The Bullpen Sleepers
There are few things that we disagree with the mainstream media on more than the value of veteran relievers. I guarantee you that you’re going to see a ton of stories this spring about how the M’s bullpen is a huge weakness, how their lack of experience is going to cost them a lot of wins, and how the loss of Putz and Green is going to affect the entire pitching staff. Whether it’s Baker, Street, LaRue, Arnold, whoever… this is an article that you can just count on getting published at some point in the next month or so.
I’m here to tell you that this bullpen could actually be pretty good. There are an awful lot of interesting arms coming to camp with the M’s, and finding six solid relievers isn’t going to be as tough as people might think. We’ve talked about the nifty low-cost pickups of Tyler Walker and David Aardsma already, and most of you are aware of what to expect from Roy Corcoran, Mark Lowe, Miguel Batista and Ryan Rowland-Smith. But, there are other guys coming to camp that could prove pretty useful out of the pen this year, and this post is about them. In no particular order:
Chris Seddon, LHP, Non-Roster Invitee
Seddon is a 25-year-old LHP who spent the last three years starting in Double-A and Triple-A for the Rays and Marlins. He has generic left-handed pitcher stuff – an 88 MPH fastball, an 81 MPH slider, and a 78 MPH change-up. With no real out-pitch against RHBs and just average command, Seddon isn’t going to have much of a career as a starting pitcher in the big leagues. However, check out his career minor league splits:
Vs LHB: 592 batters faced, 7.4% BB%, 17.2% K%, 52% GB%, 6 HR allowed, 3.54 FIP
Vs RHB: 1992 batters faced, 9.2% BB%, 17.3% K%, 39% GB%, 66 HR allowed (!), 5.06 FIP
The home run rates ought to jump off the page. 92% of his career minor league home runs have come off right-handed bats despite just 78% of his opposing batters being right-handed. His big fatal flaw as a minor league pitcher is giving up long balls to right-handed hitters. Against lefties, he’s just fine.
So, now, the team has an opening in the bullpen for a left-handed reliever who can get left-handers out, and they happen to play half their games in a park that is extremely hard on right-handed power hitters. The park somewhat neutralizes Seddon’s fatal flaw, and his best skill is one the team has need of. And remember, these are his numbers as a starter – move him to the pen, and his velocity is going to jump a couple of ticks. There’s no reason Seddon couldn’t be a league average LOOGY right now, and if he takes to a bullpen conversion well, there’s George Sherrill-type potential here.
Shawn Kelley, RHP, Non-Roster Invitee
We talked about him initially when the NRI list came out, but it bears repeating – Kelley just killed Double-A batters last summer and dominated the Venezuelan Winter League a few months ago. His fastball/slider combination gives him two pitches that can miss bats and he’s got pretty good command of both. He doesn’t have a great weapon against lefties, so he might not end up as a future closer, but if you’re looking for a guy who could emerge as a right-handed strikeout reliever, he’s the main one to watch.
It’s unlikely that Kelley makes the roster out of spring training, as he’s currently penciled in as Tacoma’s closer to start the year, but it wouldn’t be surprising at all to see him join the team at some point this summer. He’s the kind of pitcher who won’t need much time in the minors.
Jose Lugo, LHP, Rule 5 Selection
As a rule 5 pick, Lugo has something of a leg up on the competition for the last spot in the bullpen. If the M’s don’t keep him on the big league roster, they lose him, so if the team has a hard decision to make, Lugo’s probably getting the tiebreaker. And, really, he should – he’s a power left-handed arm who gets extreme sink on his fastball. His secondary stuff needs a lot of work, but think of him as something like a left-handed Roy Corcoran with a bit more velocity – the groundball rate makes up for a lot of his other weaknesses.
