Does the Phillies' Jonathan Papelbon have the toughest job in sports?

Jonathan Papelbon is sitting in the Phillies dugout at Citizens Bank Park, surrounded by a pack of reporters who have spent much of the previous decade chronicling his every pitch. The Red Sox are in town, and with them one of the major league's largest media contingents, the entirety of which is quizzing the veteran closer on the looming showdown with his former team. Reveling in the attention, Papelbon begins to refer himself as "Cinco Ocho," a label that began as a nickname coined by former teammate Alex Cora but has since morphed into an entity that he considers to be his alter-ego. He spends the next 10 minutes eliciting obligatory laughs, referring to Red Sox slugger David "Big Papi" Ortiz as "Big Sloppy" and later poking fun at his own Mississippi State education.

It all seems tailor-made for some amateur psychological observation about the ­human condition, about the pressure of closing baseball games for a big-market baseball team and the unique manner in which a player may deal with that stress. But the more you learn about Papelbon, the more you realize that to look deep into his psyche is to ignore the very nature of his success. On an overcast afternoon earlier this week, Phillies bullpen coach Mick Billmeyer gave a verbal shrug when asked if he had gleaned any new insight into his closer and his long record of accomplishment.

"He doesn't like losing," Billmeyer said matter-of-factly. "And he ain't afraid of bleep."

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The stare arrived sometime after college. Make no mistake: Jonathan Papelbon always pitched as if his mission were to reduce a hitter's bat to a subatomic state, sending a mid-90s fastball screaming toward home like the beams of a particle gun. But the stare?

"I don't know where he picked it up," Ron Polk says with a laugh. "Guys pick things up in the pros. I coached Buck Martinez when he was Nathaniel ... He became a Buck in the minors."

What Polk does know is that Papelbon is a closer, no ifs, ands or spot starts about it. The three years that he spent coaching the imposing righthander at Mississippi State convinced him of that. S much so that when he ran into Terry Francona at a convention several years ago, he told the then-Red Sox manager that the organization's attempt to move their young fireballer into the rotation would prove to be a mere flirtation.

"You do what you have to do," Polk told Francona, "but his temperament is more of a closer's."

That temperament developed at an early age. Papelbon's mother, Sheila, was a softball and volleyball player at Louisiana State University. Two years after Papelbon was born, he was joined by twin brothers Josh and Jeremy, laying the foundation for one of the more intense sibling rivalries to ever sweep through Bishop Kenny High School in Jacksonville, Fla.

When the Papelbon boys started to attend the school's baseball camp, it didn't take long for their presence to come to the attention of longtime baseball coach and current athletic director Bob West.

"You couldn't put the three of them together," he says. "There was going to be a ruckus before it was over with."

When Papelbon was a junior and senior, and thus one of the players responsible for serving as a camp instructor, he used to beg his coach not to place his younger brothers under his charge.

"They were going to get into it," West says, "because they weren't going to listen to him. They all just have an unusual competitiveness about them. You see some people who can't quite get it all together and win games. Or they have talent, but they just lack something else that would make them a winner and put them up another step. Well, these kids have it. They are not fearful of anything."

It is interesting how often the concept of fear is broached by those who have watched Papelbon develop from a raw, hard-throwing project into one of the most dominant closers of his generation. When you think of fear in sports, you think of going over the middle in front of Brian Dawkins, or standing in the pocket with Ray Lewis bearing down, or skating into the corner in pursuit of a loose puck, or standing nose-to-nose with Floyd Mayweather or Manny Pacquiao, or even standing at home plate as a pitcher prepares to unleash mid-90s heat. Which is ironic, because the fear people speak of when they talk about Papelbon is the fear that even a 150-pound office worker can relate to. It is the fear of failure, and not only failure, but failure in front of a packed house of people who are waiting to cast judgment.

Think about it. What other team sport has every eye in the stadium focused on the same individual at the same time, with no teammates or opponents or blockers or defenders sharing the frame? A pitcher is alone on a stage, but instead of delivering a speech, he is delivering an object to another athlete who has the ability to crush said object into oblivion. A pitcher's only safety nets are the defense behind him and the inning or two or three or four that lay in front. And for a closer, one of those safety nets is removed. "I don't care if an eighth-inning guy hasn't given up a run all year," says longtime Braves pitcher and current MLB Network analyst John Smoltz. "He knows he has another chance if he has a hiccup. There's no other chance in the bottom of the ninth. You are always in a position to fail."

Smoltz's perspective is an interesting one because of the transition he made from starting to closing in the middle of his career. In fact, he recently published a memoir titled exactly that: Starting and Closing. Smoltz also spent a brief stint as Papelbon's teammate with the Red Sox in 2009, during which time he witnessed a mental fortitude that he insists is required for the position. "He has that mentality, whatever that mentality is," Smoltz says. "He has that ability to forget about yesterday and worry about today."

