After running down the positional side last Tuesday, it’s time to examine the pitching staff. Scary? Maybe. Any cause for hope? A little. Let’s dive into the numbers.

Starting Pitchers

So, uh, how about that Rick Porcello, everyone? We knew going into the season that the notably ace-free Red Sox weren’t exactly going to set ERA records in 2015. Sure enough, they didn’t. But, believe it or not, the starting rotation isn’t what tanked the Red Sox in 2015.

That’s the major league leaderboard for starting pitchers, sorted by BP’s Deserved Run Average. And that’s Boston at #5 in the big leagues. Sure enough, the Red Sox starters performed pretty admirably as a unit. So how’d that happen? Well, it probably has to start with two pitchers who were pretty awesome for half a season each: Clay Buchholz and Eduardo Rodriguez.

Clay and Ed were the yin and yang of the Sox 2015 rotation, slanted reflections of each other. Buchholz was the closest thing to an ace that the Sox had coming into 2015, but couldn’t be counted on to stay healthy. True to form, Buchholz started strong, but his elbow failed him as the season went on. In the end, he logged 113 quality innings, posting a DRA of 3.36 (pretty great!) and an FIP of 2.66 (really great!). Of course, as is Clay’s wont to do when pitching well, he was injured. He can’t seem to make it through a full season, and he closed up shop in mid-July.

At the end of May, Eduardo Rodriguez made his major-league debut and held Red Sox Nation in the palm of his hand. His stellar first couple of starts pushed expectations sky-high. We’ve made covering #Ed kind of a cottage industry here at BP Boston, from comps to Alex Skillin’s continuing “continuing education” series. Perhaps Eduardo wasn’t quite the dominator that Clay was on a consistent basis, but his DRA of 3.46 and FIP of 3.90 were just fine, thank you very much. While the team would love to see his strikeout rate improve, as well as stay whole and healthy, he’s established himself as a perfectly-good middle-of-the-rotation starter, even in the challenging American League.

So with half a great pitcher, and probably one whole good one, that leaves an average guy: Wade Miley. Miley did, well, almost exactly what he should’ve been expected to do. Miley ate innings, and posted good-but-not-great numbers doing so. It’s almost funny; his ERA was 4% worse than league-average and his FIP was 4% better. He posted numbers almost entirely in line with his past two seasons in Arizona, and stuck to an average level of performance like he was glued there.

There were also some small wins in terms of performance here and there. Henry Owens debuted, and he’s looked pretty good over his first 10 starts. He could certainly stick for next season. And I’d write up Rich Hill here, but he’s a goddamned unicorn. All I can say is that he deserves a shot in the rotation during Spring Training, and that I have absolutely no faith that he’ll be any good. But he might be. To be continued.

So not only were there some bright spots in terms of specific 2015 performance, but there’s some hope for the future. Miley should stay Miley. Eduardo Rodriguez looks real, and between Clay Buchholz and/or Henry Owens, another slot in the rotation might be pretty good.

Buuuut … then there’s Rick Porcello. Porcello was an unmitigated disaster in Boston, a failure in the first degree. He needs another chance to prove he’s at least the pitcher he was in Detroit, if not the pitcher the Sox want him to be. According to cFIP, which is a pretty good true talent measure, Porcello was roughly similar to last year as he was last in terms of peripherals. His cFIP in ‘14 was 99, his cFIP in ‘15 was 99.

Porcello went wildly wrong, Joe Kelly went pretty wrong (but he has great stuff!), and the simple fact that the Sox needed to cycle through a fair number of starters is something that went wrong. Beyond that? The rotation is pretty okay.

There is room for improvement here … be it from Porcello, from an improving Owens / Rodriguez combo or, most likely, from a new addition in the last available rotation slot. Dollars to donuts, I’d bet that Dave Dombrowski would be interested in adding another higher-end rotation piece, and likely by trade. Improvement would be good — very good — but things don’t look quite so dire here.

Relief Pitching

Welcome to the danger zone. Here is a comprehensive list of all the Red Sox’ good relievers in 2015:

• Koji Uehara, who is 40
• nope

This isn’t the most fair: Tommy Layne was a bit above-average, and Robbie Ross and Junichi Tazawa were about average. But really, in an era where relievers strike out batters like it’s going out of style (it’s not), the bullpen should be an asset that makes Red Sox starters breathe a bit of a sigh of relief as they hand over the keys. In 2015 it wasn’t, and there’s no reason to think 2016 should be markedly different.

