Dombrowski Hopes Brad Keller Can Snap His Spell of Bad Bullpens

Of the many haunted residences in New Orleans, one in particular comes with a very specific warning: Don’t walk under the gallery. (As a brief architectural aside, a gallery is like a balcony, but it’s held up by posts or columns that go all the way to the ground, as opposed to L-shaped supports attached to the side of the building. The posts allow galleries to extend farther out from the building, typically spanning the sidewalk below. Having a gallery rather than a balcony was, and to some extent still is, seen as a status symbol in New Orleans.) This home sits in the French Quarter, and without getting too far into it because the details are pretty horrific, and this article is ostensibly about the Phillies’ signing free agent reliever Brad Keller to a two-year $22 million contract, the place is said to be haunted by the torture victims of an exceedingly cruel socialite who owned the mansion in the early 1830s.

The spirits who linger remain very unhappy (deservedly so!), and they seem especially offended by the thrill-seekers looking to exploit their suffering in the hope of experiencing some sort of supernatural activity. Many who have sought to prove themselves unbothered by the notion of tangling with a few disgruntled ghosts have marched proudly down the sidewalk under the mansion’s gallery. They did not just find themselves temporarily spooked by a burst of cold air or the smell of rotting flesh. Rather, they found themselves cursed with long-term bouts of bad luck and, for years after the fact, continued to report disturbing encounters with other worldly forces.

Now, is this story exaggerated and sensationalized by the ghost tour industrial complex that exists in New Orleans? Probably. But nevertheless, as a former ghost tour attendee, I’m left wondering if at some point early in his career Dave Dombrowski wandered through a heavily haunted bullpen.

Hear me out. In his three-plus decades of running baseball operations for the Expos, Marlins, Tigers, Red Sox, and Phillies, Dombrowski has assembled just three bullpens that ranked in the top 10 in the majors by ERA. In the interest of fairness, I will note that several of those shabby bullpens existed in the context of similarly shabby teams, so no one should have expected anything other than a sub-par performance from the relief core. But of the 30 rosters crafted by Dombrowski with middling-to-bad bullpens, 18 finished at or above .500, several made the postseason, and four appeared in the World Series. Even though he’s clearly been in situations with the resources to construct a winning roster, he still hasn’t mastered the art of the pen. And it’s not just that his bullpens haven’t been good; 17 of those 30 teams that fell outside the top 10 also ranked 20th or worse. That level of poor performance is what makes Dombrowski’s reliever acquisitions feel not just unlucky, but truly cursed.

So now here we are, with Dombrowski in his thirty-seven-hundredth year as the head guy of a baseball operations department, watching to see if he can finally exorcise his bullpen demons, or if he will have to lobby Phillies majority owner John Middleton to change the team’s powder blue to haint blue instead. And thus, Philadelphia’s third notable move of the offseason (after re-signing Kyle Schwarber and bringing in Adolis García to start in right field) is adding a right-handed reliever to the team’s lefty-heavy bullpen.

But Keller doesn’t just level out the handedness skew among the team’s existing batch of relievers, he also provides an important counterbalance in several other key areas where the Phillies struggled in 2025. First, Philadelphia’s relievers ranked 22nd in the majors in HR/FB rate and posted the fourth-highest rate of fly balls allowed — a lethal combo. Some of those homers are a side effect of playing home games at Citizens Bank Park, but not all of them; the Phillies still ranked fourth-highest in park-adjusted slugging percentage. Relatedly, they logged the fifth-highest Barrel% and the fourth-lowest GB%. Keller, meanwhile, finished 2025 among the best in the league in terms of both Barrel% (86th percentile) and GB% (95th percentile). His HR/FB rate of 7.8% checked in a full four ticks below league average (11.9%), and his fly ball rate was similarly below average (29.8%, versus the league-wide mark of 38.5%) because hitters are driving the ball into the ground nearly every time they make contact against Keller.

All of that sounds great, and it probably is, but this version of Keller has really only existed for one season. What if it’s an illusion? Digging below the surface stats, there’s no real reason to believe the Phillies have been hoodwinked by one fluky season. Keller spent his first five seasons in the majors starting for the Royals. Then thoracic outlet syndrome mucked up most of his year in 2023, and he spent 2024 getting fully healthy and remodeling himself into the pitcher he is now. After getting released by the 2024 White Sox (😬), Keller caught on with the Red Sox, who helped him gut his mechanics and construct a delivery that allows him to generate more power from his lower half and features a more efficient arm path. The result was an extra three ticks of velocity on his fastball. When he got to the Cubs in 2025, he continued making improvements by tweaking his pitch mix.

“I’m incorporating more sinkers this year,” Keller explained to David Laurila back in October. “I’m also incorporating more changeups. It’s kind of a split-change, if you will. I also have the sweeper, which I didn’t have a few years ago. Outside of that, I still have the hard slider I’ve had my whole career, as well as the fastball.”

As a former starter, Keller is able to make use of a full five-pitch arsenal, including a four-seamer, a sinker, a changeup, a slider, and a sweeper. The approach is mostly east-west, with the sinker and changeup breaking arm side, while the slider and sweeper move glove side. Those four offerings mirror one another’s spin direction, making it harder for the hitter to decipher between them. But even though Keller throws four pitches with horizontal movement and downward bite, opponents can’t fixate on that movement profile too much. Because at 43% usage, Keller’s primary fastball is still his 97-mph four-seamer with a rising action. And though his stuff is closer to average than eye-popping, the way the pitches complement one another produces an arsenal greater than the sum of its parts.

In the context of the Phillies bullpen as it currently stands, Keller is likely to slot into a matchup-based setup role alongside left-hander José Alvarado, leaving the ninth for closer Jhoan Duran. And even though reporting from Joel Sherman of the New York Post indicates that the plan is to continue using Keller as a reliever, he did draw interest as a starter this offseason. His mere existence as a potential conversion candidate could also provide a bit of roster flexibility if the Phillies come up short in their efforts to re-sign Ranger Suárez or add other free agent starters. After all, improving the bullpen is not the only remaining item on Philadelphia’s to-do list this offseason, the success of which still hinges on acquiring rotation depth and bringing back J.T. Realmuto.

But with any luck, signing Keller will break the curse dogging Dombrowski’s bullpens.