This was provoked – triggered might be a better word – by paulnh’s feed post about the D-backs’ bullpen. The key conclusion was, “Since Mike Hazen has taken over, the Diamondbacks bullpen has been the second worst position in all of baseball, better only than the Pirates shortstop. That’s an even 300 positions (30 teams x 10 positions) and your D-backs bullpen ranks 299th.” As a kneejerk response, last night’s opening game of the 2026 season didn’t indicate any improvement. While Ryan Thompson and Juan Morillo looked good, and Andrew Hoffman wobbled into and out of trouble, Taylor Clarke served up batting practice. Overall bullpen ERA = 9.00. Not a great start.
This continues a trend which, frankly, we have banged on about for years. It has probably gone past dead horse levels, and is now circling dead parrot levels of obviousness. Mike Hazen has a bullpen problem. But how much has it hurt the Diamondbacks overall? To find out, I decided to look at each season from 2018-2025, and give the D-backs simply a league average bullpen. For this, I used fWAR, because Fangraphs allows easy splitting out of starting and relief pitching. I took the mid-point between the 15th- and 16th-ranked bullpens as the average, and saw how many more wins than the actual D-backs bullpen that would have given the team.
The chart above shows the math. But those averse to such things can focus on the final two columns, which show the actual wins for the Diamondbacks and the “ABP wins”. That is the wins Arizona would have had, with an Average BullPen. Now, there are some season it wouldn’t have made a difference. The biggest bump comes in 2021, when our bullpen was five wins below average. However, that would only have given the D-backs a record of 57-105. They would still have had the second pick in the draft the following season, so an average bullpen that year really would not have moved the needle at all.
The same goes for all the seasons through 2022. In 2018, the last wild-card went to the Colorado Rockies who won 91 games, so Arizona would still have been well short. Of course, back in those days, there were only two wild-card teams, so the bar was higher. But a third wild-card team would have been the Braves at 90 wins. No difference. In 2023, the D-backs would still have had a wild-card spot. Though the extra two wins would have made the last week or so considerably less nerve-wracking – or “exciting”, if you prefer. It would have bumped them above the Marlins to face the Phillies in the first round. Would we have beaten them in five? We didn’t in the first five games of the NLCS…
But it’s 2024 and 2025 where the bullpen really hurt the Diamondbacks, and that’s perhaps why we have focused on it so much over the past couple of years. In 2024, the Arizona bullpen was the closest to mediocrity it has been since 2019, just a win and a half below average. But considering the team ended up on the sticky end of a three-way tie for the last two spots… Those 1.5 wins would have propelled the D-backs from the outside of the dance to the second wild-card position, and a series against the Padres. Who knows what might have happened? Could hardly have done worse than Atlanta, who trailed at the end of 17 of the 18 innings played against San Diego.
Although the D-backs were worse in 2025, so was the post-season standard. The Mets got in with just 83 wins, three more than the Diamondbacks. With our bullpen 3.7 wins below average, we would have been rounded into the final wild-card spot based on ABP victories. [Three wins would have led to another three-way tie between New York, Arizona and Cincinnatti. I do not have time to go down the rabbit-hole of that hypothetical scenario, especially since we split the season series against the Mets!] We’d have replaced the Reds against the Dodgers. Again, we could hardly have done worse, as Cincinnati conceded eighteen runs over two games.
Based on the above, it’s fair to think that, with merely an average bullpen, the D-backs could have gone to the postseason in three consecutive seasons. That’s something the team has never managed to do. Let’s hope this is not another article about our relievers I need to start bringing out every winter.