Yes, he was 24 and hasn’t pitched above A-ball yet, but he’s faced 1,350 batters and has a career GB% of 59%. Not surprisingly, he doesn’t give up home runs – just 13 in 321 innings as a pro. It’s hard to hit the ball over the wall when you’re just punching it on the ground all the time. And, even without any real good secondary stuff, he’s run a career 2.4 K/BB rate, even holding his own against RHBs. He’s probably not going to be a great reliever this year, but a left-handed power sinking fastball out of the pen isn’t something to be ignored. He’ll probably spend most of the season throwing low leverage innings and working on a strikeout pitch of some sort, but don’t sleep on Lugo – he could turn into a nifty little arm down the stretch.
Eric Hull, RHP, Non-Roster Invitee
A little guy with big numbers, Hull has fallen victim to the anti-short-RHP bias. He’s listed at 5’11 but is probably more like 5’9, so that gets him written off in a lot of circles from the start. However, he’s got nothing left to prove in Triple-A, where he’s just blown hitters away the last few years. He’s struck out 25.4% of the batters he’s faced as a professional pitcher, and is at 28.5% against RHBs. His FIP against righties in Pawtucket last year was 1.82. He doesn’t throw 94, but he pitches like a guy who does.
Like Kelley, he’s unlikely to break camp with the team, but he’ll provide depth in Tacoma should the team needed a right-handed reliever who can generate swings-and-misses. His upside is as a situational reliever, but if the team isn’t getting good performances from the Walker/Lowe/Aardsma/Corcoran/Batista group, they’ll have another option down on the farm.
The best way to build a good bullpen is to stick a ton of interesting relievers in a dog fight and give the jobs to the winners. That’s exactly what the M’s have done this winter, and they’ll come to Peoria with something like 13 or 14 potential bullpen options with some potential. Even if you haven’t heard of these guys before, that doesn’t make them talentless hacks.
There’s a good chance that, by the end of the year, the M’s bullpen will be one of the pleasant surprises of the season.
Where would Josh Fields fit in with this group, if signed? Would he be markedly better than some or all of these? Is he even worth signing? And note, I realize he is not ready to join the big league club in April, but then you’re predicting some on this list will not join the M’s until later in the year, as well.
Great stuff, Dave.
I’d point out that Seddon’s been a starter his entire career, and it’s possible he’d get a bit of a boost on his FB coming out of the pen.
Hull and Kelley both seem to limit the damage vs. lefties by giving up a lot more walks; you’re right, this isn’t a great template for a complete reliever, but Sean Green showed you can be fairly valuable by killing righties and not giving lefties anything to hit (and both Hull/Kelley have much better career MiLB FIPs vs. LH than Green ever did).
Completely agree that this ‘pen has the raw material to be both extremely effective and extremely inexpensive.
Good question about Fields, Rusty. I wonder when Phillippe Aumont will make the jump, although I also wonder if he’ll be brought up midseason for bullpen help or left in the minors until a spot potentially opens in the rotation.
Where would Josh Fields fit in with this group, if signed?
He’d be right there with Shawn Kelley as power-RH guys who probably won’t make the team out of ST. And, really, this team doesn’t need him. Take the #21 pick and run.
I’d point out that Seddon’s been a starter his entire career, and it’s possible he’d get a bit of a boost on his FB coming out of the pen.
Then I’d point out that I pointed that out in the article. But great minds think alike and all that.
I wonder when Phillippe Aumont will make the jump, although I also wonder if he’ll be brought up midseason for bullpen help or left in the minors until a spot potentially opens in the rotation.
He’s nowhere close to being major league ready, and the new front office is a lot smarter than the old one – the days of us wasting our good pitching prospects as not-ready-for-the-big-leagues relievers is over.
Great post dave! I was waiting for some more info on these guys. Personally, I love paying attention to the guys who have to grind and fight for a roster spot as a situational reliever.
Seddon seems like a great option against lefties. This should put pressure on Vargas and Jimenez to perform well this spring or be pushed down to Tacoma.
This line
reminds me of a line from Moneyball describing Chad Bradford.
Speaking of sleepers, this should, obviously, be one of the better position battles in spring training. As I think Dave or Derek said before, the idea of bringing together a bunch of people to see who will pan out seems like a good strategy.
