This bullpen

[Cloud]

One of my main concerns in the offseason and coming into the season was whether or not the bullpen is capable of pitching like they did last year. So far, through the first month of the season, they haven't and it already cost the M's some games in April. Regression was going to happen and it was just a question of whether how much... right now it's pretty bad.

Our closer is questionable and the back-end of the bullpen is shaky at best. Our starters needs to go deeper into games to help this bullpen out and the only pitcher capable of doing that right now is Felix or it's going to get worse.

Good news is that it's only the first month of April so there's plenty of time to turn it around and the AL West looks like it stinks this year. I believe things will eventually evens out and there's no cause to be alarm yet, but it is concerning.

 

[SeattleCoug]

Yea I think it comes down to three things. Two of them you touched on. The starters not going deep enough and the inevitable regression from the performance from last year.

Lastly I think the bullpen needs to be managed differently. This whole 8th inning by committee approach isn't going to work. It really shouldn't have worked last year but it did. You cant play roulette on when to bring in Smith, Farquhar and Medina. If Smith is the best option which it seems then make him your 8th inning guy and not the sometimes mop up for a starter in the 6th guy. These guys need roles.

I don't think it will be this bad but they need a better plan.

 

[EVille3]

I think once the bartender returns, he will assume the 8th inning role.

 

[Cloud]

Even the ones that have roles aren't exactly capable of doing their jobs. Most notably our closer who isn't exactly on a roller coaster but a downward spiral so far the first month of the season.

I expect these guys to do better and they probably will. Really depends on how far the starters are capable of going into games.

 

[gowazzu02]

I said it in the series thread yesterday. We need another arm out there. Going with a short pen to accomodate platoons in left and right field is killing us. And the fact that were not ever doing the platoons and trotting cruz out there is mind boggling.

Pick one of your righty platoons, Weeks or Ruggs send em down and bring up another bull pen arm. The short pen idea is great in theory if your starters are going deep but they are not and the pen is gassed and its not even May.

 

[PolarVortex]

The way I'd run the bullpen:
9th - Rodney
8th - Smith
7th - Medina and Furbush
6th - Farquar, Leone and Olsen

If Rodney gets hurt or becomes inffective, I think the closer job should go to Smith.

Farquar, Furbush and Smith have already been in 8 of the first 14 games, and Medina has been in 7. That's 4 guys on pacce to be in at least 80 games each. Obviously this can not continue if they expect to get anywhere near the production they got out of the bullpen last year.

I think Paxton will ultimately settle in which will take some pressurre off the bullpen. But Walker is going to tax the bullpen all year long. He may eventually pitch effectively but he won't go deep in games because he runs up his pitch count too rapidly.

Happ has been a pleasant suprise so far, but after today he has couple of starts coming up in Arlington and Houston - hitter's paradises. That's when we will see what he is really made of.

And Iwakuma - yeah I'm not feeling too good about him. The excuses the announcers make for him sound eerily like the same excuses they were making for Fassero in 1998. Kuma has not been right since last August.

 

[Perpetual_Beast_Mode]

I think some of our bullpen pitchers will bounce back, but I'm not sure. A lot of them have pretty short track records, don't they?

 

[WizardHawk]

The way I'd run the bullpen:
9th - Rodney
8th - Smith
7th - Medina and Furbush
6th - Farquar, Leone and Olsen

No love for Wilhelmsen?

It's impossible to set a role based list when your starters are 3/5's shitty as hell right now. Just blows too many things up, but once Tom is back he will have a role late in games when the pen can get back to situational pitching.

 

[PolarVortex]

No love for Wilhelmsen?

It's impossible to set a role based list when your starters are 3/5's shitty as hell right now. Just blows too many things up, but once Tom is back he will have a role late in games when the pen can get back to situational pitching.

When Tom returns to the team, I think his role should be long relief. They are kinda using Olsen in that role but I think it should be a righthander's job.

It's also just a matter of time before we see Lowe and/or Luetge. Those two guys can alternate with Leone and Olsen to go back and forth between Seattle and Tacoma to hopefully keep fresh arrms in the bullpen.

 

[dude82]

The starting pitchers, outside of Felix and Happ, need to pitch deeper into games. We can't keep trotting our bullpen out there in the 6th and earlier three or four times a week and expect them to be consistently good with that kind of workload. Obviously the lack of consistent starting pitching has come back to bite us in the form of blown late leads by the pen. They've gotta do better and I think they will.

I'll say this much... it's a testament to how good our pitching has been over the last several years that the relative struggle we've seen from this year's staff hasn't caused a forum-wide panic yet. That we haven't seen that type of reaction, even this early in the season, tells me that people are reasonably confident that they can and will right the ship in pretty short order. If the roles were reversed and our pitching was doing as well as it has in recent years and it was our offense that was losing games for us on a fairly consistent basis, I'm pretty sure this board would be in full-on meltdown mode right now, with little to no confidence in the offense's ability to bounce back. Now I haven't paid a ton of attention to the series threads, so maybe there has been some of that there, but I'm fairly confident in my thinking that if the offense struggled out of the gate and the team was losing largely because of that, the criticisms wouldn't be limited to the series threads and maybe one or two additional threads.