Let’s Make a Deal! Reliever Edition

Let’s play some word association. I’m going to name someone, and I want you to say the first two words that come to mind. Okay, I’m ready: Richard Bleier. Did “middle reliever” jump to the fore? You’re exactly right; Bleier spent 2022 chipping in mid-quality work in the middle innings for the Marlins. One more: Matt Barnes. Did you say “middle reliever” this time? If not, maybe it was “ex-closer.” Barnes was a roller coaster ride of a closer right until he wasn’t, and he spent 2022 pitching anywhere from the sixth to ninth inning depending on need, at least when he wasn’t on the IL.

This year, I can guarantee you that those two won’t be reprising their roles. On Monday, the Red Sox and Marlins swapped their relievers in a one-for-one trade. It’s not even a contract-based swap; both players are under contract for 2023 with a team option for 2024, and the Red Sox sent $5 million to Miami to even out the payroll expenditure on the deal. It’s simpler than that: I want your reliever, and you can take mine.

You can stare at this trade and see whatever you want to. For example, one side got a much better reliever, based on their stats from 2020 through 2022:

Except, wait, maybe the other side got a much better reliever:

The first reliever is Bleier, and the second is Barnes. They’re very different pitchers, but they accomplish very similar things despite their differences, providing above-average but hardly perfect relief innings. Bleier doesn’t strike anyone out and struggles with righties. Barnes walks far too many batters and saw his strikeout rate fall off a cliff in 2022.

Boston’s perspective on this trade is relatively straightforward for such a weird deal. They designated Barnes for assignment last week, which meant that they had to trade him or risk him refusing a minor league assignment and leaving for nothing. They were going to owe him roughly $10 million for that; instead, they’re paying roughly the same amount of money between Bleier’s salary and the cash they sent to Miami, but they also have Richard Bleier.

There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of Bleier. He’s a LOOGY living in a post-LOOGY world. The one constant in his career has been a complete inability to retire righties. Against lefties, he’s nails. He’s faced 549 of them in his career and allowed a .250 wOBA (3.02 FIP, if you’d prefer that as a metric). That’s really good – like, really good. That’s how good Carlos Rodón has been against lefties in the past three years. It’s how good Julio Urías has been, or Blake Snell. Bleier is great-lefty-starter level good when he gets to face opposing southpaws.

Against righties? We don’t need to talk about righties. Well, actually we do, unfortunately for Bleier. He’s faced 690 of them and allowed a .332 wOBA (3.92 FIP). That’s Bad Lucas Giolito territory, or late-career Sergio Romo. Or Paolo Espino? Maybe Chris Archer? The point is, Bleier against right-handers is someone you’d prefer not to have on your roster. He was downright abysmal against righties in 2022, surrendering a .336/.370/.513 slash line against them.

It’s not that Bleier doesn’t have a plan for righties; in fact, he has a pitch (his cutter) reserved exclusively for them. In 2021 and 2022 combined, he threw 400 cutters to righties and exactly one to a lefty. He also experimented with a changeup last season, again only for righties. They just… didn’t work. Neither pitch is objectively great; they’re exactly what you think they are, get-me-over pitches from a sidearm lefty who can’t rely on his normal sinker/slider combination against righties.

Maybe the Red Sox have some magical fix for Bleier, but at this point in his career I’m skeptical. He’s a fully formed product at this point, a 35-year-old who knows how to get lefties out. If they can find places for him to face two lefties out of his three batters, or to face a lefty to end an inning and then leave the game, he’ll be a perfectly reasonable piece. If he ends up facing a lot of righties, it probably won’t be a good time for the Fenway faithful.

Speaking of bad times for the Fenway faithful, Barnes had his fair share of meltdowns in his tenure as Boston’s closer – 18 meltdowns as calculated by our WPA model between 2021 and 2022, to be precise. That’s not even close to the most meltdowns in baseball, but it’s certainly more than you’d like, and I think that his uneven nature had a lot to do with his DFA. There are a lot of relievers capable of posting Barnes-esque results; maybe the Red Sox would prefer to have a different one just for variety’s sake. Bleier fits that bill – heck, he had more meltdowns than Barnes over the past two years, he just had them largely against righties.

For the Marlins, though, Barnes represents a reasonable gamble. Bleier is what he is, a perfectly cromulent lefty who won’t do much to change your team’s fortunes. Barnes has a much higher ceiling, and he could absolutely return to it. He might have had a disastrous 2022 (half as many strikeouts as in 2021 but more walks — not great, Bob), but he also hit the 60-day IL with a shoulder injury, and some of that ineffectiveness could be rust-related.

On the other hand, uh, he had a 7.94 ERA before getting hurt, and the strikeouts had already vanished. Maybe he was pitching hurt all year, but short of that, it was just a complete washout of a season. His stuff didn’t play, his command was off, and everything that could go wrong did. This is just something that happens to relievers sometimes; they’re good until they aren’t. Sometimes they rediscover it, and sometimes they fade into obscurity.

To be clear, Barnes is definitely capable of regaining his earlier form. His curveball and fastball are both superb when he’s on top of his game. He’s the kind of pitcher who can come in and set the middle of the other team’s order down on strikes, no questions asked. Again, he hasn’t done it recently, but the form is there. While projections might not show it, I think that gambling on big-stuff relievers is a worthy move given how good teams have become at working with relievers to fix what ails them.

As I mentioned, that gamble makes sense for the Marlins. Their closer right now is some combination of Dylan Floro and Tanner Scott. Scott has some gaudy projections, but he also has a career 4.61 ERA and leads baseball in meltdowns over the last two years. Floro has been steadier, but most of his value comes from his ability to suppress home runs, and that’s not the most stable of skills, to put it mildly.

Somewhere in Barnes, there’s a pitcher who posted a five-year stretch with a 35% strikeout rate. Whether the Marlins can unlock that form again, I have no clue. I like that they’re trying, though, because I don’t think Bleier had any shot of ending up atop their bullpen hierarchy. Barnes probably won’t end up there either, but there’s at least some chance that he will. If the Marlins decided they didn’t want Bleier’s lefty stylings – and that’s hardly an irrational decision, as he’s right on the cusp of bullpen playability in my opinion – a swap for a high-variance bullpen option seems eminently logical.