Was the Nats bullpen good or bad last year? Quick. Guess.
It was bad posting the 4th worst ERA in baseball.
The Nats best relievers put up some ok ERAs. Hunter Harvey (MY BOY!) was clearly the best of the lot throwing to a 2.82 ERA, but Kyle Finnegan and Jordan Weems had perfectly ok ERAs in the high mid 3.00s. And Carl Edwards Jr was doing around the same before his injury limited him to 30 innings this year. But outside of this there was almost nothing to look to. The Nats had a lot of bad relievers pitch for them last year. Mason Thompson, Andres Machado, and Cory Abbott threw the 4th, 5th, and 6th most innings for relievers and had 5.50, 5.22, and 6.64 ERAs respectively. Ten other guys were given innings in relief and only 1 (Robert Garcia) had an ERA under 4.76. Only three were under 6.33.
The good news is the rotation didn't ask for that many innings. so this was no worse than it had to be, but this lack of depth presents a problem to fix for 2024. You expect your pen to have issues. That's true for every team. You don't expect to get into questionable areas on your 4th best arm and stock 2-3 unusable arms at any time.
The Nats have started to bridge this gap by signing Dylan Floro. He's a guy whose stats (good control, never gives up homers, decent K rate, but does get hit) suggest a better ERA than he had last year. Yes, he gives up hits and it's not that fluky. He doesn't induce a lot of soft contact. But he does keep the ball on the ground and a .401 BABIP like he had last year is kind of crazy and unlikely to be repeated. The takeaway is the contact makes him a questionable mid-inning reliever to stop the bleeding but a decent arm to start a frame. It's not a bad gamble that he'll be something like a mid 3.00s ERA guy.
Presumed Plan : The Nats sign Dylan Floro. NAILED IT!
The Nats sign some cheaper guys to fill in that gap, but don't commit to that back end stopper. Floro is one. There will probably be a number two. Anything beyond that is likely to be chaff. Minor league contract guys that they bring in because they are available for org depth.
Reasoning behind Presumed Plan : Relief pitching is usually the last thing a team addresses. This is because the cost for value is bad here and it's not that hard to find a decent arm that can throw one inning from a teams stockpile. If you aren't competing or just about to, you let it slide and hope cheap internal alternatives show themselves.
The Nats are not competing in 2024.
But they won't do nothing because the bullpen was really half-terrible leaving them one injury away from disaster. Rainey coming back is good. Floro coming in is good. But the way they are talking they need at least one more Floro type.
My Take : Finnegan and Weems were not ok. I think they know this but they don't care. Hell they are selling Zuckerman on the fact that Machado was good when you have to parse it like "from August through mid September" to actually see that. So this is why I have them only making one more signing even though it leaves them with a pen that is:
Harvey : Good!
Rainey : Maybe Good but coming back from injury
Floro : Maybe good / Maybe Not good
Finnegan : Maybe good but a sneaky bad last year.
Weems : Probably Not Good
Machado : Probably Not Good
???
If their next signing slotted in above or after Harvey then fine, but you know it's going to be either a guy that might be good but has something against him or a guy that probably won't be good but not as terrible as the guys here.
So I think they are going to end up one arm short of a serviceable pen which leaves them at the mercy of injuries and crashes. If they had a deeper organizational depth at the position I might understand it but they don't - at least not for 2024.
But I guess I did say it would be the last thing a team looks to fix and the Nats aren't there yet so this is pretty much on schedule if a bit disappointing.
And that's probably a take away from this entire position by position review. The Nats aren't there yet. They know it. Their moves for 2024 will reflect that and what they think about their chances for 2025. So far these still aren't moves to set up a winner, which means they are not bullish on 2025. Which means YOU shouldn't be bullish on 2025. At least right now.
The off-season is young though. Maybe they'll surprise us. And really it's not the Nats organization now that you should really want to surprise you, it's the Nats young players in the summer of 2025.
9 comments:
Which of their crappier starters, if any, will make a surprise turnaround as a good reliever?