Pressure, competition for jobs? GOOOOOOOD.
And, if folks remember, the bullpen people we’re counting have a lot of folks who were unknowns when they first arrived. I mean, just last year, Roy Corcoran was a “Who???”
…the days of us wasting our good pitching prospects as not-ready-for-the-big-leagues relievers is over.
Thank God.
So is Cesar Jiminez totally lost in the shuffle then? I never thought he was a star, but I thought he’d fit in with the other “Yeah, he’ll probably do alright” kinda guys you’re talkinig about here.
Oh, and the same question but with Jason Vargas’s name in Cesar Jiminez’s place.
oh, it has already come up. Back in Jan., Arnold was writing things like “Bullpen depth is one of the Mariners greatest needs.”
how can they sleep with Corcoran nattering away?
that might almost be the mantra for the whole team this year.
Bullpen depth both in Seattle and Tacoma (and probably West Tennessee as well), no defined “roles” or “proven veterans,” not rushing prospects to the majors, an 11-man pitching staff, where does it end? A winning record maybe? Getting good and staying good? I would advise against a dog fight among pitchers though, given Silva’s well-publicized desire to “take someone out.”
“Then I’d point out that I pointed that out in the article.”
Uhhhhh. Well how about that! Moving on…
“is Cesar Jiminez totally lost in the shuffle then?”
Absolutely not. Jimenez is already a league average relief pitcher. The guys listed here might be. I think it’s great to go into camp with a lot of options for LHRP, especially if Rowland-Smith moves into the rotation, but Jimenez pitched quite well last year. To reiterate, Jimenez isn’t competing for a LOOGY job; he isn’t a great LOOGY. But it’s great to have a middle-reliever/swing man who can go multiple innings and get righties out. That’s really got nothing to do with Seddon, say, or even Vargas.
Jimenez’s problem is he’s best suited for mopup duty. He’s better against RHB than LHB, and he’s not nearly good enough against RHB to be a better option than the RH relievers on the staff.
So, his future is probably as a 5th-7th inning low leverage innings soaker.
Will Austin Bibens-Dirkx enter the picture at any point? I remember being pretty fired up about him awhile back, but then I think he got injured and was pretty ineffective.
Which is another way of saying, “Replacement Level.”
Cumulatively, these guys are a good argument for keeping Batista on a short leash this ST & season: if he doesn’t pitch well out of the bullpen, write him off as a sunk cost and cut him. No reason to put up with mediocre performance when there are this many guys floating around who might do better.
Of course we all know that there are no assigned roles in the bullpens in our minor league system.
“Which is another way of saying, “Replacement Level.—
No, it’s not. The guy was a better than league average reliever last year. He’s coming up on his age 24 season. If he never develops a slider, and stays exactly as he was last year, he’s a perfectly serviceable 7th inning guy. If he improves at all, he’s going to be a very solid one-inning reliever. He doesn’t fit the standard ‘righty who’s death to righties, lefty who’s a great LOOGY’ template, but that doesn’t mean he’s without value. Replacement level is way, way off.
“His fastball/slider combination gives him two pitches that can miss bats and he’s got pretty good command of both. He doesn’t have a great weapon against lefties”
-Sounds kind of similar to what you could expect out of Batista, no?
“There’s a good chance that, by the end of the year, the M’s bullpen will be one of the pleasant surprises of the season.”
This has been true almost every season since the M’s began their run of miserable play. Look at Putz, Sherrill, Green, Corco, etc. Yet every year you get the obligatory story about the bullpen’s potential problems and question marks. Is there a possibility that one beat writer will dare to write an article saying and explaining that the bullpen is not and should not be a concern or worry for the M’s? At least that would be original.
I’m pretty stoked about Chris Seddon now.
Him and Endy Chavez could be good friends.
It has always seemed to me, and it seems like the new front office is taking this approach, that the best way to get a cost-effective, successful bullpen is to stockpile some cheap arms and keep the ones who are successful around. If you have enough mud to throw at the wall, some of it will stick.
