All great things come in fives. Jacksons. Golden rings. Police Academy movies (I stopped watching them after the fifth). In that spirit, we’d like to introduce Poll Position—a new interactive exercise in obsessive Boston fandom (1988-2008). We list. You vote. We all discuss. Euphoric insanity ensues. Let’s roll.

Given the current black cloud hanging over the landscape of the Red Sox bullpen, we kick off Poll Position with a look at five best middle reliever seasons you might have forgotten about:

1989: Rob Murphy

Every time Hideki Okajima takes the mound he looks on the verge of tears; Mike Timlin looks on the verge of having his arm snap off; Craig Hansen looks on the verge of breaking into a cover of "Whole Hearted" by Extreme.

When Murphy got the call, he looked on the verge of tearing your nuts off and forcing you watch as he fed them to a jaguar. He was the Duke from Major League—the dude who threw at his own kid in a father son game.

In 2008, his toughness would be a huge asset… as would his numbers The 1989 Murphy had nine saves and a 2.74 ERA in 74 appearances. He also threw 105 innings, a number that becomes more significant when you consider that the Sox haven’t had a reliever break the 100-inning mark since Derek Lowe in 1999 (shhh…that’s what we call a teaser.)

Note: A close second on that ‘89 team is Dennis Lamp who had a 2.32 ERA in 43 appearances. Although I’m really only bringing this up so I can tell the story of how Lamp waited on my Dad at a supermarket deli counter in Southern California two years ago. And… that’s the story.

1991: Tony Fossas

Appearance-wise, Fossas looked like the unfortunate offspring of Joe Torre and Michael Imperioli, but when you needed someone to sit down a left-handed bat, Uncle Tony was your man. He had a 3.47 ERA in 64 appearances for the Sox 1991, but most importantly, lefties only hit .190 off him for the season.

Note: Do you realize that Fossas played four full seasons in Boston? I would have guessed two at most. He had 239 appearances in his Red Sox career. Almost 30 more than Alan Embree, a guy I remember pitching in a hell of a lot of games.

1995: Stan Belinda

Some credit Cal Ripken’s streak or McGwire and Sosa’s bats for pulling Major League Baseball out of its post strike slump. But anyone who lived in Boston during the summer of 1995 knows that it was Stan Belinda’s 7-0 start that single-handedly captivated a nation and showed us all that it was safe to love again. When you’re 15, the Internet doesn’t exist yet and you’re on year two of a four-year awkward phase, very few things make you happier than when one of the Red Sox’s bolded named appeared in the League Leaders on Page 4 of the Globe’s sports section. And when Belinda—as a reliever, no less!—made it as one of the leaders in wins, it was a good day.

Not only did he roll out an impressive winning percentage, but over the course of 63 appearances he also racked up 10 saves and a 3.10 ERA in 69.7 innings.

He also shared a first name with the 78-year-old retired car insurance salesman from Wellesley who sat next to me at games.

Note: One thing I’ll always remember about the extended AL League Leaders page that ran in the Globe in the late-80s/early-90s was that Mark McGwire and Mike Greenwell were always one and two in Game Winning RBIs—a stat that for some reason people don’t talk about anymore.

1999: Derek Lowe

In D-Lowe’s last season before becoming a full-time closer and then a full-time starter, he was the most valuable bullpen guy on a team that reached the ALCS. Lowe made 74 appearances and had a 6-3 record with 15 saves and a 2.63 ERA over the course of 109 innings. If that D-Lowe were on the roster today, he’d pitch every time Dice-K took the mound. No one was better at saving the Sox from a starter’s inability to pitch deep into a game. He owned the seventh inning. Sometimes the sixth and seventh. Sometimes the seventh and eighth. He was a luxury that today seems unbelievably foreign—like the woman who won the Best Actress Oscar last year.

Note: D-Lowe became a full-time starter for the Sox in 2002 and registered 52 wins over the next three seasons. Over that same time span, Pedro Martinez won 50 games.

2000: Hipolito Pichardo

From the moment he entered the league in 1992, I always liked Pichardo. Most of that came from the fact that I was 12 and thought it was funny to call him hippopotamus penis, but when HP joined the Sox bullpen in 2000, he gave us a legit (more legit?) reason to love him. Hippo celebrated the millennium by going 6-3 with 3.46 ERA. He only appeared in 38 games, but those 38 were good for 65 innings. By comparison, only one reliever on the 2007 Sox roster pitched as many as 65 innings—Hideki Okajima, who had 69 innings, but it took him 66 appearances to do it.

Note: This one could just as easily have gone to 2000 Rich Garces who was just as good if not better that season, but in the end I decided to go with HP because of lines like THIS. Not that this happened every night, but these are the kind of relief performances we just don’t see anymore.

We’ve given you five to choose from. Which season ranks as the best?

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