Shapes of things before my eyes
Just teach me to despise
Will time make men more wise?Here within my lonely frame
My eyes just heard my brain
But will it seem the same?
We all want to win the World Series and we don’t care what shape the team takes to achieve that goal. If we cruise to the title on the back of a great pitching team, we will be thrilled. If we raise a flag because we clubbed the other team into submission due to offense, that would be wonderful. The goal is to win and you do what makes the most sense to achieve that objective with the talent on hand.
I’ve written numerous articles here about the stupidity of the 2011-2015 Mets using one, two and even three LOOGYs at a time. I did the math and showed why that approach was a sub-optimal one for the Mets. Insisting on using LOOGYs made those Mets teams worse. There’s simply no way an objective person could look at the actual data and come to any other conclusion.
It’s not a coincidence that the Mets’ great finish to the 2015 season and run to the World Series came when they no longer utilized a LOOGY. The futile attempts with the nameless one aside, the end game was clear. It was Addison Reed to Tyler Clippard to Jeurys Familia. They finally used a sensible bullpen and the results were good.
But there’s more than one way to skin a cat. The 2015 Mets succeeded with a bullpen that featured three RHP with closing experience. It’s not the only way to experience success. In fact, the Mets immediately discarded that blueprint and went back to something that they’ve been desperate to succeed with previously – lefty relievers. They re-signed Jerry Blevins and imported Antonio Bastardo.
The thing is that this time, it might actually work.
Here’s a blurb from an article from January, 2015 entitled, “LOOGY history and the Mets’ dismal failure with the approach”
It’s not that the LOOGY strategy can’t work – remember the 1990 A’s – it’s just that it’s not fool-proof and guaranteed to work in all instances. You need starters that go deep into games, a shut-down closer and, perhaps most importantly, good lefty relievers. In the past four years the Mets have not had those things on a consistent basis.
Let’s look at the time frame from May 10 – May 20 last year and see how many innings the relievers had to pitch:
5/10 – 3 IP
5/11 – 3 IP
5/12 – 2.2 IP
5/13 – 1.1 IP
5/14 – 1.2 IP
5/15 – 4 IP
5/16 – 3 IP
5/17 – 3 IP
5/18 – 6 IP
5/19 – 4 IP
5/20 – 4.2 IP
That’s 36.1 IP in 11 days. If the seven relievers had the innings distributed evenly, they would each pitch roughly 5.1 IP, a heavy, but manageable, workload. But if all of the sudden you’ve got a guy who can only pitch to one or two batters per appearance, these numbers become a huge problem, especially without a long man in the pen. In that 5/18 game, the Mets used five relievers.
However, the expectation is that the 2016 Mets will no longer need to use their bullpen for three innings or more eight times in 11 days. The belief is that the starters will pitch longer and Familia will shut the door when given a lead, significantly cutting down on extra-inning games. If the starter goes seven, the team can play matchups in the 8th and use Familia to close out the win in the ninth.
In the Tim Byrdak/Scott Rice days, the Mets bent over backwards to get their lefty relievers to face as many LHB as possible. Which certainly made sense on the surface because they were both lousy versus righties. The issue became that they couldn’t use them at all versus righties in anything but the lowest leverage game. And in order to justify their presence, they were brought into games where they didn’t really need to be on the mound.
Instead of plotting how to get them in to face Ryan Howard, the manager was plotting strategy to use his LOOGY versus Roger Bernadina. No offense to one of the newest Mets but if your righty reliever can’t get out that guy on a regular basis, maybe he shouldn’t be on the roster.
Now, the two primary lefty relievers have had at least some success versus righties. You can bring in Bastardo or Blevins to retire the dangerous lefty in the 8th inning. Or you can use either one to pitch in a tie game, regardless of which batters are coming to the plate. Previously, Terry Collins would have to pitch a righty reliever for the fourth time in five games if the score was close, because he could only trust his lefty reliever as far as he could throw him. Now, theoretically at least, he doesn’t have to do that.
If forced to guess, my assumption would be that the Mets would use Bastardo in this fashion but not Blevins. Instead, Blevins will be used much more in the way that they employed Byrdak and Rice – looking to get him the platoon advantage 60% or more of the time. But at least when the opposing manager sends up generic righty PH, it won’t leave the Mets in an awful place. Whereas Byrdak had a lifetime .876 OPS versus RHB and Rice had a 1.002 mark without the platoon advantage, Blevins has held righties to a .728 OPS. Yes, that’s below average but it’s a long way from horrible.
There are concerns about Bastardo’s performance in high leverage situations and Blevins’ durability. You may not prescribe a high level of concern to either of those issues but we have to at least admit they exist. However, it’s so much more preferable to have these concerns rather than having to worry about what happens if our lefty reliever is forced to face a righty batter at any point in the game.
The 1990 A’s, who essentially started the LOOGY madness, received 1,038.2 IP from their starters and their relievers only needed to provide 417.1 IP. Their shutdown closer had a 0.61 ERA over 73.1 IP. They had two primary setup men who combined for 153.1 IP with a 2.29 ERA. This allowed them to carry two lefty relievers who hovered at the LOOGY line, including one who threw just 39.2 innings all year.
