Welcome to BP Boston’s Roster Recap series! Over the next four months, we’ll be breaking down every player on Boston’s 40-man roster and many of their top prospects in order to provide a comprehensive overview of the Red Sox roster’s strengths and weaknesses, as well as what we can expect moving forward. There’s no better time than the offseason to review the best (there was some best!) and worst (there was a lot of worst!) of the past year in red and navy. You can see previous editions of Roster Recap here.
One of the hardest things to find in baseball is a reliever who, year-in and year-out, is consistently good. Relievers are infamously volatile, capable of performing as world-beaters one year and the poster boys for batting practice the next. Predicting what they’ll do next year is, well, I’ll let Mr. Scott describe that virtual impossibility.
Craig Kimbrel has been, to put it very blandly, different. Not only has he been a consistently good reliever, he’s done it while striking out an otherworldly 40% of the batters he faces. Since his debut in 2010, Kimbrel has thrown just under 350 innings with a 1.63 ERA. I’m not even going to attempt superlatives here. They’ve all been worn out already. There are very few sensible compliments you can give to the man that haven’t been said in a cleverer way.
Curiously enough, 2015 was Kimbrel’s worst year to date. Sure, that sounds awful because the Red Sox just traded some decent prospects for him, but Kimbrel’s version of a career-worst season resulted in a 2.58 ERA with a 2.68 FIP. If you’re not easily impressed, you can call him a bum and ask why his FIP isn’t in the negatives, but we here at BP Boston enjoy having fun, and we commend Mr. Kimbrel on a fantastic, yet relatively awful year.
What went right in 2015
Almost everything, and he was still lights out when it mattered. Kimbrel is unbelievably good in high-leverage situations. He accrued 25 innings of high-leverage action and allowed a triple-slash line of .143/.217/.226. For reference, here’s his battery mate Austin Hedges’ slash line over 150 PA: .168/.215/.248. Kimbrel held opponents in check so well with the pressure on, they devolved to third-catcher-on-the-depth-chart levels of hitting. You can’t do terribly in tough situations and expect to get gifs like this.
Kimbrel threw 59 innings and allowed 40 hits total. He had a 13.20 K/9. In the second half of the season, Kimbrel surrendered a line drive on 11% of all batted balls. Eleven percent! There are men Kimbrel faced who are paid gratuitous amounts of money to bash baseballs to the outer solar system, and they had very little chance to even make contact, much less good contact.
What went wrong in 2015
Compared to the standard Kimbrel fare, his first month was pretty rough. The right-hander coughed up a .273/.351/.424 triple-slash, which made April his worst month by far. To be fair, this might be because he was traded to the Padres on April 5th, and very few – if any – would adjust quickly after moving 3000 miles and working a high-profile job. The five months after that? Same old Kimbrel. Perfect innings, tons of strikeouts, people leaving the game in the 9th inning.
Kimbrel is very good. I’d go so far to say that he has [editor’s note … sigh] great stuff. There aren’t very many pitchers who could’ve moved Koji Uehara from the 9th inning. This man is the new Red Sox closer, and one can only imagine the carnage if he bounces back from his terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad season.
Photo by Jim Cowsert/USA Today Sports Images