The Red Sox' bullpen is a weapon

When I was doing my preseason predictions, one of the things I stated was that it seemed impossible that the Boston Red Sox bullpen could be as good as it was last season when it was one of the reasons the team went all the way to the World Series title. While we are still in small sample size territory, it looks like I was dead wrong. It appears the bullpen for the Red Sox is every bit as good as it was last season.

The bullpen starts and ends with closer, Koji Uehara. What Uehara is doing is historical. We have never seen anything like this before. Uehara last blew a save on July 6, 2013. He has not blown another one since. But the save thing is not the statistic to focus on. Everything else is mind blowing.

Since July 5 of last year, he has walked one batter. One! Since the start of the second half of 2013, Uehara has pitched 34 times covering 37 innings and has given up twelve hits. Twelve! That works out to a .098 batting average. He has given up one run. One! That works out to an ERA of 0.24. He has struck out 48 batters in those 37 innings for a strikeout to walk ratio of 48 to 1. Good golly!

I am not sure the baseball world has really gotten a hold of how incredible this run has been for Koji Uehara. Like I said, we have never seen anything like this before. I will give you Kimbrel of the Braves. But which closer would you take right now? I would take Uehara.

I have always said that a great bullpen needs three really good relievers at the back end. The Red Sox have had that and more. Junichi Tazawa is not in the same league with Uehara, but if you throw out his bad September last year, a month in which his BABIP against was .360 and he has been very good as well.

So far this year, Tazawa has not given up a run and has an 8.7 strikeout to walk ratio. He has only walked one batter.

The American League got a bit of a break when the Red Sox activated Craig Breslow and sent Brandon Workman to the minors. Workman was doing an incredible job for the Red Sox bullpen. He had an 0.78 WHIP and a 7.00 strikeout to walk ratio. It's not like Breslow is not any good. The lefty did finish with a 1.80 ERA last year despite not striking out batters as often as the rest of the bullpen. He is just good at what he does and gets batters out. And the Red Sox have added another just like him in Chris Capuano.

Capuano had rebuilt his career as a starter the last couple of seasons after years of injury troubles. But the Red Sox have had him in the bullpen and he has really responded well out there. He has not walked a batter and has an impressive WHIP of 0.60. Capuano, Breslow, Uehara and Tazawa have not allowed an inherited runner to score this season. The bullpen has also not allowed a homer.

Edward Mujica had an early struggle, but picked up a save last night against the Yankees giving Uehara a rest. Andrew Miller can be erratic, but is hard to hit most of the time. The weakest link seems to be Burke Badenhop. Badenhop will not blow hitters away and relies on a high ground ball percentage, which means he is a bit open to the foibles of BABIP. Workman is clearly a better option than Badenhop, but the Red Sox understandably do not want to give up on Workman as a starter and thus the demotion to get reps.

The real key to understanding what makes Uehara, Tazawa and even Workman so good is their ability to get batters to swing at pitches outside the strike zone. Workman had an O-swing rate of 45.2%, which is pretty incredible. Uehara is at 39.4% and Tazawa at 42.9%. Capuano and Mujica are both over 30%. Uehara also gets a first pitch strike 68% of the time, which means that batters are pretty much at his mercy the rest of the plate appearance.

I did not think the Red Sox bullpen could be as good as last year. So far, I couldn't be more wrong. If the bullpen stays this good all season, the Red Sox are going to be mighty tough to beat.

Smart teams get guys like Craig Breslow

Craig Breslow has always been a pitcher who has intrigued me. My interest probably started when he was featured on Josh Borenstein's "Jews in Baseball" site. I am not Jewish, but Josh ran a good site with an interesting idea. Getting familiar with Breslow from that site, I followed him through his career. I saw that he went to Yale University, which by reference, makes Breslow a smart guy. I saw when the Twins dumped him in the middle of the 2009 season. Then I saw that the A's picked him up that same season and he was terrific. Billy Beane's A's are a smart team. The Red Sox are a smart team. Smart teams get guys like Craig Breslow.

Saying as much, the opposite is: dumb teams get rid of guys like Craig Breslow. That was brought to my mind last night when Breslow was killing it in relief for the Red Sox' clinching game against the Rays. That thought was cemented by this tweet from my Twitter bud, Brandon Warne:

One time, the Twins cut Craig Breslow in the middle of the season.

— Brandon Warne (@Brandon_Warne) October 9, 2013

I love guys like Brandon Warne. Not only has he worked his butt off to become the sports journalist he has become, which led him to a job at 1500ESPN Radio as a Twins beat reporter, but he is also one heck of a nice guy. Warne has always been a Twins guy, which has to be difficult because the Twins seem to do things the opposite of trends in the rest of baseball. That has not worked out so well. Personally, I think the Twins are not a smart organization. I could be wrong, but I will stick with that for now.

But Warne is correct. The Twins had picked up Craig Breslow off waivers from the Cleveland Indians in 2008 an Breslow pitched brilliantly for the Twins that same season. But in 2009, Breslow had a bad month to start the season. It really was not as bad as the numbers indicated. Breslow pitched seventeen times for the Twins from April 6 in 2009 to May 19. His ERA was over six. Yup. His walks per nine were also over six, a kiss of death if you are a Twins' pitcher as they get upset over that kind of thing.