Those four pitchers I mentioned, Uehara, Layne, Ross, and Tazawa, all very well could come back next year, but banking on improvement isn’t really a great plan. The rest of the bullpen? It might be better if they disappear. The only guy with real potential out of the bunch is Matt Barnes, and I think you might be tired of waiting on Matt Barnes’s potential by now.

No, this bullpen needs a complete overhaul. As a unit, the ‘pen had a 4.56 FIP, dead last in baseball. The team’s 4.31 ERA only surpassed the Braves, Rockies, Tigers, and Athletics. These teams all have something in common: futility.

Adding average-or-better relievers could be the ticket to improving this team by wins right from the jump. Though a great bullpen only gives a team a handful of wins above replacement (four to six, if you’re both good and lucky), the Red Sox were either replacement-level or worse, depending on how you pick your poison.

So, it’ll be up to Dave Dombrowski to build a new bullpen, with hardly any exist-

… Oh no.

Well, the good news is that there’s a lot of room for improvement here. Adding two or three people who aren’t Craig Breslow or Alexi Ogando might be a good start. The bad news is, well, you know what the bad news is. It could take some luck to make this work, if not skill.

So after running through all the holes and the weaknesses, after looking back on everything that went wrong, here’s my primary takeaway: the Red Sox have a fair number of holes to fill, but they’re ones that can be filled. No, they can’t be filled internally — the team will have to go out and find these players on other rosters — but the hard work of adding new pieces to complement the existing ones can be done. It’s not likely that everything will break down, and with a couple of savvy acquisitions and some luck, the team could be back in it again within a year or so.

That’s a bit easier said than done, of course. Look at the Padres and the White Sox if you want examples of how reaching out and grabbing external players to serve as all your missing pieces can go sour. But the Sox have resources: money, prospects, and intellectual capital. They’ll be okay. Probably. Maybe. But chances are that 2016 will certainly be more exciting than 2015.

Photo by Dan Hamilton/USA Today Sports Images

As is the case with a lot of fringy lefties who at least flirt with 90 mph, Breslow has been used as a matchups guy for some time, with somewhat limited success. He was quite good in 2013, quite bad in 2014 and somewhat less bad in 2015, including his surprisingly decent showing in his two “starts” as the lead man in “bullpen days” designed to save the arms of Eduardo Rodriguez, Henry Owens and others. It may seem far-fetched, but has Breslow pulled a Rich Hill and improved his impending free-agent outlook through his two decent outings?

Here, the answer is yes and no because it depends on which southpaw we’re talking about. Hill probably has changed his market, in that he might not have had one, and now he probably does. But that’s the thing about having one unhittable pitch that, even when throwing it more than a third of the time, hasn’t seemed to get more hittable. There’s a ceiling there, maybe, that just hasn’t been reached before. It’s hard to throw a changeup more than 20% or 25% of the time, but Hill’s curve hasn’t necessarily been about deception (well, maybe in one way). And there’s the small matter of finishing four starts with a Deserved Run Average of 1.50.

Breslow may not have the same shadow of unreached ceiling following him around, and he doesn’t have the same recent history of success. Breslow finished the year with a 4.15 ERA, possibly with more than a little luck, as he’s also finished with a 4.95 DRA. Not nearly as bad as his 2014 (5.96 ERA, 6.80 DRA), far and away his worst season in MLB, but not necessarily a guy for whom you work hard to find space on your roster. I’m not sure what replacement level is for a bullpen lefty who averages well over an inning per outing, but we can take his -0.2 WARP this season as an indication that it’s not too far away from the somewhat-improved Breslow of 2015.

In this second, longer go-round with the team, Breslow has gotten by throwing his four-seam a lot less, mixing in a sinker, cutter, and curve a whole lot more.

As for his quasi-rebound this season, we probably don’t have too far to look. In this second, longer go-round with the team, Breslow has gotten by throwing his four-seam a lot less, mixing in a sinker, cutter, and curve a whole lot more. But although opponents had their highest slugging percentage against his four-seam in 2015, it may have been a more helpful part of his repertoire this year with more of a velocity difference between it and his other pitches. His four-seam velocity did take a step back toward the range that he held while he was so successful from 2009 through 2013:

With only two career starts to his name, a sparkling 1.93 ERA in 9.1 innings of work in these last two outings at least raises some questions. Considering he wasn’t really in a matchups role anyway, has Breslow been miscast as a reliever? It’s not like a swarm of scouts had all pegged him for that role at the outset of his professional career; Breslow was a 26th rounder for the Brewers in 2002, and after his release in 2004 out of Single-A ball, he was picked up by the Padres out of a tryout camp. And while we always have to be careful with relievers who may have been kept away from the most difficult competition when hitters would have the platoon advantage, over his (fairly lengthy) career, right-handed hitters have hit just .238 against him to lefties’ .240 average, although he’s walked righties at a slightly higher clip.

