2018 Positional Power Rankings: Bullpen (#1-15)
Welcome to the last installment of our positional power rankings series, tackling the top half of the bullpen rankings. Just in the last decade, we’ve witnessed the game achieve record offensive levels by certain measures. One positional group, shortstops, is enjoying a golden era. Some positions are weaker, some are stronger. The game and its positions experience peaks and troughs of production. But relief pitchers give us a constant: they keep marching forward, to greater workloads and relevance.
Last season, bullpens accounted for a major-league record 38.1% of total innings thrown, up three percentage points (35.1%) from 10 years earlier. In 2017, relief pitchers beat their previous record for workload — set the previous season — by 578 innings. Thirty years earlier, bullpens accounted for 31.8% of innings; 50 years earlier, for 26.0%. This trend has been a constant.
The bullpen becomes even more important in the postseason, when urgency and off-days warp the game. Last postseason, relievers accounted for 46.4% of innings. Bullpens have become and more important, and teams have responded by trying to build super ‘pens. The top-eight teams in the projections here all went to the postseason last season. While most free agents endured historically long waits to sign this offseason, relievers were quickly plucked from the market. Expect relievers to continue growing in importance and workload.
A Cleveland native, FanGraphs writer Travis Sawchik is the author of the New York Times bestselling book, Big Data Baseball. He also contributes to The Athletic Cleveland, and has written for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, among other outlets. Follow him on Twitter @Travis_Sawchik.
The Pirates are putting Glasnow in the bullpen, Brault too.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the Pirates have a top-5 in MLB bullpen this year. There is a ton of upside. Rivero looks like a truly dominant pitcher, and they have several guys who can miss bats. I’m very high on Feliz in particular- the stuff is outstanding and he was really rushed through the higher levels by the Astros- he started two games in AAA for a total of 8 innings (after only 79 innings in AA), so much of his development has occurred in the majors. It’s quite notable that Rivero was treated exactly the same by the Nats- he spent 43 innings in AA and 6.2 innings in AAA.
Glasnow in the bullpen could be a great move. The issue is almost entirely mental (his AAA numbers are staggering), so getting some zero-pressure innings on the major league level may be what he needs to turn the corner.
Kontos and Schugel don’t have much upside, but they should be solid. Brault will be the first guy up to move to the rotation when needed and I suspect he’ll be pretty strong in a long relief role.
Astros ranks:
#1 projected starting rotation WAR
#1 projected position player WAR
#2 projected bullpen WAR
Doh!
As an Indians’ fan, I’m a bit confused by the innings projections.
Matt Belisle was the last pitcher to make the team. He’s the 7th man in the bullpen and will be on a very short leash. For him to reach 55 innings, he’ll have to pitch much better than what his projections show.
Dan Otero has averaged 65 innings the past two seasons and was tapped by Francona to take over the Bryan Shaw role. So 35 innings seems very low for him.
Zach McAllister has averaged 60+ innings the past 3 seasons. Again, hard to seem him pitching fewer innings after the departure of Shaw plus others.
I’m also going to take the over on Tyler Olson both in terms of innings pitched and WAR. At the very least, he’s likely to be a dominant LOOGY. But if he continues his success from last year against righties, he could end up being much more.
The charts have been updated now based on your input
Thanks, much appreciated! I also think that Cameron Hill should be listed in the chart. He pitched well in spring training and Francona is reportedly very high on him. My guess is that he’ll get an opportunity before Ben Taylor.
Jeff, thought you updated the Indians bullpen usage. Still seeing 40 IP for McCalllister and 35 for Otero.
This may be topic for its very own article, but what are the chances that if CLE can’t resign either Allen or Miller, they go into their own “shallow rebuild” and trade some of their SPs (Cookie and Bauer). It’s not like they’re short on MiLB talent, but it’s tough to see how they contend outside of the AL Central in 2019 and beyond if they continue to lose some of their best talent to other teams in FA (which should largely be expected). Maybe I’m underselling the Tribe’s FO, but I don’t see how we retain Cookie, Allen, Miller, etc. or continue seriously contending for WS titles if we don’t maximize the trade value of some of these guys (Cookie in 2019 seems like an ideal trade candidate).
Some of this surely depends on the trajectory of the Twins and White Sox this year. Once you’re in the playoffs your true talent level only matters so much, etc. If Cleveland still looks like a comfortable division winner entering next year, not sure it’d be worth messing with. If you’ve got 2-3 years of great playoff odds and a handful of good prospects already lined up, trading away sure things for additional prospects might not be as strong a play as sitting tight and trying to augment what you already have with a free agent signing or two.
I think they’ll be okay going forward. They have $40+ million coming off the books next year that they can use to shore up some holes (Brantley, Miller, Allen, Chisenhall, Tomlin, McAlister, maybe Guyer).
Sure Miller and Allen are big losses, but the others are more like warm bodies whose production is easily replaced/improved for the same or less money (hate writing that about Brantley).
They can also potentially trade away guys like Kipnis, Perez and/or Gomes (with Yandy Diaz and Meija waiting in the wings) to fill other spots.
True, but they’ve got guys like Lindor and Clevinger moving through arbitration. Lindor will definitely be expensive; Clevinger could be depending on how he progresses. They’re probably pretty set in the IF with Lindor, JRam, Bradley, and Diaz coming up, but they could stand to add depth in the OF, SP, and the bullpen in the years ahead. I guess I see a shallow rebuild coming in the form of trades of Cookie and others to stock talent in the OF, maybe add another young SP or two and possibly add a BP piece or two as well. It’ll be interesting to see what they do. I personally view this as their best shot for a few years.
Rox in 4th position on these projections. Honestly, that strikes me as a little generous, but they effectively replace Holland with Davis and added Shaw to a unit that finished 7th in ERA- last year, so maybe not.
