Analyzing four years of Braves reliever contracts
Atlanta's bullpen spending has been inefficient. But who cares?
If you’re a fan of relievers, the Alex Anthopoulos era has probably been particularly fun for you. What do Mark Melancon, Will Smith, Kenley Jansen, Collin McHugh, Raisel Iglesias, Pierce Johnson, Joe Jiménez, Aaron Bummer, and Reynaldo López1 have in common? They’re all relief pitchers whom the Braves either signed to an eight-figure contract or acquired on such a contract (Melancon, Iglesias, Bummer) since the 2019 trade deadline.
Basically, in July 2019, the Braves acquired an appetite for expensive relievers. On its face, it has worked wonders.
After essentially patching together a bullpen with castoffs and glue in the first year and a half of his tenure (Anthony Swarzak, anybody?), Anthopoulos started spending big on relievers in July 2019, and ever since, the Braves have had a top five bullpen. And one of those units - ironically, probably the weakest in terms of regular season performance - attained immortality as The Night Shift.
So far, this reads like propaganda from the Big Reliever lobby. “Spend on relievers and you, too, can turn your questionable bullpen into an elite one and win a ton of games along the way!”
Not so fast.
Are the Braves getting better pitching from more expensive relievers?
The quantitative analysis in this post is rudimentary. I’m not a statistician, and I won’t pretend to be one. I looked at the Braves’ top ten relievers by innings pitched for last four seasons. (I cut it off at ten because I didn’t really want to look up numbers for one-inning wonders like Jay Flaa and Ty Tice.) Then, I removed the two cash-inexpensive relievers the Braves spent significant other capital on: Joe Jiménez and AJ Minter didn’t command big salaries, but one was a high draft pick and the other cost a respectable prospect, so it’s disingenuous to describe either as a cheap player. Finally, I plotted the remaining pitchers’ season fWAR on the X axis and their season salary on the Y axis. Here’s what I found.
There’s an extremely weak relationship between Braves reliever fWAR and Braves reliever cost. A 0.04 R-squared value suggests that basically none of the fWAR variation can be explained by player cost. Let’s look at a couple of the standouts.
Ah, Will Smith. Sweet, temporarily glorious, mostly ineffective Will Smith. Smith was responsible for two of the worst Braves reliever seasons in recent history. And while every other Braves reliever who posted a sub-replacement season made under $2M AAV, Smith collected $12M for these two campaigns. Even Smith’s good year - 2021 - saw him post a meager 0.4 fWAR. Obviously, Smith’s 2021 postseason means he’ll never have to buy a drink in Atlanta again, and rightfully so. But other than that one month - yeesh.
Let me cleanse your palate with a happier story.
Tyler Matzek is a value god. Matzek posted two of the Braves’ ten best reliever campaigns in the last four years. And he did so while making less than $1 million a year. Basically, Matzek did in 2021 for approximately league minimum what the Braves paid Kenley Jansen $16M to do in 2022 and Raisel Iglesias $16M to do in 2023. (Similar credit to 2022 Dylan Lee, whose dot blurs with Matzek’s.)
The virtual nonexistence of a relationship between bullpen spending and bullpen performance probably lines up with the wisdom you’ve heard about relievers: they’re volatile. Sometimes, you make a lucrative, multi-year commitment to a big-name reliever with All-Star Games and big playoff performances on his résumé, and he turns into a pumpkin. Sometimes, you sign a former first-round pick who was last seen pitching in indy ball and he becomes one of the deadliest relievers in the game for two years. And neither of those is a shocking outcome.
We’re going to leave the numbers behind in a minute, but before we do, I want to quickly prove that there are positional markets where spending more consistently gets you better players.
This chart compares fWAR to AAV among MLB shortstops in 2023. Sure, there are still some outliers - Ha-seong Kim was an extreme bargain and Carlos Correa an extreme overpay - but there’s a much stronger correlation (0.24 R-squared value) between fWAR and salary here.
So if the goal is to add the maximum number of fWAR per dollar spent, are the Braves acting efficiently by pushing so many chips into reliever roulette? No.
How much does it matter?
This is where we’ll go from quantitative analysis to a more vibes-based one. Let’s start with a basic premise: it is never a bad thing for the Braves to pay a player more money in a vacuum. If you told me, “All other things being equal, would you rather the Braves pay Ray Kerr $2 million or $10 million?”, I would pick $10 million every time. Ray Kerr seems like a good dude.
Of course, all other things are never equal. The whole reason fans like me care about payroll and financial value is because the Braves have a finite budget, so every dollar they pay one player is a dollar they can’t pay another. So then, the real question we have to answer is, “Has reliever spending prevented the Braves from doing other, more gainful things with their money?”
It’s impossible to know without getting inside the minds of the Braves’ brain trust, but their conduct suggests that the answer is ‘no’. Here are a few reasons I think that.
The Braves have increased payroll every year since 2016, except a pandemic-related drop from 2020 to 2021. This is not a team that has cried poor very much in recent years.
In the cases where the Braves have let a desirable player leave in free agency - Josh Donaldson, Freddie Freeman, Dansby Swanson - their hesitation has not come from an unwillingness to spend near-term cash but rather discomfort with committing long-term salary to players in their late thirties. It’s hard to link a desire to pay relievers in 2023 with hesitance to pay Freddie Freeman in 2028.
Finally, as Dan Szymborski ably pointed out at FanGraphs, there’s a ceiling to preseason World Series odds somewhere around 25 percent. The playoffs are a crapshoot, and the difference between a true-talent 97-win team and a true-talent 101-win team won’t consistently show itself in a 5- or 7-game series. The Braves have an incredibly deep lineup that’s controlled forever; in most years, they’ve had one of the better rotations in baseball. They can’t move the needle much further at this point.
So in principle, it’s perhaps a little annoying to see the Braves throwing so much money at the baseball equivalent of magic beans and reaping predictably inconsistent results - particularly when the team has shown a knack for finding cheap bullpen high performers like Tyler Matzek, Dylan Lee, Nick Anderson, and Jesse Chavez.
But so be it. Alex Anthopoulos and his team have demonstrated an eye for retaining the right prospects, they’ve signed the successful ones to team-friendly deals, and they’ve added cornerstone players via favorable trades. As they’ve done these things, Terry McGuirk has funneled more and more money into the team. Times are good. And if the front office wants to use some of the excess to create a diabolical bullpen on paper and then hope it actually translates into on-field performance? Sure.
Maybe Lopez spends significant time in the rotation, but my instinct is still that he’ll primarily pitch in some sort of multi-inning relief role, especially after the Chris Sale trade and particularly since Eno Sarris is bearish on Lopez as a starter and very bullish on Lopez as a reliever.