Bullpen Usage & Reliever Ratings, or BURR, is an idea that Flowers and Mans have been playing around with since the 2017 season. The reason for their focus is simply that bullpens are a more important part of the modern game than ever before. You know what we mean. Whereas at one time starting pitchers threw 220 innings, then 200… now 180 is the new baseline for upper end hurlers. Starting pitchers just don’t deep into games any more. Plenty of teams are using The Opener, further limiting the innings out of the starting rotation. The facts are obvious to all. Starting pitchers simply do not eat up as many innings as they used to.
Unfortunately, despite that fact, not enough people have taking that into account. That’s not how we’re going to roll at Fantasy Guru in 2019. We are going to continue to be ahead of the curve. Each week we will update our bullpen ratings giving you the best way to attack, or avoid, bullpens while setting your fantasy baseball lineup in the DFS game or in the season long setup.
WHY IS THERE A NEED FOR BURR?
Our understanding of bullpens needs to grow/improve since the men that relieve are throwing more innings and, therefore, they are growing in importance in the game of baseball.
1 – Bullpens are throwing more innings than ever before. Here’s the amount of innings thrown by relievers the last 10 seasons. Check out the massive explosion in innings the last few seasons, especially in 2018.
|
|
Bullpen Innings |
|
2009 |
15,014.2 |
|
2010 |
14,244.1 |
|
2011 |
14,228.0 |
|
2012 |
14,737.2 |
|
2013 |
14,977.0 |
|
2014 |
14,261.2 |
|
2015 |
15,184.1 |
|
2016 |
15,893.2 |
|
2017 |
16,469.2 |
|
2018 |
17,422.1 |
16,000 innings were hit for the first time in 2017.
Teams added nearly a 1,000 innings to that mark in 2018.
That’s roughly 40 percent of all innings thrown last season being tossed out there by the bullpen.
Flat out… bullpens matter a ton in all types of fantasy play.
Bullpens matter a massive amount in the DFS game where you are looking at just one outing meaning everything. Let me ask you DFS players… do you look at the bullpen when you set your lineup each day? I’m going to bet that you might, but I will also posit that you don’t really use pens as a deciding factor when splitting those hairs for your starting lineup. You worry a lot about batting orders trying to get that extra plate appearances, right? You need to factor in bullpens in as strongly when setting those lineups accounting for the relative strength, or weakness, of the staff you are asking your hitters to face. It’s great to face a Mike Leake type of starting pitcher, but what if the bullpen is nails? Do you factor that in to your decision, or are you merely looking at the starting pitcher matchup? If a team’s pen is struggling, that’s a significant advantage given that pens are throwing more innings than ever. What if the pen is mowing batters down?
Bullpens also matter in the season-long game. It’s not just about those season long leagues that set their lineups daily either. Those of you in weekly setups can benefit from BURR as well. If you see a 4-game set coming up with a team that has a bullpen to exploit, fill your lineup with batters against that unit. If there’s a 4-game set against a team with dominators, perhaps it’s time to fade the batters that week.
More innings for pens equals more attention needed when analyzing matchups. Hence the need for BURR.
WHAT DOES BURR RECORD?
It’s a lame name that we came up with, blame Mans (actually it was equally Jeff and Ray’s fault), but what it represents is illuminating.
We will start out with the simple fact that BURR isn’t overly complicated. Everyone loves WAR, thinks it’s great, but I’m here to tell you that 99.82 percent of folks that use it have zero idea how to figure it out. Even if you look at the equation, you’re no closer to understanding it.
BURR is different.
BURR takes into account 14 different categories for bullpens. Here is that list.
Innings per Game: The higher this number the more overworked the bullpen is, hence it might be prone to struggles.
Save Percentage: It might stink as a fantasy category but it does speak to the effectiveness of a pen.
Left on Base Percentage: Do they do a good job cleaning up the starters mess?
First-Pitch Strike: Getting ahead strike one might be the most important thing a reliever can do.
Swinging Strike: You can’t score runs if you don’t put the bat on the ball.
K/9: Punching a guy out allows you to escape jams with ease.
BB/9: Putting batters on without them earning it is death late in games.
SWIP: In lieu of a straight K/BB ratio, we’ve gone with SWIP which is strikeouts-walks/innings pitched. For more, click on this explanation of SWIP. By the way, we are tracking SWIP all season long in our new stats page.
HR/FB: Is there an amount of luck/fortune with a bullpens homer rate?
HR/9: Those homers into the context of workload.
GB/FB: The better the hurler is at inducing grounders, the less likely he’ll be snake bit by the big fly which is a huge killer for bullpen arms.
LD-Rate: More line drives result in hits than any other type of batted ball. Here are the league numbers from 2018: line drives produced a .626 batting average, ground balls a .243 mark and fly balls a .209 batting average.
Hard-hit Rate: A leading indicator of batter production and the ability of pitchers to miss the sweet spot of the bat.
wOBA: One of the better marks of overall effectiveness. See What is wOBA?
HOW DO YOU READ BURR?
BURR attempts to record/represent the value of those bullpens by taking into account 14 different categories for bullpens, and then puts those numbers into the context of league average before giving one, easily readable number. Here is the key to use with what you read below.
Under 1.00 = Any number under the league average is a negative for the bullpen and a positive for the batter. Any number under 1.00 is a bullpen to attack for the offense.
1.00 = The league average
Above 1.00 = Any number above the league average is a positive for the bullpen and a negative for the batter. Any number above 1.00 is a bullpen to avoid for the offense.
THE HIGHER THE NUMBER THE BETTER THE BULLPEN AND THE WORSE IT IS FOR THE BATTER.
TWO ISSUES TO ADDRESS IN-SEASON
(1) There might be short periods of time when a bullpen doesn’t allow a homer over the period of time being reviewed. To be clear, with BURR, that short period of time is 14 days. When you have a zero in a category, there is no way to compare it to the league average (0.00/1.25 as an example gets you an answer of zero). In that situation, the fairest way to deal with the situation is to give the team…? We’ve decided to do the following. We’re going to award the team that hasn’t allowed a homer a mark of 1.50 for each of the HR/9 and the HR/FB category. In addition, saves can be an issue. If a team doesn’t post a save in the period under review, I will list their mark for the period being reviewed as 0.50.
(2) Because of the vagaries of the home run, we could artificially adjust the numbers, again what happens if we’ve got a period with zeros, but that seems counterintuitive. As such, we’ve decided to do the following. (A) We will remove the two homer columns if we are looking at 14 days of time meaning that BURR will cover 12 categories when looking at two weeks. (2) When looking at 30 days, or the entire season, we will add those two cats back in, to get to our original total of 14 categories.
THE 2018 RESULTS
Obviously, bullpens have changed since last season. So, this data is only a place holder until we start rolling up info in 2019. Still, here’s a baseline of the performance of pens in 2018.
|
League |
wOBA |
AVG |
OBP |
SLG |
ISO |
|
2018 |
.315 |
.248 |
.318 |
.409 |
.161 |
RED: A bullpen to avoid.
GREEN: A bullpen to target with your batters.
So, we’re off. We will continue to tweak things as needed, and might even massage the categories that BURR takes into account. We’re in the growth stage, trying to get this sucker right, and we believe this is at least a good first step as we push to make our understanding of bullpens as complete as possible.
