Does it matter that almost everyone else’s bullpen is better?
In the AL East, that is. It’s possible that every team in the AL East has assembled a better bullpen for the 2016 season than the Baltimore Orioles have managed thus far.
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The Yankees and Red Sox are obvious — Aroldis Chapman will surely miss time for his deplorable domestic violence charge, but a Chapman/Andrew Miller/Dellin Betances top three gives the Yankees three shutdown innings late in any game they want to win, even if the rest of the projected pen has names like “Chase Shreve” and “Nick Rumbelow” (both young guys who could be good, if not great, and throw in the 90s like most bullpen guys do these days). Considered as a unit, they might be the best 7-8-9 guys in baseball. The Red Sox, on the other hand, have Craig Kimbrel, Koji Uehara, and Carson Smith in those slots. Junichi Tazawa, a dude with a career 4.46 K/BB ratio and a 139 ERA+ over the past four seasons, is the sixth inning guy. The Boston bullpen is pretty ridiculous.
But then, let’s consider the top guys in the Jays bullpen now that the Storen trade has gone through — Roberto Osuna, Drew Storen, and Brett Cecil, with Aaron Sanchez likely joining them permanently once the Blue Jays accept the fact that Aaron Sanchez is not a starter. Storen had a down year last year, but still has a K/BB of 4.19 and a 172 ERA+ over the past two seasons. Osuna’s a legit young fireballer and Cecil’s a success of the “failed starting pitcher prospect but good reliever” mold. Sanchez, of course, only has two good pitches — but one of them’s his fastball.
And the Rays? The Rays…okay, well, the Rays don’t have the topline guys the other teams in the East, including Baltimore, do. Jake McGee, Xavier Cedeno and Andrew Bellatti are their top guys, unless Brad Boxberger has a return to form after a bad 2015. This is one team where the O’s probably have their competition beat — but again, never count out the Rays in pitcher development. They’re better at it than almost everyone else in the game, and while they might not have the star late inning relievers that the rest of the division has been stocking up on, they could very well pull a couple of guys out of nowhere.
The Orioles, by comparison, have two very good relievers — Darren O’Day and Zach Britton — and a whole bunch of question marks. We’d all love to assume the best of Mychal Givens, the position player-turned-reliever who turned in 30 outstanding innings last year, but it was only 30 innings. Brad Brach’s got the good ERA+ (152 last year) but the peripherals are underwhelming at best, and while it’s nice that he struck out 10.1 per 9 last season, if he’s also going to walk 4.3 per nine then perhaps he should rein it in. Brian Matusz has similar control issues that his usage is masking, and as nice as a 142 ERA+ is in the abstract, right handed hitters still had a .721 OPS off him last season. Tommy Hunter is a free agent, but the question remains of how to replace him: Chaz Roe had an encouraging start to his O’s career last season but fell off quickly. And Vance Worley’s in there somewhere, unless he wins a starter’s job.
Okay, let’s toss out the Rays. Surely Britton/O’Day/Givens/Brach will be better than those guys. (Just a reminder, though: never, ever sleep on Tampa Bay pitching development.)
The truth is: the Orioles very well might have the second worst bullpen in the AL East next year, but that’s probably not an overall indictment of the roster-building strategy as a whole — four of the top ten bullpens in all of Major League Baseball could conceivably come from the East next year, and it doesn’t take a whole lot of imagination or best-case scenarios for that to come about. It’s part of the reason why resigning O’Day was important, whatever it might also say about the front office’s commitment to paying performers that it makes sense to pay.
But re-signing O’Day was important for another reason: the Orioles rotation is not very good, and is not likely to get measurably better before the end of the free agent period. Vance Worley was given guaranteed money to challenge the back half of the rotation out of camp, after all. The Orioles don’t just need a good bullpen to compete — they need a great bullpen. And while Baltimore had no real pieces they could have or should have offered for Kimbrel, and we’re all glad the the Orioles didn’t take on the absolute mess that Chapman currently represents, it’s still worth noting that unless they’re absolutely certain that Mychal Givens is the guy he looked like last year, Baltimore’s one or two pieces away from securing the relievers they need to support a rotation that likely won’t be making it through the sixth inning all that often.
Perhaps the Orioles have those pieces available internally — they certainly have enough guys aren’t good enough to be starting pitchers in the league but can hang with MLB hitters in individual at-bats, and those guys turn into really good relievers from time to time (see Britton, for instance, or to a lesser extent Jim Johnson, who was a starter in the minors). The O’s could also do something radical like try and make Ubaldo Jimenez a reliever — that might end in disaster, yes, but the current state of affairs with Jimenez cannot continue if another credible starter presents himself. Or they could sign Tyler Clippard, one of the more reliable relievers in baseball.
The point is that there’s still a lot of work to be done on the staff. The Yankees and Blue Jays recognized what it would cost to fix their starting pitching and addressed their relief options instead. The Red Sox recognized what it would cost and realized they had the money and assets to fix both. The Orioles opened up the pocketbook for O’Day, but that doesn’t keep them current with the arms race going on in the AL East.
Jonathan is a contributing writer for VICE Sports. His work has previously appeared in Sports on Earth, Baseball Prospectus, The Classical, and ESPN’s SweetSpot Network. Born in central Maryland, Bernhardt currently lives in the New York metropolitan area.