Aaron Boone and Bullpen Management

The Yankees are more than one third of the way through the 2023 season, are on pace for 96 wins and according to Baseball Reference’s rating system, only Tampa Bay and Texas have been better teams this season. This, despite a farcical number of player trips to the IL, and some underwhelming performances from regular players who were expected to be big contributors.

There have been plenty of reasons for the Yanks’ success thus far in ’23: One of them has been the performance of the bullpen as a whole, but specifically bullpen management. Let’s look back at Sunday night’s game as an example as a huge part of the contest was overlooked by the ESPN broadcast. (In their defense, the ESPN booth did have a talk show of revolving guests and important topics to discuss, one of them being a recently repaired fence…for an inning and a half…)

Entering the bottom of the seventh inning, the Yankees led 1-0 over the Dodgers and had Domingo Germán on the mound, who, up to that point, had looked as good as any of us have ever seen him. Germán got two outs before surrendering a solo home run to JD Martinez to tie the game at one. Giving up a long ball to Martinez, who obviously can hit, is nothing to overreact to of course, so with two outs Yanks manager Aaron Boone stuck with Germán. But after a dribbler of a single off the bat of David Peralta put the go-ahead runner on base and turned the game into essentially a coin flip game – 46%-win probability for the good guys, to be exact – Boone decided to make a change. Clay Holmes, who was viewed as the team’s best reliever when the season started, then went through a rough patch before reverting to a high level of performance recently, was brought in.

This was a bold move by Boone. Many managers, rather quizzically, are still married to the ancient and illogical philosophy of using relievers by predetermined (and arbitrarily) assigned roles. This guy is your closer, this guy is the set-up guy, this guy is the middle innings guy, etc. And although “when the game is on the line, use your best available pitcher” is a thought process that is impossible to poke holes in, it’s often not implemented in favor of using the pre-determined role approach. Most managers would rather use a mid-level pitcher in that situation and hold the big guns for later – even though it’s very unlikely there will be a spot bigger than tie game with the go-ahead run on base.

Holmes got out of the seventh then, after an Oswaldo Cabrera home run restored the Yankees one run lead, got the first two outs in the bottom of the eighth. But with left handed destroyer of baseballs Freddy Freeman due up, Boone called on Wandy Peralta, who not only got Freeman to finish the eighth, but closed the Dodgers out in the ninth, bumping the win probability to 100%.

The game should serve as a reminder that sometimes the most crucial moments in the game happen before the ninth inning, and they often come in the middle of an inning. Usage of relief pitchers should be based on the circumstances at the time – regardless of if it’s the 5^th, 7^th, or 9^th and regardless of whether it’s a “clean” inning or not – and the best available pitcher for that moment is the one who should be on the mound. Again, that’s tough logic to poke a hole in, yet Boone’s proclivity for managing that way is (luckily for us) his regular M.O.

Consider, although the Yankees’ bullpen overall has been the best in MLB, they don’t have a clearly defined number one, number two, or number three pitcher – they literally lead MLB in the number of pitchers with saves with seven different pitchers closing out wins. Obviously, the pitchers deserve the bulk of the credit for not only pitching well, but for being team players who are flexible and who don’t cry about needing to “know their role”. Pitching coach Matt Blake certainly deserves a raise as well.

But we can’t overlook Boone’s role in this aspect of the team’s success. In large part because of his bullpen management, the Yankees have a .530 winning percentage in one run games, which given the randomness of baseball, is pretty impressive – it’s actually an 86 win pace over 162 games. Because MBP never misses an opportunity to say I told you so, it’s worth remembering that Boone’s predecessor posted a .333 winning percentage – a 54 win over 162 pace – in one rune games in 2017 despite having in their primes Aroldis Chapman, Dellin Betances, David Robertson and Chad Green in the bullpen.

With 101 games to go and a soft stretch of schedule coming up, things are looking good in the Bronx.

Did I miss something? Let me know. Either leave a comment below or yell at me @mybaseballpage1 on Twitter and/or the “My Baseball Page” on Facebook.

On another note, I just started “Winning Fixes Everything” by Evan Drellich – how baseball’s brightest minds created baseball’s biggest mess. So far, it’s fantastic, I’ll come back with a full review when I’m done.