The Pittsburgh Pirates got a rare turn in the spotlight last week. In picking UCLA starting pitcher Gerrit Cole first overall in the amateur draft, the Bucs gave the baseball world a chance to imagine the hulking, 6-foot-4 right-hander anchoring a winning rotation. A half-decade from now, Cole and last year’s highly-touted high school phenoms Jameson Taillon and Stetson Allie could lead one of the best pitching staffs in the game.

But Pittsburgh could become a contender much sooner than that. Because right now, Andrew McCutchen looks a little like a young Barry Bonds.

The next Pirates superstar
Through three years of his career, Andrew McCutchen is producing a lot like Barry Bonds did when he was in Pittsburgh.

McCutchen broke into the big leagues at an age almost a full year older than Bonds was when he made his debut; that’s not insignificant in baseball terms. Still, the accompanying chart shows that the righty-swinging center fielder and lefty-swinging left fielder put up fairly comparable numbers early in their respective careers. Even more remarkable: In his third full season McCutchen is on pace to shatter what Bonds did in his third campaign.

McCutchen’s progression starts with his bat. He’s hiked his walk rate to career-high levels, and now walks once for every eight times up. His isolated slugging, a measure of power which subtracts batting average from slugging percentage, has jumped to a career-best .202. He’s continued his early-career trends of rarely swinging at pitches outside the strike zone and even more rarely swinging and missing — just 6.3 percent of the time, a strong 21st best among qualified National League hitters. A player who walks, hits for power and makes frequent contact is a very rare breed; McCutchen joins Prince Fielder, Albert Pujols, Troy Tulowitzki and Todd Helton as the only players to rank in the top 30 of isolated slugging, walk rate and swinging strike rate.

A less reliable, though still somewhat encouraging trend is a potential uptick in his defense. Ultimate Zone Rating works best when viewed in a three-year sample. That makes McCutchen’s current blistering pace (he’s on pace to produce nearly a win and a half with his defense alone this year) look almost as strange as last season’s UZR total, when he supposedly cost the Pirates nearly a win and a half. Still, other fielding metrics also suggest a big improvement in McCutchen’s glovework. That wouldn’t be an unreasonable development, given he still has the youth and athleticism to range after balls, while gaining experience and sharpening his defensive instincts.

Add up his contributions and McCutchen ranks fourth in MLB in wins above replacement. He’s been especially hot lately: McCutchen’s 2.5 WAR in the past 30 days makes him the most valuable player in the majors over that stretch.

The best news for the Bucs is that they’re not just a one-man team. The Pirates can thank several other young contributors for the team’s near-.500 record this season. McCutchen’s outfield mate Jose Tabata sports a .363 OBP and ranks among the league’s stolen base leaders. Neil Walker’s batting average is down some 40 points from last year, but he still ranks second on the team in homers, offering impressive pop from second base. Acknowledging the smaller sample size, the Pirates’ team fielding also looks much improved from last season, when they finished last in team UZR.

That defensive proficiency has made life considerably easier for Pittsburgh’s stable of mostly no-name pitchers. Jeff Karstens leads the starting rotation with a sub-3.00 ERA and a strikeout-to-walk ratio of nearly 4-to-1. Charlie Morton’s league-leading ground ball rate has also fueled baseball’s lowest home run rate, allowing him to flourish despite subpar strikeout numbers. Joel Hanrahan quietly has developed into one of the top closers in baseball. Jose Veras and Chris Resop have been quality setup men with big strikeout numbers. Going forward, the Pirates will need a couple more of their prospects to pan out like McCutchen has. Pedro Alvarez, for one, has been a major disappointment to this point, while Cole, Taillon and Allie have yet to advance beyond Class A. That said, there’s hope in Pittsburgh even if there are still a lot of unknowns.

What the Bucs do know is that they have a star in McCutchen, a player who could continue the franchise’s legacy of great outfielders, following in the footsteps of the Waner brothers, Kiner, Clemente, Stargell and, yes, the home run king. The likelihood of McCutchen’s career panning out just like Bonds’ did is nearly zero. To have a player whose first three seasons inspire enough hope to justify mentioning the two in the same sentence, though? For a Pirates team that hasn’t a winning season in nearly two decades, that’s an encouraging thought.

Trevor Bauer’s 3-1 win over Fresno State on Saturday looked no different than any of his other starts this year. The UCLA right-hander fanned 14 batters, walked two, yielded just six hits, hiked his season record to 13-2, dropped his ERA to 1.25 and tallied his ninth straight complete game. The skinny 20-year-old flashed another number, though, that was right in line with his season average, one that has MLB draft hounds wincing even as Bauer looks ready to be a top-10 pick: 133 pitches.

