Grant Balfour, the man with the awful baseball name and two consecutive sub 2.50 ERAs has been named the new closer in Oakland. Balfour has had stellar performances in three of the past four years and is finally being rewarded with a ninth inning gig. Oakland made the wise call here baseball wise, as Balfour is the better pitcher than Brian Fuentes and now Fuentes can become more of a situational pitcher, which will in turn make him a more valuable member of their bullpen.

Balfour did run into some good fortune last season, stranding 89% of his runners and recording a BABIP of .232, but he also had the highest HR/FB rate of his career, minimum 30 innings pitched, at 11.0%. Balfour is no guarantee for another sub 2.50 ERA, but I could certainly envision him around the 2.80-3.00 mark that he has averaged over the past four seasons.

As a strict two pitch pitcher who generates above average whiff rates with both pitches, Balfour certainly has the stuff to finish with more than a strikeout per inning pitched. Also helping in Balfour’s resurgence over the past few seasons is his walk rate, which has sat at 7.7% and 8.3% over the past two years compared to his career average of 10.9%. His lower walk rate has come with fewer strikeouts but an improved K/BB ratio, which have been his second and third highest of his career over the past two seasons.

Projection systems have his ERA in a wide range, with Bill James expecting a 2.40 and ZiPS expecting a 3.60 mark. I am a bit more bullish on Balfour than ZiPS is, but take that for what it is worth. Looking at shutdowns and meltdowns, last season Balfour finished with 32 and 6 respectively. That was good for a rate of 5.33 shutdowns per meltdown, which ranked him tenth among qualifying relievers. His consistent performances should allow him to hold down the closer spot for the entirety of the season, barring any odd setbacks or injuries.

So, with Balfour now officially being named closer, where does he rank among the herd? In the consensus reliever rankings, our team had Andrew Bailey, Brandon League, Joe Nathan, and Kyle Farnsworth ranked 16-19 when excluding projected starting pitchers. I would slot Balfour right in between League and Nathan, as League’s performance last year and lower FIP over the past two seasons gives him the slight edge over Balfour in my eyes.
Despite the middle tier ranking, Balfour is a solid closer to add to a roto roster.

If you were wise enough to speculate on Balfour eventually winning the job, then you likely got him at a very nice discount on draft day. If you are drafting in the near future, target Balfour as he is likely still a bit undervalued due to his inexperience as a closer. I do not place much value in a pitcher having closer experience, but in many cases your league mates will. Take advantage of the players in your league by looking at Balfour’s solid numbers over the past few seasons and expect quite a good year in his first attempt as a full time closer.

Over the last few days, Howard Bender, Chad Young, and Ben Duronio have been writing about three players they will each avoid this season (parts one, two, three, and four), and now I’m going to join in on the fun.

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Yesterday afternoon, Royals closer Joakim Soria left the game with a sore right elbow. But this doesn’t sound like any sore elbow as a result of just shaking off some spring training rust and he’ll be fine in a couple of days. This appears more ominous. His performance this spring certainly backs up the fact that he has been pitching injured, as he has now allowed 7 runs and 10 hits in just 3 1/3 innings. Of course, it’s a tiny sample size and typically should be ignored. But when elbow soreness is involved, we have to take that performance more seriously.

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Yesterday, I made some bold predictions for the league leaders in the five fantasy hitting categories. Today, I check in on the pitching side of the ledger with some equally crazy forecasts.

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As someone who drafted and trusted Matt Thornton last year with one of my closer spots, I made sure to pick up his handcuff after that awful first week for the White Sox’s left-handed reliever. I was extremely happy with what Santos provided the rest of the way through, specifically during the first part of his closer tenure in Chicago. Over his first 20 innings, he recorded six saves and allowed no runs.

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Eno Sarris published the staff’s reliever rankings earlier today, and now it’s my turn to dissect them. I have written a ton of articles on relievers since coming over to RotoGraphs in late January, so if you want to look at my specific feelings on certain relievers, you can just click my name over on the right hand side of the screen and see my in depth thoughts.