But if you look at his game log for those seventeen games, ten of those outings were quite good. Maybe Breslow was out of options. Maybe he did not jibe well with the Twins' manager or pitching coach. But he was not sent to the minors to figure things out. He was jettisoned. The Twins waived him. The A's swept him up in a heartbeat.

That's what smart teams do. Breslow pitched two very good seasons for the A's and one so-so season. Since I followed him every day, it seemed that whatever problems he had with the A's were because he was so good, they went to the well too often with him.

Left-handed relievers are like gold. You can never have too many of them. And when those left-handed relievers can also get right-handed batters out, then they more like platinum. Breslow is one of those guys. His career splits against either side batter are within points of each other (both under a .650 OPS against). The strikeout to walk ratio is much higher against lefty batters (naturally), but the results are pretty much the same. That raises Breslow above the situational lefty that just comes in for one or two lefty batters. He proved that again last night against the Rays with a brilliant inning and two thirds of relief with four strikeouts.

If you look at Breslow's overall numbers, you are not blown away. He still walks 2.7 batters per nine. He doesn't blow away a lot of hitters. In fact, his 2013 K/9 rate was way down to five. Despite all of this, his strand rate is excellent (over 80% this season) and he does not give up a lot of runs. And in 97 games for the Red Sox so far, he has only allowed three homers.

Breslow does not throw gas. He is a 90 MPH guy. But he still throws mostly fastballs and they score highly. He is throwing much more two-seam fastballs now than he used to. He has a pitch that PitchF/X calls a cutter and Fangraphs calls a slider. He throws a curve and a change-up. But his fastballs are his most effective pitches despite the lack of velocity.

He is a big cog in the Red Sox bullpen and to think they got him from Arizona (not a smart team) for fungible Matt Albers and Scott Podsednik, that was pretty brilliant. The transaction looks even more brilliant since the Red Sox have a team option on him for 2014.

Craig Breslow is a really smart guy who has made the most of his ability and has pitched for two really smart teams. I do not think that is a coincidence.

Craig Breslow - unsung reliever

One of the most fascinating players in baseball is Craig Breslow. To be sure, one man's fascination is not the same as another's. Breslow first appeared in my consciousness back in 2009 when I followed a cool blog called Jews in Baseball. No, I am not Jewish, but I always considered us Italians as the lost ten tribes since our mothers are the same. But anyway, Josh Borenstein, the proprietor of that site listed the daily accomplishments of Jewish players around the majors. Breslow was one of those guys. So I started following him too.

Breslow went to Yale University. He seems to always make the lists of smartest baseball players. He would have been a doctor or a scientist if he had not made it in baseball. But he has had an effective career in baseball so America lost a great scientific talent. Perhaps the scientific career would have had less bumps along the road.

Breslow might be the best relief pitcher in baseball that was selected on waivers three times and released once. He has now been traded twice in two years. That is a lot of roster manipulations he has been through. Was he too smart for the managers he played for? Well, those Red Sox are smart because they just signed him to a two-year contract to give the vagabond lefty a home for a couple of years.

He might have been a starter in his Yale days, but Breslow has only been a reliever in his professional career. He now has logged over 600 appearances in both his major and minor league careers and in all of those appearances, his lone start was in 2006 in the minors. He is left-handed, so naturally you would thing LOOGY. But he is not one of those. Oh sure, he is dominant against those who hit from the left side of the plate, but he has been effective against those from the right side too.

How effective? For his career, Breslow has allowed a puny wOBA of .280 against left-handed hitters. But it is only .293 against right-handed hitters too. He tends to walk more right-handed hitters, which was particularly seen in 2012. And that does elevate his walk rate higher than one would like. But those hitters do not hit him any harder. In an interview he did with Fangraphs.com a while back, it appears that he believes he can have some impact on BABIP with the location of his pitches. He must know what he is talking about because his career BABIP is just .266.

Breslow is not a hard thrower. His fastball is in the 91 MPH range. He has introduced a two-seam fastball to what has been mostly four-seams and his ground ball rate did rise in 2012. Fangraphs and PitchF/X disagree if his secondary pitch is a slider or a cut fastball. Since both agree that the pitch is around 84 MPH, slider seems like the better call. He also throws a change and a curve. All of his pitches were rated in the positive category in 2012.

As a reliever, his career strand rate of 76.6 does not rate among the best relievers in baseball since 2009, but it is still a very good strand rate. He has had a positive WPA in four of the last five seasons with only 2011 as the exception. His career OPS against in high leverage situations is just slightly higher than his career numbers.

The Red Sox would be wise to make him the eighth inning setup guy. For his career, he has an OPS against of only .578 when pitching in the eighth inning (149 appearances). They would also be wise to limit him to less than 70 appearances. The A's pitched him quite hard and he pitched 152 times for them in 2009 and 2010. Breslow would always seem to have a bad appearance when pitched too many days in a row.

Craig Breslow is simply a very good relief pitcher who should give the Red Sox some reliability for the next couple of seasons. His career ERA is 3.00 and it was less than that in 2012. He is especially good at getting left-handed batters out, but is also good at getting right-handers. It is hard to believe that teams would kick him around for so many seasons. Chalk one up on the plus side for the Red Sox this time.