Craig Kimbrel shouldn't pitch with a 3 run lead in the 9th, at all.

Fredi Gonzalez's usage of his bullpen gets a lot of flack on the interwebs. Things like his refusal to use his best relievers in a tie game on the road, using Proctor in anything other than a 12 run blowout, underusing some younger arms in the bullpen while overusing others (Venters and Kimbrel), the list could go on and on.

However, this post isn't so much about criticizing Fredi as it is something almost no manager would do, so I'm more pointing out a strategy I think could be effective for teams in certain situations, and especially for the Atlanta Braves of 2011-2012.

The save is a dumb stat. If you don't agree with that statement, just stop reading, move along, nothing good will come from further reading of this post. However, the save is still highly valued in baseball, for reasons that are not entirely clear. It's an important stat in: deciding how much money free agent relievers get; it actually seems to influence many managers' strategies, like the stat somehow counts in the win column; and for the purposes of this article it is really influential in player arbitration cases.

Craig Kimbrel is a great relief pitcher, the numbers he's put up this year are among, if not the, absolute best in baseball. He's also under full team control, making the major league minimum. This is awesome for the Atlanta Braves, as it frees up significant financial resources to pursue other spending avenues within the constraints of a limited budget.

However, this will not always be the case. There will come a time when he becomes arbitration eligible.

For relief pitchers, arbitration awards are dominated by saves. Great DIP stats to the wind, for whatever reason, saves dominate. Because of this, Craig Kimbrel could be in line for a pretty nice pay bump when he qualifies for arbitration status. As things look right now, he might be not only at the top of pitchers for his age group, but might be at the top of all relief pitchers at that point.

This is a nice problem to have, because it does mean that he's pitching extremely well. However, this burden on the Atlanta Braves could be lighter (or the benefit could be greater, depending on how you chose to look at it).

Moving from arbitration pay to workload for a second, another issue is that Kimbrel is being overworked. Now, some of this is not Fredi Gonzalez's fault. The Atlanta Braves have played in a lot of very close games, necessitating using your highest leverage relivers much more than average. The Atlanta Braves are also very top heavy in the bullpen, with Venters and Kimbrel being exceptional, but having questionable relievers after that, especially right handed relievers. It'd be really nice if we could figure out some way to lighten Kimbrel's workload, without taking him out of those situations where we need him the most.

For the third prong, let's talk about the three run lead in the ninth inning and the value of throwing a scoreless inning in that scenario. We'll use Win Probability Added (WPA) to show how important (or unimportant) a scoreless 9th inning with a 3 run lead is. Using yesterday's Braves-Rockies game as an example we see Craig Kimbrell's scoreless bottom of the 9th with a three run lead was worth a WPA of .053. This isn't an entirely meaningless number, but you'll notice Jonny Venters' scoreless inning was worth more, and 6 Braves positions players had a higher WPA for the game. Basically Kimbrell's number means that his scoreless ninth inning increased the braves chances of winning the game from 95% to 100%. A 5% increase in probability. Not negligible, but not earth shattering either.

Stepping away from an advanced stat like WPA, just think about it for a second using a more flawed, yet better understood statistic, ERA. A pitcher with a 27.00 ERA is obviously historically, laughably bad. Yet, that's essentially the ERA you have to have in order to blow a 3 run lead in one inning (of course barring unearned runs). So while a scoreless ninth with a three run lead is valuable, it's not all that valuable.

Yet the three run lead in the ninth inning is treated for our purposes just like an extremely high leverage situation. It takes a toll of 1 IP + warming up in the bullpen on Kimbrel's overworked arm and adds to the amount of money he will get in arbitration.

So if we're looking for a way to cut down on the load on Kimbrel's arm, and save the team some money for a possible extension (Tommy Hanson or Jason Heyward maybe?) then it'd seem like an obvious choice. Stop putting Kimbrel out there with three run leads in the ninth inning. Let someone else pitch besides Venters and Kimbrel in those situations. You'd save your team some money by distributing those saves to guys who aren't going to be arbitration guys to begin with (either because they're past arbitration years or not going to get enough saves to matter anyway) and we can give Kimbrel some much needed rest.

Remember, saves don't win games, wins win games.