Has our bullpen been unlucky?

[Loopee]

This post is a shoot off of a discussion started in the Linebrink thread, but I think this deserves it's own discussion.

 

As far as I can tell, our bullpen has given up far too many runs for how the pitchers peripheral stats look.

 

The Brewers relievers are 16th in MLB in bullpen ERA with a 3.91 average.

 

However, they are 5th in WHIP in MLB;

 

they are 4th in K/9 ratio;

 

they are 2nd in K/BB ratio;

 

and they are 5th in OPS against.

 

Now, I'm not a sabremetric genius; but unless I'm missing an important pitching peripheral... it looks to me like the runs allowed by our bullpen are very high for the actual "pitching" stats the relievers have put up. I'm asking those of you who follow this stuff to confirm or deny this. Those that maintained that Dave Bush would turn around based on his peripherals have turned out to be pretty much spot on. Can we expect the same from our bullpen?

 

 

(consolidated tags --1992)

[imaji]

please God let's hope so. I've been defending Bush all year, and it's not just because I have him on my fantasy team.

 

The biggest problem (IMO) is not the bullpen's "luck", it's that Nedly's putting them in positions to fail more often than he is putting them in positions to succeed.

[Ennder]

please God let's hope so. I've been defending Bush all year, and it's not just because I have him on my fantasy team.

 

The biggest problem (IMO) is not the bullpen's "luck", it's that Nedly's putting them in positions to fail more often than he is putting them in positions to succeed.

 

If that were really true their secondary stats would be bad as well. We seem to have a lot of bullpen guys that are either dominant or disasters so their hits get bunched up more leading to more runs scored and a lower LOB%. I don't know if thats just bad luck or something more systemic of our players though.

[TooLiveBrew]

We seem to have a lot of bullpen guys that are either dominant or disasters so their hits get bunched up more leading to more runs scored and a lower LOB%.

I agree on this one, Ennder. Especially (obviously) with regards to T-Bow & CoCo. I don't know, however, if this is something our relievers 'do', or if it's more like a batter's BARISP (which tends to fluctuate from year-to-year)

 

[Loopee]

So if I'm hearing you guys right. If we have not been simply unlucky, it may be that certain relievers are "Feast or Famine" guys, who either dominate, or can't retire anyone, which gives us a low LOB%.

 

So...is there any consensus whether certain pitchers carry a better or worse LOB% from year to year? Are all of the low LOB% guys in baseball on the Brewers staff?

[TooLiveBrew]

Darnit rluz or sbrylski, where are you? http://static.yuku.com/v2//domainskins/bypass/img/smileys/wink.gif

[imaji]

"If that were really true their secondary stats would be bad as well"

 

I don't necessarily agree. When used properly, guys have performed very well on the whole. The disasters/bunches of hits are easily traced (IMO) to guys being put in positions they don't need to be in, going all the way back to April when Ned let Aquino wither and die in Cincinnati and ruined the guy probably for life. Bringing Turnbow in when he has to pitch from the stretch = using him improperly = disaster/bunch of hits on the way (thankfully, Ned seems to have figured THAT one out finally). At this point, bringing Cordero in to close on the road would also seem to be in that category, considering his recent road performances. My complaint is basically that Ned has a predetermined "plan" for what he's going to do, and he stubbornly refuses to deviate from it until it has blown up in his face several times too many.

[Loopee]

There's a different thread about bullpen mismanagement, and I really fail to see how any bullpen management concerns could affect how peripheral stats translate into an ERA, which is what I'm asking about. If you have some idea of how manegerial moves have caused the bullpen to lead the league in most the pitching "stats" but be middle of the pack in earned runs allowed, I'm all ears.

[imaji]

"I really fail to see how any bullpen management concerns could affect how peripheral stats translate into an ERA"

 

I don'y know how to make it any clearer than I did in my prior post. Several proper uses lead to good stats, one misuse leads to several earned runs which skew the numbers. What exactly is hard to understand...?

[Loopee]

How the earned runs could happen from mismanagement without showing up in K/9, WHIP, OPS against, etc.

 

As Ennder said, if what you said is true about Ned setting up his pitchers to fail, at least some of those stats would be bad as well. Instead the Brewers bullpen seems to "pitch" well, but gives up a disproportiately high amount of runs.

[imaji]

How the earned runs could happen from mismanagement without showing up in K/9, WHIP, OPS against, etc.

 

As Ennder said, if what you said is true about Ned setting up his pitchers to fail, at least some of those stats would be bad as well. Instead the Brewers bullpen seems to "pitch" well, but gives up a disproportiately high amount of runs.