The rise in pitch count awareness across all levels of baseball makes people panic when they see a college pitcher racking up 130-plus pitches per start; doubly so when the guy doing it skews much closer to Tim Lincecum than Roger Clemens at 6-foot-1, and only 175 pounds. But Bauer’s situation is different. He pitches just once a week, taking the mound every Saturday for the Bruins. Meanwhile, the benefits to his team are huge: Every Saturday, UCLA knows it has one of the nation’s best pitchers ready to go nine innings and give the bullpen a day off.

All of which makes us wonder: Why doesn’t a major league team try that? Mostly because it’s hard, and looks risky.

“The team trainer and pitching coach have to know the pitcher’s quality of strength, quality of conditioning, what kind of a workload he can handle,” said Glenn Fleisig, research director for the American Sports Medicine Institute and an expert in pitching biomechanics. “You have to choose the right guy, then monitor him very closely.”

Nobody knows his body better than Bauer, and he has shown a unique ability to carry the burden of a heavy workload while at UCLA. He’s a rabid student of pitching, learning the value of pitch sequencing, as well as effective velocity (a pitch looks faster when released a couple of feet closer to home plate, making a long-striding delivery and big arm extension advantages for pitchers who can pull it off). Like Lincecum, Bauer relies on flexibility and athleticism more than brute strength to generate velocity and movement on his pitches. He works out with medicine balls and resistance bands, and steers clear of the weight room.

“Bauer is trained to do this,” said UCLA manager John Savage, “this” referring both to his pitcher’s unique workout habits and his ability to throw complete games nearly at will. “He can handle the baseball better than anyone. You’ll see him playing Hacky Sack with a baseball like it’s connected to his toe. I compare him to Pete Maravich.”

If anyone would know about developing elite pitchers, it’s Savage. Another Savage pupil, Bauer’s teammate Gerrit Cole, is likely to be the No. 1 overall pick in Monday night’s draft. Another Savage protege, Mark Prior, held the Pac-10 strikeout record for a decade with 202 K’s … until Bauer rang up his 203rd batter of the season Saturday.

Not just any pitcher can successfully adopt the Bauer model of 130 pitches once a week, Savage said. Using Inside Edge’s statistical analysis, Savage found that Bauer’s fastball velocity often increased in the later innings of games; you’d want a big league pitcher to show a similar tendency, or at least maintain similar velocity throughout his start. The other thing that helps Bauer go deep into games is his six-pitch repertoire. Even the third or fourth time through the lineup, opposing hitters still don’t know what they’ll see from Bauer. If a pitcher can’t throw that many pitches for strikes, he’d better have one pitch — think Mariano Rivera’s cutter — that hitters might know is coming but still can’t hit.

A pitcher able and willing to take on the Bauer model of pitching could help his team in multiple ways. Giving the bullpen a night off once a week would not only keep relievers fresher, but also allow a team to lean more heavily on its better arms the rest of the week, with less risk of shoving lesser pitchers into high-leverage situations. An open-minded team with weak back-end starters could get even more creative. Assuming a now-typical seven-man major league bullpen, that team could limit starts for its crummy fifth starter and run out, say, three rested relievers for three innings each, every fifth day.

Many caveats apply, though.

Since the last few major league teams transitioned from four-man to five-man rotations in the 1980s, we’ve seen very little experimentation with that model. Any team that tried to break the mold would face heavy scrutiny, and any manager who tried something radically different would need a general manager willing to back his decision. Also, even the best pitchers have a bad day once in a while; a manager might have to occasionally pull his once-a-week ace, both to give his team a better chance to win and to avoid a lousy day turning into a 180-pitch nightmare.

Then there are salary considerations, which already contribute to managers leaving in struggling starters through five innings, and using closers only in save situations. Would a starting pitcher embrace a system that might limit him to 26 starts a season, giving him fewer opportunities to win games? Or would teams worry that a system which encourages a pitcher to throw 20-plus complete games a season might lead to higher asking prices during salary arbitration and free agency discussions?

The biggest concern would be managing workload and preventing injuries. A starter who throws 26 nine-inning starts in a season would total 234 innings, around what aces like Roy Halladay and CC Sabathia typically produce already. Would spacing out those innings differently make injuries more likely? More broadly, are five-man rotations the best way to handle a pitching staff?

“There’s no science or medicine that says every fifth day is the answer — it’s really just trial and error over the years,” Fleisig said. “Pitch counts shouldn’t be used as a rule, either, but rather as a guide for when a guy might be running out of steam. There’s no rule that says you can’t try things, no rule that says every team has to do the same thing.”