The Mets can receive 1,000 innings or more from their starters. Their closer may not be quite as good but Familia should be an excellent option to finish games. Their two lefty relievers have the ability to match their 1990 A’s counterparts by putting up a sub 3.00 ERA. The biggest question might be in the reliability of Reed and mystery reliever X to provide 150 or so innings of strong work.
At long last, the Mets are set up in a way where the LOOGY gambit can work. No longer would it be a case of a homeless man wearing expensive cuff links on his ripped plaid shirt. The Mets have the starters to go deep into games, a shutdown closer and decent relievers who throw with their left hand.
In 1990, the A’s won 103 games.
When Jerry Blevins broke his arm the second time I felt the chill running down the proverbial spine. If the scientists who research these things are to be believed, there seems to be evidence that some lefthanders — some of us lefthanders, I’m one myself — are just not wired exactly right, leading to problems of not living as long and other things. I thought specifically of two other lefthanders, Tom Browning and Dave Dravecki; you probably remember their fates. One hopes that Blevins’ problems last year were just fluke occurrences, however hard it can be to forget something you’ve witnessed before.
I’m pulling for Blevins, a good guy and a pretty good pitcher. I’ll be watching him, but maybe through shaded eyes.
Interesting take on lefties being more prone to repeat damage. I don’t have a strong memory of Browning’s injury – actually had to look it up to see what happened to him – but I don’t think I’ll ever forget Dravecky.
Ojeda had some freaky things happen too.
Do hedge trimming and boating accidents qualify? May be.
I can never rewatxh the Dravecki injury. Gave me nightmares.
“The Mets can receive 1,000 innings or more from their starters.”
You better hope then that Zack Wheeler has a setback and doesn’t get many starts in the majors.
To hit 1000 innings, each starter needs to average 6.17 innings per start.
Wheeler was at 5.88 in his first season and then 5.79 in his second. And in his second season he required 100 pitches in 24 of 32 starts and 110 pitches in 13 of them.
Assuming he’ll be on a pretty strict 90-100 pitch count this season, we’re probably looking at an average of ~5.25 ip/start when Wheeler starts.
If he gets 20+ starts, it’ll be hard for the others to pick up his slack. deGrom was a 6.37 last year, Harvey 6.53 (while being limited, was 6.85 in his full season), Noah 6.25, Colon 6.21. Matz only has 6 MLB starts but he was at 5.94 last year.
Some interesting stats:
Over the past 5 years, 19 staffs have reached the 1000 IP mark (12.66%)
Over the past 10 years, 32 staffs have reached the 1000 IP mark (10.66%)
Matt Harvey exceeded 100 pitches 15 times last year, so I would be surprised if Wheeler didn’t have a similar leash. I would expect that hard count you were talking about for his first few starts but not the last six-to-eight weeks or so.
It seems they are targeting early July for his return, so we’re talking about half a season. I don’t think he’d get 20+ starts this year.
Certainly we’re all hoping for more efficiency from Wheeler. But just as important is that he avoid the early exits. He failed to pitch six innings in 10 of his 32 starts in 2014.
I’m not so sure Wheeler’s leash will be as long.
Matt Harvey had about 16 months of recovery time, then had a normal 6 weeks spring training.
If Wheeler is looking to come back early-July, mid/late May which means his recovery time will only be 13-14 months, and he’ll be aggressively rehabbing unlike Harvey who got to take it slow with a full spring training
“Certainly we’re all hoping for more efficiency from Wheeler. But just as important is that he avoid the early exits””
Not sure why you phrased it as if those two things are uncorreclated. He had so many early exits because he was inefficient. Of the 10 starts under 6IP, he was only bounced twice with under 70 pitches, which means in the other 8 he was taken out more for inefficiency rather than ineffectiveness (but then again those two things are also correlated).
But looking at Pitches/PA takes care of that issue and Wheeler was dead last in the NL in that category as well, which means inefficiency was his main problem.
No two TJ recoveries are alike and while we think of the recovery rate being high, there are certainly ones who didn’t make it back or who needed a second surgery and their prognosis is still in the air. But certainly we’ve seen guys like Patrick Corbin and Ivan Nova and Martin Perez that the proposed recovery timeline for Wheeler has already been successfully met. Harvey’s recovery time was on the cautious side. I don’t think we should view every pitcher needing that much time to make it back healthy. And we’re going to see shorter TJ recovery times in the near future. One article talked about 6 months for those who did not have a complete tear.
I don’t think it’s as cut-and-dried that you make it out to be with efficiency. He’s not getting removed from outings where he’s given up zero or one or two runs before six innings. He’s giving up four or more runs in each of those outings. In those 10 outings, he had an 8.31 ERA. He’s getting bombed in those outings and the pitcher would be removed regardless of how efficient he’s been.
Edit – Updated to the correct Corbin.
Dividing the starts equally amongst the pitchers and assuming Colon and Wheeler split the #5 starts evenly (using 6.65 for Harcey, 5.25 for Wheeler, abd last years numbers for the others), they should be right about 1000 innings. Of course, this assumes full health. The bonus is that they would have the ultimate long man in the second half of the season in Colon.
Pitcher Games Avg /start Total
DeGrom 32.4 6.37 206
Harvey 32.4 6.65 215
Noah 32.4 6.25 203
Matz 32.4 5.94 192
Colon 16.2 6.21 101
Wheeler 16.2 5.25 85
Total 1002