 

Example:

Let's say 3 games in a row, the bullpen is used properly and has nice performances. That's say 6-7 innings of little/no hits, walks, etc against. Then you have today, a misuse, Wise comes in, gives up an error and a dinger. You just added 2 runs into the mix. Now comes Cordero (a 3rd straight day), walk, infield single, walk, HBP, basehit. 2 more runs. 4 runs scored on only 1 really hard hit ball (the dinger). That's all in one inning (ERA of 36). Tomorrow (hopefully) we get 2-3 good innings from the pen, and the WHIP, OPS, K/9, and K/W get diluted, but the runs are what stick. One bad inning screws ERA far more than one bad inning screws the other metrics. I'm not a complete stat geek, so maybe the error doesn't go on ERA (even though it was committed by the pitcher), and maybe the HBP doesn't either (like WPs, I don't think they count towards "earned" runs, which seems baffling to me).

Short answer, I'm not sure, other than to say, as Ennder did, that it seems when we have bad outings, they are unmitigated disasters, and we give up runs in bunches. And it seems (to me) that those disasters usually SEEM to correlate to the times I've screamed at the tv because of who was coming in when. Sometimes math is just weird. As the saying goes, there's lies, damn lies, and statistics. OPS wouldn't have been very horrible today, because of the error and HBP. K/9 wouldn't be so bad. K/W took a hit, but a couple of nights ago Cordero struck out the side, so while you only added one clean inning to the ERA, you added 3 k's, thus a skew. I dunno. I'm sleepy now. I know the answer is around here somewhere, but my math major wife fell asleep first, so I'm without the better half of my brain atm. =p

[TheCrew07]

I think the Saber crew will agree with you and call it unlucky, or a statistical anomaly, or noise, or whatever... I get that argument, but after watching the games, I just don't see it. I thought Coco got squeezed on the corners in the 9th, that being said, he still was up in the count 0-2 and walked a guy. I can forgive walks, but not walks when you're up 0-2 where the hitter doesn't foul off 5-6 pitches, or hits on 0-2 and 1-2. At what point does "unlucky" become a "trend"?

 

Unlucky from a pitcher's point of view is he makes a good pitch, and the hitter gets a broken bat bleeder or a one handed half swing to drop someplace. In the Brewer's case here lately these pitches that are getting hit are meatballs, they are mid thigh to waist high and out over the middle of the plate, and in most cases they are getting smoked. At times I've questioned the pitch selection, and other times the pitcher just makes a horrible pitch misses his spot that badly. I have no problem with a good pitch that the hitter gets a base hit on, I just don't think that's the case for our relievers the last month. The walks are up and they are giving up way too many 2 strike hits. It's weird though, it's like a disease in that if the first couple of guys in pitch well they all do, but when the first guy or 2 has control issues, it seems like everyone has control issues. This team is just flaky weird that way right now. Tonight after the walk, and then the swinging bunt single, you could see the "here we go again" and the Crew was still only 1 out away from ending the game. Coco failed because he started to nibble... and I don't think anyone here knows why exactly. He went after the first 2 guys, then got up 0-2 on what should have been the last guy and ended up walking him on 7 pitches. I have a hard time believing that has anything to do with luck, when the count went full I just felt that he was going to walk the guy. Villy has the same problem, he's walking guys when he's way ahead in the count and he's giving up hits when he's ahead in the count.

 

In short, I think the hitters are doing to the Brewers exactly what they are supposed to do, they are hitting meatball pitches hard all over the place. These are MLB hitters, if they couldn't connect on those pitches, they wouldn't be playing at this level.

[Ennder]

Part of the problem is calling it luck, its really variance. Cordero is going to have bad outings during the year but over a full season they get diluted by the good outings and you end up with some pretty normal looking stats. Now the question is are his current struggles just normal bad outings bunched up together or an indicator that he is being misused or an indicator that he just isn't as good as he has been over the past 5 years. I dunno what the right answer is.

 

His current stats show his best K rate in a while, his lowest BB rate in a while, by far his best HR rate in a while but a high BABIP and a low LOB% so my guess is his struggles won't be sustained. I'm not sure if this all comes from a lack of confidence or just 'bad luck' though.

[M Skjellyfetti]

imaji wrote:

Bringing Turnbow in when he has to pitch from the stretch = using him improperly = disaster/bunch of hits on the way

Doesn't Turnbow always pitch from the stretch? Even if he doesn't, could you post some information as to why he's not good when in the stretch? I'd like to see some stats to back up this claim.

[Fatter than Joey]

Defense hasn't helped out -- I think Villy has hit some sort of wall, and Wise obviously is damaged at this point. There are 2 pitchers IMO that are somehow compromised but Yost keeps running them out there -- it would be like having Sheets start tomorrow, and then calling that "variance" or "luck", if Sheets got shelled.

[Ennder]

Defense hasn't helped out -- I think Villy has hit some sort of wall, and Wise obviously is damaged at this point. There are 2 pitchers IMO that are somehow compromised but Yost keeps running them out there -- it would be like having Sheets start tomorrow, and then calling that "variance" or "luck", if Sheets got shelled.

