Building a consistently good bullpen is hard. Relievers are notoriously mercurial in their abilities and health so achieving consistency and quality over a multi-year period from a bullpen is like asking your five-year-old to share his candy with his brother. It’s unlikely to work. Though perhaps with less crying.
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There are different schools of thought on bullpen building. On one extreme there’s the Yankees who have signed numerous relievers to big money, long term contracts. On the other is, oddly, the Red Sox, where new GM Chaim Bloom has cycled through approximately 230 different DFA’d relievers, like a toddler picking up and then immediately discarding shells at the beach. (To date, both Bloom and the toddler have been equally effective at bullpen building.) The Orioles don’t figure to subscribe to either pole, exactly, but then that brings up the question, how will this front office build their bullpen? Let’s explore!
The current Orioles are run by two graduates of the 2017 World Series Champion* Houston Astros front office. Mike Elias and Sig Mejdal won* that title with a certain type of bullpen, so let’s take a look at that team with an eye towards what they might attempt to recreate in Baltimore. The 2017 Astros used a lot of relievers during the 2017 season. Thirteen different relievers made 10 or more appearances out of Houston’s bullpen that season, and a slightly different though overlapping group of 13 relievers threw 10 or more innings from the bullpen for Houston that season. That’s a lot of guys. That’s the ‘throwing mud at the wall to see what sticks’ theory of bullpen construction in action.
When we drill down a bit, we can see that the Astros effectively had a two tiered bullpen. The first was composed of three guys, Ken Giles, Chris Devinski, and Will Harris, excellent relievers all. They combined for 187 innings or 35 percent of all Houston’s bullpen innings that season. The other 65 percent came from, well, everyone else.
Ken Giles was Houston’s closer that season. He came over from the Phillies in December of 2015, shortly after Mike Elias was promoted to Assistant GM in Baltimore. Giles was a top reliever with five years of team control remaining when he was traded, and two of those years coming at the league minimum. The Astros gave up what at the time were some real prospects to get him. The second and perhaps most important was Chris Devinski. He arrived from the Chicago White Sox in 2012 as part of the package for starter Brett Myers. Devinski played the role of multi-inning fireman, coming in to close games and shutting down the opposition for innings at a time. He did that be throwing his fastball far less and focusing on his off-speed pitches, a devastating changeup and slider. Devinski was also paid the major league minimum in 2017.
Unlike Devinski and Giles, Harris wasn’t 26. He came to Houston after being put on waivers by the Diamondbacks in November of 2014. Harris was a good reliever even in a small sample size with Arizona, but when he came to Houston, the Astros added a cutter and got him to throw his curveball a lot more, to the point where now he’s basically a cutter/curveball guy with no straight fastball to speak of. In contrast to the specific roles occupied by Giles and Devinski, Harris was simply an excellent reliever. He pitched in all leverage situations, against both righties and lefties. Basically, he pitched when he was ready and the game didn’t call for either of the other two guys.
The rest of Houston’s pen was more unremarkable. They did sign reliever Luke Gregerson to a three year, $18 million contract in 2014, so they were not averse to spending on the free agent market, and Gregerson was a slightly above average reliever over 188 games for Houston during those years.
So that’s where Elias and Mejdal came from. You can expect the Orioles under Elias to try to recreate Harris and Devinski by acquiring promising pitchers and fiddling with their pitch mix. Under normal circumstances (who can say how COVID will alter the free agent market this off-season) you can expect them to spend a bit on a reasonable contract for a relief pitcher.
The Giles acquisition is probably easier to recreate, at least in the abstract. Find a good reliever under team control for a long time and trade a bundle of prospects for him. The Orioles may yet do that, or they may wait until they are closer to contention, or they may not do that at all depending on whether or not they are able to recreate Giles in the lab, i.e in their own minor league system. And that brings us to what the Orioles have on hand.
The Orioles have some pieces who could become bullpen pillars. Hunter Harvey, Tanner Scott, and Dillon Tate all spring to mind as pieces with promise, though one of them is currently hurt, and one of them is Hunter Harvey and those are not the same pitchers, which is to say who knows about relievers. I still think ultimately Keegan Akin is probably a reliever and possibly a good one. But then you have guys like Cesar Valdez, a veteran of just about every baseball team in existence including those in the Mexican league and also the current Orioles bullpen leader in pitching WAR (for whatever that’s worth). Valdez is interesting because he represents the kind of player smart teams get value from. It speaks well of the Orioles organization that they’ve turned him from nothing into something.
If you look back at the Houston model outlined above, the Orioles need to assemble two tiers. The first is a group of very good relievers who can stay healthy and provide good pitching in high leverage spots for not very much money. Those players need to be identified and cultivated. The second is a rotating cast of guys. It matters less if they are healthy, or good, even. That second group is the little penny tin at the grocery store. Need a penny? Take one. Have a penny? Drop one. Need a reliever? Take one. Have a reliever? Drop one. The Orioles have a lot of guys who are candidates for that group. But, and this is important, smart organizations can pick up a penny in the tin and turn it into a quarter, or a dollar. They can do this by teaching new pitches, altering pitch mixes, changing arm angles, diets, or really any other thing you can think of. It’s how the Astros got the core of their World Series winning* bullpen. It’s what the Red Sox are trying (and not yet succeeding) to do. It’s what the Orioles will try to do. The only question is if they’ll succeed.
Orioles Analyst
Matthew Kory is a Orioles / MLB Analyst for BSL. He has covered baseball professionally for The Athletic, Vice Sports, Sports On Earth, FanGraphs, and Baseball Prospectus. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife, two boys, and his cats, Mini Squeaks and The President. Co-Host of The Warehouse.