One has to believe test at least Trevor Williams will get pushed to the pen after nats sign 1 or 2 discounted starting pitchers. And Trevor in the pen should be on the expected “good” ledger - or at least better than our “bad” relievers.
I don't think ERA is a good measurement for the effectiveness of relievers. It suffers from small sample size. If a reliever gives us 3 runs in 1/3 of an inning in one outing, and then pitches 4 2/3 innings across 5 separate outings, the ERA will be high (4.50, if my math is correct), but the pitcher will have done well and be a valuable contributor. I think a much better measurement is WHIP, because walks are BAD for relief pitchers. BABIP and K/9 are also important.
I think Finnegan is fine.
I don't think the 2024 bullpen means anything. Teams can build a bullpen from year to year, and supplement it as necessary at the trade deadline (if the team is in contention, of course).
Once again, I don't understand the logic of "the team sucks, so we dn't need a servicable bullpen." Only makes sense if fans will come to the games regardless. Do you think the team actually tries to estimate the effect on attendance before deciding they don't need a servicable bullpen, or do they just think "hey we just avoided spending [$8] million😆," or whatever it would take to get some actual good arms?
Mason Thompson’s FIP was about a half run lower than Finnegan’s, albeit with a slightly lower workload (and definitely lower leverage situations). It’s possible that Mason could improve next season
kubla / Anon - Trevor Williams moving to the pen is possibly the best case scenario bc it means someone is pitching better than him for the rotation and it put Trevor back in a spot he did well before. Not saying it will work but it's a decent
PF - I was probably too hard on Finnegan given my general "if a guy keeps doing stuff even if the stats say something different then bet on his keeping doing stuff" belief. His WHIP was ok last year but his HR rate was too high. But he seems to do this - give up too many homers but make it work. The only concern would be that dip in K rate. If that keeps going down that would be an issue.
Mainelaker - I think they aren't going to spend to make the team actually good, just good enough to not alienate the fanbase (hopefully) and if people are going to come it'll be because the young players are compelling.
GCX - I mean, someone will be better someone will be worse. Gotta just base on the average player. I'll find someone else to bet on next year after being so right about Harvey.
I don't think there's anything more bone-crushingly depressing as a fan than watching your team give up a late lead and lose. If the starters has a mediocre outing, and the offense doesn't produce so the team falls behind and loses, you expect that from a poor team. You understand it in your heart and you look for positive takeaways from individual performances. But when your team plays well and is the lead, you start to hope. And when a bad bullpen gives up leads over and over, it's just too painful to even watch. That's why I wish they'd pay a bit more on a bullpen even though they aren't contending. It's a relatively cheap way to keep fans from dying inside.
Hunter Harvey is awesome
I have to admit, I spent a lot of the back half of 2021 wincing because the offense and starters would somehow still be functional after the big sell-off and the bullpen would blow nearly every lead they were handed. So I see what Donald is talking about. It feels worse, as a fan, to be 1-2 innings from victory only to blow it than it does to get beat from the start. But from a pure dollars-to-benefit standpoint, the bullpen is the last place to spend. I genuinely want Rizzo to do something like sign Yoshinobu or Montomery (or an equivalent position player, if there was one, which there isn't since I have no faith in Bellinger and the rest of the bunch are either too old or not good enough) to a 7-year deal to be a long-term anchor. I don't want him doing the same for Hader.
(Mind you, Rizzo generally hasn't even bothered to build a good bullpen when the team is actually good, especially in the later years of the run. There's a reason why Patrick Corbin pitched three of the most important relief innings in franchise history, and that's because by the end of the year Hudson and Doolittle were the only relievers Davey trusted at all, with good reason--and Doolittle was losing that trust fast at the end. To say nothing of...was it 2017, where the entire bullpen stank and Matt Albers, who wasn't even a part of the original 'pen, basically singlehandedly saved the front half of the season, before Rizzo traded for Kintzler, Madson, and Doolittle at the deadline?)
Post a Comment