Bullpen Love

Washington manager Manny Acta has a bullpen that only a mother could love, yet it is the busiest pen in baseball.  Why does Manny trudge head down to the mound more than any other skipper in the game?  Who has the answer, Lyndon Johnson or Jeff Polman?  

At the end of Manny Acta’s first season managing the Nationals he led the majors in defensive substitutes.  Bill James compiled the stats and drew attention to Acta’s lead in “relievers used” as an important component of this statistic.  James noted it might be unfair to judge the first year manager’s tendencies given the limited sample and the staff he was working with.  But we are three years on now, and if anything the problem is getting worse.

Acta has not been working with Maddux, Glavine, and Smoltz since taking the reins from Frank Robinson.  But the consistent yanking of starters and relievers calls a question.  Is Acta’s heavy use of his bullpen evidence of over-managing even with a weak staff?  Does he have some knee-jerk tendency to go to the pen every seventh inning no matter the situation (per Jeff Polman’s excellent piece on this subject Saturday).

A superficial look inside the numbers is not re-assuring.  In 2008 Pittsburgh had the worst pitching in the National League and eclipsed the Nationals by a wide margin with a team ERA of 5.10 compared to the Nationals paltry 4.66–good for 14th overall.  John Russell, the Pirates rookie manager last season used less than 500 relievers.  Even with the worst pitching staff in the game, he took about a dozen fewer trips to the mound than Manny Acta.

The numbers are not eye-popping.  Both managers had bad pitching.  Both managers made more trips to the mound than almost any other manager, and probably more than they should.  Bobby Cox made more trips than either of them and took the prize, but Acta and Russell were nipping at his heels.

The first two months of the 2009 season–Manny Acta’s third–the case seems made.  The Nationals’ pitching this season has been worse than the Pirates’ and everyone else’s.  Only the Philadelphia Phillies have a team ERA over 5.00 and they cannot hold a candle to the Nationals’ whopping 5.76 ERA.  The Washington starters have been bad, with the Daniel Cabrera experiment failing miserably.  But they have managed to hold the opposition to almost exactly 5 runs per nine innings.  It is the bullpen’s ERA of 6.25 that jumps off the page.

This past week provides a case study on point.  Acta had rookie Ross Detwiler on the mound and the young pitcher turned in a credible 5 innings allowing 3 earned runs.  In the bottom of the fifth the Nationals mounted a rally.  With a run in, a man on second, one out and the score tied, Acta pinch-hit for Detwiler who had thrown only 84 pitches.  The pinch-hitter made a worthless out, but the Nationals went on to take the lead 5-3 going into the sixth inning.

Over the next four innings five Nationals bullpen pitchers combined to allow eight hits, four walks and nine earned runs.  They torched a 5-3 lead and turned it into another Washington loss, this one by a score of 12-7.

Manny Acta is on pace in 2009 to make 562 trips to the mound.  Think about it.  That is 3.5 pitching replacements per game, or to be exact, 4.5 pitchers per game when you count the starter.  And that is the average.  If the bullpen were a source of strength, as it was in 2007, the underlying rationale would be easy to see.  But Acta’s bullpen is pouring gasoline on every lead they can get their hands on, and still the manager cannot stay off that phone.

In less than two full months he has so far employed thirteen different relievers and called up two new ones early this week who soon will make fifteen.  The rumor is that the Nationals are looking to trade for more bullpen help.  It is a dizzying pace of consumption.  For the entire 2008 season no team managed to burn through 15 relievers for the entire year much less before Memorial Day.  It is not clear yet what this says about Manny Acta.  He is likely burning out his relievers and making poor decisions when replacing starters, but are the numbers decisive?

Jim Bowden is gone and Washington has no GM, so Acta is the topic du jour.  His competence is widely debated on any given evening at Nationals Park.  On Wednesday, after several innings of discussing Acta’s management, a keen analyst of the game attributed the following insight to Lyndon Johnson.  “You cannot make chicken salad out of chicken guano.”  So real and so true.

Lucky Lyndon’s earthy discourse is widely known, but he was also famous for getting dead men to rise from South Texas cemeteries to vote for him.  At the rate Manny Acta is running through relievers, some of those same folks may end up pitching in DC before this season is done.