Why are MLB bullpens so bad?

PurpleBrave

PurpleBrave

On BBA's Top 100 Prospects List
Is it just the juiced balls? Do breaking balls no longer break? Or is it just crap pitching?

To put into perspective how bad it is, the Braves pen is 12th in the league. Meaning 18 teams are worse.

The Nationals pen era is a miserable 6.08...and they aren’t even the worst pen.
 
Not enough good pitchers to go around. A lot of BP guys are failed starters, so they already weren’t good enough to cut it 1 time.
 
jpack1 said:
Not enough good pitchers to go around. A lot of BP guys are failed starters, so they already weren’t good enough to cut it 1 time.
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Baseball is a game of adjustments.

First fastball velocity (especially by relievers) rose.

In response, hitters have trained for and geared up to the high 90s fastball.

Also more at bats at being given to younger hitters who can hit the fastball.

I see a lot of young hitters who do fine against relievers but have more problems with starters (who generally have a deeper repertoire of off-speed pitches).

Given the adjustments that hitters and teams have made to the higher velocity, it is not surprising to see the performance of relievers decline (both absolutely and relative to starting pitchers).

The second thing affecting that is that starting pitchers are asked to pitcher fewer innings and the bullpen more. The load adjustment will also shift relative results in favor of starters.

The livelier ball also obviously will have an effect. On absolute performance. But not on relative performance of bullpens compared to starters.
 
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nsacpi said:
Baseball is a game of adjustments.

First fastball velocity (especially by relievers) rose.

In response, hitters have trained for and geared up to the high 90s fastball.

Also more at bats at being given to younger hitters who can hit the fastball.

I see a lot of young hitters who do fine against relievers but have more problems with starters (who generally have a deeper repertoire of off-speed pitches).

Given the adjustments that hitters and teams have made to the higher velocity, it is not surprising to see the performance of relievers decline (both absolutely and relative to starting pitchers).

The second thing affecting that is that starting pitchers are asked to pitcher fewer innings and the bullpen more. The load adjustment will also shift relative results in favor of starters.

The livelier ball also obviously will have an effect. On absolute performance. But not on relative performance of bullpens compared to starters.
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Agreed. For a while relievers throwing Harder was enough to mask their other shortcomings. But now like you say hitters at every level have adjusted to the higher velocity so you are back to facing 2 pitch guys without just throwing hard being the advantage it has been.
 
But it is cyclical, baseball was dominated by pitchers for a period up until the last couple years, especially this year. Now there's a great crop of young hitters. A truly great crop.
 
jpack1 said:
But it is cyclical, baseball was dominated by pitchers for a period up until the last couple years, especially this year. Now there's a great crop of young hitters. A truly great crop.
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I think there is a great crop of young hitters. But the average age of hitters has been dropping for about 10 years now. So there are multiple things happening that are causing bullpen effectiveness to drop.
 
BP usage has finally reached the tipping point where giving more IP to inferior BP arms rather than a tiring SP is causing overall BP ERA to be worse than overall SP ERA. Is it better to have a tiring Soroka face the order a 3rd time, or bring in a fresh Tomlin? We are starting to see the answer to this question on a macro scale.

As with all things in life, the pendulum swung too far in one direction, and now must correct itself.
 
Enscheff said:
BP usage has finally reached the tipping point where giving more IP to inferior BP arms rather than a tiring SP is causing overall BP ERA to be worse than overall SP ERA. Is it better to have a tiring Soroka face the order a 3rd time, or bring in a fresh Tomlin? We are starting to see the answer to this question on a macro scale.

As with all things in life, the pendulum swung too far in one direction, and now must correct itself.
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This. Basically what I was trying to say while typing quickly on a phone in between doing stuff.

It’s cyclical. After the steroid era there was an era of pitching dominance because teams were turning everybody that was decent into a pitcher because hitters were so readily available for the previous period. That and steroids mostly out of baseball. Over the last 10 years teams have been letting everyone who can hit at all, hit and a focus was put on developing young hitters. It will eventually swing back the other way like it always does.
 
nsacpi said:
I think there is a great crop of young hitters. But the average age of hitters has been dropping for about 10 years now. So there are multiple things happening that are causing bullpen effectiveness to drop.
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Agreed with multiple things coming together with the new juiced ball and hitters hitting more homers in general. Less than average pitchers are getting hit harder than possibly ever before.

As evidenced by the best pitchers still having spectacular season. Ryu, Verlander, Cole, Soroka just to name a few.
 
nsacpi said:
cuz they dont believe their stuff is good enough to get major league hitters out in the strike zone...so they nibble
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Well...they are right

Modern athletes hitting super balls is a rough environment for low end MLB pitching talent.
 
I think the scarcity of bullpen arms was my exact point last April when we had a little debate about the Phillies bullpen usage.

If you can deploy 10 dependable bullpen arms in a shuttle situation, sure go for it. The numbers show it's a good strategy I suppose. But many clubs struggle to find five dependable bullpen arms. What does that look like when the market decides that extended bullpens should be something more like orthodoxy? All of sudden we either have scarcity or we have to create more dependable relievers. I don't see a real path for increasing that pool much.

Devil take the hindmost.
 
I'd be interested to see the HR rate for relievers vs. starters. I think the juiced ball is actually the biggest factor in all of this but the other idea is that relievers generally only have or use two pitches. If a hitter can sit on one or the other, they are more likely to guess right and hit a ball harder, and simply hitting a ball hard is producing home runs, when in the past it might be a double, or a fly ball out.
 
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