It still confounds me to think that the offense is going to be the piece that is most likely to hold them down as a team.
Here’s my question: why on earth are strikeout and walk rates listed per 9IP rather than per PA?
Why are they(as in, the unit as a whole) all projected for BABIPs (well) above .300?
Unless he gets injured, I think it is quite unlikely that Adam Warren only throws 40 innings for the Yankees. Unless Boone uses the bullpen significantly different from Girardi, Warren will get multiple innings early in games when the starters only go five innings or so (e.g. most days Sabathia or Montgomery start). Warren will very likely throw at least 60 innings.
My initial thought is that they probably considered that he’d also have some starts, and split his innings accordingly. But, if you check, he’s not listed there. So, I agree, that seems low.
Thanks for the great summary.
Small correction on the Cardinals entry: Cecil is listed as one of four who is no longer on the team, but he is still on the team (and is shown in the table).
Duke, Socolovich, Siegrist, Broxton, and Alcantara are also gone from last year (some in the middle of the season). I’m not sure if any of them were that important last year.
Aside from Alcantara being a decent prospect (who was included in the Ozuna trade), no, none of the others were very important, although in Siegrist’s case it was a lost year to injury with him still being young enough to have a decent chance at a rebound. Oh wasn’t that good last year, either.
I don’t think that the odds of a Siegrist rebound are all that great. His peripherals weren’t very good in 2016 either (4.43 FIP / 4.24 xFIP) despite a very solid 2.77 ERA in 2016.
Here are Siegrist’s annual FIP number by year starting in 2017 and going back from there: 4.38, 4.43, 2.91, 4.62, 2.29. So, looking at FIP, there are 114 innings in 2013 and 2015 saying that he’s a good reliever, a 2014 season that was also injury-plagued and not very good, and then his most recent 100 innings over the last two seasons of being a roughly-replacement level reliever.
So Siegrist has been excellent every year he’s been healthy, and two out of three of those years have also been backed up by excellent peripherals. It seems just as likely that his 2016 peripherals were an outlier than signifying a decline. FIP is a better predictor of future performance, but ERA is a better analyzer of past performance.
I’m a bit surprised that the percentage of bullpen innings only increased three points to 38.1% of total innings thrown from 35.1% over the past 10 years, or a little over six points from 31.8% thirty years back. It feels like it should be more. I wonder if that’s because relievers are being used in more key situations now earlier in the game? Thirty/fifty years back, bullpen innings might have been absorbed more by long men/mop-up types who came in when the pitcher failed, perhaps with the game even out of hand. Are bullpen innings today occurring earlier in the game, but in situations that are still considered high leverage compared to past usage?
My take is that, if it feels like it should be more, that’s because the philosophical change in bullpen usage has been more pronounced in the playoffs.
I don’t get your innings breakdown (90 as SP, 10 as RP) for Alex Reyes, as the Cardinals currently intend to use him more often in the bullpen upon his return. Something around a literal 50/50 split seems much more likely.
Also, does that 60 IP projection for Luke Gregerson account for the fact that he’s starting the season on the DL?
David Phelps just had TJ, so he’ll be missing ALL the bats, so to speak.
I know it’s really hard to project bullpen innings, but I have a nitpick with the Cards projections. Reyes is likely starting the year in the bullpen and the consensus from the coaching staff and front office is that they don’t want to bounce him from starts to the ‘pen, and they want to keep him around 100 innings. The plan is to use him as a multi-inning reliever with the option to move to the rotation late in the year. All that to say, 10 innings seems low. You can probably reallocate some innings from Gant, he seems much more likely to spot start than go to the bullpen.
Given that Koda Glover has already had some injury concerns this spring, I’m going to go ahead and take the under on that innings projection.
And now that I just found out he’s starting the season on the 60 day DL, I’m going to take the WAY under on that projection.
https://www.cbssports.com/fantasy/baseball/news/nationals-koda-glover-placed-on-60-day-disabled-list/
Cingrani’s projection for a negative WAR seems weird.
Why? He has pitched about 200 innings from 2014 forward and has piled up -0.3 fWAR. He hasn’t had a positive season since 2013.
That’s fair, I guess what I’m saying is that he should easily beat that projection. After he was traded to LA in July, he started throwing his slider much more often and had a 2.79 ERA, 1.86 FIP and 4.67 K/BB ratio.
“Kimbrel was at the height of his power last season, posting absurd strikeout and walk rates of 49.6% and 5.5%, respectively. They were career- and MLB-best marks.”
In 2012 Kimbrel struck out 50.2% of opposing batters.
Hicks to STL’s bullpen makes things interesting.
“With Brett Cecil, Juan Nicasio, Seung Hwan Oh, and Trevor Rosenthal — four of the top eight WAR contributors to the relief corps last season — having departed.”
Pretty sure Brett Cecil did not depart the cardinals. Should’ve had the great Craig Edwards proof read that one…
Small correction:
Brandon Morrow is the second person to pitch in all 7 world series games. Darold Knowles did it too.
Cardinals at 12 is very generous.
They have no closer,no setup.
OK, I know projections have a lot of risk and such built into them that make them what they are, but on a purely unscientific, gut feel level, doesn’t the difference between the Yankees dynamite bullpen and a pen of purely replacement level scrubs seem like it’s more than seven wins to anyone? Don’t flame me (downvote if you must), this is purely an unscientific look at the situation.
Also, re: the Brewers, those innings projections seem a bit off too…I have a hard time for a team that has been as aggressive as they have been in improving, believing that they’re going to give JJ Hoover 40 pen innings of below replacement level performance. Maybe that’s just his projection being what it is, and if he’s truly as bad as he projects to be, they’ll cut him for someone better. Or, they’ll save his poor innings for games they’re getting blown out in.