Five Random Bullpen Tidbits
All gathered from this Baseball-Reference page.
5. Seattle relievers have collectively entered 69 games when their team held the lead. That would be individual games, not team games. Meaning, simply, the Mariners have not necessarily held the lead in 69 separate games at the point when a reliever entered. That does not seem like a ridiculous number until you look at the second lowest total in the league, which happens to be Arizona’s pen at 90 games. That’s right, the Mariners are 21 games behind the second worst team in the majors.
4. Baltimore has had 111 relief stints of multiple innings pitched. That’s the most in the league by 15. Charlie Manuel, meanwhile, has only asked a member his pen to go multiple innings at a time on 46 occasions, a league low, although Houston and Arizona (of all teams) are not too far off.
3. Jerry Manuel’s Mets lead the league in number of appearances that have come on zero days rest. This isn’t much in the way of news for Mets’ fans. Pedro Feliciano takes fewer days off than the postal service (26 times he’s worked on zero days rest). It’s happened 93 times in total for New York, 89 for Cincy, then no other team is over 80, with Tampa Bay, Colorado, Atlanta, and Houston all sitting at 75 or more.
2. The Padres’ bullpen has allowed the fewest inherited runners to score. That’s not too much of a surprise (in part because the Friars’ relievers enter with a runner on base the least of any team in the league). What is a surprise is that Cleveland’s pen ranks second. That despite a 4.53 FIP (fourth worst in baseball).
1. Last, but not least. Three members of the Pirates’ relief corp are amongst the four pitchers who enter most often when their team is down. Javier Lopez (33 down, 14 ahead/tied), D.J. Carrasco (27 down, 17 ahead/tied), and Evan Meek (26 down, 20 ahead tied) are only interrupted by Matt Albers (29 down, 12 ahead/tied). Fifth belongs to the guy I wrote about earlier, Kanekoa Texeira (26 down, 6 head/tied).
Some expansions on point 4 would be interesting; the denominators of these stats are tricky, if you really want to get at a manager’s bullpen strategy.
For example, it would be useful (for NL teams) to know whether the reliever was due to hit in the next half inning, since they’ll rarely be left in.
The number of multiple inning opportunities would be good to know, too. A team with starters that regularly make it deep into games will naturally have fewer multiple inning appearances. The Phillies starters have 10 CG between them, tied for the most in the majors with the Mariners. I’d have to go through game logs to find the number of 8.X inning appearances, and 7.X inning appearances in road losses. Incidentally, this will account for some of the gap between Seattle and Arizona in point #1.
(I admit that to some extent, leaving starters in games late also speaks to a manager’s bullpen strategy and not just the starter’s quality. )