For his part, Breslow offered at least two reasons for why his brief experience as a starter may have gone better. Here’s one: pitching out of the windup, Breslow felt like he had a “better rhythm.” He has often entered the game with a runner on, so that doesn’t sound like the craziest thing in the world. The problem? Breslow faced 141 batters this year with the bases empty, and 139 with at least one runner on; and it looks like Breslow was actually far better in the latter situation. Bases empty, Breslow had a 1.74 WHIP; with at least one runner, his 1.15 WHIP was as sterling as his earlier series of fine MLB seasons. That’s probably not it.

Breslow also suggested in the wake of his second strong start that the change in role helped him “keep hitters off-balance,” noting that it was common for him to have to go his “best pitch right away” when coming on with runners. Although Breslow has said that he gets in trouble when he thinks too much and starts to try to trick people, this is the same guy who calculated pitch spin by hand to help Josh Beckett win a bet before PITCHf/x was a thing. With the necessary small sample caveats, Breslow’s first pitch percentages from Brooks Baseball as a reliever and a starter this season:

Breslow did tweak his approach to forego all those first-pitch sinkers, but I’m not sure that comports with the idea that as a reliever he had to lead with his best pitch; opponents slugged .964 off of his sinker this year, and the weighted average slugging percentage on all of his other pitches combined was just .423.

In the end, what Craig Breslow has to teach us may be that we know nothing about this game, or that for two games, what we do know might not have a whole lot to do with the outcome. Did Breslow raise his stock with these two starts? Probably, but maybe not in a meaningful way. He did stick on the roster all year despite the closest thing to a pitching armageddon that we’ve seen at Fenway in a long while. But that may be exactly why we won’t see him return. One of Dave Dombrowski’s virtues may be impatience. And if you have to stock the staff with some replacement-level pitchers, you may be better off with pitchers who yet may be optioned — and actually replaced.

Photo by Anthony Gruppuso/USA Today Sports Images

Cleveland Indians – Current Record: 78-80

The Indians have home field advantage and their own quest to run their record to .500 or above.  Like the Red Sox, the Indians have played their best baseball in the second half off the season, going 36-33 with a run differential of +38 over that time.  This record is identical to the Red Sox’s over the same time span, however the Red Sox have boasted an even more impressive run differential of +48.  The Indians team as a whole pitches pretty well, ranking ninth in ERA but third in baseball in DRA with a mark of 3.88.  Hitting has not been as good for this club as they rank just 22nd in baseball with a TAv of just .255. The Red Sox, by comparison, have hit .261 as a team, good for 17th.  Thankfully for the Indians they have been much more able with the lumber at home, posting a 106 OPS+ at Progressive Field while struggling with a 96 OPS+ while away.  Needless to say, horrible defense aside, these Indians will not be an easy opponent.  The Red Sox are 2-1 in the season series as they look to continue that trend and their recent winning ways.

Probables

Henry Owens vs. Josh Tomlin, Friday, 7:10 p.m.

Owens is just one start removed from closing out the season at Fenway Park in style.  In what was undoubtedly his best outing of the year, Owens gave Don Orsillo a proper farewell by going 7.2 IP to shut out the Orioles at home, striking out five batters and allowing just three hits.  While the Orioles were one of the weakest teams in the league vs. left-handed pitchers, the Indians are actually a bit better than league average, posting a 104 OPS+.  Against left-handed starters alone they have been much worse, though, with a mark of 93.  Also working in Owens’ favor is that the Indians have never faced him before and he has a 1.99 road ERA, light-years ahead of the 5.00 ERA he has posted at home.

Tomlin has only been starting since August 17, however the results have been mostly positive in this limited sample size.  Over 59.1 IP he has struck out close to eight batters per nine while walking less than one. Tomlin is fairly prone to the fly ball, posting a rate of 48.2% and a HR/FB rate of 15%.  The way the Sox have been swinging the bats these past few weeks, home runs could quickly become an issue.  Slight advantage for the Red Sox here.

Craig Breslow vs. Corey Kluber, Saturday, 7:10 p.m.

