With David Robertson making his return on Friday, the bullpen is now as complete as it will be in the near-term. Therefore, it’s time to give props on how the relief staff performed in the absence of two of the most dominant relievers in the current game. The pitchers deserve credit. Joe Girardi deserves credit. And for the all the questions he justly receives for his starting pitching decisions, Brian Cashman deserves credit for understanding how to build a bullpen.

Current AL Bullpen Rank in parentheses:

xFIP: 3.75 (4th)
FIP: 3.26 (1st)
ERA: 2.71 (2nd)
SIERA: 3.22 (5th)
K%: 23.4% (3rd)
BB%: 9.4% (11th)

While the bullpen hasn’t pitched as good as its ERA indicates (mainly because of the lowest HR/FB in the league – Soriano hasn’t allowed one), they have held the fort down strongly.

Boone Logan, Corey Wade, and Rafael Soriano are the main reasons behind the success. The recently-departed David Phelps was respectable too with a 4.14 xFIP in his 25 relief innings. Contrary to perhaps popular thought, Clay Rapada and Cody Eppley are living on thin ice with the amount of people they walk. Rapada is offering free passes to 17% of batters faced, while Eppley is walking over 10%. Eppley does induce a ton of groundballs though (66%).

Overall, you can’t complain — an excellent job by some spare parts and the most stoic baseball player in history.


The tuck rule