Rampant 2009 Bullpen Speculation
First off, out of pretty much nowhere the Yankees bullpen was actually pretty good last year. The bullpen ERA was 3.79, good for fifth in the AL and 7th in all of MLB. Mariano Rivera’s minuscule 1.40ERA (which translates into a ridiculous 317ERA+) helped with that to be sure, but they got pretty good performances out of almost everyone. Here’s all the pitchers who tossed 30 innings or more for the team last year, plus Damaso Marte (included since he’s cemented in):
I sorted by innings pitched. Other than Mariano, nobody hit 60 innings though Veras and Edwar came close. Giese is included even with the starts he made because of his role as a long reliever. I did not include Joba because he is not ever going back into the bullpen unless disaster strikes. Out of this group Kyle Farnsworth, LaTroy Hawkins and Russ Ohlendorf all exited before the season was over. Farnsworth was surprisingly not completely terrible for most of the time he was with the team in 2008, but not worth keeping around after that anyway.
Beyond the conventional numbers I’ve added two columns–one for The Hardball Times’ Fielding Independent Pitching (FIP) and one for Batting Average on Balls in Play (BABIP). FIP is a measure of how good a pitcher was in terms of events solely under his control (Home Runs, Strikeouts, Walks) and is a better statistic to look at than ERA when trying to figure out how a pitcher will do the next year. BABIP is exactly what it sounds like, but the purpose it serves is to act as a red flag. Very low BABIPs are pretty much impossible to maintain–for pitchers it normalizes around .300–and can give you an idea of how lucky or unlucky a pitcher was at first glance.
Relief pitchers not named Mariano Rivera are very volatile but looking at this information briefly we can get set some expectations. Keep in mind that these are all very small samples of data, so in reality anything can happen, but here goes:
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