FanPost

Cutting the Bull (pen)

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Much has been made over the last year about the KC bullpen and how much it contributed to their regular season success and their Series run. Writers are now saying that without a top bullpen, a team can not possibly hope to compete.

These comments got me wondering. And wondering led to testing.

I took the World Series teams from the last 10 years and calculated the ordinal ranking of their bullpens over the regular season (calculated based on fangraphs team reliever fWAR). The results were unexpected.

Bullpen Ranking by fWAR

The winning Series team had, on average, a bullpen ranked 13th-14th in the regular season. The losing team’s bullpen was ranked 11th-12th. And of these 20 teams, the only time a team made it to the finals with a bullpen ranked in the top 3 was in 2014.

Four Series winners did so with bullpens ranked in the bottom third, and 7 of the 20 series teams made it to the finals with a below-average ranked bullpen. The highest ranked "bullpen battle" was in 2010, when the Giants’ 6th-ranked pen beat the Rangers’ 5th-ranked one.

Interesting! But I wondered if ordinal rankings were misleading. Perhaps each of these teams had excellent bullpens, but the rankings were distorted by other factors?

So here is the same chart showing regular season bullpen fWAR, unranked.

Bullpen fWAR

Again surprising. Four teams won the series with bullpens which put up an aggregate fWAR of 1 or less in the regular season. And the average regular bullpen regular season fWAR was 3.34 – good, but hardly elite (for example, a 3.34 fWAR in 2014 would have ranked 15th, between the Padres (3.4) and the Indians (3.1).

My conclusion? A good bullpen is better than a bad one, when it comes to making it to the playoffs and to the finals. But the bullpen is just one piece of the puzzle, and just as most playoff teams have at least one position of weakness, it is possible to win without an elite ‘pen if other factors compensate – or if your pedestrian bullpen steps it up in the offseason.

Implications for the Jays in 2015? By all means, continue to improve the bullpen. But do so in the context of improving the team wherever you can, not because the bullpen is an absolute requirement in and of itself.



Editor's Note: This is a FanPost written by a reader and member of Bluebird Banter. It was not commissioned by the editors and is not necessarily reflective of the opinions of Bluebird Banter or SB Nation.