Mike Celizic

There’s no such thing as a baseball team that has everything, and every fan of every team is reading even now about what his or her team still needs to put a hammerlock on a playoff position.

The Cubs need a second basemen, as do the Rockies. The Dodgers need a third baseman, the Mets an outfielder – and on it goes for each team.

But there’s one thing every team needs, and with each passing season, the need becomes greater and the talent to fill it seems to grow not at all. It’s middle relief, and increasingly, it’s becoming one of the more critical pieces of the major league puzzle.

No one has enough of it, and no one ever will. Every team starts with a starting rotation and a closer, and then fills in the gap. But the gap that needs to be filled is growing until now it’s all but a chasm.

The modern starting pitcher takes the ball 34 times a season, maybe 35. And all but the best of them top out at around 200 innings, which means that the average starter is gone after six innings, leaving three innings for someone else to finish.

The modern closer works one inning at a time, leaving two innings still to be filled. The way it’s done today is to take guys who aren’t good enough to be either starters or closers and hope they can get enough outs to preserve a win. But at some point, the middle reliever – the bridge between starter and closer – is going to become a position for which young pitchers are groomed, just as starters and finishers are today.

It’s got to happen. The game has been evolving in that direction for decades. It’s only in the past generation or so that every team has felt it necessary to have a closer who pitches just the final inning of a game. A generation from now, the set-up specialist who pitches just the eighth inning will be an established – and highly valued – position.

Some great teams have had such an arrangement in the past. The Yankees began their most recent dynastic run when Mariano Rivera was setting up for John Wetteland and continued with Mike Stanton setting up for Rivera. The Red Sox last year had another great one-two punch in Jonathan Papelbon and Hideki Okajima.

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This year, the Yankees are going to start the season with Joba Chamberlain setting up for Rivera. The team says it wants to move Chamberlain into the starting rotation, but they may find that he’s more valuable in preserving leads than in building them.

Once upon a time, it would have been foolish to say such a thing. But that was when starting pitchers regularly pitched into the eighth inning and frequently finished what they started. Even when starters averaged seven innings a start, you could argue that it would have been foolish to waste a good arm in middle relief.

No longer. The best teams don’t beat your starters; they beat your bullpen. For 13 seasons, the Yankees have lived by one offensive rule: make the starter work his tail off and get to the bullpen. That’s been accompanied by one defensive rule: hand the lead to Rivera.

The Red Sox are no different, nor is any top team. You survive the first five innings, get the lead against the platoons of nobodies who start traipsing in from the bullpen, then send your big guy out there to hand on in the ninth.

Consider that it’s been three years since any pitcher in baseball has thrown as many as 250 innings, which means just getting into the eighth inning. Today, 200 innings is a real accomplishment, and that’s still stuck in the sixth inning.

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