Bullpen BS

BY KEVIN KERNAN

No area of baseball shows the failure of the Ivy League Lords of Baseball more than the relief pitching market.

It is insane.

Two middle relievers signed with new teams on Wednesday for two years at $22 million, $11 million a year. That would be Luke Weaver with the Mets and Brad Keller with the Phillies.

Weaver and Keller, in today’s market, are known as backend or high-leverage relievers, but that is just Nerd talk.

Hey, if they ain’t pitching at the beginning of the game and they ain’t pitching at the end of the game, in my book, that makes them middle relievers. You can stuff all that “high leverage’’ label in your back pocket with your sliding mitten.

There are three kinds of pitchers, starters, closers and all the rest are middle relievers.

Mama don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys, but you sure as heck might want to make them middle relievers. Bullpens have become so expensive because starting pitching has been ruined. Once starters were no longer going five, six, seven, eight — or God forbid — nine innings, those other innings had to be filled by someone, hence the overpriced middle reliever market.

The Nerds created their own pitching shortage.

There is a severe price to be paid for ruining starting pitching. All that throw as hard as you physically can mentality has a cost. Command is lost. Workhorse innings are lost and certainly a lot of games have been lost by this Pitch Lab out of an industrial complex era of pitching.

New statistics are invented to show the expected success of those pitchers instead of the actual, “get a damn out” success.

Instead of the “pitching strategist’’ focusing on how to get more innings from the starters, it became all the rage to add even more relievers who empty the gas can just about every night. There is a price to be paid for that as well with pitching injuries at epidemic levels. The price of pitching has skyrocketed on every level.

No one in baseball, though, seems to care and they just shuffle the blame to different areas. As long as the gambling money is flowing through the sport, mediocre 37-year-old starters will be paid two-year $40 million contracts.

The men who knew pitching mechanics, and not just at the major league level but at every level of pro baseball, were pushed out the door in favor of metric readers and the latest “scientists’’ from those pitching labs, and many of those young gurus never made it out of independent league baseball or the lower minors.

They don’t specialize in the mechanics of pitching; they specialize in the mechanics of increasing velocity.

“Nobody teaches anymore, it is hard to watch a lot of this stuff,’’ a disgusted former pitching coach told BallNine this week. He added that is why you see middling pitchers going to Korea and then make it back to the States because they learn more about their craft in Korea. There already has been a run on pitchers returning from Korea this off-season.

It all becomes one vicious cycle and at the end of the day, the bullpens are just as beat up as the starting rotations because of overuse. It is all about whiff rate and not about getting outs. New statistics are invented to show the expected success of those pitchers instead of the actual, “get a damn out” success. My new favorite thing is how foul balls are the culprit on why pitchers can’t go deep into games. That’s because the goal is always swing and miss and not just getting outs.

Note to pitchers, there are defenders behind you and while you are at it work on your own damn PFP, so you don’t wind up like young Phillies pitcher Orion Kerkering, hands on knees after throwing the season away on a two-out comebacker.

Things are so bad on the relief market that 37-year-old Drew Pomeranz is again a wanted commodity and was given a $4 million contract.

Well, he is lefty, so there is that. He signed with the Angels, who could always use the help. The Angels were 28th in baseball last season with a bullpen ERA of 4.86. Only the Nationals and Rockies were worse.

The Angels are perennially that team that just throws pitching stuff against the wall to see if anything sticks.

The big irony is that the Dodgers won the World Series because they had their best starter become their best closer in Yoshinobu Yamamoto. That was creative thinking by the Dodgers and Dave Roberts and truth be told, the Dodgers made such terrible bullpen signings last year, they had to have their ace bail them out in October.

It appears though the Dodgers have learned their lesson and they signed closer Edwin Diaz – making it doubly special was that they stole the free agent away from the Mets – with a three-year $69 million contract.

During my time covering the Mets I always found Diaz to be a straight-shooter and he did not disappoint after he signed, saying, “I chose the Dodgers because they are a winning organization. I’m looking to win, and I think they have everything to win. Picking the Dodgers was pretty easy.’’

