FanPost

Explaining Detroit's Disaster of a Bullpen

David Richard-USA TODAY Sports

Dave Dombrowski is rightfully getting a lot of heat from Tigers fans for the lack of competent bullpen options to whom Brad Ausmus can turn in relief. The reason that Detroit's bullpen is an expensive dumpster fire is because Dombrowski's been forced to acquire relievers since the organization simply doesn't grow them itself, and his traditional big-ticket investment strategy backfires when it conflicts with the realities of relief pitcher performance.

Now, before getting into the details, let's admit that Dombrowski's 2014 bullpen plan depended on at least some gambles paying off this season, and he rolled a series of snake eyes. He gambled that he could find more cost-effective options than Joaquin Benoit and Jose Veras and let them walk; he gambled on Bruce Rondon being functional rather than on the DL all season; he gambled on Joe Nathan still having it in his tank at his advanced age; he gambled on Joba Chamberlain being a functional version of his old self for more than half a season; he gambled on Al Alburquerque and Phil Coke being the competent versions of their Jekyll-and-Hyde selves; he gambled on Ian Krol being a meaningful component of return on investment for Doug Fister; he gambled that Opening Day roster relievers Luke Putkonen and Evan Reed were ready for The Show; he gambled that a change of scenery would help Jim Johnson regain his form; he gambled on Joakim Soria being able to come in and justify the price in prospects that Detroit paid for him.

None of this paid out. Not consistently over the course of the season, at least.

And the reason for much of this is that relievers are so volatile. Very few of them are consistently excellent, year over year, and even those who put together multi-year streaks can still fall off the table suddenly. (Nathan, Johnson, Soria, Heath Bell, Jose Valverde, Grant Balfour, Chris Perez, Koji Uehara, Brian Wilson, Sergio Romo, Ernesto Frieri, Rafael Soriano, etc.) The flip side is that mediocre or bad relievers can suddenly get hot -- Tigers fans think of Jason Grilli and Fernando Rodney here -- so not all reliever volatility is a negative.

There's three things that this volatility should teach us:

  1. Paying in cash or trade chips for relievers based on past performance is risky business
  2. Giving relievers long-term contracts is risky business
  3. You better have options available when some of your bullpen inevitably stops functioning midseason

Dave Dombrowski has not shown that he's internalized those lessons, and the results have been on display this entire season-- most vividly in the playoffs.

Detroit's expensive bullpen is led by Joe Nathan, who apparently only Dombrowski thought was worth $9 million this season and $10 million next season. Nathan turns 40 years old next month, and even with Tommy John surgery and Dr. James Andrews resurrecting arms the full list of pitchers who've been excellent into their 40s doesn't take long to peruse. And $10 million is what you pay an excellent pitcher. It's far above market rate for a reliever. Nathan started the season as the sixth-highest paid reliever in baseball, and I'll let Grant Brisbee do the work on how well paying a lot of money for a star reliever worked out for teams this season. (Hint: Not good. Trigger warning: Ten-reliever list includes two members of the Tigers' roster.)

This segues into the question not just of how much you're paying, but how many wins you're realistically going to buy with those dollars. On Opening Day this season, the Tigers projected to pay roughly $3.4 million per projected fWAR across their entire roster, which was relatively high compared to the rest of the league but at least behind Superfund sites like Yankee Stadium and Citizens Bank Park. It didn't even look too terrible compared to the White Sox at $3.2 million and Twins at $3.06 million. (I'm using fWAR here just because I found some better breakdowns there of reliever value. bWAR and fWAR can come up with some pretty significant differences of opinion on reliever value, so your mileage may vary.)

But for all of the misunderstandings about WAR and the "Moneyball" model of team construction, one of the things that Billy Beane and his fellow travelers showed is that wins are what counts, and a general manager's job is to spend his financial and trade chip resources to generate wins as cheaply as possible. Paying market price for experienced relievers is, historically, about the worst possible way to achieve this goal -- but it's what Dombrowski found himself forced to do.

A big reason for this is that relievers rarely individually affect a game enough to post large WAR numbers for a season. This season, there were 37 qualified relievers in MLB who posted more than a 1.0 fWAR. Just eight of those 37 posted more than 2.0 WAR and only two (Dellin Betances and Wade Davis) were worth more than three wins. (Spoiler alert: None of those relievers played for Detroit this year. Stats variance alert: fWAR and bWAR differ pretty significantly on the value of Al Alburquerque this season. bWAR has him at 1.9 while fWAR has him at 0.2.) So, when you have a team payroll budget, not only are you gambling on a reliever's prior performance being indicative of their future value to your team, you're also looking at the roughly $6 million that a projected win cost on this past offseason's free agent market and asking whether or not it's worth spending that money on a "premium" reliever or simply getting a more affordable low-risk, low-reward option and spending the extra millions on a more reliably projectable starter or position player.

It's one thing to pay market rate for a player's projected value to your team. That's part of baseball, and Dombrowski's front office has proven that they're often able to do a better job of projecting a position player or starting pitcher's future value than anybody else -- think the Miguel Cabrera trade, the Curtis Granderson trade, the trade with Seattle for Doug Fister, the J.D. Martinez pickup, the deal with the Marlins for Anibal Sanchez and Omar Infante, etc. However, whatever mojo Dombrowski and his scouts and assistant GMs have in those situations has failed him badly when it comes to relief pitchers. Perhaps most devastatingly from a payroll perspective, the Tigers' front office has shown that its issues with identifying relievers exist not just in free agency or the trade market, but begin in the minor leagues and in fact all the way back to Draft Day. In the infamous Detroit Reliever Draft of 2008, the Tigers took eight projected relievers in their first 10 picks, pausing only to grab Alex Avila and Andy Dirks in the fifth and eighth rounds, respectively. Of those eight relievers that could be cost-controlled contributors right now to the 2014 Tigers bullpen, only Ryan Perry and Robbie Weinhardt ever made MLB appearances. (16th-round Thad Weber did end up throwing 19 MLB innings.) Scrolling through the Tigers' amateur drafts since the 2006 season and looking for the names of pitchers who ever contributed meaningfully to the Tigers' bullpen is an exercise in futility, and that's come home to roost. The other option of home-growing pitchers, the international free agent market, has only been slightly better for the team with a few MLB-quality options like Brayan Villarreal and Bruce Rondon coming through that channel.

When you combine an inability to draft and develop relievers with an over-reliance on past performance in the trade and free agent markets and stir in some bad luck on gambles that didn't pay out, you get the 2014 Tigers bullpen. Combine that with a rookie manager whose bullpen usage is rightfully criticized in its old-fashioned rigidity, and the result is what we've seen all season and was most dreadfully on display in Baltimore this week. The Tigers' bullpens have been a drag on the team's performance for much of the Dombrowski era, and it's past time for him to revisit how the team assesses, develops, acquires and compensates its relief pitchers.

This is a FanPost and does not necessarily reflect the views of the <em>Bless You Boys</em> writing staff.