Archive for Closers

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 »

At the beginning of the offseason, the White Sox had three men on their roster who had at one time been the team’s closer for an extended period of time. Chris Sale was nearly unhittable at the end of the 2010 season, but he’s moving into the Sox’s rotation. Sergio Santos, in just his third season as a pitcher after converting from shortstop in the minors, saved 30 games in 2011 and got a ticket to Toronto for his troubles. That leaves Matt Thornton, whose turn as a closer early last season can charitably be described as unsuccessful, as the man most likely to get the ball with the team up three or fewer runs in the ninth. Read the rest of this entry »

This was unexpected, to say the least. The Astros have named Brett Myers as their closer before spring training games have even started, which finally helps us figure out who will pitch the ninth in Houston this year. Nearly all of Myers’s value last season as an innings eater, which is why this announcement is such a surprise. He was the only Astro to top 200 innings last year, which was also the case in 2010. Even so, the Astros are moving Myers to closer, a position he held in Philadelphia in 2007.

As seen above, Myers does receive a significant upgrade in his stats when you split his numbers between relief and starting appearances, which is true for most pitchers.

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We — collectively — are going to steal Mike Podhorzer’s idea and make some crazy predictions for the coming season. Every year, something happens to surprise baseball viewership. Jose Bautista and Lance Berkman come to mind over the past few years.

So let’s try to open our minds and let crazy in for some fun. Then we’ll look back at the end of the season and see which RotoGraphs staff member can access the other side most effectively — then we’ll scoot down the bench a little away from him.

1) No player will hit 40 home runs this year. Obviously Mike Stanton and Jose Bautista loom large, but there were only three guys that managed the feat last year, and the point is that power is down. Handy graph time!

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Blame Mike Shanahan.

Thanks to the former Broncos coach, fantasy football players have had to come to grips with the reality that just because you draft a team’s presumptive starter, it doesn’t mean you’ll get the team’s production. Fantasy baseball players have had to work around platoon situations, but the idea of a handcuff is relatively new to this branch of the fantasy tree. For position players, traditional platoons are still a more likely issue that owners have to navigate, but especially for relievers, it’s time to learn how to use a handcuff and which players are the most likely to need one. Read the rest of this entry »

On Wednesday I explained why Joel Hanrahan is a bit undervalued in comparison to John Axford. The next step I decided to take is to evaluate Hanrahan’s fastball to elaborate on why his success last year should continue this season as well. After all, Hanrahan had 269 innings in his career before the 68.2 he threw last year. Standard thinking would force one to believe his 209 ERA+ season was an outlier, as his career ERA+ is just 106.

However, as I explained in the article earlier this week, Hanrahan altered his approach on the mound. He turned into a fastball dominant pitcher, moving away from the fastball-slider combination he had utilized for the majority of his career. At least some credit must be given to Ray Searage, the Pirates pitching coach, and the rest of the group that decided this would be a much more effective way for Hanrahan to pitch.

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After part one of the auction for the Second FanGraphs Staff League, I took some time to look back at the strategy I set up going into the auction, and to re-strategize for day two, based on where I was.

And looking back, I’d have to say I executed pretty well, although not always in the ways I expected.

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The trouble with writing up any type of offseason primer or plan is that, inevitably, something changes with a player, rendering the writing useless. For example, Edinson Volquez and Yonder Alonso were traded the morning after I’d written up their player caps for FG+. So I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that mere hours after I wrote a section on David Aardsma as a free agent and possible midseason pick up, he would sign a two-year contract with the Yankees. Oh well, C’est la guerre.

Spring Training is a time for small stories to become huge stories simply because there aren’t really good things to talk about yet. Yes, pitchers and catchers finally reported, but unless PFP is the kind of the thing that really revs your engine, good stories are still few and far between. This is how something minor like Tim Lincecum’s tight back briefly becomes a serious concern. Another of these tempest-in-a-teapot spring stories is Mariano Rivera hinting that 2012 may be his last season. I get that for Yankees fans, it means a storied career coming to an end and there’s always some sadness with that, but the man is headed into his age-42 season. This was going to happen sooner or later with sooner as the early favorite.