With Eduardo Rodriguez shut down for the season due to workload the Red Sox will once again hand the ball to Breslow in what should be a fairly taxing day on their bullpen.  Last time out on September 26, Breslow and co. combined for a bullpen-only shutout of the Orioles, with Breslow himself contributing four strong frames, striking out just two.  I am less optimistic this time out.

The Klubot gets to make one last start in front of the home crowd where he has posted a 3.05 ERA this season.  It was also the site of the most impressive pitching performance of the season when he struck out 18 Cardinals over 8 IP in May. Those same Cardinals just won their 100th game on Wednesday so this performance plays up in my mind.  Despite his 3.62 ERA the advanced stats continue to like Kluber more than Drew Carey loves Cleveland.  His DRA is 3.35 15th best in baseball and his cFIP of 71, which is predictive, is even more impressive, ranking him seventh best in baseball among starters with 100 IP.  This one is likely a loss.

Rick Porcello vs. Danny Salazar, Sunday, 3:10 p.m.

The final matchup of the year for both teams looks like a mismatch on paper in favor of the Indians.  Salazar has had a pretty solid year, posting a 3.51 ERA and a very healthy K-BB rate of 18.6%.  Porcello on the surface looks like the turd he was for much of the season, countering with an ugly 5.02 ERA and a decent K-BB rate of 14.9%.

Lately, the story for both of these pitchers have been very different. Salazar has struggled in September with a bloated ERA of 4.76 while Porcello has surged with a mark of 3.74.  While Porcello has been by no means elite anyone that has watched him knows he has been attacking batters differently.  This contest is too close to call.

Opposing Lineup

Perhaps no lineup in all of baseball possesses more switch-hitters than the Indians, however, this has not led them to success.  The team has been slightly harder on left-handed pitching than it has righties but they aren’t keeping any pitchers up at night.

Jason Kipnis – 2B – L
Jose Ramirez – 3B – S
Francisco Lindor – SS – S
Carlos Santana – 1B – S
Yan Gomes – C – R
Lonnie Chisenhall – RF – L
Chris Johnson – DH – R
Abraham Almonte – CF– S
Mike Aviles – LF – R

Offense along with improved defense are where the Red Sox hold the advantage over Tito’s boys.

Recap

It’s been a long year for Red Sox fans across the nation who have had to suffer though some pretty ugly months of baseball.  Lately, what we have seen from the club has been inspired play that leaves me dreaming about what the team could look like during the 2016 campaign.  Every position on the team has an answer as we head into the off-season, but some are more pronounced. Pablo Sandoval at third base, Hanley Ramirez at first base and Rusney Castillo in the outfield are far from sure things.  If one or two of those issues can be addressed via free agency or trade and Dombrowski can land his coveted ace the Red Sox will be half a bullpen away from being a complete team.  Stay with us over what I expect to be one of the busiest and exciting off-seasons we will have ever covered and thanks for reading our stuff all year.

Photo by Greg M. Cooper/USA Today Sports Images

Top Play (WPA): Dee Gordon’s lead-off triple in the 10th inning was worth a whopping .302 WPA. The Red Sox set themselves up for disaster here. Acting manager Torey Lovullo brought in Craig Breslow for the 10th inning, which sounds okay on paper as he’d face two left-handed hitters and Martin Prado in the first three plate appearances, and another LHH in Justin Bour waited just in case the fourth PA needed to happen. Then you realize that it’s Craig Breslow pitching. He left a fastball waist-high and middle-out and Gordon whacked it into the left-center field gap. Three ABs later, Bour walked him off. That was not a very fun sequence of events.

Bottom Play (WPA): The Marlins loaded the bases with no outs in the 7th. Alexi Ogando allowed a fly ball that wasn’t a home run(!!) off the bat of J.T. Realmuto. Rusney Castillo caught it and fired an absolute rocket to home to make sure no one advanced. That was worth -.130 WPA. The feeling of relief was short-lived, as Ichiro cranked a fly ball to deep right field – also not a homer! Progress! – that Castillo could not throw back in fast enough to keep the score from changing to 4-3. The Red Sox would escape the inning with that same score which, as you probably knew and expected, wouldn’t be enough for the bullpen.

Key Moment: Hoo boy. There are quite a few to pick from, but play that wins out is Junichi Tazawa’s battle with known bad hitter Adeiny Hechavarria. With runners on 1st and 2nd, Tazawa uncorked a wild pitch that Blake Swihart could not corral. Both runners advanced a base, making it much more difficult to preserve the 4-3 lead. A few pitches later, Hechavarria tied it. In the span of just eight pitches, Tazawa added to one of the most infuriating bullpen meltdowns this season. That takes talent.

