I Resurrected a Dead Relief Pitcher Stat (Part Two: The Geese and the Jays)
For an introduction to the goose egg and gWAR stats and this series, click here.
Throughout the next couple of weeks as the postseason rages on in the background (and by that, I clearly meant “basically at the end of the postseason”), we here at JAYSLAM are taking a look at the results in several posts. The first will look at the Toronto Blue Jays specifically because I have a brand to keep up. The second and third ones will look at the American and National Leagues respectively, with my spreadsheets for each being available in the articles, and with the NL article being exclusive to paid subscribers.
As I said, today’s post will be looking at how goose eggs and gWAR see the 2021 Toronto Blue Jays relief corps. Surprise surprise, it’s not especially positively!
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For as atrociously as the Blue Jays’ bullpen performed over large chunks of the year, you would have expected them to turn up lower than squarely middle of the pack for bullpen ERA with 4.08, good for fifteenth in MLB. FIP and xFIP are a little more critical (4.38, 20th in MLB and 4.21, 19th in MLB respectively), but Win Probability Added (WPA) saw them as middling once again (1.44, 16th in MLB). If we look at the WPA-based Shutdown and Meltdown stats, while Toronto was 21st in MLB in Shutdowns (128), they actually had the fourth-least Meltdowns in the game (79) and as someone who had the immense pleasure of watching at least approximately 70 percent of this team’s relief innings, that seems very hard to believe.
So what can Goose Eggs and gWAR tell us? Well, it seems to be mostly more of the stuff we already know, but there are some interesting tidbits.
First though, to get the obvious statement out of the way: Jordan Romano is really fucking good.
Jordan Romano converted 26 of his 29 goose egg opportunities. This conversion rate of 89.6 percent led to a 2.95 gWAR, second-best in the American League behind only the Yankees’ Jonathan Loáisiga, and sixth in all of MLB behind, in descending order, Josh Hader, Loáisiga, Tyler Rogers, Blake Treinen, and Kenley Jansen. Not bad company at all! Now if only the Jays could clone him.
Also unsurprising is Tim Mayza putting together a very solid 1.09 gWAR through converting 14 of 17 opportunities. With that said, it thins out rapidly after him. There just wasn’t a whole lot of sustained goose egg success going on. And not for lack of trying. And by “trying” I of course mean “throwing pitchers at the situation and hoping in vain that the situation resolves itself”.
Not that I necessarily blame management for that, much as some would like to. They were working with what little they had thanks to injuries and sudden underperformance from what was supposed to be a solid relief corps, but it’s not the most encouraging sign for stability when your team uses 21 different relievers in goose egg situations (tied for 3rd-most in MLB, league average is 15.9).
The next pitcher on the Jays’ gWAR leaderboard is David Phelps (0.78 gWAR), who secured all five of his goose opportunities before going down with a season-ending injury. After him in fourth place comes… Tyler Chatwood???
Chatwood’s amazing start to the season looms large here, buoying his 0.67 gWAR (converting 9 of 11 opportunities). He was dropped from high-leverage extremely quickly once the wheels started falling off, so his numbers weren’t really affected until he eventually got cut, and no other relievers had enough sustained success to knock him out of the number four spot (though in all fairness, Adam Cimber and Trevor Richards would’ve challenged for it had they played a full season with the team, both contributing six goose eggs in eight opportunities).
It’s also worth mentioning that Nate Pearson looked really, really solid coming out of the bullpen in the last bit of the season, but never actually made a goose opportunity appearance, so he doesn’t really factor into this conversation.
After Julian Merryweather in fifth place (who converted his first five opportunities, got hurt, and looked awful in his only goose opportunity after his return, leading to 0.41 gWAR), and then Cimber and Richards, there’s an 11-man mushy middle where the pitchers who didn’t get a lot of high leverage situations reside, either because they didn’t see a lot of time with the team, or because they weren’t trusted in high leverage situations. Your Jeremy Beasleys, your Travis Bergens, your Carl Edwards Jrs. The only one of these guys that got more than five high-leverage opportunities is Rafael Dolis, who struggled through injuries and general underperformance, racking up a pretty poor -0.16 gWAR, converting 6 eggs in 9 opportunities before being outrighted.
There are three relievers, however, who stand out as having done truly terribly, the first of which is, of course, Brad Hand. He only had two goose opportunities with the Jays, but he blew them both (enough for a -0.73 fWAR) and wasn’t trusted with another high leverage situation until he became a member of the New York Mets.
Side note: Hand had an abysmal year no matter what team he was on. In 33 goose opportunities between the Nationals, Jays, and Mets, Hand only got 21 goose eggs and had a -1.77 gWAR. That’s second-worst in MLB behind only Atlanta’s A.J. Minter, surprisingly enough.
Trent Thornton was pretty woefully bad in his first (and last?) year as a full-time reliever, and gWAR doesn’t disagree (-0.94). He only converted one of his four opportunities, and by the end of the season, when not in Buffalo, he would only play when the Jays were basically punting the game. Neither Hand nor Thornton, however, were as much of a drag on the Jays’ total gWAR count as Anthony Castro, though.
Castro came out firing to start the season, with his best aspects as a pitcher flashing tantalizing potential. However, after going down and coming back from an injury, his biggest weaknesses (mainly some command problems and susceptibility to home runs) brought him tumbling back down to earth. In seven goose egg opportunities, Castro only converted three and just barely missed out on a full negative gWAR (-0.99). You can definitely see the potential with Castro, but he was miscast in high leverage situations, at least in 2021.
So what have we learned? Mainly, I think, that mitigating the inherent vulnerability of the bullpen as much as possible would greatly behove the Jays. Toronto dealt with collapses from Chatwood and Dolis and found itself without not only Merryweather, Phelps, and Ryan Borucki, but also Kirby Yates for most of the season due to injuries (though with regards to Borucki, some critical underperformance was also a huge factor). Romano, Mayza, and the midseason acquisitions of Cimber, Richards, and a largely absent Joakim Soria could only do so much to pick up the slack. This led to a lot of pitchers getting high leverage situations when they didn’t really have any business doing so. Relief depth often goes under-appreciated, but when everything that can go wrong for what’s supposed to be your A-team of relievers kinda does go wrong (as was the case for the Jays) you better hope that your B-team doesn’t consist of the likes of Anthony Castro, Trent Thornton, and Joel Payamps.