The Orioles Bullpen....ugh

by user Ben

All right, it's not completely bad. But it's certainly not good right now.

From the Baltimore Sun:

"Even after Orioles relievers carded 4 1/3 scoreless innings Wednesday night against Texas, a stretch that ended when John Halama served up a walk-off home run to Mark DeRosa in the 12th inning, the bullpen's ERA was a robust 6.08 before last night, better than only the relief corps of the San Francisco Giants.

The Orioles' bullpen is also last in the league in WHIP, the ratio of walks and hits to innings pitched, and has the worst strikeout to walk ratio. Opponents were hitting .302 against Orioles relievers going into last night."

The reign of horror of Jim Brower is over, so that automatically makes the bullpen batter.Todd Williams is back and performing well. Chris Ray is proving he'll be be a major league closer and LaTroy Hawkins will give you a good 8th inning nine out of ten times.

The problem lies in having no long relief. John Halama is not someone I care to see much of. The more I see of him, I realize why he played for 4 teams last year. I think he's ok to have and use once a week but not 4 times a week. Julio Manon and Kurt Birkins were called up to replace Brower. Both did good last night. Manon's bounced around for awhile including two years in Korea and Birkins is 24 years old. Building a bullpen on journeymen and inexperienced rookies is dangerous. The AL East is not a division to build a patchwork bullpen in, but the O's don't appear to have much choice.

Maybe they can add some arms in a trade though I doubt Luis Matos is going to bring a bullpen savior in. There are some good arms in the farm system and I bet within a couple weeks Hayden Penn will be called up and the horrific Bruce Chen will get a crack at long relief.

Date
Fri 05/05/06, 10:58 am EST