If you had to pick any element of the 2018 Blue Jays roster that looked ready to break out, the bullpen would’ve likely ranked near the bottom of the list.
Toronto’s most valuable reliever last year using a combination of innings pitched and run prevention was Dominic Leone, and he’d been shipped to St. Louis in January for the right to watch Randal Grichuk give fans a cool breeze with each and every whiff at the plate. Another excellent right-handed setup man, veteran Joe Smith, was also pitching elsewhere courtesy of a summer 2017 trade with Cleveland. Left behind were all-star closer Roberto Osuna, along with a supporting cast that included some effective returnees, but also a trio of iffy mid-30s free agents coming off ugly seasons.
Add it all up and you had a pen that looked poised for another middle-of-the-pack finish. Instead, the 2018 Jays bullpen has done something else entirely: lead the American League with a 2.43 ERA, topping Houston, Cleveland, and other talented groups by a mile.
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So what gives? How did this dirt-cheap group of relative no-names become the class of the junior circuit? Can the Jays’ suddenly stingy pen keep the good times rolling?
One element working in its favour is the success of the relievers across the board. The pen’s top six innings guys — Osuna, Danny Barnes, Ryan Tepera, Tyler Clippard, John Axford, and Seung-hwan Oh — all sport ERAs below 3.00.
For Barnes and Tepera, those results build on last year’s success. When 40-year-old ball of charisma and hair Jason Grilli finally lost out to Father Time last season, it was Barnes and Tepera (along with Leone) who filled the void for a revamped setup corps. Barnes has been especially effective this year, striking out 14 batters against three walks across 12 innings, and delivering a healthy 2.25 ERA. Tepera’s been no slouch himself, with 14 punchouts against just three walks in 11 ⅔ innings, and a 2.31 ERA.
Those incumbents needed help this year, so General Manager Ross Atkins scooped up three more veteran righties to help the cause. Clippard’s been the best of that newly imported trio, allowing just five hits in his 13 appearances this year. Known for leaning heavily on a wicked changeup, Clippard’s has absolutely devoured opposing hitters with that pitch in 2018, holding them to a tiny .077 batting average with the change. Meanwhile, Clippard’s 91-m.p.h. fastball looks relatively slow compared to other short relievers in today’s game… but opponents have batted .111 against that pitch in the early going, with Clippard relying on steady command and the threat of the change to keep hitters off balance.
Other than impressive run prevention, the most striking marker of success for this year’s pen has been an extreme aversion to walks. Only three other bullpens sport lower walk rates than the 7.4 per cent mark put up by Toronto’s crew. If you’re looking for signs of hope that this early success might last, finding a group that absolutely pounds the strike zone is it.
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Teams are leaning on relief pitchers more than ever, with some of those relievers wielding fastballs that push 100-m.p.h. and managers growing more frightened of having their starters try to navigate a third time through the batting order. You would think that such an increased focus on relief pitcher performance would lead to a big jump in spending on bullpens.
The problem is that relief pitcher performance remains wildly unpredictable, for multiple reasons. First, you’re dealing with small sample sizes; a pitcher who tosses just 60 innings in a season will be disproportionately affected by a single bad night in which he coughs up four or five runs. Second, relief pitchers simply aren’t as good as starting pitchers. It takes more skill, more stamina, and a deeper repertoire to keep hitters off balance for 100 pitches a night than it does to do so for 10 or 15 pitches. So while you can count on the same small group of elite starters dominating just about every year, the list of top bullpen performers is constantly in flux.
That unpredictability can embolden teams to focus their resources on five-tool position players and top-of-the-rotation starters, on the theory that an expensive bullpen might be no more effective than one built on the cheap.
That’s where this year’s Jays pen comes in. As an all-star closer who ranks among the league leaders in saves every year, Osuna was bound to get paid, as his $5.3-million payout in his first year of arbitration eligibility shows. But not a single Jays reliever other than Osuna tops $2-million this year, not the returnees from last season (Barnes, Tepera, and Aaron Loup) nor the Clippard-Axford-Oh combo, each of whom arrived on cheapie one-year deals.
Pedigree in general also matters less when it comes to relievers than it does with, say, middle-of-the-order bats. Clippard, Axford, and Oh all arrived inexpensively because they were all buy-low pickups, with Atkins reasoning that a year of spotty results and nagging injuries represent buying opportunities for the notoriously fickle commodity that is bullpen help. Meanwhile Tepera’s a 19th-round draft choice who didn’t break through as a reliable big league reliever until his age-29 season. That’s still a way more impressive background than the one in Barnes’s bio. The Jays drafted him out of Princeton University in 2010, all the way down in the 35th round. All told, 1,055 players heard their names called in that year’s draft before the biggest pleasant surprise on one of baseball’s most unlikely hot-start teams.
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The bad news is that this might not last all that long. When evaluating pitchers, the most reliable indicators for long-term success tend to be nuts-and-bolts results like strikeout rate, walk rate, and groundball rate. Far less reliable are gauges like strand rate; if a group of pitchers is leaving a disproportionate numbers of baserunners on base at the end of innings, that’s typically just a sign of good luck, something that’s not likely to keep going for long.
The average pitcher’s strand rate hovers between 70 and 75 per cent every year. Jays relievers have stranded an astounding 90.2 per cent of runners, tops in the majors. While you like to see your bullpen bend but not break in pressure situations, there’s no way Jays relievers will continue to bail out the team’s starters — and themselves — anywhere near that often over a full season. A bottom-third 46.7 per cent groundball rate also makes you nervous, especially in one of the most homer-prone ball parks in all of baseball.
An impressive group of bullpen bargains that’s putting up zeroes thanks to terrific command of the strike zone, or a ragtag group of castoffs that’s been lucky for four weeks and is due for a major correction. You can apply either label to this year’s Jays bullpen and make a strong argument in that direction. In a highly competitive AL playoff race, the Jays’ fate could rest in large part on which of those two tags proves to be true.
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