 

The problem is when a pitcher is pitching poorly he doesnt' just give up hits. He doesn't K people, he BB's people and he gives up HR's. Those things DO show up in other stats than BABIP and LOB%. When all of your other stats look normal and your BABIP is just high that tends to be variance more than anything else. With a RP its just hard to tell anything because of how small the samples of innings are.

[bklynbrewcrew]

The bullpen is faltering as of late because they have all been way overworked especially Villanueva. Villanueva seems to be pitching 3 or 4 games per week and when he doesnt pitch he is warming up. He is totally worn out. I also think Cordero and Turnbow have been overused as well.

[Fatter than Joey]

With a RP its just hard to tell anything because of how small the samples of innings are.

 

This is in essence what I am saying -- you have players like Wise and Villy pitching in a compromised fashion, you can't really expect past performances to somehow predict how things are going to project.

 

I guess I don't see the problems as variance or luck-related -- more pitchers getting ran out there that are not ready to perform. (IMO) When you start talking about variance and/or luck there is an implication that things will return to some sort of base-measure -- I don't think that this is a realistic hope for our BP.

[JohnBriggs12]

When you get to your 4th reliever in a game where you've allowed just one run up until that point, the odds are you are going to get to a guy who won't have a good day. Linebrink breezed through the 8th in 13 pitches. Last time we saw Wise, he'd thrown 10 balls in a row. Why tempt fate? Let Linebrink, who you gave up some pretty good talent for, finish the game and allow Cordero and Turnbow to rest.

Eight relievers is too many especially when two shouldn't be used in close games.

[Ennder]

With a RP its just hard to tell anything because of how small the samples of innings are.

 

This is in essence what I am saying -- you have players like Wise and Villy pitching in a compromised fashion, you can't really expect past performances to somehow predict how things are going to project.

 

I guess I don't see the problems as variance or luck-related -- more pitchers getting ran out there that are not ready to perform. (IMO) When you start talking about variance and/or luck there is an implication that things will return to some sort of base-measure -- I don't think that this is a realistic hope for our BP.

That still shows up in his base stats though. Wise has walked a bunch of guys and gave up a HR, you can tell from his base stats that something is wrong. When your K/9, BB/9 etc suggest one result but your BABIP, LOB% suggest another you go with the K/9, BB/9, GB%. When a pitcher is bad because something is wrong with him it shows up everywhere, so just saying they are compromised doesn't answer his question. Other than Cordero who has been unlucky and maybe Spurling, I'm not seeing a problem with any individual bullpen pitchers stats though. Most of them have put up the ERA you'd expect or better.

[Loopee]

Just so everyone understands what we're talking about, the stats I posted are a compilation of every relief inning the Brewers have thrown this year. In total it's just over 345 innings at this point, so I don't consider it an especially small sample.

 

After a little more digging, I notice a stat on ESPN called ERC%, which apparently compares a prediction of ERA based off the pure pitching "stats" with the ERA actually given up. As you can see, the Brewers are second to last. This seems to indicate that our bullpen has actually been better than the ERA suggests (of course our bullpen was a major problem yesterday, so perhaps it was an inopportune time to make this post).

 

Individual pitchers and management concerns aside...I think the gist of it is that the "Bullpen is due" to get a few lucky breaks (see e.g. the potentially game-tying rocket Counsell hit yesterday that went right at the Phillies 2B).

[Fatter than Joey]

Other than Cordero who has been unlucky and maybe Spurling, I'm not seeing a problem with any individual bullpen pitchers stats though. Most of them have put up the ERA you'd expect or better.

 

I suspect if a BP pitcher has been unlucky, it has been Cordero -- even the infamous game in TX -- he pitched well -- got 2 strikes on a lot of hitters, and then gave up a bunch of hits.

[Fatter than Joey]

BTW -- Wise would probably have a more inflated ERA, if Shouse wouldn't have saved him in that 12 pitch 12 ball performance against the Mets.

 

Our BP would probably look a lot worse if Shouse wouldn't have been pitching out of his mind these last weeks.

[RU Rah Rah]

Since June 9, CoCo has a 6.55 ERA, and opponents are batting .319 against him. Even if those numbers are not completely indicative of his performance, I still have to say that he's been mediocre (if not worse) for almost two full months.

[imaji]

Loopee wrote:

Individual pitchers and management concerns aside...I think the gist of it is that the "Bullpen is due" to get a few lucky breaks (see e.g. the potentially game-tying rocket Counsell hit yesterday that went right at the Phillies 2B).

 

I think Corey Hart bringing a homerun back from over the wall exhausted our "lucky breaks FOR" well. Braun's error yesterday aside, my immediate recollections are of great defensive plays saving hits/runs far more often than flukes creating them.