Rays Right To Let Pen Go

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.