I have had to take about almost two weeks to just let the Atlanta Braves’ offseason to really settle in. It was hard to watch and was hard to experience, as a fan of baseball and a fan of the Braves. Anyone who had a pulse and watched the games saw the horrible train-wreck that occurred.
This is the time of year where you look at what happened and see what could have been done to stop it from occurring. This is the lengthy process that Frank Wren, Fredi Gonzalez and the Braves’ front office are about to enter into. The sure thing about everything is that the Braves need to make some tweaks to the team in some areas and consider upgrading other areas. There will be much written about these areas in the coming weeks.
But, the thing that I want to consider here is the Braves’ use of the bullpen. Craig Kimbrel, Jonny Venters and Eric O’Flaherty formed one of the best trios in any bullpen that I can remember. Each of the three pitchers had outstanding ERAs, solid K numbers, extremely good opposing hitters’ batting averages. Kimbrel and Venters were two of the most dynamic 8th and 9th inning relievers for a couple months this season.
The issue that many people were concerned about and brought up was that they were over-used by Fredi Gonzalez. I don’t agree with this assessment completely. The realistic situation is that outside of those three guys, the bullpen had other pitchers that were ineffective and inconsistent. Part of this was because of injuries to Peter Moylan. Another piece of this was due to youth, Cory Gearrin, Cristhian Martinez, Anthony Varvaro and Arodys Vizcaino all struggled at times due to their youth and learning to pitch to big-league hitters.
The other part of the bullpen struggles came from the Braves’ front office decisions to re-sign and acquire two bad pitchers: Scott Proctor and Scott Linebrink. The reason why the Braves traded for Linebrink was to add a veteran presence to the bullpen to help some of the younger relievers, specifically Venters and Kimbrel to not have to carry the bulk of the late and stressful situations alone. Linebrink was useful for part of the year. In June and July, he posted an ERA lower than 2.00, though he had a high walk rate. In July he stranded 100% of the runners that he inherited.
Linebrink, though, spent some time on the DL. The main issue that I had with the Braves’ usage of Linebrink, was when he returned from the DL, the Braves did not send him on a rehab assignment. They put him in a game against the Chicago Cubs and he lost the game. This was poor management and front-office operation. This was unacceptable for Linebrink. He couldn’t be expected to be successful without pitching for 2 weeks and without giving up runs. After he was activated from the DL, he was horrible.
As the Braves came to realize at the end of the season, they missed the playoffs by one win. These types of games where they could and should have won, these types of decisions hurt when they missed the playoffs by a game.
The other portion of this was Scott Proctor. First of all, the Braves signed him for $750K to before the season. This was problematic because he showed nothing that warranted a salary that high heading into this season from his September last year. The Braves really did not need Proctor with as many young arms in their farm system that were better.
Proctor stranded 69.8% of the runners he inherited to score in June and 57.7% in July. Those two signs are characteristic of how terrible he was. He walked too many batters and gave up too many hits.
The problem that the Braves had was that Proctor and Linebrink combined to be a collective terrible pitcher for the entire season. Together they lost 7 games and blew 3 saves on the year. Not to be redundant, but the Braves missed the playoffs by one game. Having these two pitchers blow so many games shows that the Braves should have done things differently.
At a minimum, having Proctor on the roster was a forfeiture of a minimum of 3 games and two blown saves. Linebrink, after August, morphed into Proctor. Neither pitcher was necessary.
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