Let’s begin our examination of the great New York Yankees bullpen freak-out by comparing two groups of relief pitchers.
The first group logged a heavier workload. The second group was better — not by a ton, but better. Those relievers, as a group, were more efficient with save and hold opportunities, gave up fewer runs and were more dominant.
Well, you already know this is all about the Yankees, so let’s jump to the point. The first group comprises the pitchers who populate New York’s ALDS bullpen. The second group is made up of the relievers on the 40-man roster who, for one reason or another, aren’t currently doing battle with the Cleveland Guardians.
There are many concerns about the Yankees’ playoff bullpen, and there are many reasons those concerns are well-founded. Still, they’re based in part on a couple factors that aren’t necessarily indicative of how well Aaron Boone’s relief staff is going to perform in the days or weeks to come. The bullpen performance is very much an open question — for worse, maybe, but also possibly for better.
One factor that magnifies this problem relates to that opening chart. The Yankees aren’t just down a few relievers — they are down a whole bunch of them, all very good pitchers with long track records. Let’s say we swapped the names in those groups, and it was the inactives who were prepping for Game 2 against Cleveland. The bullpen depth chart would look something like this:
It’s an awfully nice-looking group! And the fact that not one of them is on the roster right now is reason enough to worry. We get it.
The other factor contributing to the freak-out is surely the steady progression of bad news. The flow of bad news began May with Green’s elbow injury and never stopped, culminating the week before the playoffs: Marinaccio went on the 15-day injured list, Britton was shut down for the season, Effross headed for Tommy John surgery and Chapman went AWOL from a mandatory workout.
It’s a tale fit for spooky season. But it’s also not a death knell to the Bombers’ title hopes. No one would make the argument that the Yankees are better off because they have been confronted by all of those bullpen obstacles, but it doesn’t mean they can’t get over them.
Projecting bullpen performance is a fool’s errand in the best of circumstances, but it’s particularly harrowing when you’re trying to anticipate what’s going to happen over a short period of time — like in a playoff series. First of all, few teams have a bullpen depth chart at the end of the season that looks familiar to what they drew up in spring training. And even after a season’s worth of performance to feed our expectations, we still have little idea of just how the various bullpen scenarios are going to play out in the weeks to come.
Take the defending champion Atlanta Braves. Last season, the Braves went into the All-Star break with a bullpen ERA of 4.52, ranking 21st in the majors. By October, Brian Snitker had found a devastating paint-by-the-numbers progression of firemen, with Tyler Matzek, Luke Jackson and Will Smith closing out virtually every game en route to the championship.
Now, one year later, the Braves enter the postseason with a highly regarded bullpen that should help them in their quest to defend their crown. But Matzek is headed for Tommy John surgery, Jackson missed the entire season, and Smith is with the Astros (but not on Houston’s ALDS roster).
This is the nature of bullpen management. Things change fast because reliever performance and availability vacillate wildly. Teams have to approach relief pitching systematically and exercise flexibility and creativity, even as the rest of us wring our hands over the absences.
The healthy version of the Yankees bullpen, as we would have conceived it spring training, would have involved Chapman at the back of the bullpen and some combination of Green, Jonathan Loaisiga and King in setup roles. Through the end of May, that quartet led the Yankees in batters faced in high-leverage spots, per TruMedia. By then, Clay Holmes’ early dominance had emerged and his opportunities in key spots were growing. Still, there was a recognizable structure to how the bullpen was set up.
King would often appear in the sixth inning during that portion of the season, although both he and Green would serve as bridge pitchers in the sixth and the seventh innings. Loaisiga was a prevalent choice in the seventh and eighth. Gradually Holmes became a go-to pitcher in those innings as well. Chapman was the primary ninth-inning pitcher.
Then the injuries began, and performances started to falter. Before the season’s midpoint, Holmes outpitched Chapman so thoroughly that by July he was an All-Star closer. As pitchers were injured, roles shuffled. Effross was acquired at the trade deadline to fill some of the important innings opened up by the absences. Abreu was plucked off the scrap heap.
By the time the last spurt of bad bullpen news occurred in October, the only clear-cut role that was still being filled by one of those first-half studs was the ninth-inning gig held by Holmes — and even his performance had taken a nosedive after the midseason break. Holmes, who had a 1.31 ERA and 16 of 18 converted save chances before the All-Star Game, had a 4.84 ERA after the break and converted just four of seven save chances. He battled shoulder trouble late in the season and was a question mark for the Yankees’ postseason roster.
That fact, alongside concerns about his shoulder, meant even his status was tenuous.
