FanPost

Dombrowski Discovers How to Build a Bullpen

Kim Klement-USA TODAY Sports

Everyone loves Victor Martinez, so what could possibly ruin the grandeur of the press conference that reintroduced the Tigers designated hitter to the fan base? The bullpen. The bullpen always ruins everyone’s fun. The bullpen can even ruin Victor Martinez’s press conference. The bullpen was so bad, that Baltimore Orioles fans jeered Brad Ausmus whenever he made a call to the bullpen for relief pitchers. Only three teams had a worse bullpen FIP last year. In fact, if you spread bullpen performances over an arbitrary span of years, like say since 2007 to now, the Tigers have the worst bullpen ERA among any team in the league. Thus, when Dave Dombrowski announced that the Tigers had picked up Joakim Soria’s option so that they could avoid the free agent market for relief pitchers, everyone became sad, mad, depressed, enraged, and a host of many other negative emotions. How can Dave Dombrowski neglect the one area of the team that needed fixing the most?!

But what if… just what if Dave Dombrowski was actually going about the right way in building his bullpen?

Look, it’s a commonly known fact that bullpen arms are volatile and fungible and as bipolar as all get-out. Whenever one researches ways to reliably build a decent bullpen, you’ll always come across the word "crapshoot" in some way, shape, or form. That’s because building a good bullpen is a pure crapshoot. You can spend $44 million over four years for Andrew Miller. That doesn’t guarantee Miller fixes your bullpen. That $10 million you spend on both Pat Neshek and Zach Duke could just as easily end up as $10 million in dead weight money when both pitchers flame out at the same time. I shouldn’t have to tell you this, but I’ll say it anyway because it’s such an important thing to reiterate: building a bullpen is a gamble. Instead of gambling with really volatile and expensive pieces and having those signings blow up in your face, it’s better to gamble with much cheaper arms that are less likely to burn you if they melt down. And then when said cheap arms put up unexpected dominant performances, you reap the rewards of surplus value. Let’s just gamble with what we have and maybe it turns into a dominant bullpen.

"But the Tigers don’t have any good arms!"

But what if I told you the Tigers have a relief pitcher who is a six-time All Star as recent as 2013? What if I told you that opponents only hit .205/.297/.304 against him when the team's primary catcher was receiving his pitches? Isn’t that a good relief pitcher?

Oh sure, Joe Nathan wasn’t that good. He was essentially Jose Valverde 2.0. He flicked off the fans. He was not liked very much. But we can’t deny Joe Nathan’s past work. He assumed the mantle of most dominant closer in the league when Mariano Rivera retired. Sure, the drop in velocity is concerning, but Rivera dealt with it. Between 2008-2009, Rivera lost a full mile-per-hour on his fastball velocity and still posted a sub-2 ERA. Trevor Hoffman lost a full mile-per-hour in that same time span, and at the ripe old age of 42 actually posted a sub-2 ERA as well. Koji Uehara is the same age as Joe Nathan and doesn’t even average over 90 miles per hour on his fastball, and he was quite effective. Sure, these relief pitchers I’m mentioning are a step above Joe Nathan. My point stands. Joe Nathan is a really good relief pitcher and I’ve shown that really good relief pitchers have remained effective as they aged and lost velocity. Given that relief pitchers are so fungible, who’s to say Nathan doesn’t have one good season left in him? He’s on the team and has the pedigree. Might as well give him the chance.

So enough about Joe Nathan, what if I told you that the Tigers have a relief pitcher who has a career FIP of 2.85 and in 152 high leverage innings, has held opposing hitters to an abysmal .243 wOBA? Yup. That’s Joakim Soria. He’s making a cool $7 million this year. I know, he absolutely sucked when he came to the Tigers. But we aren’t about to let a small sampling of 11 innings of injury-filled futility cloud our judgment now, are we?

So that’s potentially two very good arms that the Tigers have in their bullpen for 2015.

What if I told you the Tigers have a relief pitcher who, on his career, has stranded 82.4% of base runners? This pitcher strikes out a lot of batters, posted the lowest walk rate of his three year career, and has held his opponents to a .228 wOBA in high leverage plate appearances on his career. And what if I told you the Tigers also have a young fireballing pitcher who Steamer is projecting to put up a 2.97 ERA in 45 innings in 2015?

Al Alburquerque and Bruce Rondon both respectively fit those descriptions right down to a "T."

Alburquerque is perhaps the most underrated relief pitcher in the Tigers bullpen. He gets a bad rap for being wild, but in reality he gets the job done better than most pitchers in the league. And let’s not sell Bruce Rondon short. It generally takes pitchers 10-12 months to recover from Tommy John Surgery. At the latest, barring a setback, that puts Rondon in pitching-ready condition smack dab in the middle of spring training.

So that’s four potentially good arms that the Tigers have in their bullpen, and they didn’t even have to lift a finger to get them! I didn’t even mention Joel Hanrahan, the former All Star closer who, by all reports, will be ready to pitch in Spring Training. He has a track record of usefulness. And then there's Ian Krol, who will be 23 and not 22 going into the 2015 season. You could probably count the number of 22 year old relievers who are successful in Major League Baseball on one hand. A little more maturity could turn him into a useful LOOGY, and it doesn’t really take much to be a lefty killing relief pitcher these days. I could also mention Kyle Ryan, who is likely to be moved to the bullpen due to the unlikelihood of making the Tigers as a starter. He has also killed lefties and was used in important situations by Brad Ausmus down the stretch in September. You also have Josh Zeid, freshly picked off the waiver wire. He might turn into something or remain largely nothing. But he’s pretty cheap, making league minimum and all.

So sure, the Tigers bullpen has a lot of question marks to them. Those question marks could easily turn into a cataclysmic nightmare or just as easily become a very scary good bullpen. Relief pitchers just work that way. You never know what you’re getting. Dave Dombrowski is much maligned for his inability to properly build a bullpen that doesn’t give Tigers fans heart attacks. This time around, rather than gambling on the free agent market with its inflated prices and inflated contract lengths, the Tigers GM is choosing to gamble with what he’s already got. What he’s got has the potential to be both cheap and very good. Dave Dombrowski may have discovered how to properly approach building a good bullpen.

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