It’s with an eye toward the post-Rivera future that Yankees GM Brian Cashman has signed Aardsma to be an option for the possibly vacant 2013 closers role. Unlike Rafael Soriano in 2011, however, Aardsma won’t be spending his 2012 racking up  innings as an uncloser and waiting for his chance. The 30-year-old right-hander is still working his way back from the Tommy John surgery that was performed in late July of last year. That means there’s virtually no way Aardsma comes back before August 1 and while one year is the commonly accepted timeline for return from Tommy John, newer research suggests that the figure is probably just a little longer than that, which would push Aardsma closer to a mid-August return.

This makes him unusable in redraft leagues, and to be frank, I don’t even see him as a waiver option this season. He’ll be facing major league hitters for the first time since the end of 2010 at the end of the fantasy season and beginning of the fantasy playoffs, which introduces an awful lot of risk for a player who may need 3-4 low leverage outings to get his feeling back. I think there’s every reason to believe he’ll be more valuable for the Yankees than he is for fantasy players in 2012.

For keeper and dynasty players, however, the calculus is a little different. Is Aardsma worth stashing in a DL spot for most or all of 2012 to have the potential Yankee closer on your roster for 2013? The short answer is that I doubt it. The way Aardsma’s deal is structured is such that it’s not actually a two-year deal, it’s a one-year deal with a team option for 2013. So, if Aardsma looks good in the minors and pitches well down the stretch, the Yankees will retain his rights and put him in the mix for the closers job next year…if Rivera does retire.

There are four options regarding Aardsma’s 2013 status based on his performance in 2012. If he doesn’t pitch well or doesn’t get healthy, the Yankees won’t retain him and his fantasy value going forward is virtually nil. If he pitches well, there are still three options. First, the Yankees choose not to retain him anyway because they feel confident with their younger bullpen options and let him go back to free agency. Second, the Yankees do retain him, but either Rivera comes back for 2013 or they choose to give the closer’s job to David Robertson, Joba Chamberlain, or some other reliever, who may not even be on the roster at this point. Third, Aardsma pitches well in 2011 and gets the job for 2013. So, that’s three potential negative outcomes compared to just one potential positive outcome, which to me seems too risky, even with the upside of having the Yankee closer stashed away at a low cost. As always, your mileage may vary.

I’ll be interested to see how Aardsma looks after watching Joe Nathan struggle a little bit coming back from Tommy John last year. We know that relievers fatigue differently from starters and, at least according to the Journal of Anecdotal Medicine, seem to be prone to less predictable returns from surgery. If Aardsma does return to pitch well in 2012, he’ll definitely be on my radar for 2013 drafts whether he’s with the Yankees or not, but there’s enough ambiguity in his future that I’ll be watching from afar this year rather than taking him on as risk.

The consensus around the fantasy industry seems to be that John Axford is a top tier closer while Joel Hanrahan is more of a second tier guy. Among closers, Axford has been drafted third in standard mock drafts on Mock Draft Central and fifth in expert drafts, while Hanrahan sits at eighth and tenth respectively. To me, there seems to be a bit too large of a gap between their draft positions.

Hanrahan has posted two consecutive sub-3.00 FIP seasons, though his ERA dropped almost two full runs from 2010 to last season. The drop in ERA had a lot to do with Hanrahan’s pitching approach, as he threw his fastball over 15% more than his career average. This resulted in a 10% increase in ground balls and only one home run allowed compared to his yearly average of six long balls given up.

While his career BABIP of .318 and 8.2% HR/FB ratio point to a regression, — he posted a career best .282 BABIP and 1.9% HR/FB ratio last year — his new approach seems to be a good counter-point against his numbers reverting back to career rates. Even if you do expect a regression, he should maintain similar success on batted balls with his new fastball heavy method.

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