Trend To Watch: There are a couple of note.

The first and more positive of the two is productivity from the outfielders. Jackie Bradley was 2-4 with a triple, Mookie Betts was 3-5 with a double and Rusney Castillo went 1-4 with a triple as well. Oh, and JBJ did something amazing again. Ho hum. Another day in the life.

The second and more pressing is the terrible, no good, very bad bullpen. Koji Uehara was by far the best reliever to come out of that tire fire, and with him gone, you better hope your starter goes the distance every time. Tazawa was already feeling fatigue, having allowed a .315 batting average since July 1st. Ryan Cook showed why he was traded for a PTBNL, and Breslow – well, he’s Breslow. If you expected any more from him than what happened today, I don’t know what to tell you. But maybe Ramsay Bolton does.

Coming Next: The Red Sox play yet another game by National League rules, this time with Eduardo Rodriguez pitching and hitting for them!

Photo by Robert Mayer/USA Today Sports Images

While most chances for changing a lineup coming in the off-season, building the bullpen is a constant endeavor. Relievers are forever pitching terribly, then somehow pitching amazingly, then pitching horribly again, then getting hurt. You can’t predict, with a very few exceptions, who will be any good in any given year without using error bars large enough to require rent control.

This is the best possible news for the 2015 Boston Red Sox because this means the bullpen the Red Sox have now will not be the same as the bullpen the Red Sox will have in a few months. This isn’t to say the bullpen the team has now is terrible. It’s not. It’s not great either, and in truth, that even oversells it. There is, as in other areas, much room for improvement. And now that I’ve mentioned “other areas” I am tempted to trash the script and write about how frustrating the Red Sox offense is, but I promised Ben a piece on the Red Sox bullpen and Matt Barnes’s place in it and Ben is a very nice person who lets me write for you people, so I’m afraid I’m stuck writing this. I’d appreciate it if you’d stick with me here. Maybe we’ll learn something together! And if not, it’s Friday! Whatever!

The Red Sox don’t possess many hard throwers and while that isn’t the kiss of death, it generally means, as it does in this specific case, fewer strikeouts.

Cumulatively, which is to say the Red Sox bullpen as presently and previous constructed under the banner of 2015, ranks 26th in strike out percentage. They strike out 19 percent of the hitters they face, not good in a relative sense. Strikeouts have been, in this age of big strikeout bullpens, comparatively infrequent. Part of the problem is a lack of velocity out of the bullpen. The Red Sox don’t possess many hard throwers and while that isn’t the kiss of death, it generally means, as it does in this specific case, fewer strikeouts. Red Sox relievers average 91.8 mph on their fastball, good for 24th in baseball. It’s not a perfect relationship, but Dodgers relievers strike out almost 30 percent of the hitters they face, and throw, on average, the third hardest. Yankee relievers throw the fourth hardest and get the third most strikeouts. For Boston, there is, in the words of the captain of the Titanic, some room for improvement. I award myself 10 Timely Reference points and I move on to the next paragraph full of hope!

The first real fix the Red Sox have tried this season is Matt Barnes (if you don’t count Robbie Ross and please, I beg you, don’t count Robbie Ross). Barnes is a former first round draft pick out of the University of Connecticut with a mid-to-upper 90s fastball and a strong curve. He’d been a starter in college and coming up through the minor league system, but he’s not been able to harness a third pitch as of yet and his first two aren’t so amazing that he’s capable of running through lineups multiple times with them alone. That might change, but for now he’s 25 and Boston’s bullpen is in need of help so we have ourselves a perfect little match! According to Brooks Baseball, Barnes’s fastball has averaged 96 mph during his time in the majors. That’s the fastest in the bullpen by a good bit. Alexi Ogando and Tazawa are the only other relievers to average over 93 mph and neither averages 95. Barnes is supposed to deploy his heat and hammer curve to full effect in the later innings, giving Boston three hard throwing relievers from which manager John Farrell can choose. Yay!

So far the numbers look dreadful (boo!) but don’t judge yet. Barnes has thrown all of eight innings and has five strikeouts and three walks. That’s whatever because that’s eight innings. Barnes may not ever be a great reliever, but eight innings are far too few to say for sure, and the combination of the fastball playing up, the curve, and the fact that he’ll only have to face hitters once makes him a potential weapon in a bullpen badly in need of such.

