Don’t Undervalue Your Bullpen

Over a fantasy season, it’s hard to trace results back to the decisions or actions you took that led to that result. We take so many actions from keepers (if your league has them), to the draft, to trades, to FAAB or waiver moves, to lineup decisions, that parsing what mattered and what didn’t can be impossible.

Instead, I find it is more productive to evaluate things the other direction – look at decisions you made or actions you took, determine how they impacted your final results, and then decide if you did something right and repeatable or wrong and avoidable. That is how I started the analysis of my trade for Tarik Skubal. And that’s why I am diving into my bullpen in Ottoneu League 1.

I felt I had a strong team, with a good lineup and a top-tier rotation. I finished 4th. That’s not terrible – we pay out the top four spots and I still get bragging rights over eight managers, many of whom I have competed with for nearly two decades. But it isn’t what I hoped. And the bullpen might be why.

I have a long-standing distaste for spending on relievers. League format is a factor here – I spend more in saves leagues, a little less in saves + holds leagues, and even less in leagues that don’t track saves or holds – but I am almost always less willing to pony up for relievers than my leaguemates.

The rationale for me is that relievers have the smallest impact on your team and that their performance is the hardest to predict. The first part of that makes it hard for me to justify spend; the second makes me believe I can find good-enough performance while spending less.

Over the years, I have slowly nudged my reliever spending up, and decided it was time to look in detail at the impact of my approach in a format (Ottoneu 4×4) that doesn’t reward relievers with any credit for saves and holds. The cheap bullpen approach should be most effective here, right?

In league one this year, I actually tried to be more aggressive with my pen. Back in the off-season, I tried to find a deal for a $6 Cade Smith, dangling a $21 Hunter Greene, among others. Now, I think we can all agree that the other manager did well to pass on Greene, given how his season went, but the point is that I was offering real value for an elite reliever, which is not usually my style. When that fell through, I focused on the rest of my roster and went into the season feeling pretty good.

I hit opening day with a strong lineup, what I thought was an elite rotation, and a 6-man bullpen that cost $11 but was filled with guys I liked. I was intentional about targeting guys with low HR/9, hoping to use my bullpen to bring that specific rate down and giving me the freedom to be less picky about potential HR issues for my starters. Those six relievers did not pan out as expected:

• Daniel Palencia was hurt and never got on track
• Garrett Cleavinger got hurt and wasn’t good when healthy
• Matt Svanson was just a mess from the jump
• Brendon Little didn’t repeat his 2025
• Jack Dreyer was fine, but not actually, you know, good
• Justin Wrobleski was a solid pickup, but obviously didn’t help my pen in the way I expected

By the end of the season, I had churned my way into some decent relievers (Nate Lavender, Juan Morillo, Brandyn Garcia, Luis Medina, among others). And that is always part of the plan – starting cheap means you can make moves as needed and build to a strong pen, and the hope is the net result is effective.

Well, it wasn’t.

As noted, I finished fourth, two points out of third and six points out of second. And if you break down the scoring by portions of the roster, you can see where I went wrong.

My offense put up 38 points, third overall, two points ahead of the team that finished third in the standings, and just four and five points behind the teams ahead of me. My pitching put up 35 points, sitting fourth in that area, and behind all the teams that finished ahead of me in the standings.

But if you split out relief innings from starting innings, you learn more.

If you roto scoring with just the numbers accrued from starting pitchers, my rotation slots in third, just one and four points behind the two teams ahead of me. I posted good rates while throwing the second most innings from my starters.

But if you do the same thing with relievers, my pen put up the 7th best season. This is particularly concerning because teams that fall out of contention don’t really invest in bullpen strategy. Having the 7th best bullpen while contending is basically the floor.

Part of my issue was volume. As noted, I threw the second most innings from my starters, and in a league with an innings cap, that means fewer relief innings. I counteracted that a bit by maxing out my innings overall – my 1510 innings were second in the league and 75 innings more than the next most – but even so, 319.1 IP from my relievers was 7th in the league. The five other contenders (the teams other than mine that finished 1-6 overall) were top five in relief innings. The top three finishers in the standings threw 371.3, 367, and 366 bullpen innings.

The issue with low RP volume is that relief innings are better than starter innings, in general. Here is a comparison of SP vs. RP stats for this league:

So there you go. The more you shift your balance towards relievers, the better.

Except not all teams follow that pattern. Here is the same table but for my team:

You can see how good my starting pitching was – better than league average in each category. And you can see that my bullpen was worse than average in everything except HR/9 (the area I targeted). And not just worse than league average. My bullpen was worse than my rotation in ERA and WHIP and basically the same as my rotation in K/9.

Now, it turns out, volume was still an issue. An extra 38 relief innings (and removing 38 starter innings) would have had no impact on my K, ERA or WHIP, but it would have lowered by HR/9 by about .008 which would be just enough to earn me two extra points in the standings and push me into a tie for third.

And that is without assuming I could have ducked some poor starts by needing 38 fewer SP innings. By throwing 38 fewer SP innings, my rotation would have given up 5 fewer HR, while my RP throwing 38 more innings would give up 3 more HR, hence the two fewer HR over the same 1510 innings leading to a slightly improved team HR/9. But if I assume I could have been slightly more picky about what SP I used and managed a 1.09 HR/9 instead of a 1.11 from my starters, that would have pushed me up another spot in HR/9 and moved me into sole possession of third place.

But let’s get really greedy. What if I had made that trade for Cade Smith or otherwise just been more effective at building a bullpen? Let’s assume I couldn’t quite get to league average rates, but what if I managed to split the difference and had a bullpen that put up 9.68 K/9, 3.40 ERA, and 1.21 WHIP  while maintaining my 0.82 HR/9?

Even with no change in volume (same 319.2 IP), that improved (but still not even league average) bullpen performance would have earned me an extra point in strikeouts and an extra point in WHIP, enough to move me into a tie for third.

If I get that improved performance and increase my volume, I gain four points, and move into sole possession of third. If I get that improved performance, and the increased volume, and can be a bit more effective with my SP choices, I gain five points, move to within one point of second place, and maybe change the trajectory of my season enough to buy a bit more aggressively and get into the top two.

The lesson here for me is pretty obvious: I need to stop undervaluing the impact of a bullpen. Yes, it is the smallest portion of your team. In a roto league, offense is half the scoring and pitching is half the scoring, but relievers make up 20-30% of your innings. They are, in theory, only impacting about 10-15% of your final tally. But that 10-15% matters. I brushed my bullpen too far aside this year, and it bit me. I’ll need to pay it more attention in 2027.