Pat Lackey, in an awesome article for Fanhouse, examines Jim Tracy’s decision to let Huston Street face Ryan Howard last night.

As Lackey points out, Street is the Rockies’ closer, and so no one doubted Tracy. But Howard demonstrates a massive platoon split, and lefty Joe Biemel was available in the bullpen.

The whole concept of the one-inning closer makes no sense to me. It seems like the entire role has been developed to serve the save stat, and the save stat is an imperfect one. Is there anything more surreal than seeing the Yankees score a run to go ahead by four, instead of three, in the top of the ninth and watching Mariano Rivera stop warming up?

Check it out: In the 20-year period after Tony La Russa popularized the one-inning closer in 1988, teams won nearly exactly the same percentage of games they were leading in the ninth inning as they did in the 20 years prior.

It’s nice to have a closer that shortens the game, as they say, but all too frequently guys incapable of that job are pigeonholed into it for lack of a better option. And even worse, in the toughest situations — often in the sixth or seventh inning, when the starting pitcher has tired — teams frequently rely on their middle men, almost by definition the worst pitchers on the staff.

The problem is, the best relievers, obviously, want to be paid accordingly, and the way to do that is to accumulate saves. So relief pitchers demand to know their roles, and no pioneering team has yet had the nerve to tell them their role is to retire all the batters they face.

There now are stats that weigh the importance of a situation into which a reliever has been called and his ability to succeed in those situations. Stats Tom Tango creates, like Leverage Index and WPA/LI could help us understand the highest-leverage situations in a ballgame, and the pitchers who best succeed in them.

But I’m getting away from my point. There’s no reason the best pitcher in the bullpen should be limited to the ninth inning in games while his team is winning. Some shrewd team needs to break the mold and stop assigning so much importance to saves and the isolated ninth inning.

It won’t be the Mets, for sure, or likely any team so concerned about public perception. But it will happen eventually, once some smart GM decides not to pay such a premium for 70 innings and instead to find or groom a versatile reliever who can be equally effective in any situation.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: The era of the one-inning closer should end. It brought us one beautiful, awesome pitcher of transcendent greatness: Mariano Rivera. When he hangs ’em up, so should the entire institution.