Matt Barnes can help but he is not going to fix the Red Sox bullpen single-handedly. The group is going to need to get better, and that likely means bringing someone else up or in. The next shoe to drop might be Craig Breslow, whose ERA says has not been very good and who other stats say has been significantly worse than that. The Red Sox might want to give Heath Hembree another shot as he has a 94 mph fastball and 17 strikeouts and two walks in just under 17 innings in Triple-A. He’s likely not the savior either, but he’s better than watching Robbie Ross struggle again. Otherwise it might be time to look outside the organization.

Matt Barnes can help but he is not going to fix the Red Sox bullpen single-handedly.

This team has some holes, maybe more than we thought coming into the season. There are significant concerns on defense, the starting rotation seems to be rounding into form but has been a huge problem until recently, and now it seems the Red Sox turn to icicles whenever a runner gets on base or a left-handed pitcher stands on the mound. The front office will have to make some difficult choices about where to best allocate their capital and I won’t sit here and advocate for another bullpen arm in the face of this mountain of potentially more pressing issues.

It does strike me, though, that the likelihood of the bullpen fixing itself, like could happen with the offense, like could happen if to a lesser degree with the rotation, is remarkably slim. The Red Sox already have what has to be considered full Koji. Tazawa has been better than anyone had a right to expect, and the same could be said of Ogando considering his history. Throw Barnes on that and it isn’t a bad starting spot, but it’s only a starting spot. The Breslows and Laynes of the world are place holders for the better relievers Boston needs. No team has eight Wade Davises (Davi?) coming out of the bullpen, but at this stage the Red Sox barely have one. It’s going to take more from the pen if this team wants to compete in October. Matt Barnes’s fastball is a good start but it’s only a start. The organic reformulation of the Red Sox bullpen must continue!

Photo by John Rieger/USA Today Sports Images

The Closer

All bullpens start at the back end and work their way forward, and Boston’s is no exception. As has been the case for the last year and a half, Koji Uehara is the ninth-inning man when he’s healthy. Despite some premature worries after a couple of rough outings to start the year, Uehara is still one of the better relievers in the game. It’s true that he suffered from a visible drop in velocity a few weeks ago, but that’s mostly rectified itself now. What’s always made Uehara so great has been his absurd ability to rack up strikeouts while limiting his walks. In one stretch between 2013 and 2014, including the playoffs, he struck out 54 batters between walks. He’s back to that level in the early part of 2015. The 40-year-old has 11 strikeouts in 6 1/3 innings without allowing a single walk. The age means injury and fatigue may be an issue, but as long as he’s able to pitch, the Red Sox will be just fine at the end of games.

The Set-Up Men

The next man down on the totem pole is Junichi Tazawa, who has become a borderline dominant reliever since converting from a starter in 2012. He’s become something of a middle class Uehara in terms of racking up strikeouts and limiting walks. Since becoming a full-time reliever Tazawa has struck out exactly a quarter of the batters he has faced while walking just under five percent. On top of that, he’s been able to hold up despite appearing in 71 games in each of the last two seasons. He’s by no means invincible, though. He’s been very prone to hard contact over his career, allowing about a home run every nine innings and a .308 opponents’ BABIP in that same time frame. Those issues aside, he’s been one of my favorite pitchers to watch over the last few years and gives the Red Sox a consistent threat in the eighth inning, as long as the Blue Jays aren’t the opponent.

This is where things start to get a little shaky. Coming into the season, Edward Mujica was the next man in line. In fact, he started the year as the closer while Uehara worked his way back from injury. There’s no way to sugarcoat it, though: He’s been a train wreck in 2015. He’s getting lit up with hard contact and isn’t striking out any batters to offset that. There’s a chance that he can bounce back like he did last year, but there have been no signs of life from him thus far, and he’s been relegated to medium- and low-leverage situations for the time being. [Editor’s note: WELP]

Taking his spot as the secondary set-up man has been Alexi Ogando. The former Ranger has always had electric stuff, but injury and shuffling back and forth between the bullpen and the rotation made him available for cheap this offseason. Thus far, he’s performed above my expectations. His velocity is as high as it’s been since 2012 and it’s only climbing, averaging above 95 mph over his last couple outings. With that velocity has come a good strikeout rate with surprising control. He’s given up a couple of homers that have hurt his overall numbers, but he’s looked very good so far. Given the team’s wariness towards putting Tazawa in the closer role, Ogando may very well be the one to replace Uehara in case of injury.