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You get the sense that the ability Smoltz is talking about stems from Papelbon's utter distaste for losing, and his all-consuming desire to play a significant role in victory. Throughout high school, Papelbon believed that his future lay as a power-hitting corner infielder, despite his ability to throw a fastball harder than most teenagers. He would pitch occasionally, but he liked the ability to have an effect on the outcome of every game. One year, Bishop Kenny was competing in a tournament in Miami. The team played several games in row, sapping their pitching depth. In the last game, West asked Papelbon to pitch.

"And he goes out there and throws a no-hitter," West says. "Everybody is saying, 'God dang, why don't you pitch this guy?' I'm saying I would, but he wants to hit every single game."

When Papelbon signed with Mississippi State, he did so with the intention of playing every day. But after his first season of fall baseball, then-Bulldogs coach Pat McMahon called him into a meeting and convinced him that a full-time role in the bullpen would serve the best interests of both team and player. "You liked his arm, you liked his body, you liked the way his arm worked, his velocity is a factor," says McMahon, who left Mississippi State after Papelbon's first year and is now in charge of international player development for the New York Yankees. "He had the size, the makeup and then the underlying values. The competitiveness and the will to compete are big factors."

That competitiveness has already become legendary in the Phillies' clubhouse, from the team's annual NCAA basketball tournament pool to the poker games that pass the time on team flights. Back in 2008, when the Red Sox opened up the season with a series in Japan, Papelbon ordered a custom portable poker table for the traveling party and told the Boston Globe that his plan was to "slow-play the bleep out of them and take all their money."

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Over the last two decades, the closer position has achieved an almost mythological status among the managers and talent evaluators who guide the trajectory of the sport's personnel management. Separating legend from reality can be difficult, especially given the belief in an unquantifiable quality that separates the "true closers" from mere relievers. Take the case of Mariano Rivera. Many pundits point to the veteran closer as the biggest factor behind the five World Series titles that the Yankees have won during his time with the team.

Rivera is clearly one of the sport's all-time greats, a player whom Papelbon recently referred to as "the godfather" of the closer position. And while he is one of only two relievers in history to log 14 seasons of 30 or more saves, the pitcher who shares that honor is an example of just how relative a closer's success can be.

Over the course of his career, Trevor Hoffman converted 89 percent of his save opportunities, the same rate Rivera held when he suffered a freak season-ending ACL tear in his right knee earlier this season. According to Baseball-Reference.com's Average Leverage Index, a formula that attempts to quantify the importance of every situation in a game, Hoffman — the longtime Padres closer — faced a greater amount of pressure in his career than Rivera did. He stranded a higher rate of his inherited runners, and struck out a higher percentage of the batters he faced. Yet, Hoffman retired in 2010 without winning a World Series.

Therein lies the paradox of the closer. Since assuming the role full-time in 2006, Papelbon has established himself as one of the few elite closers in the game. He has 232 saves since '06, second only to Francisco Rodriguez (233) in that time frame. During that same period, his strikeout rate of 10.8-per-nine-innings ranks eighth among relievers with at least 200 appearances. His 2.30 ERA ranks seventh.

Heading into the weekend, he was a perfect 13-for-13 in save opportunities. Yet, the Phillies are 0-5 in games in which they entered the ninth inning tied. In four of those games, Papelbon never pitched, as Charlie Manuel and Rich Dubee elected to save their closer for a potential save situation.

Such specialization can drive fans crazy. But the conventional wisdom among managers is that a closer — and a closer only — is capable of closing out a close win. To use that closer in a tie game on the road is to force a manager to call on somebody other than the closer, should his team take the lead in a subsequent inning. Intuition suggests that a tie game should rarely end without a team's best reliever getting a shot to prevent a loss. But managers and pitching coaches now view using the closer before a save situation as conceding a loss.

"The [last] inning is a different animal," Dubee says.

Smoltz takes a pragmatic view on the conundrum. "I don't think it's better," he says, "but it's the way we've evolved."

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Closers are creatures of habit, from the manner in which they run from the bullpen to the mound to the music that blares while they do so. More than anything else, this is the one factor that makes the most sense when it comes to defending the current usage of the position.

For Papelbon, the routine begins well before the ninth inning, and it involves monitoring the ebbs and flows of the action on the field. He might carry himself with a fun-loving swagger off the field, but once the game starts, his focus shifts to the game — and all of the variables that lead up to the ninth.

These days, he sits next to Billmeyer in the bullpen, studying pitch sequences and swings and offering his thoughts. Sometimes, those thoughts can lead to debates that—like everything else—Papelbon puts plenty of effort into winning. "He likes to argue," the Billmeyer says. "He knows what he's doing, and he ain't afraid to bark it out."

Six weeks into his first season as a Phillie, Papelbon's bite has matched his bark. And however you feel about Cinco Ocho, the fact that you feel anything is the whole point of his being, the foundation of his success. You are more afraid of him than he is of anything.