Call Him Medium Leverage Ben

About six weeks ago, Eric Longenhagen published his Dodgers Top Prospects list. It ran 51 players deep, and was headlined by some of the trendiest names in prospect circles: Roki Sasaki, Dalton Rushing, Zyhir Hope. Down at no. 24, headlining the 40 FV group, was a blurb that started with the following phrase: “Low Leverage Ben.”

Ben Casparius is a bulk reliever. He is now what the fifth starter in a four-man rotation was 40 years ago. Most baseball fans know him as the rookie who got called on to make a spot start in Game 4 of last year’s World Series. He’s the guy you call on when Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Jack Flaherty, and Walker Buehler have all taken their turns in the rotation, and Clayton Kershaw is hurt. And so is Tyler Glasnow. And Tony Gonsolin. And Bobby Miller. And River Ryan. And Gavin Stone. And Emmet Sheehan. And (ironically) Kyle Hurt. And Shohei Ohtani, or half of him, anyway.

I guess when you’re in the double digits on the Dodgers’ starting pitcher pecking order, getting “Low Leverage” as a nickname is an occupational hazard. But I don’t like it. Mostly because it’s one short of the three-beat alliteration that made “Late Night LaMonte” roll off the tongue so felicitously. (My condolences to LaMonte Wade Jr. on his recent DFA.)

But also because it’s not true.

Before Wednesday’s games, there were 187 qualified relievers in major league baseball. Casparius is 129th in pLI (average leverage index), but 74th in gmLI (leverage index when entering the game). All due respect, that’s medium leverage. And despite having a short stick to push with, Casparius is 16th among relievers in WPA, two spots ahead of Ryan Helsley.

That’s because Casparius has been really good this year. Out of those 187 qualified relievers, he’s 29th in K-BB%, third in FIP, and second — SECOND — in WAR. WAR comes in such small increments that it doesn’t always (or even all that frequently) paint a comprehensive picture of reliever performance. But the top of this year’s leaderboard is a list of closers and elite one-inning setup men having great years. Plus the Dodgers’ no. 12 starting pitcher.

If I needed three outs in the ninth inning of a World Series game, I don’t know that Casparius would show up near Muñoz or Hader or Suarez on my list of guys to call. But in 39 innings this year, Casparius has struck out 44 batters and walked just seven. He’s allowed an opponent batting average of .193 and just a solitary home run. His ERA (2.54) is right in line with his xERA (2.53) and actually almost a run worse than his FIP (1.69).

I won’t bore you with a granular rundown of Casparius’ advanced numbers — you all know how to find Baseball Savant — but he’s missing bats, he’s getting opponents to chase, he’s avoiding hard contact… I don’t know what more you’d want from a reliever. I feel pretty comfortable saying he’s more than bullpen filler.

Apart from Casparius’ unexpectedly good statistical record, two things about him are of interest to me: First, how he’s doing it. Second, how the Dodgers are using him.

Casparius throws from a high three-quarters arm slot, with a downward arm stab that keeps the ball behind his body. With nobody on base, he also takes a big step toward first base and drags his foot all the way across the rubber over the course of his windup. It’s an odd motion that gives him the sense of pitching in 3/4. I’ll show you what I mean here.

If I couldn’t show you that video, I would’ve said that Casparius’ pitching motion is one part Tommy Hanson and two parts Viennese waltz. (Feel free to disagree on that comparison; I only watched one season of So You Think You Can Dance.)

After all that rigmarole come four pitches: a four-seamer, a cutter, a sweeper, and a curveball. Both breaking balls have above-average movement in both directions; righties see more of the sweeper than all other pitches combined, while lefties see a mix of all four of Casparius’ offerings, with more curveballs than sweepers.

The sweeper is devastatingly effective, and it’s helped Casparius hold same-handed hitters to a .145/.163/.205 batting line this year. I was intrigued that Casparius can get lefties out without a changeup or a splitter — or even a sinker, or any pitch with significant arm-side movement — and if there’s a weakness for Casparius, that’s it. Nevertheless, left-handed hitters are hitting .262/.318/.344 against the righty, so it’s not a fatal weakness yet.

As good as the sweeper is, Casparius is dining out on his two-fastball pairing. He’s one of only three pitchers in baseball who has thrown two fastball types 100 or more times this year, with an opponent wOBA under .250 for both.

That’s because each pitch is a little weird. The four-seamer has top-of-the-scale rise, but almost no arm-side run. The cutter, meanwhile, has poor vertical movement but four extra inches of glove-side movement compared to cutters of similar velocity. In other words, when a hitter faces Casparius, the cutter goes right when it’s supposed to go up, and the four-seamer goes up when it’s supposed to go left.

It seems like the most obvious thing in the world for someone in the Dodgers organization to show Casparius how to throw a changeup, and stretch him out into a starter. He’s on pace to throw about 100 innings this year, with a FIP of 1.73. If he could do that over 180 innings, he’d win the Cy Young Award.