What you want to watch, Fleisig said, are microtears. Every time a pitcher pitches, a weekend warrior goes for a three-mile run, or a bodybuilder bench-presses, he develops soreness — the body’s way of alerting you to little tears in your ligaments and tendons. The body recovers, repairs those tears, and gets stronger between workouts, or in a pitcher’s case, between starts. If you work out too hard, you can develop tears too big to repair. But there’s no rule that says that point should be 100 pitches, Fleisig said; some pitchers might need to be pulled earlier; others a lot later.

Savage closely tracks each inning Bauer throws, looking for high-stress innings or even high-stress batters who potentially create the kind of fatigue that could prove harmful down the road. So far, pushing to 130 pitches or more hasn’t resulted in injuries or ineffectiveness for Bauer.

That might be doable for certain big league pitchers too, Fleisig said. “You could get those microtears from 130 pitches and be good to go five, six, or seven days later, sure.”

But?

“With some guys, 130 pitches might take you well past the point of fatigue. You develop tears that are too big. After that, you can wait five, 10, 20, even 100 days and still not be recovered.”

If fortune really does favor the bold, maybe we’ll see a major league team go this route one day. Who knows? Maybe the guy who’ll make it work will be the prototype: Trevor Bauer himself.

Eleven years removed from his MVP season, well past his prime and near the end of his career, Jason Giambi doesn’t play much anymore. When the Rockies penciled him into the lineup Thursday, it marked just his second start in nearly a month.

But the 40-year-old slugger showed he had something left in the tank, blasting three homers and knocking in all seven of Colorado’s runs in a blowout win over the Phillies. In the process, Giambi accomplished a feat that’s becoming increasingly rare in baseball: providing a big contribution off the bench.

A generation ago, teams carried 10-man pitching staffs, allowing managers to deploy a litany of platoons and employ ace pinch hitters, while still saving room for speedy pinch runners and defensive replacements who could make big plays late in a game. Before Bobby Cox built a dynasty in Atlanta, he managed the first winning clubs in Blue Jays history, using his deep bench to field platoons at multiple positions. Meanwhile, professional pinch hitters such as Manny Mota and Wallace Johnson stayed employed, despite having little value other than their ability to bag a base hit late in a game.

Today, teams use 12-, even 13-man pitching staffs, leaving little room to collect a group of quality backups. For all the advantages managers gain by being able to play bullpen matchups, they’re giving a lot of that back by trotting out shallow benches.

Though it’s tough to peg one person for starting the trend of bloated bullpens and tiny benches, Tony LaRussa certainly helped get the movement going with the way he built his pen around Dennis Eckersley while managing the Oakland A’s in the late 1980s.

Baseball being a game of copycats, other teams started expanding the size of their bullpens, hoping to tap into that Oakland magic. The trend rapidly accelerated once pitch counts and more conservative usage of starting pitchers came into vogue. Today, a typical American League team carries just four bench players.

One of the best ways to handle this severe limitation is to build a versatile roster. The Tampa Bay Rays have Ben Zobrist, who doubles as one of the better hitters in the league and a multi-position threat, having played everywhere except pitcher and catcher in 2009, then skipping just pitcher, catcher and shortstop last season. Adding Sean Rodriguez (seven positions played last year) allows the Rays to platoon, pinch run and pinch hit as well as any club with just four bench guys possibly can. (Why the Rays have bothered with a seven-man ‘pen while their long relief man almost never pitches is another question, and a strike against their usually sharp manager Joe Maddon.)

Through the season’s first six weeks, however, the honor of baseball’s best bench goes to another team: LaRussa’s own St. Louis Cardinals. Perhaps realizing what he’s wrought with his bullpen tinkering, LaRussa has long targeted the most versatile players to man his bench, shying away from the Matt Stairs types who can get you an occasional pinch-hit homer but little else.

Hole Cards
Owning baseball’s best bench is one of many reasons the St. Louis Cardinals sit in first place in the NL Central.

PLAYER PA AVG/OBP/SLG
Jon Jay 89 .312/.398/.455
Allen Craig 80 .319/.400/.507
Nick Punto 77 .262/.355/.385
Gerald Laird 48 .214/.313/.381

This year’s club is no exception. The three bench players who’ve seen the most playing time — Allen Craig, Jon Jay and Nick Punto — have played four, three and three positions, respectively. All three have hit well, too (see table), so much so that Craig has seized the starting second-base job with Skip Schumaker on the disabled list. LaRussa’s penchant for flexing players at different spots doesn’t just extend to relative no-names either. To make room for other players, Albert Pujols has played two games at third base this year, the first time he’s handled that position in nine years. As much as Matt Holliday and Lance Berkman have supercharged the offense and Jaime Garcia, Kyle McLellan and Kyle Lohse have been revelations in the rotation, the Cardinals might not be in first place if not for the contributions of their reserves.

