’s decision to reinvent the modern edition of the game represented a substantial risk in a Yankee-dominated division and a risk likely to draw consistent second guessing throughout the always nervous Red Sox Nation.

The Nation, in fact, was in the process of hyperventilating after only two games as the committee blew a four-run lead in losing the opener to the lowly Devil Rays and then blew another four-run lead before winning Game 2 in 16 innings.

By the time the Red Sox staggered out of Tropicana Field, 29-year-old General Manager Theo Epstein was saying that “whatever hair I have left” had turned gray and the Red Sox had won three of four games even though their seven relief pitchers had given up 24 hits and 10 runs in 19 2/3 innings.

Said Martinez, whose sensational start in the opener was erased by the blown save: “When you have a guy who saved 40 games for you, it’s difficult for you to understand that you’re going to really just hand the ball to a committee of relievers that you’ve never seen before.... I guess I’m just going to have to shut my mouth and continue to do my work.”

Park’s Place

Chan Ho Park faces the Seattle Mariners today, trying again to find some of the magic of his good years with the Dodgers. Park was hammered by the Angels in the second game of the season, lasting only 2 2/3 innings. He is 13-14 with a 5.61 earned-run average in his last 39 starts dating to the 2001 season with the Dodgers.

The Rangers, in addition to guaranteeing him $65 million, have done everything they can to provide him with a security blanket, bringing in Chad Kreuter as his regular catcher and allowing him to pitch the second game of the season after Park reportedly told Manager Buck Showalter he would prefer not to cope with the pressure of the opener.

A hamstring strain hampered his 9-8 debut season with the Rangers, and now people close to Park say he has a sore back. A reporter mentioned that to Showalter at Edison Field on Wednesday and the manager simply rolled his eyes and said, “We’re going to keep doing whatever we can to get Chan Ho going.”

All That Glitters ...

In the latter years of Ivan Rodriguez’s Gold Glove tenure as the Rangers’ catcher, the inside story was that he had lost the respect and rapport of his pitchers, who tended to feel he didn’t work with them in building a relationship or game plan.

In his opening-night start as the Florida Marlins’ $10-million catcher, an 8-5 loss to the Philadelphia Phillies, Rodriguez (who would be charged with three passed balls in the first two games) was criticized by his pitcher, Josh Beckett, for calling too many off-speed pitches, prompting a testy (but, perhaps, accurate?) response by Rodriguez that was unlikely to create friends and build rapport with his new staff.

“We didn’t lose because I called too many breaking balls or fastballs or whatever,” he said. “We lost because we made errors and our pitchers walked too many guys.”

The 500 Club

Bob Costas and other pundits have suggested that the offensive explosion of recent years has cheapened those statistics, including the significance of 500 home runs, which four players -- Sammy Sosa, Rafael Palmeiro, Fred McGriff and Ken Griffey Jr. (depending on his shoulder injury Saturday) -- should reach this season.

Nonsense, said Dusty Baker, Sosa’s manager with the Cubs.

“Five hundred is 500,” Baker said. “I don’t like the fact that people are talking about so many people having a shot at it, like that takes something away. They say a lot of guys are going to do it. Hey, a lot of guys have done it before in bunches -- [Hank] Aaron, [Willie] Mays, [Frank] Robinson, [Mickey] Mantle, [Harmon] Killebrew. They all probably did it within four or five years of each other.”

Baker knows his history.

That quintet all hit No. 500 between 1965 and 1971, a span in which Ernie Banks and Eddie Mathews also joined that club.

Name Game

Should the new facility in Cincinnati be called the Great American Ballpark or the Great American Launching Pad?

Twelve homers were hit in the opening series, eight by the Pittsburgh Pirates in a three-game sweep. Jimmy Haynes, the Reds’ opening-day starter, gave up three in one inning.

Of course, when a team is reduced to starting a pitcher with a 61-74 career record in the season opener, it’s an indication of a long year and the amount of fuel it will be delivering to the Launching Pad.

Fitness Test

A decision by new Milwaukee Manager Ned Yost to move his coaches from a private locker room into the main clubhouse drew the approval of the players. Said relief pitcher Curtis Leskanic: “I kind of like having them in here. It makes me feel a lot better about my body.”