For the Colorado Rockies bullpen, chaos is a ladder

As Americans, we love to root for the hero almost as much as we love to root for the downfall of the villain.

Nothing quite matches the feeling of seeing the bad guy get his comeuppance as evidenced by the recent popularity of Game of Thrones, a story rife with opportunities for schadenfreude.

The worst ones for us as an audience are the silver-tongued politicians who sneak their way into power by using lies and truth in equal measure. And it is the truths that hurt the most.

Hearing real wisdom from a villain like Petyr “Littlefinger” Baelish is deeply unsettling but it is wisdom nonetheless when he responds to the cliche that “what you don’t know won’t hurt you,” is nonsense.

“What we don’t know is usually what gets us killed,” he retorts.

And there is an awful lot the Colorado Rockies don’t know about their bullpen right now.

When looking at the differences between a Colorado club that was sitting around the fourth best record in the National League for 400 games between 2017 and the beginning of 2019, and the one that finished the season looking like one of the worst teams in baseball, a few clear red flags jump out.

This is not the same as looking at the problem areas on the roster. Many of the issues one could fairly critique about this club – mostly revolving around veteran players like Ian Desmond, Jake McGee, and Bryan Shaw making too much money for far too little production – are critiques that could also have been fairly lobbied as the team paraded their way to 91 wins just one season before last.

While it would be nice for the Rockies to get more from these roster spots, they have already proven they can succeed while these players fail.

What they cannot endure, however, is for the rotation to become the mess it did in 2019 and, in a similar vein, for the back end of the bullpen to be a giant question mark for more than half of the season.

Wade Davis’ worst season as a professional is directly tied to the disappointing campaign as any individual player but the Rockies have already addressed the closer situation by promoting, and then extending, Scott Oberg.

And pretty much everyone involved admits that this is a pretty good place to start. It’s what comes after, that will be key and is currently a vast expanse of unknown.

That might tempt some to try once again to go after reinforcements in the bullpen with some experience and a proven track record in MLB. Of course, the Rockies have done this recently to disastrous effect. We mentioned Shaw and McGee, right?

So, it sounds like GM Jeff Bridich is going to attack the problem by trying to find the right mix of guys ready to prove that they have what it takes.

“One of the things that we’ve spent a good deal of time and resources in this general area these past three offseasons,” he said during the Winter Meetings in San Diego. “And so it has been a focus of ours. One thing I have learned through those three years is that the bullpen is predictably unpredictable, no matter who you have in there. I think some of the experience of our younger guys… some of the experience that they got last year in tough situations … Jairo Diaz, for example. Scott Oberg, [Carlos] Estevez to a certain degree, although he had already been there a couple of years prior and had saved, what, 12 of 15 games for us? I think all of that experience should benefit those guys greatly. Do we need our veterans to perform? We talked about that yesterday. We basically need them to do their jobs. I have a lot of confidence and a lot of faith is these young guys.”     

This statement, while suggesting very little roster movement in terms of transactions, does show a shifting in how we should expect these players to be deployed.

The heaviest burdens will be on the younger relievers, until further notice, while the veterans simply have to “do their jobs.”

For guys like Diaz, Estevez, James Pazos, Jesus Tinoco and a slew of others, the chaos at the top will be their ladder toward opportunity.

One player Bridich is surely hoping can be a major factor here is Diaz who actually finished out the season performing quite well as the club’s closer. He had his ups and downs to be sure but was ultimately one of the most reliable relievers for Colorado in what amounted to his first full season at the Majors.

His strikeout rate of nearly 10 batters per nine innings and a walk rate under three per nine also suggests there is even more to unlock with him if he can limit the occasional home run.

On a human level, there is also plenty of reason to see Diaz as someone on the upswing.

“I’m really, really proud of Jairo Diaz,” Bridich continued. “To go through what he has been through in his life over the last three years, to come back to the club as a Minor League free agent and work his way into pitching in the seventh, eighth and ninth inning for our team not long after losing his wife to cancer and having Tommy John surgery. This just is a kid who’s been dealt a whole helluva lot. He’s such a good person, such a good kid. Those are the real rewarding things, when you see stuff like that. I think good things are in store for Jairo.”

If good things are in store for him, then good things are in store for the Rockies who suddenly have a trio of fireballers with wicked strikeout stuff at the back end of the bullpen, if you include Estevez who has quietly been solid for three years now.

This means that you also have a two buffers between Davis and the job he used to hold. And that could work out to the benefit of both him and the club.

Frankly, it wouldn’t be fair to him, his teammates, or the fans to roll out in 2020 with him back pitching the ninth inning. He wasn’t just bad last year, he had one of the worst seasons of relief pitching in recorded history and it cost his club dearly.

However, it would be foolish to assume that such a dramatic statistical outlier is the new normal for a pitcher who has almost a thousand innings of Big League experience and just turned 34 years old.