– The first thing I noticed on these rankings is how close John Axford and Joel Hanrahan are. I have commented on this a few times this year and see Hanrahan as an undervalued reliever, with the only slight against him being the possibility for a future trade.

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Consensus Ranks: OF, C, 1B, 2B, 3B, SS, and RP and SP.

Tiered Ranks: C, 1B, 2B, SS, 3B, NL OF, AL SP, NL SP, Holds.

The main hullabaloo will probably be about the relievers-turned-starters. There’s a bit of a damned-if-you-do damned-if-you-don’t thing going on. If you don’t rank the reliever/starters because they won’t be traditional relievers getting saves, then those pitchers will fall out of the player ranking universe for the most part. Most of them don’t have ‘starter’ eligibility. Add to that the difficulty of projecting a dominant reliever into a new role, and, well, you get a difficult situation. So that’s what happened with Matt Moore, Chris Sale, Daniel Bard, Neftali Feliz and Cory Luebke.

As for the traditional relievers, there’s a lot of agreement. Well, Zimmerman thinks the magic will run out for Mariano Rivera this year, Podhorzer hates Heath Bell, half of us thought J.J. Putz would stay healthy and half of us thought he’d crap out again, Zimmerman put Kenley Jansen right into the closer’s role while the rest of us were more cautious, and Carlos Marmol inspired some differing opinions.

The relievers!

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The Cardinal’s new manager, Mike Matheny, officially named Jason Motte closer a few weeks ago, but pretty much everyone expected him to land the gig even before the announcement. Motte finished last season in the role and had a solid postseason as the ninth inning man under Tony La Russa, with an 8-1 strikeout-to-walk rate and a 2.19 ERA in 12.1 October innings.

More than just being a useful closer, Motte has developed into a top notch pitcher. He has seen his K/BB rate increase in each of the past three seasons, from 2.35 to 3.00 to 3.94. It appears that he is getting more comfortable on the mound each year removed from his transition from catcher to pitcher, which is a logical reason for his continued improvement. He also ditched the curveball that he threw 11% of the time in 2009, which was a rather ineffective pitch.
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It has been a long time since the Twins needed a long-term option to close games, and it’s not a position they’re used to having to think about. In the 20 years between 1990 and 2009, the Twins had 17 seasons where a pitcher recorded 20 saves, of those, 13 were attributed to either Rick Aguilera or Joe Nathan. Unfortunately for the Twins, Aguilera retired in 2000 and Nathan hasn’t been a real option since he missed the 2010 season after tearing his UCL in spring training. As much as the Twins have had a few years to prepare for Nathan’s departure, there’s a substantial difference between patching a one-year hole and finding the team’s next stopper for the next 8-10 years.

When Nathan fled the Twin Cities to close where the “coyotes wail along the trail” (Deep in the heart of Texas), I speculated that the Twins would choose to use Glen Perkins at the end of games rather than going after someone on the free agent market. After all, Perkins was not only the Twins’ best relievers in 2011, he had the 11th highest WAR among all relievers, and one of the few members of the Twins’ pen that performed better than expected. Instead of entrusting Perkins with the closer’s job, the Twins chose to bring back one of 2011’s two closers, Matt Capps. Read the rest of this entry »

The previous two pairs of relievers I profiled this week weren’t handcuffs in the traditional sense, they were more of a master/apprentice relationship where the student is beginning to threaten the master’s claim on that title. The Dodgers, on the other hand, have as traditional a handcuff situation as has ever existed in fantasy baseball. With Javy Guerra and Kenley Jansen ready at the end of games, Don Mattingly has two extremely good options to choose from, and owners who have one or the other may find themselves reaping less than the full benefit of the Dodgers’ save chances. Like the Bronco running backs of old, Guerra and Jansen may limit their other’s value by their very existence. Read the rest of this entry »