A World Series--even one hosted in such grim locales as St. Petersburg's moldy Tropicana Field or Philadelphia's Citizens Bank Park, the Ford F-250 of ballparks--is all about stars. No one pays $600 for a ticket to watch Tampa Bay Rays shortstop Jason Bartlett work smart at-bats and turn tricky double plays; they come to watch men like Philadelphia Phillies first baseman Ryan Howard hit the ball 450 feet.

If only for that reason, as one watches the least glamorous World Series in recent memory, one should cheer that most despised class of ballplayer, the one-out situational specialist--the guy whose entire job is to frustrate players like Howard. The best starting pitchers are painters, carefully brushing the outer and inner edges of the strike zone with bold fastballs and delicate change-ups, varying their tones to meet the precise pitch of each hitter in each at-bat. Specialists are more like street vendors peddling airbrushed Barack Obama t-shirts. All the more reason, I say, to root them on.

Take the first game of the World Series, held Wednesday. In the 9th inning, with the Phillies up by a run, Rays pitcher Grant Balfour gave up a one-out double and then intentionally walked the next batter, bringing up Howard, who's averaged 51 home runs the last three years. Out came the manager, and in came Trever Miller, a fairly undistinguished reliever who's amassed an earned run average of 4.43 over a career spent with seven different teams.

The whole point, of course, is that both Howard and Miller are left-handed. Howard has hit .304 against right-handers in his career, and .231 against left-handers; Miller has allowed a .293 career average to right-handers, and a .235 mark to left-handers. Sure enough, Miller struck out the big man on four pitches, preserving his team's narrow margin, and promptly exited the game.

For each of the last five years, Miller has averaged less than an inning per appearance, the true scarlet mark of the situationalist. Just this year, he made 17 one-batter appearances. (Phillies lefties Scott Eyre and J.C. Romero, luxury models who between them made $7.8 million this year, went in for another 25 between them.) His job may be the functional equivalent of that held by those random football players who pull down fat salaries for their skill at long-snapping, or of those benchwarming basketball players who stay flush by laughing at the point guard's lousy jokes, but at least Miller does it well--in his 17 one-batter jobs, he let only two men on base. Who, anywhere, doing anything, succeeds that often?

Against the admiration one has for a job done properly, one has to balance the horrific pain the use of these specialists inflicts on spectators. Bill James has proposed various rule changes, such as barring pitching changes in any inning in which a run hasn't yet been scored, as a way of limiting the absurd, tension-defusing shuffling in and shuffling out of various relievers in late innings . (Even Tampa Bay’s sharp manager Joe Maddon used an excruciating five pitchers in one inning in the American League Championship Series.) Legendary pitching coach Leo Mazzone groused about the switches to Alan Schwarz of The New York Times two years ago: "Just go ahead and pitch." Hardcore fans sum the general consensus by calling players like Miller, without an ounce of affection, LOOGIES--an acronym standing, roughly, for lefty one out guys.

But this venomous response is ridiculous, a massive exercise in point missing. The whole point of baseball is its absurdity--this is a sport without a clock or standard field, in which the least explanation for the non-initiate invariably becomes a 40-minute disquisition on the whims of 19th-century segregationists. The LOOGY, like the sight of 77-year-old Rays adviser Don Zimmer in uniform or the arcane code one needs to learn to score a game, is more in the line of charming quirk than active offense.

Why jeer at Trever Miller? Here's a man who can walk through the concourse in uniform during a game and go completely unremarked on, foiling the plans of a former Most Valuable Player and breaking the heart of Philadelphia, a city that deserves it. Perhaps more to the point, some of the more glorious players in recent history made their money as LOOGIES.

Jesse Orosco, the beloved New York Met (and Dodger, and Indian, and Yankee, and …) whose toss of his glove up into the air at the end of the 1986 World Series is one of the game's great iconic moments, pitched, absurdly, until he was 46, mostly well. By the end of his career he looked, fittingly, a bit like Yoda. Sidewinder Mike Myers , believed to hold the major league record for one-off appearances with an amazing 310, was one of the more entertaining pitchers of this decade, throwing from a freakishly low angle that saw his knuckles barely miss scraping the mound while the ball twirled and jumped in on batters’ hands. Paul Assenmacher, like Billy Bob Thornton, looked like he was about 38 when he was 25 and when he was 38, and got all manner of big outs for the excellent Cleveland teams of the late 1990s, seeming all the while as liable to shoot the batter as throw some sloppy breaking ball his way.

How much drearier would the game have been without these men and dozens other like them? How tedious would the World Series be were Howard given every chance to launch his 450 foot bombs with no effort at resistance from someone who might occasionally be mistaken for a trainer, or an adult fantasy camp refugee? By all means let the people pay their $600 to see Carl Crawford and Chase Utley come up in the biggest spots, under the brightest lights. Thanks to the likes of Miller and Eyre, they'll most likely botch things miserably. It well fits a game of failure.

Tim Marchman lives in Chicago, and is covering the World Series for The Wall Street Journal.

By Tim Marchman