Take half of those away and Anaheim is playoff bound. Yes it’s very frustrating how one key aspect is keeping this team from winning consistently. We’re always gonna have the same debate. A near 10 game improvement from last year is solid as a start that’s for sure. Also, fuck the mariners! Shit feels insulting seeing them win the west.
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We have a terrible bullpen, Fermin alone has blown 4 of them 😆
That’s a wild stat given Jansen is 28 for 29 in save chances. One bright spot.
It’s not that simple. The bullpen only had 18 blown saves last year, third fewest that season. It didn’t matter. The problem is that the team is below average everywhere. Both the rotation and pen are 27th worst in ERA. Offense is 25th in wRC+. Fundamentals are terrible and they are 29th in FRV. 28th in DRS. The reason they can’t win consistently is because they aren’t good anywhere. It’s not just one thing or two things they need to fix. They need big improvements across the board to become a real competitive team.
And I’m skeptical that this 10 win improvement means much tbh. Their run differential is still abysmal and barely improved. Their Pythagorean win-loss is actually much worse and about as bad as last year. Objectively the future looks pretty dismal. I’m hoping for the best next year but….once again they need almost everyone to go right. And that’s not a position you want to be starting at.
Another thing to note, and I’m not sure how many they have but a reliever coming in the 7th inning and giving up the lead is considered a blown save
Guess what my two favorite teams are.
I think this statistic is a combination of both bullpen quality **and** how frequently teams end up in close games.
Sure, I can accept that our bullpen hasn’t been the most reliable. It’s probably been about middle of the pack relative to all teams in the majors in run prevention.
But part of it is that inevitably, pitchers give up runs, and whether they pick up a blown save (specifically) for those runs is situational. Burke, Detmers, and Zeferjahn all had 5 blown saves this season, and I think you’d be hard pressed to find a bullpen staff that would turn away Burke or Detmers.
Quite a few of the others can be explained. When our offense was still keeping us games at the beginning of the season, we also had guys like Ian Anderson, Ryan Johnson (2), Ben Joyce (2), and Hector Neris blowing saves. 6 between those guys.
As Onitsukaryu said, we have much bigger things to worry about than our bullpen.
We’re losing two starting pitchers to free agency and our #5 starter spot has been incredibly shaky.
Moncada and Rengifo (big struggle after 3 solid years) are heading to free agency as well, leaving 2B and 3B question marks. Might we really need to start the season with Moore and Guzman starting on Opening Day or will we find some semi-washed up vet to hold it down until they inevitably get injured?
There’s a bit of uncertainty in CF (Teodosio? Rada promoted early?) and RF/DH (where do we squeeze Adell, Trout, and Soler?). Do we need to start thinking about a Ward replacement too (free agent after 2026)?
Finally, what can we even do about our catcher situation? d’Arnaud being mid was kind of predictable; he’s been like this every odd year since COVID. But O’Hoppe really struggling has actually made our catcher position dead last in WAA. For a guy who should have been a central piece of our young core, his performance plummeted on both sides of the plate.
The bullpen, in the grand scheme of things, is a relatively irrelevant crapshoot, as long as the bullpen isn’t abjectly terrible. 20 teams, including us, had bullpens between a -2.4 and 1.6 WAA on the season. In other words, the majority of teams had an okay bullpen that sat within a 4 bWAR range. Unless our bullpen magically becomes elite (unlikely with the lack of farm talent), we can probably bank on staying in this range. Gaining 2 WAR from the bullpen is just not something we can focus on when so many other key components are missing.
Two wins matters for teams within two games of a playoff spot. Not for teams that are 15 games out. That’s why it was so crazy that our only move at the trade deadline was to trade for two okay reliever rentals. Our record looked decent, but most models already had our playoff odds at <5%. We also had some surprisingly good health from our four best starting pitchers and for most of our position players (except Rendon).
Nothing new
We throw leads away like nothing else
So you’re saying that our bullpen sucks? Hasn’t that been true for quite a while now? Seems like something someone that gets paid millions of dollars to figure out would figure out by now.
Unfortunately, this is not new news….
All season long the angels take the lead then next half inning give up the lead immediately.
As easy as it is to point at this, we have a TON of more pressing issues than the bullpen. We strike out wayyyyy too much and don’t have anyone that can consistently put the ball in play and get on base other than Schanuel. I’d like to see some more power come from Nolan’s bat as a 1B next season but he’s really our only consistent guy at the plate. Neto is promising but he also strikes out way too often for a true lead off guy and although Trout still has a good OBP, he still strikes out way too often for us to generate runs. Everyone else is a sub .250 hitter with low OBPs so if Adell and Ward aren’t hitting HRs we have a low chance of getting on base, scoring runs, and running up the opposing pitcher’s pitch count. I won’t even talk about the mess that is our starting rotation.
Suprising that the Dodgers aren’t on here. Tanner Scott has blown every game he’s been in.