Guardians’ Bullpen in the Middle of Concerning Trend
The Cleveland Guardians' bullpen must limit the number of free base runners.
Video Transcript
For the last few seasons, the Cleveland Guardians' main strength has been their bullpen, and it's even really been what has been the backbone of this team in two thousand and twenty-six in many ways as well.
But over the last few weeks, Cleveland's bullpen is starting to enter a very concerning trend, and that's allowing way too many free base runners to reach, and with that, those base runners coming around to do damage as well.
Since the beginning of August, the Guardians' bullpen has a walk rate of fourteen point four percent, which is-- ranks the third highest in all of MLB over that stretch.
And I wanna preface this by saying this is not one pitcher, not one player in particular that's struggling with this.
It's a whole staff-wide issue.
Tim Herron, Cade Smith, Craig Yoho have all walked four batters each.
Eric Zabowski, Hunter Gaddis have all walked three batters each.
Matt Festa, Slade Zucconi, and Franco Alman have all lost or, or all walked two runners each as well.
And the player who's walked the fewest runners, Colin Holderman, also has hit four batters as well.
That's simply too many base runners to allow reach, and as we saw against the White Sox earlier over the weekend when Holderman ended up hitting two batters, they each came around to score, what ended up being the difference maker in that game as well.
So allowing these free base runners, especially when Cleveland is playing with such a thin margin for error with the offense being the way it is, and also the starting rotation maybe starting to show some cracks as well, it's really gonna come back to bite the Guardians.
Now, this group in particular, this is not something they've struggled with all year long.
In fact, their walk rate throughout the season has been about ten percent, which is about in the middle of the pack compared to the rest of MLB.
So there is room for improvement overall, but this has not been a reoccurring issue for the Guardians.
But it's something they need to fix very quickly because if they don't, this could be something that ends up hurting the Guardians in the last few weeks of the season