The contending team that might have the weakest bench is Philadelphia. Though the Phillies knew they had a major injury risk with Chase Utley, they failed to acquire quality backups, watching Wilson Valdez (.234 AVG/.261 OBP/.290 SLG, not far off his career numbers) and Pete Orr (.230/.299/.279, and ditto) struggle mightily in Utley’s place. Brian Schneider, 34, predictably flailed (.173/.218/.327) behind Carlos Ruiz at catcher before going on the DL. With Raul Ibanez looking close to the end and All-Star center fielder Shane Victorino on the DL, backup outfielder Ben Francisco’s performance (.216/.329/.360) has also been a letdown, though his career numbers are considerably better.

With a team heavy on star power but showing age or injuries or both at several positions, the Phillies could sorely use some bench reinforcements to hold off the upstart Marlins and Braves in the NL East. Given GM Ruben Amaro’s history of making in-season upgrades (including Stairs, Professional Hitter himself), we could well see that happen in the next few weeks.

Carl Crawford became a top-of-the-order hitter in his first full big league season, at age 21. Batting almost exclusively in the top three spots, he developed into an All-Star and the best player in Tampa Bay Rays history. He banked the best season of his career in 2010, making his fourth All-Star team, winning the Gold Glove and Silver Slugger awards, finishing seventh in MVP voting, and propelling Tampa Bay to an achievement few ever thought possible: their second AL East title in three years. His success was so overwhelming, the Boston Red Sox gave Crawford a seven-year, $142 million contract, the second-richest deal in club history.

Then the Red Sox started the season 0-2. Terry Francona promptly dropped his left fielder to No. 7 in the Boston order — the lowest Crawford had batted since 2003 — against Rangers lefty Matt Harrison on Sunday.

But really, it was the other way around. For eight long years, Crawford’s managers misused him. Boston’s 0-2 start simply offered an excuse to make what might turn out to be one of Francona’s smartest moves of 2011.

In exactly 1,600 career plate appearances versus left-handed pitching, Crawford has hit just .270/.315/.381. For comparison’s sake, Jeff Francoeur, one of the most notorious hackers of his generation and a whipping boy for many baseball writers and analysts, has hit .268/.310/.425 for his career. Even Neifi Perez’s .672 career OPS isn’t far off Crawford’s .696 mark versus lefties.

Despite what’s now nearly a decade of futility against southpaws, Crawford has never seen anything close to a platoon, let alone been dropped from his perch at or near the top of the order. At first, this made some sense. When Crawford began his career in 2002, the then-Devil Rays were a joke of a team, licking their wounds after the ill-fated Hit Show saw Greg Vaughn, Jose Canseco and Vinny Castilla blow up the team’s building efforts and financial situation in one offseason spending orgy. Tampa Bay saw a future star in Crawford, and wanted to give him every chance to grow into a successful everyday player.

Lou Piniella took the reins in 2003, found little in the way of dynamic, young talent and installed Crawford as his leadoff hitter. In 184 times up versus lefties that year, Crawford hit an abysmal .263/.283/.302. The next season, Crawford saw big improvement in both his overall game, and in his efforts against left-handers. His OPS versus lefties spiked 180 points (.295/.346/.418). But in 2005, Crawford’s production versus lefties nosedived again, to .244/.293/.326, the D-Rays won 70 or fewer games for the eighth straight year, and Piniella was out of a job.

Joe Maddon took over in 2006, rightly waiting to see what his young players had to offer before making big decisions. What he saw from Crawford in the next two years was a hitter who looked like he could hack it against pitchers of all stripes. Crawford hit a solid .288/.341/.436 versus lefties in ’06, then a career-best .318/.350/.437 against them in ’07. The Rays were maturing as a young club, a new wave of intriguing players had filtered in, and Crawford was going to be Maddon’s go-to guy, a five-tool player who would play (and bat high in the order) against everyone, no matter the circumstances.

That’s when the law of averages kicked in, and Crawford’s truer tendencies re-emerged. From 2008 through 2010, Crawford hit a blistering .316/.367/.493 versus righties, but just .259/.312/.372 versus lefties, right around his career average. Ever the lineup tinkerer and fearless decision maker, Maddon showed he would do just about anything to find the smallest edges — except drop Crawford lower in the order versus left-handed pitchers.

Left with a problem
These left-handed hitters are all considered stars. But you wouldn’t know it from looking at their career numbers against southpaws.

