Hello Everyone,
I am pretty new to this forum and I am finding a ton of great information so thank you all. I have a baseball model I have been working on over the past few seasons and a lot of these posts are helping me to tweak it so I can continue to improve my model.
My question for today is about bullpens. I know a good bit about baseball so I know a good bullpen is key. However, what I am not sure of is how predictable a good bullpen can be. Sure - a bullpen is good for a while and gets labeled as a great bullpen - then when it misfires it is "struggling." The opposite can also be true. Plus there are so many different pitchers than can come in for so many different reasons it always seemed very difficult for me to quantify so I just left bullpens out of my analysis.
In Trading Basey Joe Peta actually did the same thing. He claimed that his research showed the bullpens are not consistent year to year (mostly due to changes in staff I would imagine). But if I recall correctly he goes on to say that even bullpen pitchers wavier a good bit and do not show consistency (except for a few obvious examples).
I think some of this can be predicted by accuracy. In a separate project I started to look at accuracy and opposing plate discipline to show how good a reliever is and how likely it is for a bullpen pitcher to have a severe fall-off. I was going to call this study "The Carlos Marmol Effect" since I think he was the best example. A player who was lights out until people literally just stopped swinging. Marmol went from stud to nobody seemingly overnight.
Anyway, sorry for rambling. Please let me know your thoughts and lets talk bullpens!
Red