The Lefties

This is about as uninspiring of a group as one could imagine, especially after we were spoiled by Andrew Miller the last few years. Alone, Craig Breslow, Tommy Layne and Robbie Ross Jr. can all be effective middle relievers. Needing one of them to step up as the top lefty is asking a lot, though. To his credit, Breslow has looked much better than he did in his disastrous 2014, but he’s allowed runs in three of his last four starts and doesn’t have the stuff to be a true dominant force. Layne continues to be a solid producer against all odds, but he’s a career minor league who carries an underwhelming profile and will likely go downhill at some point. Ross may be the most intriguing part of this trio, which says more about the group than him. He still comes with relative youth and the Red Sox have seemingly given him higher-leverage situations than the other lefties. However, he’s never been able to strike batters out, and hitters have roughed him up so far this year. Given the way the last few weeks have gone, it’s not going to be too high on their list of priorities, but the left-handed reliever situation will need to be addressed at some point.

The Future

Luckily for the Red Sox, the shaky part of their bullpen can be addressed with some young arms. Guys like Heath Hembree, Dalier Hinojosa, Noe Ramirez and Steven Wright can all help out when needed, but they won’t move the needle. Pawtucket’s starters, on the other hand, could. Matt Barnes jumps to mind first, as he worked as a reliever in spring training and has stuff that could play up in that role. With a few more poor outings from Mujica, it wouldn’t be surprising at all to see the veteran designated for assignment with Barnes coming up to take his place.

The other three big names in Pawtucket’s rotation intrigue me the most, though. Eduardo Rodriguez, Henry Owens and Brian Johnson all throw from the left side and could be ready for the majors soon. The rotation will obviously be the main concern, but it’s unlikely that three spots open up. If all three are ready to make an impact at the big-league level, it would be great to see at least one shifted into a bullpen role a couple months down the road. Not only would it help Boston’s atrocious lefty reliever situation, it would also give the pitcher a valuable taste of major-league competition.

With the lackluster rotation and sputtering offense, the bullpen is the least of everyone’s concerns right now. Once the offense starts hitting, though, there will be a lot of close, winnable games that will come down to which bullpen performs the best. The eighth and ninth innings look good right now, but the rest of the unit has been very shaky. Luckily, there are some names on the farm that could come up and make a big impact.

Photo by Bob DeChiara/USA Today Sports Images

Top Play (WPA): Weirdly enough, the Red Sox had the top play even in a loss. With Boston down 1-0 in the third and Mookie Betts on first, Dustin Pedroia took a high fastball and crushed it into the left field bleachers (+.231). It gave the Red Sox the lead, and for a while it looked like they wouldn’t give it up all game.

The top play for the winning Rays came in their big sixth inning. Brandon Guyer came in to pinch hit for Kevin Kiermaier with the bases loaded down by two runs. With Craig Breslow on the mound, Guyer ripped a single on a liner to right field (+.190) that scored Desmond Jennings and Jake Elmore to tie the game. The play would close the book on Kelly’s performance, which we’ll get to in a minute.

Bottom Play (WPA): To get a picture of just how strange this game was, look no further than the WPA. The losing team had the top play by WPA, and the winning team actually had the bottom three plays. All of them came in that sixth inning that was referenced above. After Guyer’s single, the Rays still had a couple of base runners with nobody out. Then, Rene Rivera flew out (-.075), Tim Beckham struck out (-.062) and Steven Souza was sent down by way of the K (-.063).

The Red Sox’s most damaging play came in the eighth inning, after the Rays had taken a two-run lead. Allen Craig made it to second after an Evan Longoria throwing error, giving Xander Bogaerts a big opportunity to come up with a huge hit to snap him out of a slump. Instead, he flailed at some low-and-outside sliders and struck out swinging (-.051).

Key Moment: If you’ll grant me an entire half-inning as a single moment, then the sixth inning is the easy answer here. After Kelly had cruised through the first five innings, the wheels came off in the sixth in spectacular fashion. The Red Sox began the inning up by four runs before Kelly proceeded to give up four straight singles. This led to one run being scored and the bases loaded, all with no outs. After walking in another run, he was finally taken out of his misery for Craig Breslow. The lefty gave up the single to Guyer to tie the game before getting out of the rest of the inning. Although there wasn’t a big extra base hit in the frame, the slow, methodical rally was somehow more excruciating.