Player OPS vs. RHP OPS vs. LHP
Ryan Howard 1.039 .769
Josh Hamilton .984 .786
Prince Fielder .974 .796
Andre Ethier .915 .676
Carl Crawford .816 .696
Whether it was the team’s 0-2 start or other factors that prompted Francona to drop Crawford down to seventh in the order yesterday, the Red Sox could be better for it, while also being unique in taking such action. The Phillies’ Ryan Howard has always been a mediocre hitter versus lefties, posting a career OPS of just .769 against them, with an awful .316 on-base percentage. But the politics and optics of the situation dictate that Charlie Manuel keep batting his $125 million slugger in the middle of the lineup against any and all pitchers, just as other managers stubbornly give prime lineup spots to other hitters when career-long tendencies suggest they’re wrong in doing so.

The Red Sox should still play Crawford every day. As the game’s best defensive left fielder, and one of baseball’s most dynamic baserunners and base stealers, he offers plenty of value even when he’s not hitting. There’s even an argument to be made that his speed is even more valuable at the bottom of the lineup because he can take chances without worrying about robbing the likes of Kevin Youkilis and Adrian Gonzalez of RBI opportunities.

Once the Sox’s lineup gets cooking, it will be very interesting to see if Francona keeps Crawford near the bottom of the lineup.

Carlos Gonzalez’s gigantic breakout was one of the great stories of the 2010 season. Few players in major league history have exploded onto the scene quite the way he did — leading the circuit in hits, total bases and batting average, and finishing third in NL MVP voting.

So impressive was CarGo’s effort that he might have won more fantasy leagues for his owners than perhaps any player other than Jose Bautista, and he also earned a seven-year, $80 million contract. Not bad for a player in his first full big league season.

But in a year of amazing numbers, one stat soared so high that it makes you wonder whether Gonzalez can do it again. Major league hitters batted .297 on balls hit in play last season; Gonzalez hit .384.

To understand what .384 means — and to find out whether this amazing performance is repeatable — we need to examine how baseball research has influenced the way we’ve come to evaluate pitchers and how hitters are subject to many of the same variables, although to a lesser extent.

Ten years ago, an inquisitive student and baseball fan named Voros McCracken wrote an article for Baseball Prospectus that set the analytical community on its head. The story, titled “Pitching and Defense: How Much Control Do Hurlers Have?” posited that pitchers had very little control over a pitch once the hitter made contact. Once a hitter put the ball into play, the pitcher was at the mercy of his defense, which would decide whether the batted ball would result in a hit or an out. Our understanding grew, to the point where we also could describe a batted ball as neither the result of pitching nor defense but rather pure luck (or random variance, or however you want to describe a seven-hopper squirting through while a scorching liner lands right in a fielder’s glove).

Today, we use one five-letter acronym as short-hand for the separation of pitching and hitting from defense and luck: BABIP (batting average on balls in play). McCracken’s theory has held up well during the past decade, with few pitchers managing to post BABIP results drastically different from league norms throughout a career. (League average is typically around .300 or a shade below.) But BABIP means something different on the hitters’ side. Hitters tend to show more BABIP variance throughout their careers, both above and below league norms, than pitchers do.

One of the most common ways for a hitter to post unusually high BABIP numbers is with great speed. Ichiro Suzuki sports a career .357 BABIP, making him perennially one of the league leaders. His hitting approach is unique, specifically tailored to his ability to hit ’em where they ain’t, and to beat the play when the ball doesn’t leave the infield.

According to FanGraphs, Ichiro’s career ground-ball rate is a sky-high 55.7 percent, compared to just a 24 percent fly-ball rate. Grounders turn into hits more often than fly balls for any player. In Ichiro’s case, he is fast enough to beat out a ton of infield hits and possesses a swing that has him bailing out of the box early, propelling him halfway to first base by the time the ball takes its second hop. Ichiro’s slashing approach also has netted a career 20.3 percent line-drive rate, a high-average figure that also makes hits more likely.

By both traditional and advanced measures, CarGo ranks among the fastest players in the game today. He stole 26 bases in 2010, an impressive-enough total. But take a look at his speed score, a metric devised by Bill James that combines a player’s stolen-base percentage, frequency of stolen-base attempts, percentage of triples and runs scored percentage. By that standard, CarGo ranked 11th in the majors, well ahead of Ichiro, and also above known speedsters (and prolific base stealers) like Juan Pierre and Rajai Davis.

The bigger factor boosting CarGo’s BABIP, though, is Coors Field. The accompanying table lists the BABIPs of the Rockies’ 10 most frequently used hitters. Eight of the 10 came in above .300, four of them above .325. The list of BABIP outperformers includes fast guys like CarGo and outfield running mate Dexter Fowler but also plodders like Melvin Mora, Brad Hawpe and Todd Helton.