Maybe we will be surprised and one of those guys will write an article about the nosedive Lopez and Betancourt have taken on defensive value over the last couple years.
I thought the last front office was pretty good at that….(of course the dugout still believed in roles….)
No reason to sign him in the first place.
The crazy thing about Bavasi was that building a bullpen on the cheap was the one thing he did consistently well. Which makes no sense, really, because why would he be good at this one part of the job when the same principles apply throughout all of it? My own theory is that he just didn’t care about the bullpen, at least not enough to go chasing “veteran” free agents for it (though when Charlton or Hargrove whined about it he’d go out and sign some aging crap like White or Parrish). Alternatively, perhaps the bullpen was his lowest priority so he just ran out of budget by the time he got there and was forced to be creative. But that’s the crazy part: whether it was due to simple neglect or outright ineptitude, it was the one thing he did well — if he’d had less budget, or just didn’t try as hard at the rest of the roster, he might have been better at his job.
Whatever the case, the bullpens in the Bavasi years should have refuted the whole “lack of experience is going to cost them” meme (especially when it was experienced crap like Mateo that really cost them), and yet it pops up off-season after off-season like some kind of herpes infection the local sportswriters can’t shake. Who was Putz before he got thrown into the closer role? Who was Sherrill or Lowe or even Sean Green?
It still does. I believe the Wakamatsu quote was “I prefer set roles. We’ll have to see.â€
Though I believe he was responding to speculation about a “closer-by-committee” so, as his second sentence suggests, he may be more flexible than that makes it sound.
Everybody prefers set roles, unless you’re a multi-tasking genius like Earl Weaver, because they’re simpler — it frees you up to think about other things. Being willing to do it another way if that doesn’t work is the most you can reasonably expect.
Of course, it’s always easy to make it look this way when you don’t have any starting talent.
Zduriencik was handed Morrow and RRS on a silver pladder of guys who he could start in the rotation and be league average or above who make peanuts.
Sure, we all wish Bavasi would have signed cheaper options to be the 5th starter the last few years in a row, or else we wouldn’t be in this situation, but I can at least see where the team needs were here and then.
Why do writers think established guys are the only ways to win? Because these guys don’t follow baseball as closely as they should, or they don’t want or care to use newer statistics to evaluate talent.
They feel that numbers like ERA and saves are the only numbers needed to see value in a reliever. Instead of looking deeper, they gloss over the surface to crank out their column as quickly as possible, with no time or care to read between the lines.
I think the 2009 M’s can definitely surprise some people, what with the new regime not letting players think they’re going to have an everyday job without performing, to actually make players compete for their jobs, and with the way off career marks for several players returning to the norm, there’s a chance we sniff .500 which, for me at least, would be a HUGE boost from the disaster that was 2008.
Axtell-
I think its due to the fact that many people want to ‘romanticize’ sports. The fact a pitcher got the final out in the big game wasn’t due to that fact that he had a hard changeup with lots of movement and could be thrown accurately, it was due to him having ‘heart’ and ‘determination’ and having greater desire than the guy on the other team who was simply using his superior eye-hand coordination, reaction times, and muscle strength/quickness to try and put a bat on the ball in a meaningful way. It’s way too dry and analytical.
Listen to a sports show like J.T. the Brick (I only did this a few times. I stopped because the guy is asinine) and all he ever does is go on and on calling out athletes who failed in a situation for ‘not being man enough’ or ‘not wanting it’. Talent and ability take a backseat to pop-psychology and the imagined size of an athlete’s cojones.
Let me correct the impression that Bavasi consistently built good bullpens on the cheap with two words: Rick White.
I apologize to those who just lost their breakfasts.
I don’t have a problem with set roles on a successful team. You could set your watch in 2001-3 and figure when you’d see Paniagua or Shiggy, Rhodes or Nellie. On bad teams, particularly on teams where the starters are not lasting long, you can’t have set roles. Tell me who pitches the fifth when the starters are knocked out in the fourth or earlier four days in a row.
