I get it — many relievers aren’t that exciting. There’s the highest tier, and then there’s all the rest, and it can be hard to tell which among the rest are really and truly good. This time of year, seemingly dozens of adequate relievers find new teams, and they always have their various upsides. They all seem okay, which means few of them stand out. No one pays close attention to the winter meetings to see who’ll get a new option for the seventh or eighth inning.

But, look. According to reports, Tommy Hunter is signing a two-year contract with the Phillies. Now, one notable thing is that the Phillies are not good. They’re not good, and yet they’re signing Hunter, to go with their signing of Pat Neshek. Might as well do something. Nobody wants a terrible bullpen. Hunter isn’t in the Kenley Jansen tier, and he’s not thought of as being close to Wade Davis. It’s very possible you didn’t even realize Hunter just appeared in 61 major-league games with the Rays. It was quiet. But Hunter brought his game up to a new level. As a reliever in 2017, Tommy Hunter was legitimately great.

This gets to the core of what I mean. Behold Hunter’s career year-by-year walk and strikeout rates.

Hunter has always thrown hard. His fastball rides in around 96, and, if you can believe it, he throws something resembling a cutter that averages 94. Hunter has never before been on the major-league disabled list with an arm injury. His arm has always been good, and this past season, Hunter best put it to use. Among relievers, he ranked in the 89th percentile in wOBA allowed, by names like Brad Hand and Raisel Iglesias. Even better, by Baseball Savant’s expected wOBA allowed, he ranked in the 97th percentile. Behind Roberto Osuna, and in front of Mike Minor. Hunter, you could say, broke out, and from the sounds of things, he went and got Raysed.

One thing the Rays did was have Hunter throw fewer and fewer four-seam fastballs.

Hunter leaned more often on his cutter, especially against lefties, and partially as a consequence, you can see a distinct change in Hunter’s overall pitch pattern. Below, on the left, you see where Hunter threw his pitches from 2014 through 2016. On the right, you have 2017.

Hunter stayed away against righties, and he stayed in against lefties. Armed with good command, Hunter was able to use his curveball off of that arm-side cutter, and lefties slugged just .261. Righties didn’t fare a whole lot better, so, when you combine everything, Hunter was a hard-throwing strikeout reliever who could retire opponents on both sides of the plate.

What Brandon Morrow had going for him, Hunter basically had, too, and Hunter is younger, with a better record of health. It’s a little strange, therefore, to see Hunter sign with a team unlikely to feature in the race, but then, every team wants late-inning stability, and obviously there’s the trade consideration down the road. It’s possible Hunter was met with some industry skepticism; teams might not have known whether Hunter could stay so successful as part of another, non-Rays organization. Now the Phillies will give him some dozens of innings, if everything goes well, and then if Hunter looks more or less the same, he’ll be in great July demand. Power pitchers who throw strikes in big situations are limited in number, and every team at the deadline wants a deeper bullpen.

There’s nothing unique here about the Phillies’ approach. Bad teams have long looked to flip relievers midseason. Hunter is the real story, looking like a potential shutdown setup guy a year after settling for a minor-league contract. All he needed was a handful of pointers from his handlers in Tampa Bay. The rest of it was all up to him.

The task of assembling a pitching staff is as much about quantity as quality. With injury rates over 50% for most pitchers in the age of the ten-day DL, you need more than the ten starters you used to need, in order to withstand the assault that is a full season of throwing baseballs hard. So, even though Drew Smyly won’t suit up for the Cubs until late next season at best, it makes sense to put him on the roster, slot him in the Disabled List, and hope he can contribute. Especially since the cost is low.

The Cubs will be on the hook only a little bit more than the Mariners would have owed Smyly had they retained his services through his last year of arbitration. The left-hander, despite being in the midst of rehab for Tommy John surgery, would have gotten around $7m in arbitration. Chicago is giving him a base salary of $10 million, with the potential for more.

Smyly deal with #Cubs is two years, $10M plus the potential to earn more than $7M in performance bonuses, source tells The Athletic. Pitched with #Rays for Maddon and Hickey.

— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) December 13, 2017

Return rates on Tommy John surgery are good enough that this could easily be a good contract for the Cubs. Perhaps Smyly wanted to lock in two years after his extended arm issue took from the World Baseball Classic until June last season to really nail down. Perhaps he understood that, after only topping 150 innings twice in his career, and being pegged as one of the biggest injury risks in baseball in a 2016 study by Bradley Woodrum, he needed to have a healthy 2019 before he would get a longer-term deal anyway.

This way, the lefty with the intriguing stuff — almost nothing he throws cuts towards his glove side, and his extreme over-the-top release point means that everything seems to fade away from righties — gets to take his rehab slowly. A 12-to-15 month timeline has him back mid season at best, though it does seem worth pointing out that pitchers that take longer to come back from Tommy John have better outcomes. Any longer, and he might miss most of the 2018 season.

When he does come back, the Cubs could use him as a lefty out of the pen, since Mike Montgomery is their second lefty behind Justin Wilson, and Montgomery may be headed to the rotation as it stands right now.

Or they can slot him into their 2019 rotation, at a low cost of a $3 million base salary. Sounds like a good way to maybe help the staff now and almost definitely help later on.

Just yesterday, the Rangers signed Chris Martin for two years and $4 million. Martin is a righty reliever who will turn 32 next June, and his major-league ERA is 6.19. If you try to Google him to examine his background, you have to be selective with your queries, because otherwise you just learn an awful lot about popular music. The Martin signing is a fairly easy one to ignore, all things considered.

I can’t make any promises. I don’t know what Martin might be capable of. But I feel almost obligated to try to talk him up. This seems like a forgettable deal, but Martin appears to have major upside. And the key to this is that, since Martin last pitched in the major leagues, he spent a couple of years in Japan.

Martin has been a teammate of Shohei Ohtani, with Hokkaido. Two years ago, he picked up 21 saves, reflecting the kind of trust he quickly earned. Because of an ankle injury, Martin has thrown just 88.1 innings over two seasons, but his performance was almost immaculate. I’ll tell you what I mean! Between 2016 – 2017, 190 different pitchers in the NPB threw at least 50 innings. Martin ranked first out of all of them in runs per nine, at 1.32. He ranked sixth in walk rate and seventh in strikeout rate, and he ranked second in K-BB%. The only pitcher ahead of him, in that final stat: Dennis Sarfate, who is outstanding. Martin hasn’t been quite on Sarfate’s level, but Sarfate seems like one of the best relievers in the world. Martin, meanwhile, seems just plain good.

If you’re curious about the stuff — when Martin last pitched in the majors, his fastball was 95, and he had a cutter at 90 and a slider at 83. This past season in Japan, Martin threw his fastball at 95, with a cutter at 91 and a slider at 84. He also started to show a splitter, at 87. This is all coming from a righty who stands 6’8. Martin just threw one of the better fastballs in Japan, and while the average fastball in the majors, of course, is harder, the stuff is good enough to play. Martin qualifies as a power reliever, with three or four pitches at his disposal. The numbers leave little reason for doubt.

The uncertainty is always the same. NPB isn’t the same as MLB, and so you can’t bring the same hitters over. Martin is going to face tougher competition, and the Rangers are hoping his overall command improvements are real. But, at the very least, Martin deserves this second shot. If a pitcher were this effective in Triple-A, you’d want to see him in a big-league bullpen, and Japanese baseball is better than that. The Rangers in 2016 got a good relief season out of Tony Barnette, who had also just pitched in Japan, and I’m sure that only encouraged them. In a market where everyone wants bullpen help, Martin is a potential bargain. Players from Japan have their prices driven down, perhaps unfairly. Finding inefficiencies is always the goal.

I don’t know if Martin will be good against the world’s best hitters. He was extremely good against the world’s second-best hitters. He’s going to cost a relative pittance. While this probably won’t win the Rangers a World Series, I could never look down on a move like this.