Atlanta Braves lefty reliever search: 5 names to know
By Fred Owens
As rumors about the Atlanta Braves acquiring an expensive bat bounce around the net, pitching remains the most obvious area requiring improvement.
Last week Alan wrote about the Atlanta Braves search for relievers who don’t moonlight as a crossing guard. I highlighted right-handed relievers in my last bullpen post. Today the spotlight falls on lefties.
The Braves possess two very good lefties in Jesse Biddle and A.J. Minter. Biddle’s huge reverse split makes him less of a weapon against left-handed hitters than the Braves and Minter became the de facto closer.
Sam Freeman strikes out 27% of RHH and 36% of LHH, posts a 0.74 HR/9 rate, a 53.4% groundball rate, holds RHH to a .221 average and LHH to a .200 average. Those are good numbers – great actually – except Freeman walks 17% of RHH and 20% of LHH.
Last year Freeman’s luck held, this year his luck left town. Overall the lefty ranks in the bottom third of qualified relievers. As a result, the Braves lack a lefty who consistently gets lefties out and doesn’t run and hide from opposite-sided bats.
We know Alex Anthopoulos refuses to throw valuable prospects at rentals. In fact, rentals as a class are at the bottom of his shopping list:
"We would prefer not to go after rentals unless the acquisition cost (is cheap) . . . (it was painful) putting together this young talent. We’re not ready to throw that all away (for one year) . . . I do think we owe it to the players and the fanbase . . . to make this team better . . ."
Believe him or don’t; your choice. I do.
Method to my madness
How did I come up with these names? I set down some guidelines or I’d have gone crazy. First, I excluded closers. They’re expensive and better acquired in the offseason.
I created a list based on low WHIP, ERA, FIP, SIERA, DRA, and flyball numbers. I thinned that further by looking inside that list for high whiff, chase, and groundball rates.
I eliminated overpriced arms from the result, as well as relievers on contending teams and those without enough innings this season or a track record of success in the last three years.,
Walk rates for relief pitchers suffer from small sample size bias. That number may over or understate performance actual performance.
To offset that, I used Fangraphs shutdown/meltdown metric to create a ratio of shutdowns and meltdowns to total innings pitched. I also added something I call no-hit innings pitched (NHIP.)
No hit innings pitched are innings where the reliever:
- Faced at least two batters,
- Retired at least two batters, and
- Faced no more than one over the maximum needed to meet those requirements.
Any inning with two outs and three batters faced without a hit counts as 2/3 NHIP.
After removing rookies and players with less than 10 innings pitched, five names remained. I’m covering them in alphabetical order.