The Giants bullpen...bad?

I've never heard of such a thing!

I had the idea for this newsletter over the weekend and was planning on doing it Tuesday, except the bullpen wasn’t bad on Monday night. This was a shame for me personally, but a good thing for the team as a whole, so I guess I can accept it. But I was waiting. No matter how long it takes, I thought, I will patiently wait out the bullpen having a bad game, and then be ready to pounce on it when it does. No matter how long it takes, no matter how much faith I need to have in the righteousness of my cause, I will never waver. I will never back down. I will nev-

And it’s relevant again! Took two days. I love being topical.

Special thanks go out to the Giants bullpen for having a bad day yesterday, allowing me to use it today. Way to help out, guys!

We’ll start out with the obvious here: even before yesterday’s game, in which the bullpen allowed eight runs, the Giants bullpen had the second worst ERA in the majors, ahead of only the Phillies. Now, some of that was bad luck: they were also 17th in FIP and 22nd in fWAR, but by no means have they been good this year.

And that was BEFORE yesterday! Remember yesterday? Gosh, that wasn’t good at all, was it? Ryan Walker was typically excellent as the opener, but Sean Hjelle shit the bed, and then Landon Roupp shit the bed some more, and after Erik Miller, Luke Jackson, and Taylor Rogers calmed things down, Mitch White thought it would be fun to make his Giants debut shitting the bed.

This has been a season-long trend. You can talk about good process and sample size all you want, but when a team’s bullpen as a whole has a 5.51 ERA, that’s a miserable failure of a bullpen. Oh, their FIP is much better, and indicates that over the long term they won’t give up so many runs? Great. Don’t care. They’ve been terrible. You think they’re going to turn it around because they’re too talented to keep malingering forever, but then they malinger even harder just to teach you a lesson about optimism.

Optimism: Not even once. (Sponsored by the San Francisco Giants)

Let’s go through the relievers just to make sure we’re not missing anyone. First, we’ll take Camillo Doval and Ryan Walker, thank them for their contributions, and let them grab a complimentary set of steak knives on their way out the door. Thanks for coming, guys! See you next time!

The rest of the bullpen consists of Erik Miller, Landon Roupp, the brothers Rogers, and Mitch White, with Nick Avila and Kai-Wei Teng already back down in Sacramento. It is not an inspiring group. Miller’s metrics are generally strong, with his gaudy strikeout rate making him seem almost unhittable. Also making him seem unhittable: a BABIP under .200. That is bound to increase dramatically, and when it does, Miller’s effectiveness will wane. The good news for Erik Miller, though, is that his strand rate is sitting at a paltry 23%, shockingly under the league average 2.29.

Roupp, meanwhile, was supposed to be sent down to Sacramento to get his arm streched back up if the team needed another starter. The good news: it was a smart play, just in case. The bad news: The team does need another starter because Blake Snell is hurt, and they had a bullpen game yesterday, so it was a good thought. Didn’t work out, but a good thought.

The Rogers brothers have been perfectly fine this year. While neither has a particularly strong strikeout rate, they’ve both limited runs allowed, which is the whole idea. Tyler has given up 2 homers in 10.2 innings, which doesn’t lend itself to good vibes, but otherwise, you can’t complain about what they’ve done.

Mitch White allowed too many runs yesterday, and also last year, and was in the process of allowing too many runs this year when he got traded to the Giants from the Blue Jays. This is everything I know about him, but it’s not promising!

You absolutely can complain about Kai-Wei Teng and Nick Avila, and both of them would probably expect it. Both had ERAs over 7 in their time in the majors, and while Avila seems like he was doing some things right, his argument would probably be bad luck: a very high BABIP will crush any pitcher’s hopes and dreams (the counterargument is simple: Remember when Tim Lincecum kept underperforming his FIP? It’s because he had started to get bad, so the standard adjustments simply no longer worked). As for Teng, the answer pretty clearly seems to be that he’s not ready. Better luck next time!

Of course, if the Giants were able to jettison one of the reliever they don’t trust, they would need to replace him. The two leading candidates already in the system are probably Juan Sanchez and Randy Rodriguez. Both have had excellent starts to the season in Sacramento, and Sanchez in particular got a lot of hype in Spring Training this year. If anything happens to any pitcher on the roster, Juan Sanchez is likely the first man up.

So all of this is getting lost in the weed a bit before we get to the point: Almost everyone in the bullpen is untrustworthy. Sure, Doval and Walker are holding the fort down, but it’s a band-aid on a severed limb. The bullpen has been absolutely miserable to start the season. They have been much worse than almost every other bullpen. That’s the bad news. I guess the good news is that they have nowhere to go but up.