Coors Field is a well-known hitters’ haven, and it even helps batting average on balls in play. The league’s BABIP was .297 in 2010, but most of the Rockies far exceeded that figure.

Player 2010 BABIP
Carlos Gonzalez .384
Ryan Spilborghs .341
Dexter Fowler .328
Troy Tulowitzki .327
Melvin Mora .324
Brad Hawpe .314
Ian Stewart .308
Todd Helton .307
Clint Barmes .263
Seth Smith .256

No major league park boosts hits more than Coors, whether you’re using 2010 figures or more reliable three-year park factors. According to stat-tracking site StatCorner.com, Coors does tend to help right-handed hitters a little more than it does lefties. Still, the spacious Coors outfield, the lack of ample foul territory (as seen in parks like Oakland Coliseum) and some managers’ desire to play deep and prevent extra-base hits have conspired to boost hits across the board, be they singles, doubles or triples on balls in play, not to mention the homer spike we’ve come to know through the days of the Blake Street Bombers to more recent balls-in-humidor tactics.

Even accounting for Gonzalez’s speed, his own healthy line-drive rates (20.8 percent in 2010, 20.7 percent career) and high ground-ball-to-fly-ball rate for a power hitter (42.5 percent GB vs. 36.6 percent FB last year), and Coors Field’s significant impact, Gonzalez’s BABIP was abnormally high last year. Only Austin Jackson‘s and Josh Hamilton’s numbers were higher, and only four batting-title-qualified hitters in the past three years have topped Gonzalez’s .384 BABIP from last season. Other numbers warrant concern, such as Gonzalez’s strikeout-to-walk ratio (nearly 4-to-1 in 2010) and his poor walk rate (just 32 unintentional walks in 628 plate appearances last year).

But Gonzalez is still a 25-year-old outfielder with immense physical talents, playing in the friendliest hitters’ park in the game with a skill set that suggests he’ll continue hitting — and BABIPing — his way to big numbers. Don’t expect the moon this season. Do expect another round of impressive results. Even his true level of a talent is a .350 BABIP, he’s still an All-Star.

By any objective measure, the Tampa Bay Rays bullpen was terrific in 2010.

Rays relievers posted the lowest team ERA in the American League last season (3.33). Using FanGraphs’ fielding independent pitching (FIP), a stat that runs along a similar scale to ERA but strips out the impact of balls hit in play, the Rays ranked second at 3.76. The Rays’ three best relievers and seventh-, eighth- and ninth-inning men, Grant Balfour, Joaquin Benoit, and Rafael Soriano, were all among the AL’s top 10 relievers by Baseball Prospectus’ expected wins added stat. No way the Rays win 96 games and their second AL East title in three years if not for the bullpen’s knockout performance.

So when Tampa Bay’s top relievers all became free agents at the end of the year, the Rays took stock of their roster … and let them all go. And here’s the crazy part: They did the right thing.

The most basic reason for dropping six relievers in a single offseason is that relief pitchers are the single most unpredictable commodity in baseball. Only four relievers in all of baseball have posted an FIP of 3.50 or lower in each of the past four seasons: Jonathan Broxton, Huston Street, the now-retired Billy Wagner and, of course, Mariano Rivera. Try a more modest query and you’ll still find a very small group of consistently excellent pitchers — just 15 have posted sub-3.50 FIPs in each of the past three seasons (minimum 10 IP per season). Trusting a non-Rivera reliever to be great (or even good) every year is an unrealistic proposition.

Like all players, the time frame that counts the most in evaluating a relief pitcher’s future value is his most recent season. In the Rays’ case, they had to match other teams’ offers on a passel of pitchers coming off career or near-career years. The table below shows the monster seasons put up by Balfour, Benoit and Soriano, plus a slightly-better-than-usual season for left-handed specialist Randy Choate. Even if the Rays re-signed every one of last year’s relievers, there’s no way they could have expected that group to duplicate their 2010 performances.

The table also shows the dollars and years commanded by this buy-high crew. Lefty specialists who can’t get a right-handed batter out to save their lives practically grow on trees, yet Choate secured a guaranteed two-year contract. Benoit earned a $16.5 million deal, less than two years removed from major shoulder surgery. Soriano’s three-year, $35 million contract to serve as Rivera’s apprentice was so stupefying that Yankees GM Brian Cashman immediately pointed the finger at other front office members for offering the deal, coming as close to overtly blasting his own team’s spending as any GM has over any move in recent history.