Trend to Watch: Last night was yet another game in which the Red Sox starting pitcher failed to get deep into a ball game. I’m not exaggerating when I say Kelly looked like the Cy Young contender he claims to be in the first five innings. Besides one mistake pitch on a Souza home run, Kelly was locating everything on the black and showing plus offerings of all his pitches. Tampa’s lineup isn’t the most intimidating around, but he was still making them look foolish. Then, just when it looks like the Sox would finally have a starter get through seven or eight strong innings, Kelly blew up in the sixth, forcing the bullpen to work another three-plus inning game. Eventually, that kind of thing will catch up to a team.

Coming Next: The Red Sox close out the series tonight with a rubber match pitting Clay Buchholz against Jake Odorizzi. Buchholz has been his typical Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde this season with a couple good starts and an atrocious one. As always, it’s futile trying to predict which Buchholz we’ll get. Odorizzi has been fantastic this season and could be in the midst of a breakout season. The Red Sox will try to stop that from happening, at least for one night, en route to another series victory.

Photo by Kelly O’Connor, sittingstill.smugmug.com

Flexibility in the bullpen, therefore, may be more important than anywhere else on the roster. This can often be accomplished through the use of option years, as young relievers who struggle may get the chance to get on track with a minor league team. But teams can also choose to shuffle the major league deck. With three left-handed relievers in the seven-man bullpen, from afar it could look like the Red Sox are as poised to handle this season’s bullpen potholes as capably as your grandparents’ old Buick.

That may not be the case. The 19-inning marathon on Friday night has helped to obscure just how John Farrell will use his lefty trio this season, but last season, he deployed a bullpen lefty for fewer than three batters 47 times (26 for two batters, 21 for one). Of Robbie Ross, Craig Breslow and Tommy Layne, only Layne is likely to be used in a traditional LOOGY match-ups role. Nonetheless, should Layne run into some struggles, either of the two other lefties could be leaned on in a big spot for a big out against the likes of lefty masher like Chris Davis or Brian McCann.

PECOTA is bearish about how Ross (0.2 WARP), Breslow (0.0 WARP) and Layne (-0.2) are likely to perform this year. Ross is probably the least likely to be used for lefty match-ups. A starter until May and then for three more games later in the 2014 season, Ross pitched as a reliever in just 15 games last year, throwing to fewer than three batters just once. Overall, he pitched with the platoon advantage for just 32% of batters, and while he has been more effective against lefties in his career (holding them to a .277 True Average), “more” isn’t the same thing as “much.” His main usefulness to the club is probably as a multi-inning reliever, where his relative success against right-handed hitters (.286 TAv) is also helpful.

Breslow is also a less than ideal fit for a lefty match-ups role, with a similar career platoon split (.274 TAv vs. lefties, .287 vs. righties). Farrell has used him that way occasionally (nine appearances facing one or two batters in 2014), and he did enjoy a slightly more frequent platoon advantage (45% of PA) than you might expect. That certainly didn’t seem to help him last season; en route to his 5.96 ERA, opponents slashed .247/.309/.379, numbers almost identical to league average.

In fact, Layne’s career success against lefties is almost as impressive as Andrew Miller’s from last season (.176 TAv).

It’s Layne who sticks out as a very effective lefty match-ups man, especially as he was deployed with the platoon advantage for 63% of plate appearances last year. In what is a much smaller sample of plate appearances, Layne has held lefties to a .179 True Average, much stronger than Ross or Breslow and much stronger than Layne has been against righties (.313 TAv). In fact, Layne’s career success against lefties is almost as impressive as Andrew Miller’s from last season (.176 TAv), which raises the question: how good is “good” when it comes to matchup men?

Not as good as Layne. Sixty-three lefty relievers pitched in at least 30 games last year, and their stats against lefties for the most part don’t compare to Layne’s:

Among that crew, Layne had the sixth-lowest batting average against, ranked 10th in on base percentage, and had the fifth-best slugging against. Factor everything that matters into the mix, and Layne’s success against lefties last year merited him a .136 True Average — among those 63 relievers, that ranked him second, behind only Sean Doolittle. Ranking better than 2014 standouts Zach Britton and Aroldis Chapman doesn’t mean that Layne will do the same in 2015, but it does at least highlight the gulf between Layne and Breslow, who ranked 57th in this group.

Layne, like every other lefty reliever, will be called on to get multiple outs most of the time, and so his remarkable success against lefties doesn’t guarantee that he’ll thrive. But his LOOGY prowess is an important ingredient in a recipe that may make Layne an important asset in Farrell’s bullpen all season long.

Photo by Kelly O’Connor, sittingstill.smugmug.com