Bullsh*t Bullpen Management?
Author’s Note: This is what many in the baseball writing industry call #GoryMath, it is inelegant, it is imperfect, but for the purposes of this piece, it’s good enough.
This piece is the first one that I’m doing about something that is currently happening in MLB. It is largely inspired by conversations I’ve been having with one of my real life friends about his favorite baseball team, the Cleveland Guardians. They are in the midst of their first meaningful playoff run since Barack Obama was President. I share the opinion of one of my favorite podcast hosts, Meg Rowley, who has stipulated—jokingly—that when the Chicago Cubs won the 2016 World Series against the Cleveland Guardians, snapping their 108-year World Series drought, the Cubs opened up a rupture in our timeline that allowed for the election of Donald Trump and the ensuing chaos. If the Cubs could win, anything was possible.
Anyway, tonight (October 17), they will be facing off in Game 3 of the American League Championship Series against the New York Yankees. The Yankees currently boast a 2-0 lead in the best-of-seven-series to decide who will go to the World Series. One theme that my friend and I have discussed throughout the Guardians run in the 2024 Postseason, including this series against the Yankees, has been their pitching usage. Their manager, Stephen Vogt, is in his first season as Manager of the club, and was playing Major League Baseball just two years ago. While there has been a trend lately of hiring young former ballplayers to manage teams, Vogt is exceptionally green for the role, having just one season of coaching experience between his career as a player ending and his role as skipper beginning. I, personally, do believe that the Guardians did better at hewing to the Selig Rule than the other hirings I wrote about last Sunday—for what it’s worth.
Now, it is important to have some context for this discussion before we get into the math of it all. In baseball, it is common practice to have two different roles assigned to your pitchers: starters and relievers. Starters do just what their name implies, they are the pitcher who begins the game on the mound for their team. It is expected that starters will pitch a majority of the team’s innings for that game. Relievers, on the other hand, hang out in the bullpen until they are needed to relieve the starter—you can see where their name comes from—due to fatigue, performance, or because the manager believes the relievers will be better against the upcoming batters than the starter. In baseball, at all levels, familiarity builds each time a batter faces a pitcher, so the more times a starter pitches to the same batter, the better one can expect the outcomes to be against the starter. Often, this effect is most apparent the third time through the batting order, which can occur at any point during the game depending on how many baserunners and runs the pitcher allows. The more baserunners and runs, the worse the pitcher is performing. Okay, basics are pretty much out of the way. Now we can get into it.
My friend and I text each other during Guardians games, and while I am not a Guards fan, I can appreciate the pain that he feels when things aren’t going well for his squad. One of the most frustrating things that can happen to a baseball fan, is an unforced error by the manager, and this manifests most predominantly in two ways, leaving a pitcher in too long, and taking a pitcher out too quickly. These decisions often happen on the margins and are much easier to see in hindsight, however, with Stephen Vogt this year, it has been incredibly obvious that he has a very quick hook with his starting pitchers. Last night I pulled some data from Stathead (pronounced “Stat Head”) to see if I could confirm what we were feeling watching the games. And I cannot believe what I ended up finding.
So far, in the 2024 MLB Postseason, starting pitchers are averaging just under 5 innings pitched (IP) per game—compared to about 5 and 1/3 innings during the regular season. However, Cleveland’s pitchers are averaging about 3 innings per game during the postseason! That is not good! That is very bad! For context, during the regular season, out of the 4858 player games started by a pitcher this year, 4426 games saw the starting pitchers go deeper into games than the Guardians’ starting pitching has this postseason. That puts the Cleveland starting pitchers in the bottom 8.9% of pitchers. Yikes. This is mainly an issue because it puts an undue amount of stress on the relievers on the Guardians, they are being asked to pitch way more innings than relievers on any other team. In terms of percentages, Cleveland’s starting pitching has lasted 30% less into games than the average team’s starting pitchers this postseason. They also pitched less than the average team during the regular season, but that difference was just 5%.
The graph above is a snapshot comparing the average team in the regular season and the average team this postseason to Cleveland’s pitching in the postseason and the regular season. You can see that in the postseason, the difference in innings is much larger than it was during the regular season. Otherwise, everything else looks about as you would expect. Where Cleveland was worse during the regular season, they have been worse during the postseason. But a few things stick out to me. Despite pitching 30% fewer innings and facing considerably fewer batters, Guardians pitchers are walking A TON of batters. In almost two fewer innings, they are averaging MORE walks than the rest of the postseason teams. They walked more batters than the average team during the regular season too, but only 7% more. In the postseason, that number has shot up to 11%. Below, you can see how that has impacted the WHIP (walks and hits per inning pitched) of Cleveland pitchers. They are allowing baserunners at a rate 43% higher than their postseason counterparts. That is awful.
I started this article expecting to confirm my assumption that Vogt was too quick to pull his pitchers. After looking at the numbers, I can’t blame him. I like this team, I do. Vogt is an easy manager to root for, the team is full of young players that have skills that aren’t found on many teams. Watching them play is really fun, watching them pitch is really not. I thought I could blame Vogt for being an over-zealous manager, too eager to treat every game as if it were a must-win. But it turns out, his pitching staff—or at least his starting pitchers—have been pretty bad. Stephen Vogt, I’m sorry, you are not the problem. Your roster is.