RAYS BULLPEN PERFORMANCE IN 2010
Player 2010 ERA Career ERA 2010 FIP Career FIP New Contract
Rafael Soriano 1.73 2.73 2.81 3.23 3 yrs/$35M
Joaquin Benoit 1.34 4.47 2.43 4.30 3 yrs/$16.5M
Grant Balfour 2.28 3.31 2.68 3.47 2 yrs/$8.1M
Randy Choate 4.23 4.39 3.50 3.80 2 yrs/$2.5M

By jettisoning the big three and Choate, the Rays also collected multiple compensatory draft picks. Tampa Bay pocketed the 31st and 42nd overall picks in the 2011 draft for losing Soriano. Benoit brought back the No. 52 pick, Choate No. 56. Baseball’s arcane free-agent compensation system can even pay off when teams lose players of dubious repute. Chad Qualls posted an unfathomable 7.32 ERA last season, partly due to bad luck on balls in play, but also due to injuries and an overall decline in effectiveness. Yet the Rays still scored the No. 60 pick in the draft for watching Qualls sign elsewhere.

All told, Tampa Bay holds 12 of the first 89 picks in the 2011 draft, a bounty never before seen in major league baseball. Those picks will require plenty of cash to pay for them all, cash saved by not, say, throwing $35 million at Rafael Soriano. Draft picks are wildly unpredictable, with even first-rounders often failing to pan out. But the long-term upside for top picks is also much higher than whatever you’d get from a typical 30-something relief pitcher. For a team that lives and dies with its homegrown talent as it competes against much wealthier rivals like the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox, the draft is a much smarter venue for aggressive spending.

Building a brand-new bullpen filled with unproven commodities still carries major risk, of course. The Yankees and Red Sox now sport loaded bullpens to go with their loaded lineups, adding the likes of Soriano and Bobby Jenks to their stables. One can’t help but wonder how long the Rays can keep knocking off the beasts of the East with a much smaller payroll, especially with the team’s already modest 2010 payroll of $73 million dropping by a full $30 million for 2011.

But, as I wrote about the Rays in my book on their unlikely worst-to-first journey, they have started to make a habit of pulling off such financial miracles. (See ESPN.com’s excerpt of the book here). Finding players with hidden value has been one of the keys to their rise; finding relief pitchers with hidden value has been a linchpin of that success.

This year’s projected bullpen is no exception. Remember the 15 pitchers with FIP marks of 3.50 or lower in each of the past three seasons? Adam Russell, a 6-foot-8 behemoth with big strikeout rates and ground ball tendencies, is one of those 15 (more than 54 combined major league innings, granted, but he showed those skills in the minors too).

Hard-throwing, homegrown lefty Jake McGee could emerge as a high-leverage relief ace for years to come. Joel Peralta signed for just $925,000 after striking out a batter an inning, posting a 2.02 ERA and a 3.02 FIP last year with the Washington Nationals. Yankees fans might cringe just from hearing the name Kyle Farnsworth, but the hulking righty has blossomed into an excellent reliever, picking up a cut fastball, slicing his walk rate and posting FIPs of 3.10 and 3.06 the past two seasons.

If those names don’t excite you, remember that the Rays have built great bullpens from spare parts before. They grabbed Balfour off the scrap heap from the Milwaukee Brewers, designated him for assignment, brought him back to the big leagues, then watched him turn into a dominant force on the Rays’ 2008 pennant-winning team. Balfour’s running mate that year, J.P. Howell, was acquired in a trade for Joey Gathright, a player with little on his résumé other than jumping over cars on YouTube.

Last month the Rays signed Juan Cruz, nabbing a fly-ball pitcher with big strikeout rates coming off a shoulder injury, for the price of a minor league contract. The deal looked like a classic Rays move. Benoit was once a struggling starter with Texas before finding success in the Rangers’ bullpen. He had major shoulder surgery in January 2009 and missed that entire season. But where others saw defects, the Rays saw opportunity, in the form of strong career strikeout rates and fly-ball tendencies that could work out much better in Tampa Bay, given the team’s strong outfield defense and Tropicana Field’s far friendlier park effects for pitchers. The Rays signed Benoit to a minor league deal in February of last year, ultimately paying him a grand total of $750,000 … to pitch like vintage Dennis Eckersley.

The lesson here: Don’t overpay to bring back last year’s success stories. Instead, dig deep to find the new one, for millions less. It’s a smart move for any team trying to build a bullpen.

The Minnesota Twins have taken plenty of flak for the mass exodus from their bullpen and their many unproven, younger relievers. But the Twins have a much bigger problem on their hands for 2011, one that could threaten their two-year reign as AL Central champs: a severely diminished defense.

