I just want to poke my head in shortly to show you guys something.
Greg Holland doesn't suck. He just doesn't. He has among the better sliders in baseball and mid-90s gas. Sometimes he loses the zone...so does virtually every reliever. He's probably not elite but he does not suck.
However, Holland's suck/not suck is irrelevant to the discussion of who should be the closer on the Royals. Take a look at this:
1
2
3
Anyone have a quick guess as to what those pitches were? Those weren't screwballs, they weren't sinkers. They were
changeups with the kind of armside run you just don't see from changeups. That's a 2-seamer break on a changeup. The 2nd one is especially vile.
Now look at those 3 pictures more closely, notably, look at the
count. Anyone notice anything?
He threw those back to back to back. He pitched
backwards off his change, threw it 3 times in a row and the damn pitch was so good that Saltalamaccia
still looked like an idiot on the 3rd one, even with 2 prior looks at it.
Oh, and Herrera's fastball is possibly the best in baseball (I like Rosenthal's a little more, but there's certainly room for debate).
Guys, Kelvin Herrera could be the best reliever in the major leagues. I know, Holland's a good pitcher and you'd hate to cut his legs out from under him this quickly, but Herrera has stuff that you just don't see very often and if you're struggling in the 9th, the answer is easy, IMO.