"not worthy of its own thread" offseason thread

[misterManager]

Lyons was a world-eater from the pen last season, especially in the latter months of the season. If he and Reyes perform half as well as you'd like/expect, you are 2/3 of the way to the bullpen of 2012 when we had Rosie, Cmart, and Siegrist setting up Motte (Motte being Colome in my perfect world). There's no predicting bullpen performance outside of maybe five arms is the overarching theme to JL's posts I think, so to that extent I think it's smart to stay away from deals that have the potential to look very bad almost immediately.

[MrCrowesGarden]

I get what JL is saying, but I also think it's not a good idea to have Lyons be your closer when you probably need him more to be an Andrew Miller type.

[misterManager]

Agreed - Mo needs to get on a real ninth inning guy. I don't see how hard it could be to trade a minor league starter and some OF depth for a couple years of a 2nd tier closer. I could see Gregerson being fine, but that's not exciting to me at all. Brad Hand would be my alternate to Colome, and I don't see how either San Diego or Tampa are not bowled over by the offer of one of the starters who made strides last year + Plummer/O'neil/Grichuk (not that I think Grichuk is going to be shopped after Piscotty has left the building). Seems like the move we need to finish the offseason as well as we could have hoped.

[Magneto2.0]

So Dave Cameron is leaving Fangraphs, he got a job with the Padres to build their Research and Development department

[Fat Strat]

I'm all for another arm, and I'm all for Reed barring something ridiculous (4 year deals, outlandish money, whatever). I really don't want anything to do with Holland.

That said, I tend to think the bullpen is like the rotation- where there's a perceived shortage that's probably overblown. Again, using FG's Depth Charts, they project for the 11th best bullpen by fWAR in MLB, and the 8th best by FIP. Things happen, things fall apart, relievers are volatile and harder to project, etc... but I think that's a pretty decent snapshot of where they are. It can be better and I'd love another arm to firm things up. But it's not a dire situation with a burgeoning chasm. Lyons, Cecil, Gregorson, Brebbia, Bowman, and Tui make up the spine of a very solid/useful bullpen. Sherriff, Lucas, Gant, potentially Flaherty, and eventually Reyes is pretty good depth. Hellsley, too. Maybe they get lucky and Hicks comes along, because he has the kind of potential to rocket through a system the way Rosenthal did.

The only problem I see with the scenario you describe is that the stuff we get with those arms does not compensate for the pre-existing volatility of a bullpen. If we assume that bullpen arms are going to be fairly erratic, you can still insulate yourself by filling it with talent. When Oh lost it on us, he was still talented enough to be fairly useful. Same with Rosenthal in the various incarnations of his struggles. Someone like Reed or Davis could fall down to Gregorson or Cecil levels, but that's about their floor, barring injury. Every guy you list can (and recently has) been nothing more than replacement level. You can like Lyons and still acknowledge that he has only had one productive season in 6 with the Cards (much of that out of the pen, though not all).

You can also like the other arms behind them, but in order to get to them something bad has to happen and that costs us games in the standings.

I'm not really arguing with you, because it sounds like you would want another arm, too, barring price. Even if we added a non-closer who had the upside to close I would feel a lot better about the pen heading into the season. If we don't want to pay the $$'s or years for a player with saves in his history, lets at least pay something for a guy with the potential to get saves in his future.

[Socnorb11]

I'm all for another arm, and I'm all for Reed barring something ridiculous (4 year deals, outlandish money, whatever). I really don't want anything to do with Holland.

That said, I tend to think the bullpen is like the rotation- where there's a perceived shortage that's probably overblown. Again, using FG's Depth Charts, they project for the 11th best bullpen by fWAR in MLB, and the 8th best by FIP. Things happen, things fall apart, relievers are volatile and harder to project, etc... but I think that's a pretty decent snapshot of where they are. It can be better and I'd love another arm to firm things up. But it's not a dire situation with a burgeoning chasm. Lyons, Cecil, Gregorson, Brebbia, Bowman, and Tui make up the spine of a very solid/useful bullpen. Sherriff, Lucas, Gant, potentially Flaherty, and eventually Reyes is pretty good depth. Hellsley, too. Maybe they get lucky and Hicks comes along, because he has the kind of potential to rocket through a system the way Rosenthal did.

