So you’re coming out of your Super Bowl food coma, and your brain is slowly ridding itself of the six pounds of cream cheese you inhaled while watching Bruno Mars, Cam Newton and puppies, in some order. Great! Welcome to baseball season!
Think back 12 months. The Texas Rangers were plodding toward spring training with the same amount of buzz as a rerun of “Martin.” And for those who could sweep away the growing sense of melancholy around the team to actually look at the roster, there was one giant, glaring issue:
“Hey, uh, what are the Rangers going to do about their bullpen?”
You’re remembering it correctly — it was a mess. A hodgepodge of complete unknowns and we-wish-we-didn’t-knows. It was more or less the leftovers from the altogether miserable 2014 season in which the most valuable remaining bullpen piece was either Nick Martinez or Alex Claudio. Yes, it was bad.
There was a terrible duality to the Rangers’ bullpen situation entering 2015: the vast majority of the options were woefully inexperienced, and the experienced options they did have were either bad or named Neftali Feliz.
Check out the Rangers’ Opening Day bullpen from 2015, but you may want to look at it through a pinhole viewer like a solar eclipse.
TEX Bullpen, 2015 Opening Day | PRE-2015 CAREER IP | PRE-2015 CAREER WAR |
Anthony Bass | 214.1 | -0.2 |
Neftali Feliz | 241.2 | 4.3 |
Keone Kela | 0 | 0.0 |
Phil Klein | 19 | -0.1 |
Roman Mendez | 33 | 0.0 |
Shawn Tolleson | 109.1 | -0.1 |
Logan Verrett | 0 | 0.0 |
TOTAL | 617.1 | 3.9 |
To put that in some perspective: Royals reliever Wade Davis entered 2015 with more innings pitched and career WAR than the entire Rangers bullpen.
Of course, this is 12 months later, though it feels like eons have passed. The Rangers’ bullpen did a midseason about-face from albatross to asset thanks in large part to a number of deals at the trade deadline, bringing in the likes of Sam Dyson and Jake Diekman. And, of course, the emergence of some of those unknowns — Kela and Tolleson in particular — helped with that as well.
With the offseason addition of veteran dance enthusiast and also right-handed reliever Tom Wilhelmsen from Seattle, the Rangers’ projected bullpen for 2016 has definitely closed the experience gap.
TEX Bullpen, 2016 Opening Day (Projected) | PRE-2016 CAREER IP | PRE-2016 CAREER WAR |
Shawn Tolleson | 181.2 | 1.0 |
Sam Freeman | 108.2 | 0.0 |
Sam Dyson | 129 | 1.1 |
Jake Diekman | 195 | 2.5 |
Tom Wilhelmsen | 312.1 | 2.8 |
Keone Kela | 60.1 | 1.5 |
Andrew Faulkner | 9.2 | 0.0 |
TOTAL | 996.2 | 8.9 |
(Tolleson, Freeman, Dyson, Diekman, Wilhelmsen and Kela seem like pretty good bets for the Rangers’ Opening Day roster; Faulkner seems to have the inside track for the final spot, especially as a lefty in an otherwise righty-dominated pen.)
That would mean that the Rangers have increased their bullpen experience by more than 61 percent, and not at the expense of empty innings — the bullpen’s cumulative WAR is more than twice what it was last season.
Bullpens are notoriously fickle, and the increase in experience and quality is no guarantee that the Rangers’ relievers will play to their paper. But for now, the white-knuckle days of wondering which member of the mystery team is coming out of the door in right-center field feel long ago.
Welcome Greg to the Baseball Texas cadre of writers by following him on Twitter @Tepper.
