Building a bullpen from year to year is the biggest crap shoot in baseball. The variance in what a relief pitcher does from year to year can be night and day. But still teams shell out tremendous sums in hopes that they have found their missing piece to their late innings puzzle. Frugality goes out the window when it comes to relief help these days. This offseason has been no different. Multi-year contracts have been handed out left and right to relievers from both sides of the bump. Washington gave Oliver Perez and Shawn Kelley two and three year pacts respectively. Ryan Madson and Tony Sipp parlayed playoff appearances into a combined $40 million worth of salary. The big winner though so far has been Darren O’Day. Baltimore brought back the submarine style righty to the tune of 4 years and $31 million. The last reliever on the ESPN Top 50 Free Agents, Mark Lowe, just inked a deal to specifically be their eighth inning man.
There are still a ton of former closers and top notch set up men available on the market, but they are going quick. Take a gander at the crunch time arms still looking for work this winter.
BOBBY PARNELL, RHP (NEW YORK)
Bobby Parnell was supposed to be the closer for the future for the Mets. Injuries curbed those plans and Parnell has been trying to rehab his arm and his image in the market ever since. At his finest, Parnell had a fastball that routinely touched triple digits. His secondary pitches, usually a slider or curveball, came in at weird angles on batters on both sides of the plate. Now that his velocity is severely diminished, Parnell needs to work on his most glaring weakness: control. If Parnell can remake himself into a poor man’s Trevor Hoffman, some club is going to get a bargain with him on either a minor league or one year contract. Playing in New York has thickened his skin, as it would for any relief pitcher. If a smaller market team came in with a modest offer, say Tampa Bay or Oakland, he’d be a fool to let that opportunity pass him by.
ANTONIO BASTARDO, LHP (PITTSBURGH)
There isn’t more of a lefty specialist left than the Pirates’ Antonio Bastardo. To say he dominates left handed hitters would be an understatement. Left handed hitters slashed a puny .138/.233/.215 last season against him. Like Parnell though, the big knock on Bastardo as a relief pitcher is his walks. He does walk over four batters per nine innings. As a specialist, that makes the job for a manager that much harder as it could mean as many as three changes in an inning if Bastardo doesn’t do his job. With durable and reliable southpaws hard to come by, Bastardo should still get something close to the 3 years, $18 million Tony Sipp received to re-sign in Houston. Bastardo’s fastball is the fastest it has been since 2010 according to FanGraphs. The Pirates should try hard to retain him, but the Tigers, Mariners, Cubs, and Padres will all vie for his services.
TYLER CLIPPARD, RHP (NEW YORK)
The second New York Met relief pitcher on this list is Tyler Clippard. He comes with substantially fewer question marks than Bobby Parnell, but started to show some wear at the end of this season. Clippard has been the most used reliever in the game since 2010. He’s racked up 440 appearances and 464 1/3 innings during those six seasons. He’s been incredibly reliable in the regular season. He even made an All-Star appearance with Washington in 2012. This season was his first extended run in the postseason though and the workload looked to have finally caught up with him. He got worse in each successive round of the playoffs, including issuing two horrible walks to aid a Royals rally in Game 4 of the World Series. Despite that postseason snapshot, Clippard is more than likely due at least a three year deal. He should easily command Ryan Madson money (3 years, $22 million) but from where? That may be too rich for the Mets’ blood. Desperate teams such as Detroit, Seattle, and Washington could potentially get in a bidding war that may push that number even higher.
CARLOS VILLANUEVA, RHP (ST. LOUIS)
Carlos Villanueva’s career bounced back in forth between the rotation and the pen over his previous three teams. But last year with the Cardinals, he was utilized only as a relief pitcher. As with most pitching experiments for St. Louis, the results were quite good. Villanueva was used primarily as a bridge guy in middle relief. It wasn’t that Mike Matheny didn’t trust him in the later innings, but Villanueva’s ability to pitch multiple frames worked better earlier. That would allow St. Louis to become more specialized with their bullpen deployment late on. A set role and fewer appearances allowed the righty to post his best ERA (2.95) and second-best WHIP (1.16) of his career. Though he’s started in the past, he’ll be looking for a gig this winter in the pen. He should have a wider pool of teams to choose from because even teams with established closers and set-up men could still use an arm of his skill set. The last chatter out of St. Louis is that they wanted to bring him back, but a team could easily pile on an extra year or two to a contract to pull the rug out from under the NL Central champs.
FRANKLIN MORALES, LHP (KANSAS CITY)
Though by nature they all are, there is no bigger risk/reward relief pitcher left available than Franklin Morales. He’s been around awhile, breaking in at the age of 21 during Colorado’s improbable run to the World Series. Since then he’s made two more trips to the promised land with Boston in 2013 and Kansas City last year. After originally being groomed as a starter in the Majors, Morales has worked himself into a nice niche as a middle reliever. He isn’t a lefty specialist by any means, but to nobody’s surprise he does his best work against left handed batters. They hit just .192 against him last year and his K/BB against lefties is nearly double than his figure against right handers. Similarly to Clippard though, Morales has shrunk in the light of the postseason. He was unused in Boston’s 2013 World Series victory and was slaughtered in both Colorado and Kansas City during the playoffs. He’ll only be 30 in January, so he’ll probably get multiple years on his next contract. But will it be from a contender or will it be from a team looking towards bridging the gap to the future?
Since there are so many relief pitcher options still available, I’ve decided to group some in the Best of the Rest portion of the column. Let’s proceed shall we?
THE BEST OF THE REST
VERSATILE OPTIONS: An increasing demand in the relief pitcher market is coming from teams that want a guy to not only pitch in relief, but have the ability to fill in gaps in their starting rotation when such a situation arises. Minnesota’s Brian Duensing did that in his first four years with the Twins. The ageless Chris Capuano has been a fill-in man in several of his last few Major League stops. Ross Detwiler is left-handed and still young enough to revive his career as a starter after pitching his way out of Washington’s, and subsequently Texas’ and Atlanta’s, rotation.
DETROIT’S DISCARDED TRIO: Detroit had a calamitous 2015 and one of their biggest flaws was their bullpen. New GM Al Avila is cleaning house, non-tendering Al Alburquerque and Neftali Feliz and declining Joe Nathan‘s team option. The latter two have significant closing experience on their resume. Nathan is showing his age though and Feliz doesn’t look fully back from Tommy John surgery that got him shipped out of Texas. If there is one thing that will always keep your phone ringing in the MLB, it is being a relief pitcher with closer experience.
THE FORMER CLOSER GRAVEYARD: Remember what I just said about closer experience? That is the reason that even after down years there will still be work for the likes of Fernando Rodney, Tommy Hunter, and Rafael Soriano. All three of those guys ended up on the Cubs last year but none could unseat incumbent Hector Rondon much to Chicago’s chagrin. Them and former Royals All-Star Greg Holland, who may miss all of 2015 due to Tommy John, should find new homes and pushing their new team’s closer again.
Stay tuned next week when we cover infielders and end the month with the outfielders yet to be inked. As always, check me out on Twitter @TREVORutley and the site @sportsftb to keep yourself consistently informed with everything Hot Stove.