The Twins finished sixth in team ultimate zone rating last season. Developed by Mitchel Lichtman and tracked by FanGraphs, UZR is a stat that measures the number of runs a player saves compared to the average player at his position. It’s more reliable on a three-year basis, though, and at times subject to small-sample-size flukes, such as Jason Repko’s team-leading performance in just 58 games played.

Random fluctuations aside, the Twins’ biggest defensive downgrade this season comes at shortstop, where Alexi Casilla takes over for J.J. Hardy. Per UZR, we see that Hardy ranked among the Twins’ best defenders last season. He earned a UZR of 8.1 in 2010, saving just more than eight runs last year as compared to an average defensive shortstop. And this wasn’t a one-year fluke. For his career, Hardy has a UZR of 11.0 per 150 games played. Using the sabermetric convention of 10 runs saved equaling one win gained in the standings, that means Hardy is worth one full win more than an average shortstop each year with his glove alone.

Meanwhile, Casilla is a big unknown as a major league shortstop, having played just 41 games at the position in four-plus years as a mostly part-time player in Minnesota. Without a meaningful sample of games, it’s tough to make an accurate prediction of Casilla’s expected defensive value at short. The scouting reports haven’t been glowing, though, and finding a near-elite defensive shortstop like Hardy is tough to do. And it’s not as if Casilla will be much of an offensive contributor, as his career line is just .249/.306/.395 in more than 1,000 plate appearances.

New Twins second baseman Tsuyoshi Nishioka comes with a better defensive reputation than Casilla’s. But he, too, replaces a player coming off a strong defensive season for the Twins’ 2010 division-winning squad. Orlando Hudson saved nearly 10 runs more than an average second baseman last year for Minnesota in just 126 games — down from 2008 and 2009 levels but consistent with longer-term trends and thus likely a pretty accurate reading of his true defensive value to the club. The loss of slick-fielding (though terrible-hitting) utility infielder Nick Punto compounds the issue.

If the Twins’ defense was stellar everywhere else, you might not worry that much about their middle-infield uncertainty. But Minnesota’s corner-outfield defense ranks among the very worst in baseball. Delmon Young, Jason Kubel and Michael Cuddyer cost the team about three wins in their combined time in left and right fields last season, compared to the average player at those positions. That’s consistent with those players’ career track records, which show butcherish tendencies in the field.

Cuddyer was a far worse defender (and a far inferior hitter) than Justin Morneau when he took over at first base for the concussed slugger this past summer. Morneau has started seeing game action in spring training as he tries to make it back after missing half of last season due to complications stemming from the concussion. If he comes back fully healthy in April, or even May, the Twins could bank a two-way upgrade, with one of Young, Kubel or Cuddyer relegated to DH or the bench when Morneau plays. But Morneau’s health remains a major question mark for the Twins with less than three weeks until Opening Day.

We’re still learning about the connection between pitching and defense and exactly how much catching the ball means to a team’s run prevention. Although stats such as UZR and defensive runs saved above average do a pretty good job of quantifying defensive impact, one factor which can get lost in the calculus is something we can call “cascading.”

Here’s an example of how cascading can play out: bases loaded, one out, pitcher induces a grounder up the middle. A good shortstop fields the ball, tosses to second for one, on to first, inning-ending double play, crisis averted. A lesser shortstop lets the ball go through. But it’s not just the two runs that score that hurt the team on the field; it’s also the added strain it places on the pitching staff. The pitcher on the mound still needs two more outs to escape this high-stress situation. If he can’t get out of the jam, the manager will have to make a call to the bullpen earlier than he’d like. Now you’re getting your lesser middle relievers into the game instead of your better late-inning guys, meaning you’re liable to give up more runs. You’re also forcing the bullpen to generally work harder, raising the risk that your relievers could wear down as the season goes on, if your defense continues to struggle. The end result can be more runs allowed, more fatigue for your pitchers and even a greater risk of injuries.

In the Twins’ case, more grounders could shoot through holes with Hardy and Hudson gone, and line drives and deep flies could land in the gaps, given the team’s weak corner-outfield defense. This is important because Twins have a pitch-to-contact staff that finished 10th in the AL in strikeouts in 2010. Minnesota’s pitchers need a good defense to thrive. So whether you’re a ground-ball-oriented pitcher like Francisco Liriano, Carl Pavano, Nick Blackburn or Brian Duensing, or an extreme fly-ball pitcher like Scott Baker or Kevin Slowey, you’re vulnerable to the team’s defensive problems.

Losing four established relief pitchers from last year’s squad could dent the Twins’ chances, although the return of Joe Nathan and a full season of Matt Capps should help. The White Sox should be better than they were last season, although they still have question marks at multiple positions. But if Minnesota fails to three-peat in 2011, that leaky defense could be the biggest reason.