Reese Kaplan -- Being Good Doesn't Always Generate Headlines

In the current era of roster composition people tend sometimes to forget the players and instead wind up rooting for laundry -- whomever is wearing the hometown team's uniform.  If you think about it, every year there's pretty significant roster turnover with lots of new faces arriving and old faces departing, often with no significant improvements achieved.  

The idea of the franchise player who spends nearly his entire career with one team has gone the way of David Wright and Derek Jeter.  In those cases it was a little easier to understand as you had top-of-the-game levels of talent.  

However, when it comes to role players who fill a significant niche, well, that's a much rarer occurrence and happens far less frequently.  Yes, you can look back and find the evidence of an Ed Kranepool or other less-than-stellar players who sometimes get that treatment.  However, it's a less common situation in today's game.  

We recently lost one of those players from this life whose entire career was spent in a Mets uniform.  While I'm not going to dwell on what type of teammate he was or what personality attributes he possessed, the fact is that his career as a relief pitcher was often overlooked.  Let's take a look at his numbers and come to appreciate the lifelong Met who was underappreciated while he was here and certainly missed now that he's gone.  

While everyone loves starters and closers, there's little attention paid to the middle relievers who come in during the 5th, 6th of 7th innings of a 9 inning game whose role it is to hold down the fort for the departed starting pitcher and in anticipation of the fireman's arrival.  

Jeff Innis was a pure middle reliever who came up as a 24-year old rookie back in 1987 after the World Series championship year.  He threw sidearm which was a bit unusual, but otherwise he attracted little attention for what he did.  Many regarded unusual deliveries as a gimmick rather than an effective technique.  

During that first season he delivered above and beyond what they might have hoped.  In his 17 games he pitched under 26 innings, notched 28 strikeouts and posted a nearly unbelievable 7.00 ratio of strikeouts to walks.  It looked like this low flung sidearmer might have something after all.

In 1988 he was called up for just 12 games, but again he was way better than expected.  This time his ERA was just 1.89 and he maintained that 7.00 ratio of strikeouts to walks.  Baseball minds are often hard to change from the traditional to the innovative and you have to wonder what they felt was missing from the man's game to keep him off the roster for the full season for a second season in a row.

Oddly, as his strikeout numbers began to decline the Mets' attention to his success finally started to take hold.  Over the next few years he was in 29 and 18 games until the front office finally woke up in 1991.  For that season he was called into 69 games with a remarkable WHIP of a hair over 1.000 and finished the year with a 2.66 ERA.  

Apparently they decided that the down under pitching style was not just a gimmick and he became an integral part of the Mets landscape.  In 1992 he made it into 76 games, finishing with a similar 2.86 ERA.  In his final Mets season in 1993 he had what could be called his weakest output with a 4.11 ERA over 67 games.  He was let go by the Mets despite having had a 7-year career ERA of 3.05.  

When you delve into it a little more, you find that manager Davey Johnson was not a fan of his 83 mph pitching despite the results they produced.  He was the designated soft tosser once they parted ways with Terry Leach and Innis racked up a lot of frequent flyer miles to Tidewater.  After his 1991 brilliant season he asked for a raise and the arbiter agreed with the Mets that he had neither a win or a save to show for his 2.66 ERA over 69 games.  

Innis pointed out that could have been 15 and 1 had the hitters helped the Mets to come back when Johnson brought him in during losing games to pitch.  He had set a record having pitched in that many games without a win or a save.  

It turns out that he was a man for the record books despite his odd usage.  In his final three years in a Mets uniform he led the National League with 212 games.  That's a lot of assignments to take the mound for a guy who was neither a starter nor a closer.  At age 30 he was out of the majors and never made it back despite his excellent performance.  To look at the bottom line he was a mere 10-20 over 7 years with just a total of 5 saves.  He was the very definition of an invisible pitcher but he was very good at what he did when Johnson finally deigned to use him.  

Most everyone is aware that he had set up an online funding page after his cancer progressed to the terminal stage.  He wanted to spend the last few days with his family and people generously kicked in what was needed to make that happen.  He passed away on January 30th last month in Georgia at just age 59.  

Take a moment to remember and appreciate the folks who help win games for the team who are not All Stars, are not regulars and do not get the headlines.  Innis' entire major league career was with the Mets and that's an unusual baseball achievement.