Talk:Long reliever

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"Least effective"

I put a "citation needed" tag on the partial-sentence "a long reliever is often a team's least effective pitcher". This may be true, but to me it seems questionable. If the starting pitcher has given up several (or more) runs in the first few innings and it's not getting better (which is the most common reason why he would be taken out so early), you want a guy who is hopefully going to "get the game under control" (as the article says elsewhere). Since his team is now down, let's say for example, five runs, the only way to "get the game under control" is to give up no runs, or maybe at most, one run and hope his team scores some runs (or in the NL, help his team score some runs). For that, a team is going to rely on its "least effective pitcher"? I don't see the logic. Neutron (talk) 16:02, 31 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]