Relievers today face so few hitters that it’s hard to come up with a decent book for them. How can you learn what a so-called left-handed relief specialist can do against righties if he never faces them? How can you tell if a guy can go two innings if he is never allowed to try? And letting a manager have extra relievers for all those situations, particularly on a team like the Mariners who are going to have to platoon, pinch hit and pinch run at multiple positions due to the lack of stars, minimizes the manager’s flexibility on offense and defense both.
“Let me correct the impression that Bavasi consistently built good bullpens on the cheap with two words: Rick White.”
Just because Bavasi made a few mistakes doesn’t mean that, on the whole, he didn’t do a fine job with the bullpen. In fact, the one area where I would actively compliment the Bavasi/Grover era was in the construction and use of the bullpen. There were some hiccups (White and Grover’s love of Mateo), but the ‘pens were often the best part of those often bad teams. I am glad that the new administration approaches the ‘pen in the same manner, and I am even happier that their approaches to defense and other areas of the team are superior.
In August of 2007, I was travelling though a pretty remote and isolated section of of Northern Laos. After about a week in which I’d barely had any internet access, I came upon a decent sized trade town with a high-speed internet cafe, and decided to check on my overacheiving but contending (last I checked) beloved Mariners. I got an ESPN gamecast going. 3-3 late inning game, still, shockingly, one game out of first. At which point gamecast tells me Rick White enters the game to pitch. I think this must be some sort of error. Can’t be. We have a good bullpen, we don’t need this. Then I vaguely remember Bavasi saying something about getting some more experience for the pen. As I watched White give it away through the pixels, I think I loathed Bavasi more at that moment than any moment before or after.
Bavasi was really bad, but he deserves credit here…he always had a good pen…it was the one area each year that I had ZERO worry about…maybe I was spoiled, but I feel the same way now…even more so with the intelligence Z seems to be showing…
As always, we have other problems than the pen…the writers need to stop writing about it and move on to other topics…
Well, while Bavasi did do a pretty good job with the bullpen, it’s also about the easiest part of roster construction.
It is not difficult at all to put together a good, cheap bullpen.
So if you previously gave him an F overall on his roster construction, this should really only get him up to about a D-.
While he did get lucky with the bullpen, I really am having a hard time congratulating him for the work he did to build it. Especially considering the Soriano trade. That was one of the most moronic deals in history.
Given that it is easier to find cheap arms for the bullpen than to fill any other part of the roster, I have no problem that when one of these guys proves themselves, Zduriencik can ship them off for a position player or starting pitcher… like for example he did with Putz and Green to get Gutierrez in CF. He could go do the same with Corcoran or Lowe and the middle infield if need be.
The Soriano deal was bad, but didn’t do nearly the damage that the Bedard deal was or the contracts given to Silva, Washburn, Sexson, Vidro, Cairo, Batista, Spiezio, or his mismanagement of Morrow in the pen did.
Hey, we may have the first “you have no one in the bullpen” quote of the year from Jeff Nelson on KJR with Softy.
Conversely, here’s a relatively decent article from mlb.com on the success of “unproven” youngsters in the closer role. It mentions the Mariners among other teams, and has some good quotes from Billy Beane, and this Whitey Herzog recollection from Ken Macah of all people.
But yeah, as basic as the concept is, I haven’t seen it coming from the local writers yet.
Add Lefty Tyler Johnson to the list. Baker’s column.
Add Tyler Johnson to the list.
Link
I don’t think you should be looking at this in isolation. The Soriano deal led directly to the mismanagement of Morrow in the pen. With or without a healthy Putz, Soriano could have been doing what Morrow was doing in both ’07 and ’08, and Morrow could have been starting in place of HoRam in ’07 or learning his craft in Tacoma. Then in the winter of ’07-’08, you’re not thinking you need two “established” starters, and you’re certainly not doing both the Silva signing and the Bedard trade.
Add Tyler Johnson to the list.
Does he project to be more of a LOOGY than someone that’s going to go an inning or two?
Even MLB.com has noticed.