But in the end, what Boone is left with is a relatively easy decision, especially because he doesn’t have to deal with Chapman’s inconsistencies. He merely has to forget about roles and structure and slide the bullpen management control lever in the direction of matchups.
This decision — planning around roles vs. matchups — is not really a binary choice that teams make, but more one of preference and organizational philosophy. Even a team like the Tampa Bay Rays, whose identity is built on exploiting ideal percentage plays, will go through stretches where the bullpen roles are relatively fixed. Few teams are married to that kind of structure. Other teams, such as perhaps the Yankees, will sometimes move away from what is usually a fairly rigid bullpen design and in the direction of matchups because whatever their plans are, reality intervenes.
Let’s take a look at what the Yankees are left with:
These are three-year baselines, used to smooth out the short-term peaks and valleys inherent to relievers’ performance, to give you a snapshot of what Boone has to work with. More important than these numbers is the simple reality of how each pitcher is throwing right now, but this is the jumping-off point for evaluation.
Worth noting is that while Taillon and German have been shifted to the bullpen for the league division series, they normally work in the rotation. Taillon has never pitched in relief during the regular season. But German has, and his career FIP in 22 relief appearances is 2.97 — and his velocity has ticked up in that role.
These are the pitchers Boone needs to use to get from his starter to the final out. And if Tuesday’s Game 1 is any indication, he still plans on using Holmes to get that final out. Despite Holmes’ second-half troubles, when the Yankees were trying to protect a three-run lead in a playoff game, Boone turned to Holmes to finish it out.
Holmes got two outs in Game 1, throwing 10 pitches, all sinkers that didn’t flash velocity or spin rates at the level he was getting to when he was rolling earlier in the season. And the state of his slider is unknown because he didn’t throw any. The good news for Boone is that Holmes doesn’t have to be what he was in July. He just has to be good enough to get the last two or three outs in a game.
While Loaisiga seems like the best candidate to emerge as a shutdown setup reliever to fill a role that might have been held down by Green or King or even Britton in a parallel universe, in reality Boone is probably going to be pointing relievers toward specific patches of the opposing lineup, channeling the mindset of someone like Tampa Bay manager Kevin Cash.
Who will do what? It depends on the part of the opponent’s lineup that needs to be navigated through. This improvised version of the Yankees’ bullpen isn’t a fully complementary group. But for the most part, they all do something a little bit different:
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Loaisiga has a hard sinker and a changeup combo that keeps the ball in the yard.
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Lou Trivino has re-emerged after a rough start to the season in Oakland and has tons of high-leverage experience. His arsenal features a little bit of everything.
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Lucas Luetge is a soft-throwing lefty who throws a lot of cutters to go with his breaking stuff. Nothing is straight.
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Wandy Peralta is a well-traveled lefty who leans heavily on his changeup.
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Clarke Schmidt has a starter’s arsenal that has played up since he shifted to the bullpen.
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Miguel Castro is an experienced righty who features a sinker/slider combo with a changeup.
One element that appears to be missing from this group is a pitcher like Green who can come in and dominate the top of the strike zone with high-octane, high-spin four-seamers. Taillon, relief experience or not, might be the pitcher best suited to fill that gap in the short term if such a pitcher is needed.
As for German, he might serve a specific purpose for Boone as someone who can cover larger expanses of the starter-to-closer bridge. This may be especially important when Luis Severino takes the mound. After struggling with so many injuries in recent seasons, Severino isn’t likely to throw more than 90 to 95 pitches in an outing. German will be important there — he can be called on any time a starter labors early and doesn’t work into at least the middle innings.
If all of this seems to put the burden on Boone, pitching coach Matt Blake and the Yankees’ game-planning staff (including the statheads), then that’s because the burden is on those people. This isn’t the optimal version of a Yankees postseason bullpen but, to quote an often-uttered refrain from Knicks coach Tom Thibodeau, they have “more than enough to win.”
So far, so good. Game 1 was smooth sailing for the Yankees and their evolving staff. Gerrit Cole did his part, shortening the bridge by pitching into the seventh inning. Loaisiga got two outs but was a bit shaky. Peralta got four outs despite facing just three batters. And Holmes retired the last two Guardians.
Don’t expect that exact progression to be repeated often or to emerge in the fashion of Atlanta’s Matzek-Jackson-Smith dynamo from last October. Every game is going to be different. But the challenge is the same: Tiptoe from one matchup to the next until 27 outs are on the board.
For the Yankees, one bridge has been cleared. Now, if all goes well, 10 more of them lie directly ahead.
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