Penciling him in as the closer would put everyone in an unfair spot, but slotting him in as the fourth guy on the bullpen depth chart (assuming he doesn’t just look awful in Spring Training) gives the ‘pen unique depth. Should he rebound, he gives the Rockies a third set-up quality reliever.

For his part, Bridich showed far more confidence in Davis than his other veteran relievers.

“Part of the interesting part about living in altitude like we do is that there is no blueprint,” he says. “Wade Davis comes in, in year one, and leads the league in saves. And if you look at his stats — traditional stats — he was basically the same guy — home and road. He had a bad 10-day span. Cincinnati, Texas … in that season. It was tough. It was tough to watch. And then he snapped back. This year it was totally different. Greg Holland the same thing, right? Greg comes in the year before and leads the league in saves, right off the bat — boom. He does what he has done in the past. We have seen this in the past, before, with guys, relievers … Some of our best relievers haven’t always been, completely, the same guy all of the time. (Brian) Fuentes, (Rafael) Betancourt, Huston Street, right? There was some of this going on.”

Surprised he left off Adam Ottavino who was once the poster child for this very argument.

Colorado has seen these wild swings many times before. This is why so many of the decisions about who gets what spot and what roles are going to be left to the last possible minute.

And it is why they believe that Davis’ 8.65 ERA from a season ago is likely to track back toward his 3.73 career number.

Some of that is that they have belief in the person.

“I would say that there is that professionalism and there is an expectation for him,” Bridich says. “He knows he’s good. He knows he should perform at a certain level and do certain things. He’s been there and done that, at the highest of highs. I mean, the World Series. The stage doesn’t get any bigger and he’s done it. That was a tough year. It was a tough year for him and it was a tough year for us. It’s not the first time and it won’t be the last. I do believe he will bounce back strong. I have a lot of faith in Wade. This is not the first time that he has struggled; maybe it was to this degree. But this wasn’t the first time that the game has won out a little bit. He’s bounced back before and he can do it again.”

While manager Bud Black has been reluctant to show his cards in terms of the depth chart, Bridich also gave a hint that they will indeed be giving Davis a chance to earn his way back up rather than getting the spot based on tenure.

“If it’s pitching the ninth inning, great,” he said. “If it’s not pitching the ninth inning because we have somebody else who is pitching really well in the ninth inning, OK, great. He can pitch really well in the eighth, or whatever.”

Colorado’s slowness to remove Davis from the ninth was easily one of their worst decisions of the 2019 season.

But they seem to have learned from it.

They need to have learned from it.

Because, in theory, it isn’t unreasonable to expect different results from a younger group, especially if the responsibilities are shifted away from the players who have let the team down in the recent past. But you have to be smart and proactive about making that happen. They can’t fall back into their old comfortable patterns.

The Rockies have added a pair of pitchers to the 40-man roster this offseason in Jose Mujica and Tyler Kinley who could factor into all this as well, but the mistakes of the past are both the reason why Colorado can’t, and maybe shouldn’t, be trying to solve the problem via free agency.

“We’ve been fairly aggressive in the reliever market over the last few years… I think we all can agree it’s led to mixed results,” Bridich admitted. “So I think we feel like we have at this point a lot of bodies in our bullpen mix and we have a lot of talented people. Some of those talented people need to do their jobs. So that is a stronger case for us than going out and being aggressive on the reliever market, free-agent wise.”

In case you are wondering, no, this wasn’t code for “we are counting on Shaw and McGee” for whom Bridich showed clear frustration.

“Bryan, in certain ways, was actually better than he was the year prior, he made some adjustments that helped… to a certain degree,” he says. “Jake has to figure out a way to do better with inherited runners, especially if he is going to be utilized the way he was utilized the last couple of years. It’s like we are relying on Jake to pitch massive amounts of innings when he’s out there. Jake needs to come in and miss more bats, especially when he’s being relied upon to get us out of innings.”

It may well be the case that this all amounts to the same end result; A maddeningly frustrating bullpen that takes far too many potential wins and turns them into losses. But don’t get caught in the trap of believing that the Rockies are “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” This is not the case.

Spending big money on a reliever with a proven track record and expecting him to come to Denver and play a vital role? Now that might be a definition of insanity.

Expecting players who have grown up in altitude to take steps forward as they move into their mid-20s? Seems reasonable. As reasonable at least as remembering Bridich’s own words that bullpens are “predictably unpredictable.”

There’s a lot we don’t know about the Rockies 2020 bullpen. And that may be what “gets them killed.”

You might consider other wise words from Lord Baelish, though. When confronted about whether or not he is plotting treason, he gives an answer that applies to whether or not this bullpen approach truly is a calamitous one for Colorado.

“Only if we lose.”