With Diaz gone, the Mets will rely on the insurance deal they signed with free agent Devin Williams, who failed as Yankee closer this past season but had much success with David Stearns in Milwaukee. On December 1, the Mets signed Williams to a three-year, $51 million deal. Diaz, evidently, was not informed of the signing of Williams. If it were me, I would have run it by my closer, a closer who spent seven years with the Mets after coming over from Seattle and was beloved by the Mets fan base.

But that’s me.

Stearns clearly is going to do it his way and emotion is not any part of his baseball filter. He’s rebuilding the Mets and the Mets bullpen his way. We will see how it all works out and this adds a lot more spice to the upcoming season. By signing Luke Weaver as well the Mets and Stearns are continuing to sign ex-Yankees. It’s almost comical. The list includes Weaver, Williams, Juan Soto, Frankie Montas, Clay Holmes and Luis Severino.

Who knew that part of David Stearns’ plan to build the Mets was to collect three failed Yankee closers?

You can’t have too many ex-Yankees at Citi Field. Maybe Cody Bellinger will be next.

Word also came on Wednesday that much sought-after free agent Bo Bichette is willing to play second base, something I said all along was going to happen and would be best for Bichette.

If the Craig Breslow Red Sox ever want to be serious again about building a true championship caliber team, this is a direct signal to them.

If the Dodgers are looking to sign every superstar in baseball, this is a direct signal to them as well. Bichette, to me, is the key free agent out there. I just love the fact he can hit anyone’s fastball, is not intimidated by any situation and came up off the mat to almost carry the Blue Jays to a Game 7 victory in the World Series, until Jeff Hoffman, another middle reliever masquerading as a closer, gave it all away with the worst slider in the last 25 years of baseball to the ancient Miguel Rojas.

As for the Mets pickups of former Yankees, Weaver and Williams, a scout told me this: “I have concerns, but if you go with the stock market thing of up and down years, they both could back and be as good as they were in their previous year.’’

I do believe in bounce back years for relievers.

Believe it or not, Nerds, I first became aware of bounce back relievers when I was 15 years old in 1968. Yes, there was MLB in 1968.

Six days after I turned 14, Yankees GM Lee MacPhail made a trade with the Giants, getting veteran reliever Lindy McDaniel for Bill Monbouquette. McDaniel was struggling with the Giants but put up a 1.75 ERA the rest of the season for the Yankees. Lindy was lights out. The next year his ERA jumped to 3.55, but in 1970 it was back down, 2.01 with 24 saves, the second highest total of saves in the AL that season. McDaniel’s ERA ballooned to 5.04 in 1971 and was back to 2.25 in 1972. Lindy was the embodiment of up and down seasons for a reliever. The most money Lindy ever made in a season with the Yankees was $48,000. He’d be an arm easily making $11 million a year now.

But the best was yet to come. After the 1973 season, Lee MacPhail shipped Lindy off to the Kansas City Royals for Ken Wright, a pitcher who appeared in all of three games with the Yankees, and a hot-headed outfielder named Lou Piniella. The rest is Yankee history.

The modern bullpen is baseball’s version of Russian roulette. You are not sure what you are going to get.

“You have guys who are up five days a week throwing,’’ the former pitching coach told me. “A lot of ups, a lot of pitches thrown and you start to see that decline in stuff, the decline in velocity, and you go, maybe it is not in there.’’

Scouts told me last spring that Weaver’s velocity was down, and it could be a rough year for him. It was – as his ERA jumped from 2.89 to 3.62. He suffered a hamstring injury and also was not thrilled the Yankees tweaked his delivery because they said he was tipping pitches. In three postseason appearances Weaver was 0-1 with a 135.00 ERA. Yep, 135.00.

So, Weaver has plenty of excuses to fall back on and make 2026 a better year in New York, this time with the Mets. Same goes for Williams, who was more concerned with his beard than with his pitching with the Yankees. The Yankees caved and changed their facial hair policy and Williams rewarded them with a 4.86 ERA. Now he gets a fresh start with the Mets who are paying a combined $73 million for the two relievers. That’s more than Diaz money.

And neither is a sure thing.