When Liam Hendriks visited the Toronto Blue Jays complex on Monday, it seemed to come out of the blue considering the club’s pursuit of position player stars George Springer and DJ LeMahieu — as well as the holes in their rotation.
No one would dispute that Hendriks has a lot to offer the Blue Jays. He’s been the best reliever in the game by WAR over the last two years (by a significant margin) and there’s no other bullpen difference-maker of his ilk available in free agency. No Blue Jays fans are going to be disappointed if Toronto reunites with the Australian right-hander, but the team’s interest in him doesn’t align with their stated priorities or clearest needs.
Trying to add some high-calibre bullpen help is less of a luxury than it may appear, though. In 2020 the narrative was that the relief corps was one of the Blue Jays’ greatest strengths, and that group was propping up a rotation that was disappointing outside of Hyun-Jin Ryu. For much of the season that notion was true, but it lingered beyond the point of being accurate.
Here’s a comparison between the Blue Jays bullpen in the first and second half of 2020:
First Half: 140.2 IP, 9.79 K/9, 4.67 BB/9, 0.64 HR/9, 3.26 ERA, 3.56 FIP, 2.6 WAR
Second Half: 128.2 IP, 8.32 K/9, 4.97 BB/9, 1.75 HR/9, 6.30 ERA, 5.66 FIP, -0.4 WAR
The group fell off a cliff, and were unrecognizable in the second half of the season due to a combination of Jordan Romano’s finger injury, declines by possibly overworked pitchers like Anthony Bass and A.J. Cole, plus overall regression to the mean. The end result was a bullpen that produced a 4.71 ERA over the course of the full season — good for 24th in the majors. Their peripherals weren’t much better with a 4.57 FIP and 4.84 xFIP, thanks to the unit’s bloated walk rate.
Not only are those numbers unimpressive, but there also isn’t a particularly good reason to believe they’ll drastically improve in 2021. In fact, if the season started tomorrow the Blue Jays would probably be in worse shape, even presuming Jordan Romano’s good health. The most obvious reason for that is the departure of Bass and Cole. That duo logged close to a fifth of the team’s bullpen innings last season (18.2 per cent) at a 3.31 ERA clip, providing stops in a number of high-leverage spots.
Although neither of those guys are all-world talents, those innings aren’t so easily replaced. As it stands, the Blue Jays’ best high-leverage guys are probably Romano, Rafael Dolis and Ryan Borucki from the left side, perhaps with a sprinkling of Julian Merryweather. While Romano feels like a safe bet based on his elite stuff, Dolis and Borucki have control problems that can make them wobbly in big spots — and Merryweather is an extreme injury risk as well as someone who could be deployed as a starter.
That question of deployment is another development that makes it hard to believe in the Blue Jays bullpen as currently constructed. In 2020, the team had the luxury of putting every starter who didn’t crack the starting rotation in a relief role because they couldn’t accumulate innings at triple-A. This year the team will stock the upper minors with depth starters instead of pushing them all to the bullpen.
Merryweather looked great out of the pen, but it’s possible he’s the sixth or seventh starter on the depth chart. Anthony Kay is probably the best example of someone who the team might value more as rotation insurance than a full-time reliever. Even Thomas Hatch, who had his moments as a multi-inning weapon, could find himself in the minors waiting for his opportunity to start. If you take Kay and Hatch out of the mix, along with the departing Cole and Bass, that’s 34.9 per cent of last year’s bullpen innings, and half the Blue Jays’ relief WAR.
Because the Blue Jays have done such a good job of finding cheap and effective veterans in recent years like Dolis, Bass, Cole, Dominic Leone, Tyler Clippard, Seunghwan Oh and Daniel Hudson, it’s easy to believe that the bullpen is easily and infinitely replenishable. Unless you’ve got a massive pipeline of homegrown arms like the Tampa Bay Rays, that’s simply not the case.
The Washington Nationals, for instance, spent years trying to plug their relief corps with veterans only to consistently see those efforts end in failure. They ended up winning their championship on the strength of their dual aces — and as few contributing relievers as humanly possible.
Stockpiling effective relievers isn’t easy, even if the Blue Jays have made it seem like that at times in recent years. Coming off a season where the bullpen was worse than its reputation and stands to lose significant contributors, some help from outside the organization could go a long way. If the Blue Jays brought aboard Hendriks it wouldn’t be a vanity purchase for a team looking to build a super bullpen, it would be an appropriate reaction to one of the club’s pressing needs.
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