Instead, Casparius has made just one start this year, with his other 36 2/3 innings coming across 19 relief appearances. Only A’s righty Mitch Spence has thrown more innings out of the bullpen this year; only Spence has more relief appearances of four or more outs, and only Spence and White Sox righty Mike Vasil have more relief appearances of at least six outs.

The Dodgers need the innings. They currently have seven starting pitchers and eight relievers on the IL, including six starters on the 60-day IL. That doesn’t count Ohtani, who’s running out there bashing dingers every night from the DH spot but hasn’t thrown a pitch in a professional game since August 2023.

Ohtani was already injured when he joined the Dodgers, so you can’t blame his absence on an organizational profligacy with the connective tissue of the arm. But the other guys… yeah, the Dodgers have a reputation for struggling to keep their guys healthy.

Can you name the pitcher who led the Dodgers in innings last year? Or here’s a better way to put it: How many guesses would you have needed to get to Stone?

Last year’s Dodgers had just two pitchers — Stone and Glasnow — throw 100 or more innings, the fewest ever for a pennant-winning team in a non-COVID-shortened season. (Both pennant winners in 1981 had four such pitchers; both World Series contestants in 1995 had five.) They were the third World Series-winning team that didn’t have a single pitcher qualify for the ERA title, and the only one that didn’t get a pitcher to 90% of the innings threshold.

Fortunately (I guess), the Dodgers know this is a problem, and compensate. Even with an entire rotation-and-a-half in the infirmary, the Dodgers still don’t really need to use Casparius in the rotation. In the bullpen, however: Kirby Yates, Blake Treinen, Brusdar Graterol, Luis García, Michael Kopech, and Evan Phillips are all on the IL, and Tanner Scott has been awful. That’s not just seven names — all of them with a recent history of high-leverage performance — it’s something like $50 million in salary. Even the Dodgers need bulk to make up for that.

So how do you get that kind of bulk out of one guy? You throw him more than one inning at a time, and not necessarily at the end of the game. Casparius has made 19 relief appearances this year to date; he’s entered the game after the sixth inning just five times, and after the seventh inning just twice. And in 15 of those 19 occasions, the Dodgers were either leading or trailing by two or fewer runs when Casparius took the mound. Casparius entered another game to lead off the bottom of the sixth with the Dodgers ahead three runs, and another with a runner on first and two outs in the sixth with the Dodgers up four. So only twice in 20 appearances (including that lone start) has Casparius come in to pitch with the outcome already decided.

This reliever usage pattern is one of a thousand things I’ve been thinking about since I got Bill James’ New Historical Baseball Abstract for Christmas when I was in middle school. Therein, James wrote an essay criticizing the one-inning closer role as an inefficient use of a relief ace; such a pitcher would give a team more bang for its buck if used more frequently at any point in the second half of the game, when the score was close in either direction — not just to protect a lead.

Sabermetric orthodoxy quickly solidified around something like this idea, culminating in Terry Francona’s bullpen usage in the 2016 playoffs: with Cody Allen as a traditional three-out closer, and Andrew Miller as an all-purpose multi-inning stopper in high leverage. College closers are also expected to go multiple innings and appear in high-leverage moments earlier in the game, but that usage is easier to navigate when you play four or five times a week and not six.

Obviously, that’s a couple notches richer than how Dave Roberts has been using Casparius. But this multi-inning medium-leverage mid-game relief role is one I’m delighted to see in real life, because whenever I’ve gotten into a baseball video game, I’ve isolated a reliever to use in this fashion. I mentioned this last summer when I wrote about 2003 All-Star Lance Carter, my 23-game winner in MVP Baseball 2005 for GameCube. (I also had an OOTP save years ago where Wilmer Font went 31-0 in a 130-inning relief season.)

A pitcher who’s used like Casparius (currently 4-0) could rack up tons of wins. In 2023, Mike Baumann was the Orioles’ designated down-one-run-after-five-or-six guy and ended up going 10-1 with some pretty unremarkable rate stats in nowhere near the volume Casparius is on track for.

Casparius is currently on pace for 95 relief innings, which would be the most for a reliever since… Ryan Yarbrough last year. Mostly for the Dodgers. I confess I was hoping for a more impressive and/or obscure name there.

A strict two-innings-every-three-games regiment would get Casparius over 100 relief innings; a feat that’s only been achieved seven times in the 21st Century by six different pitchers, three of whom were named Scot or Scott: Scott Sullivan, who did it twice, Scot Shields, and Scott Proctor. (Yarbrough is also on this list, in his capacity as the original bulk reliever behind the opener for the Rays in 2018.)

I think this is going to be the next trendy thing in relief pitcher usage: the two-inning guy for the middle third of close games. It makes too much sense; starters don’t go deep in games anymore, and one-inning guys can be unreliable. There’s a need for a bridge pitcher, and that role gets the most out of guys like Casparius, who might lack the zip required to close but would also struggle to turn over a lineup more than once. A generation ago, that kind of pitcher could make a living as a spot starter, but not anymore.

I suppose this is what the spot starter looks like in 2025. And the Dodgers have a good one.