How do you rebuild a major league bullpen?
Bullpens today are integral pieces of building a winning team. Just looking at the contributions the Los Angeles Dodgers received from guys like Blake Treinen, Alex Vesia, Anthony Banda and Michael Kopech.
The runner-up New York Yankees ran into found money in the form of one Luke Weaver, formerly a journeyman arm that had yet to truly find his place in Major League Baseball, whose assignment to the Closer role resulted in a dominant string of performances.
The bullpen can be tricky, as you can have a season for the ages like the Cleveland Guardians had this past year, but then imploded in the post-season potentially costing them a trip to the big dance.
Or you can have a season like the Blue Jays had, where even games that you may have been in for 6 innings became total blow outs as soon as the ball was handed off from the starting staff.
In fact, the bullpen is an anomaly in baseball. Relievers can arrive as mainstays on the major league roster one year and find their way into minor league obscurity the next. This is why, as important as they may be, rear-guard arms generally do not command a large part of a team's payroll.
Cost is almost irrelevant, and the risk of investing in long-term contracts at massive dollar amounts is simply not palatable for most, if not all teams.
Yes, there are a few things that seem to be consistent with efficient relief arsenals. The ability to miss bats. The ability to throw strikes. Velocity. Movement. Deception. Intelligence. A variety of arm slots and angles.
With the amount of available data that is out there on every pitcher, hitters step to the plate with the advantage a significant amount of the time.
Lastly, it isn't always about playing the percentages. Managers today, just as they have since the beginning of baseball, need to use their instincts. The best bullpens, or more accurately, the bullpens that end up performing the best, are given every opportunity by their managers to succeed.
This requires an innate knowledge of their competitors, reading the room, and exhibiting a death-defying amount of decision-making skill, faith and trust in being able to pull the trigger at exactly the right moment.
The bottom line is that it takes a lot of things to fall into place at the right time, combined with the experience and expert execution of the man who pulls the strings in the dugout.
That being said, bullpen construction is rarely an exact science and lady luck can sometimes decide which battles are won, and which wars are lost.
| POLL | ||
NOVEMBRE 24 | 24 ANSWERS How do you rebuild a major league bullpen? What should the Blue Jays focus their 2024 off-season on? | ||
| Hitting | 13 | 54.2 % |
| Starting Pitching | 4 | 16.7 % |
| Bullpen | 7 | 29.2 % |
| List of polls | ||
