After the fisticuffs between Reynaldo Lopez and Jorge Soler, Walt Weiss had a bit of a problem. He had to get 5 1/3 from his bullpen, but ideally, while preserving a small lead. If the game were a blowout already, it would be easy to sacrifice Jose Suarez and move on from there, but that wasn’t a good tactical option in a close game.
When I saw Tyler Kinley coming in, I started to do some math in my head — between Kinley and three “good relievers,” you could straightforwardly get either 4 1/3 or 3 1/3,
depending on whether Kinley came back out after ending the fifth. Neither of those numbers are 5 1/3, of course. So, I started to think along the lines of, “Okay, fine, these guys are gonna have to pitch more than an inning, and that’s how we solve this problem.”
But that’s not what happened either. Kinley got two outs, one in the fifth, and one in the sixth. Dylan Lee finished the sixth. Robert Suarez was thrown in to face the scary part of this lineup in the seventh, but he was only asked to go an inning. Then we got an “Aaron Bummer in not-meaningless leverage” sighting, but a hit-by-pitch and a “oh rats we used all our ABS challenges already” sequence led to the tying run coming to the plate, so Walt Weiss, Jeremy Hefner and company went with Raisel Iglesias for the remainder of the game. Iglesias even stayed in as the Braves tacked on multiple runs in the top of the ninth.
While we’ve seen a lot of these things before (Iglesias for more than an inning, pitchers for less than an inning for handedness reasons, Aaron Bummer in non-awful leverage, a better reliever pitching earlier to face off against tougher batters), we generally haven’t seen them combined in this fashion. While the starting pitching decisions still trend towards the lackadaisical, we can at least say that Walt Weiss and company are being a lot more aggressive with their bullpen and bench decisions than we’ve seen in the past from this team.
If you were watching last night (which I know is a tough sell given the time for many of you), did the bullpen management surprise you as it happened?
