{"id":1208,"date":"2009-05-24T06:33:09","date_gmt":"2009-05-24T13:33:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/2009\/05\/24\/bullpen-love\/"},"modified":"2009-05-24T13:27:15","modified_gmt":"2009-05-24T20:27:15","slug":"bullpen-love","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/2009\/05\/24\/bullpen-love\/","title":{"rendered":"Bullpen Love"},"content":{"rendered":"

Washington manager Manny Acta\u00c2\u00a0has a bullpen that only a mother could love, yet it is the busiest pen in baseball.\u00c2\u00a0 Why does Manny trudge head down to the mound more than any other skipper in the game?\u00c2\u00a0 Who has the answer,\u00c2\u00a0Lyndon Johnson or Jeff Polman?<\/em>\u00c2\u00a0 <\/p>\n

At the end of Manny Acta’s first season managing the Nationals he led the majors in defensive substitutes.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0Bill James compiled the stats and\u00c2\u00a0drew attention to Acta’s lead in “relievers used” as an important component of this statistic.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0James\u00c2\u00a0noted\u00c2\u00a0it might be unfair to judge the first year manager’s tendencies given the limited sample and the staff he was working with.\u00c2\u00a0 But we are three years on now, and if anything the problem is getting worse.<\/p>\n

Acta has not been working with Maddux, Glavine, and Smoltz since taking the reins from Frank Robinson.\u00c2\u00a0 But the consistent yanking of starters and relievers calls a question.\u00c2\u00a0 Is Acta’s heavy use of his bullpen evidence of over-managing even with a weak staff?\u00c2\u00a0 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 <\/a>on this subject Saturday).<\/p>\n

A superficial look inside the numbers is not re-assuring.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 John Russell, the Pirates rookie manager last season used less than 500 relievers.\u00c2\u00a0 Even with the worst pitching staff in the game, he\u00c2\u00a0took\u00c2\u00a0about a dozen fewer trips to the mound\u00c2\u00a0than Manny Acta.<\/p>\n

The numbers are not eye-popping.\u00c2\u00a0 Both managers had bad pitching.\u00c2\u00a0 Both managers made more trips to the mound than almost any other manager, and probably more than they should.\u00c2\u00a0 Bobby Cox made more trips than either of them and took the prize, but\u00c2\u00a0Acta and Russell\u00c2\u00a0were nipping at his heels.<\/p>\n

The first two months\u00c2\u00a0of the 2009 season–Manny Acta’s third–the\u00c2\u00a0case seems made.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0The Nationals’ pitching this season has been worse than\u00c2\u00a0the Pirates’ and everyone else’s.\u00c2\u00a0 Only the Philadelphia Phillies have a team ERA over 5.00 and they cannot hold a candle to the Nationals’ whopping 5.76 ERA.\u00c2\u00a0 The Washington starters have been bad, with the Daniel Cabrera experiment failing miserably.\u00c2\u00a0 But they have managed\u00c2\u00a0to hold the opposition to\u00c2\u00a0almost exactly 5 runs per nine innings.\u00c2\u00a0 It is the\u00c2\u00a0bullpen’s ERA of 6.25 that jumps off the page.<\/p>\n

This past week provides a case study on point.\u00c2\u00a0 Acta had rookie Ross Detwiler on the mound and the young pitcher turned in a credible 5 innings allowing 3 earned runs.\u00c2\u00a0 In the bottom of the fifth the Nationals mounted a rally.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 The pinch-hitter made a worthless out, but the Nationals went on to take the lead 5-3 going into the sixth inning.<\/p>\n

Over\u00c2\u00a0the next four innings five\u00c2\u00a0Nationals bullpen pitchers combined to allow eight hits, four walks and nine earned runs.\u00c2\u00a0 They torched a 5-3 lead and turned it into another Washington loss, this one by a score of 12-7.<\/p>\n

Manny Acta is on pace in 2009\u00c2\u00a0to make 562 trips to the mound.\u00c2\u00a0 Think about it.\u00c2\u00a0 That is 3.5 pitching replacements per game, or to be exact, 4.5 pitchers per game when you count the starter.\u00c2\u00a0 And that is the average.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0If the bullpen were a source of strength, as it was in 2007,\u00c2\u00a0the underlying rationale would be easy to see.\u00c2\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

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.\u00c2\u00a0 The rumor is that the Nationals are looking to trade for more bullpen help.\u00c2\u00a0 It is a dizzying pace of consumption.\u00c2\u00a0 For the entire\u00c2\u00a02008 season no team managed to burn through 15 relievers for the entire year much less before Memorial Day.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0It is not clear yet\u00c2\u00a0what\u00c2\u00a0this\u00c2\u00a0says about Manny Acta.\u00c2\u00a0 He is likely burning out his relievers and making poor decisions when replacing starters, but are the numbers decisive?<\/p>\n

Jim Bowden is gone and Washington has no GM,\u00c2\u00a0so Acta is the topic du jour.\u00c2\u00a0 His competence is widely debated on any given evening at Nationals Park.\u00c2\u00a0 On Wednesday, after several innings\u00c2\u00a0of discussing Acta’s management, a keen analyst of the game attributed the following insight to Lyndon Johnson. \u00c2\u00a0“You cannot make chicken salad out of chicken guano.”\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0So real and so true.<\/p>\n

Lucky Lyndon’s earthy discourse is widely known, but he was also famous for\u00c2\u00a0getting dead men to rise from\u00c2\u00a0South Texas cemeteries to vote for\u00c2\u00a0him.\u00c2\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Washington manager Manny Acta\u00c2\u00a0has a bullpen that only a mother could love, yet it is the busiest pen in baseball.\u00c2\u00a0 Why does Manny trudge head down to the mound more than any other skipper in the game?\u00c2\u00a0 Who has the answer,\u00c2\u00a0Lyndon Johnson or Jeff Polman?\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":73,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1208","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-a-view-from-the-capital","category-general"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1208","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/73"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1208"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1208\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}