The only problem I see with the scenario you describe is that the stuff we get with those arms does not compensate for the pre-existing volatility of a bullpen. If we assume that bullpen arms are going to be fairly erratic, you can still insulate yourself by filling it with talent. When Oh lost it on us, he was still talented enough to be fairly useful. Same with Rosenthal in the various incarnations of his struggles. Someone like Reed or Davis could fall down to Gregorson or Cecil levels, but that's about their floor, barring injury. Every guy you list can (and recently has) been nothing more than replacement level. You can like Lyons and still acknowledge that he has only had one productive season in 6 with the Cards (much of that out of the pen, though not all).

You can also like the other arms behind them, but in order to get to them something bad has to happen and that costs us games in the standings.

I'm not really arguing with you, because it sounds like you would want another arm, too, barring price. Even if we added a non-closer who had the upside to close I would feel a lot better about the pen heading into the season. If we don't want to pay the $$'s or years for a player with saves in his history, lets at least pay something for a guy with the potential to get saves in his future.

Doesn't this theory apply to every position on the field, though? Should the Cardinals insulate themselves against Pham's floor, by buying more established outfield talent? Should the Cardinals insulate themselves against Wong's floor, by buying more infield talent? Sometimes you just have to gamble on upside, I think. You can't afford to insulate every position with proven talent.

[MrCrowesGarden]

They're pretty well insulated as is WRT Pham with plenty of OF options available. They absolutely should insulate on Wong's floor (or Dejong's). Maybe they did that or tried doing that with Munoz, I don't know, but the infield has a very good chance of being bad.

[Socnorb11]

If the Cards have insulated the outfield with proven talent, then it's news to me.

[Fat Strat]

Doesn't this theory apply to every position on the field, though? Should the Cardinals insulate themselves against Pham's floor, by buying more established outfield talent? Should the Cardinals insulate themselves against Wong's floor, by buying more infield talent? Sometimes you just have to gamble on upside, I think. You can't afford to insulate every position with proven talent.

No, it doesn't. Bullpens are exponentially more volatile than position players. Even SP's are considerably less volatile than bullpens. It's a simple matter of innings. Pham had 530 plate appearances last year to display his talent. It would take a good reliever 7 years to get that many innings in. There are question marks about Pham, but we really do have a pretty good idea of what kind of player he'll be -- within a certain range of projectability.

So, as a fun little exercise in understanding bullpens, take the opposite approach. If you limited an offensive player, like Pham, to just 75 plate appearances next year, what would you get? Good? Bad? OK? The answer is "Who the heck knows!" He wouldn't have enough PA's for his performance to even out. I have no idea how he'll hit. So, if you only had 75 plate appearances from a hitter, what kind of hitter would you WANT?

That's the kind of question we should be asking about our bullpen. You could say, "I want a proven performer"? Well, what is "proven" when it comes to a bullpeners innings? Nothing is really proven with these guys; Gregorson was as proven as you're going to get and he turned in a replacement level performance last year. What about guys that were "hot" last year (say, Lyons)? Does that guarantee they'll still be "hot" next year? Oh was hot in '16 and pretty terrible in '17.

For me, over small samples, I want talent. If I'm not going to get enough appearances out of someone for the natural ups and downs of their performance to really even out over a large sample size, then I at least want the players with the electric stuff. In the end, stuff usually plays. It's much more important to me than grit or experience or toughness or being hot.

So, to your other point. I don't see us gambling on upside or stuff in our pen. I don't see much (any?) upside with the arms we have out there right now. Maybe Lyons. But the rest of them simply don't have the stuff to make me want to rely on them. There is stuff in the farm but, as I said, we have to lose games for that stuff to get a chance, and that's troublesome, too.

(Lastly, we have insulated ourselves against volatility with Pham. If he sucks, we have Bader and O'Neil behind him... guys with "stuff" to perform pretty well if given the chance. We all like them. Wong has 5 years in this league -- thousands of plate appearances now -- and is as much a known commodity as you can find with a young player. Plus, we have Gyorko, Carpenter and other quality players that we can shuffle around if he gets injured or has a bad year.)

[MrCrowesGarden]

No one specified proven talent until now. Fat Strat said WRT relievers if they don't want to get a guy with a track record then they should get a guy who might have that potential.

Between Fowler, Pham, Ozuna, Grichuk, Bader, O'Neill, JAG, Arozarena, there's plenty of options for the outfield.