In the wake of Anthony DeSclafani’s injury, the Giants only have four healthy, major league-caliber starters, so every fifth day, they’re planning on a bullpen game. It’s a calculated strategy, and I’m sure all the very smart people in the Giants front office have worked out why it’s good and smart, and yesterday, despite a bad couple of innings from Sam Long, it worked out well enough for the team to win.
They did it last year too, filling 2 rotation spots with bullpen games for a stretch in September, and having a lot of success doing it. They even beat Walker Buehler on Sunday Night Baseball in a bullpen game, and if I’m remembering right that game was the first time Buehler had ever allowed an earned run in his life. Bullpen games! They’re magic!
But on the other hand…they also suck?
It’s not fun to watch a parade of relievers come in and out of the game for nine innings. It’s fine every once in a while — oh no, the starter pulled something in pregame warmups, and now the bullpen has to go a full nine with 30 MINUTES NOTICE is good drama — but as a story, it’s lacking. Watching a starter face a lineup three (or more!) times has a ton of inherent questions in it, such as:
Will he get tired the third time through the lineup
How will he handle the guy who has ownage on him?
Will the good hitter with bad career numbers against him break out today?
How will the 28 pitches he threw in the second affect him down the road?
Is he getting tired?
How about now?
Is he going to get through five innings to qualify for a win?
Okay, is he tired NOW?
Is this the part where they lose the game?
And so on.
By contrast, watching a bullpen game inspires these questions:
Who’s pitching?
Can he go two innings?
Are they gonna do some matchup crap?
The guy I actually want to see is too tired to go, right?
Can he maybe pitch an inning later?
I’ve already seen this guy pitch way too much this year (long pause, while you realize that this isn’t technically a question yet)…right?
Is this the part where they lose the game?
And you ask all of those questions multiple times! Every pitcher draws his own set, and it just feels like you’re doing the same thing over and over, and that thing isn’t very good.
Watching a bullpen game is just watching extra innings, but if you knew that the game wasn’t going to end anytime soon. It always feels like it’s been going forever, and it will go forever, and you’re wasting your life. At least there isn’t that stupid runner on second to make things go faster.
Though now that I think about it…
I wonder if the automatic runner on second is contributing to this wave of bullpen games. Because you’re practically guaranteed a game that won’t go past 11 innings, suddenly part of the risk of a bullpen game falls away. Because if you burn your best bullpen arms over the first 9 innings in a game that goes 12, that’s almost a guaranteed loss. And front offices don’t tend to look too kindly on guaranteed losses that are a direct result of their decisions.
I thought about this yesterday, when Wilmer Flores, saint that he is, homered to tie the game in the eighth. In a real game, there would be urgency to score another run before the arms in the bullpen ran out. In that one, shoot, Doval could take the 9th and the 10th, hopefully put up zeroes, and then the Giants would have a great shot at scoring the stupid 10th inning runner and winning the game. Easy. Simple. The decision to have a bullpen game pays off.
That decision ended up paying off with a win anyway, but that’s neither here nor there. Where is it? No one knows.
In a world with the same number of bullpen games and no stupid extra runner in extra innings, a team would have lost a game by now because they ran out of relievers in the 11th inning. They would have looked like morons, and been pilloried for their dumb, intentional decision to use up all their relievers so early in the game. “They had Fringe Major Leaguer on their AAA roster,” people will say. “Why have him if you’re not going to use him here?”
This is the natural weeding out process when you play the game the way it’s always been played. If your strategy gives you a slight edge you wouldn’t otherwise have, but also makes you look like an absolute buffoon in case of failure, that failure will likely ensure you never use your strategy again.
But with the rule changes came unforeseen consequences. Teams saw an opportunity to grab a slight edge, and they took it, and if it involved a fundamental change to the starters-and-relievers dynamic that has been around for decades (before that, it was more of a pure starters dynamic), well, so much the better. If you’re a GM or a PBO, you don’t build your reputation by just doing what other executives do. I mean, where’s the fun in that?
So here’s where we are: Major League Baseball made a rule change a couple years ago to make the game more exciting, and it ended up making it less exciting in ways that they probably didn’t anticipate. Could they have? Well, maybe if they’d studied it or considered it more, but who has time for all that?
For a couple years now, the Giants have turned to bullpen games because they don’t want to use Sean Hjelle or Sam Long as a starter. In those bullpen games this year, the Giants are 5-5, and aesthetically, they haven’t been very interesting. I understand why the team is doing them. I would like them to stop.