On Tuesday evening, the Giants, lacking a starting pitcher due to Alex Wood’s injury, had a bullpen game. They gave up a bunch of runs and lost. After the brief high of Lewis Brinson’s leadoff homer, it wasn’t much of a game.
So it goes.
I have written about bullpen games before. In July, I scathingly called them “blahpen games,” and while that’s probably the thing that history will remember me for, I did it more in the service of pointing out that the runner-on-second-in-extras rule incentivizes that kind of bullpen management. And almost a year ago now, on September 16 of last year, I raised some concerns about bullpen games as a strategy.
The Giants are still doing bullpen games, of course. And now I have a new strategic concern: the bullpen sucks shit and it’s dumb as hell to intentionally pitch them for 8 innings a game.
It was one thing to intentionally throw the bullpen out there for an entire game last year, when the team had its best bullpen in years. It is another thing to do it this year, when the team, uh, does not have its best bullpen in years.
I mean, Bryan and I just spent half a podcast talking about who we trust in the bullpen. And if you listened to that podcast — give us a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts! — then you know that we don’t really trust anyone. Yes, Scott Alexander and Alex Young and Camilo Doval look like the team’s better relievers right now, and they are objectively the correct choices to put into a high-pressure situation, but also…it’s the 2022 Giants bullpen. More likely than not, it’s gonna end in misery.
So why would you go out of your way to pitch more bullpen guys? If each individual bullpen guy is bad, and you put a lot of the ones on your roster into a game, then it stands to reason that your pitching in that game is likely to be bad. But has that been the case this year? Let’s figure it out.
The Giants have had relievers start 11 games this year. Sam Long has started 6, John Brebbia has started 4, and Mauricio Llovera has started 1. In those 11 games, the team is 5-6. If you really want to get pedantic, in 2 of Long’s starts, Jakob Junis followed him by going 5 innings, making those games more of an opener situation than pure bullpen games; the team was 1-1 in those games, so by record it’s not much of a difference, though the Giants gave up 2 runs combined in those 2 games, so on the pitching side, the strategy worked.
Eliminating those opener games, then, the Giants have had 9 pure bullpen games this year, and have gone 4-5 in those games. They have pitched 79 innings in those games and given up 47 runs (42 earned), for an ERA of 4.78. Giants relievers on the whole have had an ERA of 4.27, so these bullpen games have been a significant downgrade even from their standard poor performance.
Of course, that brings up the real issue here: the Giants, for the second consecutive year, have no starting depth in AAA. As someone who has gone to his fair share of River Cats games this year, they’ve had a parade of bullpen games, and when they’ve actually had a real starting pitcher in a game, he hasn’t exactly lit the world on fire. Sean Hjelle has had a 4.92 ERA this year. Tristan Beck’s ERA is 5.60. Emmanuel De Jesus is at 4.65 (though that’s wtih 13 relief appearances included), and that’s it for pitchers who are currently on the roster and have made at least 10 starts.
That’s it. That’s the starting pitching depth. So you understand why the team is hesitant to call up a starting pitcher to make a start in a major league game. On the other hand, that means the team has failed to find starters who can come into a major league game. Yes, Junis was originally supposed to be in that category, and he has excelled this year. But where are the capable-if-mediocre starters who can fill in? Where is the pitching equivalent of Andrew Knapp? If your entire starting pitching depth is one guy, then you don’t really have depth.
And what that lack of depth has led to is bullpen games. Shitty, boring bullpen games that no one likes. From a sabermetric point of view, bullpen games should be the wave of the future. The bullpen generally gives up fewer runs than the rotation, so why not make the whole plane out of the bullpen?
This is why. When a bullpen is not very good, and the Giants bullpen is 26th in fWAR, which I think qualifies as “not very good,” you don’t want them pitching a lot of innings. Even when things are going well, a bullpen game doesn’t leave much room for error. When things are going like they are for the 2022 Giants, that error is practically guaranteed.
It is possible to find competent depth pieces. Even the 2018 Giants, not that good of a team, were able to find multiple starters who could approximate being major league quality. They came into the year with a projected rotation of Madison Bumgarner, Johnny Cueto, Jeff Samardzija, Derek Holland, and Chris Stratton, but each of the top three pitchers on that list missed significant time. So that team found Dereck Rodriguez, and got decent enough performances from Andrew Suarez and Ty Blach. Late in the year, they even got some good pitching from Casey Kelly for a few starts.
It can be done. As awful as 2017 was, in that year they had 7 guys who made 10 starts. These guys can be found, if you look for them. I don’t know if this team hasn’t looked for them or just hasn’t done it successfully, but the results have been disappointing. By that, I don’t not mean wins and losses, but I also mean bullpen games, which have been a bad idea, executed badly. Any time they want to go away forever would be a good time.
And it certainly helps explain the organization’s focus on pitching in the last two drafts.