JABO: The Dodgers Cheap Excellent Bullpen
During Ned Colletti’s tenure as the General Manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers, a hallmark of the franchise was lavish spending on relief pitchers. A year ago, their Opening Day bullpen combined to make $33 million, by far the most of any team in baseball. To pitch in front of All-Star closer Kenley Jansen, Colletti shelled out big money to sign former All-Star closers Brian Wilson and Brandon League; even his idea of a bargain signing was signing injured former All-Star closer Chris Perez and hoping he returned to his prior form.
Colletti valued experience and track record, going after guys who were on the downsides of their careers, but had been effective ninth inning guys in the past. Unfortunately for him and the Dodgers, he routinely overestimated the shelf life of a relief pitcher, and ended up with expensive, ineffective setup guys incapable of getting the ball to Kenley Jansen with a lead. Last year, those three combined to give the Dodgers 158 mediocre innings, posting a 3.71 ERA and a miserable 4.17 FIP; they also combined to make $20 million between them, a total higher than 25 other MLB teams spent on their relief corps.
Last winter, the Dodgers replaced Colletti with Andrew Friedman and Farhan Zaidi, poaching two analytically-inclined executives from the Rays and A’s respectively. Those two franchises have spent years building bullpens on the cheap, and not surprisingly, the Dodgers 2015 bullpen looks a lot different than their 2014 bullpen.
Gone is Brian Wilson, released despite the fact that he exercised his $9 million player option for the 2015 season; the new-look Dodgers decided they’d rather pay him that money to sit at home rather than let him take the mound. League is on the disabled list with a shoulder problem and won’t be joining the team any time soon. Perez signed a minor league deal with the Brewers this winter, and currently has a 9.00 ERA in Triple-A. Even Kenley Jansen, the team’s one actual good reliever from a year ago, has yet to throw an inning for the team in the regular season, as he had surgery to remove a growth from his foot during spring training.
From four closers to no closers in a year’s time, the Dodgers bullpen couldn’t possibly be any different than it was a year ago. And despite their lack of anything resembling a proven ninth-inning workhorse, LA’s bullpen has been nothing short of amazing so far.
The current group, listed with their 2015 walk, strikeout, and groundball rates, are included in the table below.
| Name | BB% | K% | GB% |
|---|---|---|---|
| Joel Peralta | 6% | 22% | 15% |
| J.P. Howell | 11% | 26% | 58% |
| Yimi Garcia | 4% | 46% | 23% |
| Pedro Baez | 5% | 33% | 54% |
| Juan Nicasio | 16% | 32% | 54% |
| Paco Rodriguez | 8% | 33% | 57% |
| Chris Hatcher | 5% | 37% | 67% |
| Adam Liberatore | 0% | 33% | 67% |
Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.
Dave is the Managing Editor of FanGraphs.
I love Garcia’s FIP.
And Hatcher’s E-F of 11.37.
I liked how Bucky Weston educated Dave on SSS in the comments.
So, you shouldn’t have to spend much on a good bullpen (which is not unique to LA), unless a certain GM does so, then it is also a good idea to spend big on the bullpen. Actually Friedman himself sunk a great deal into Balfour last year.
I’m going to go with the concept that bullpen success is inherently a SSS endeavor and luck plays an awfully big role in which moves look good and which ones look bad. After all, WAR indicates that most RP fail to make a dent above replacement level.
I think the key is, pay for what you’re going to get, not break the bank for what’s already happened.
Ned, like so many of his moves prior (beyond RP), shelled out money based on what players had done, not what they could reasonably be expected to do.
The numbers Dave is showing here were mostly put up in low-leverage situations. 14 game into the season, this bullpen has 2 one-run Saves, 1 Blown Save and 3 Losses. It might be just a tad early to be proclaiming them a rousing success.
The article sounded good overall, I’m sure, to many people, but after thinking about it, I have some huge issues with the analysis.
First off, isn’t it too soon to be tooting their horn regarding anyone’s performance so far, particularly for relievers? Isn’t there SSS at work here, in a huge way, because the relievers have not been used all that much?
Second, even if we take the performances (of roughly two weeks) at face value, I used your link to pull up Fangraphs LA bullpen data and went into each relievers profile to compare performance so far and the projected rest-of-season performance and all of them are overperforming right now, by a large margin. Following are K/9 but across most metrics this is true:
Garcia: 14.09 K/9 vs. 10.28 (ROS)
Hatcher: 14.40 vs. 9.61
Howell: 10.38 vs. 8.85
Nicasio: 12.86 vs. 7.83
Baez: 13.50 vs. 8.00
Which leads to this dichotomy:
Garcia: 1.17/1.11/2.71 (2015 ERA/FIP/xFIP) vs. 2.94/2.88 (2015 ROS ERA/FIP).
Liberatore: 0.00/1.22/2.17 vs. 3.29/3.36
Rodriguez: 2.08/1.45/1.45 vs. 3.36/3.33
Hatcher: 10.80/1.67/2.21 vs 3.26/3.14.
Peralta: 0.00/2.13/4.18 vs. 3.64/3.51
Howell: 2.08/2.14/2.77 vs. 3.29/3.61
Nicasio: 1.29/2.35/3.13 vs. 4.33/4.21
Baez: 3.00/3.23/2.20 vs. 3.86/3.97
Except for Hatcher’s ERA, every one of the Dodgers relievers so far is over achieving vs. their projected abilities (ERA and FIP) by a large margin. If you average the ROS ERAs, you get an overall projected bullpen ERA and FIP of 3.50 for the rest of the season. The average era for relievers in the majors right now is 3.45 and in 2014, 3.58 for the whole season. So the bullpen of the Dodgers is projected to be average, roughly, for the rest of the season.
Which suggests that LA is not maximizing its chances to win it all by skimping on their bullpen this season. Tom Tippett long ago analyzed which teams did well in the playoffs and he determined that having a good bullpen is key to doing well in today’s (meaning baseball a dozen years ago or so, when he did the study, but undoubtedly still valid today) game.
By putting together a bullpen that is roughly average, that is a weak link in their roster, and means that their two-man GM team failed to build a team equipped to compete for the trophy, then, based on the above analysis of their relievers they got now. In other words, they could potentially waste (by hurting their playoff chances) all the money they spent on payroll by going cheap on the relievers right now.
Perhaps they hope to fix this by trading for some better relievers by the trade deadline, as the projected bullpen performance would be much better if they go rid of Nicasio, Peralta, and Baez and replaced with better pitchers. But right now their bullpen looks more like it will hold them back, rather than lead the way, as the article suggests.
To illustrate Obsessivegiantscompulsive’s conclusion – see what happened to the Dodger’s pen in the 3 games against the Giants recently.