how do you evaluate relief pitchers (with such a short sample size)

pats3peat · Jun 4, 2011

Any favorite metrics to see how relief pitchers are doing and if they are actually good. I guess 20-30 innings pitched is enough to see if they are good, just looking at ERA?

I want to get better at evaluating bullpens, but its hard to tell with all these unknown pitchers. I look at dailybaseball's bullpen usage.. and see if their bullpen has been pitching a lot, but thats all I can really look at.

And on Cover's they have the "Last 3 bullpen ERA" and "Available ERA" . Do you guys know what the available part means? Im guessing it means "who is avialable to relief pitch in the next game" but thats not even predictable?

pats3peat · Jun 5, 2011

anybody

tar_heel_in_sc · Jun 5, 2011

I use covers as well, and I've wondered how they arrive at 'available' as well. The main thing I look at is if the starting pitcher only went <6 innings the day before, or if there was a long extra inning game the day before (i.e. Reds recently had 2 long ones close together).

pats3peat · Jun 5, 2011

tar_heel_in_sc said:
I use covers as well, and I've wondered how they arrive at 'available' as well. The main thing I look at is if the starting pitcher only went <6 innings the day before, or if there was a long extra inning game the day before (i.e. Reds recently had 2 long ones close together).

yeah definitely. The long extra inning game the day before is a very good point.

glad to see im not the only one confused by the 'available' thing hah

TheGuarantee · Jun 5, 2011

It could be useful to check which pitchers threw over the course of the past few days to see who would be available. With that said, to me, I'd rather evaluate the lineups and starting pitchers. Look at the strikeout numbers and watch as many baseball games as possible and you can basically just say, ok this team has a plus pen, that team has a minus pen. ERA's are useless in my opinion. Bullpen pitching is so situational that to me, to consider too much for any given game is overrated. If a game really comes down to "well this team has the better pen" or "this team's pen blows" then you're probably not looking at enough value to play the game anyway.

pats3peat · Jun 5, 2011

TheGuarantee said:
It could be useful to check which pitchers threw over the course of the past few days to see who would be available. With that said, to me, I'd rather evaluate the lineups and starting pitchers. Look at the strikeout numbers and watch as many baseball games as possible and you can basically just say, ok this team has a plus pen, that team has a minus pen. ERA's are useless in my opinion. Bullpen pitching is so situational that to me, to consider too much for any given game is overrated. If a game really comes down to "well this team has the better pen" or "this team's pen blows" then you're probably not looking at enough value to play the game anyway.

yeah thats my thought too. I dont think too much analysis should be given to bullpens, but I mean I could possibly be missing a good metric to see how good bullpens will be that I am missing. Maybe im missing something instead of how do you really get a feel for a teams bullpen.

Does anyone know any good sites that will judge teams bullpens qualitatively, like a list