Surfing the Bullpenternet – 11/28 Edition

This installment of the bullpenternet has news, analysis, wild conjecturing, father-daughter games, and shopping!!

• Sox fans break down the upcoming Rule 5 Draft, focusing on the Royals’ AA Loogy Carlos Guevara (among others). (SOSH)

• Retrospective: former-DOE-daughter relieved former-MLB-no hitter-father in 1956 American Legion game: rambling article follows 51 years later. (Columbia (Mo.) Daily Tribune)

• Red Sox miss out on Kerry Wood, consider signing Percival or…Japan? (Yardbarker; DaBigTicket)

• A bad week for a few middle relievers: following the Joe Kennedy tragedy, Indians’ relief pitcher Juan Lara’s career is cut short. (ESPN)

• Paul White breaks down the relief pitcher free agent market, noting that “signing relievers is a buyer-beware proposition.” The article also creates a list of remaining free agent relievers . . . a little shorter than this one. (USA Today)

• The USA Today article gives us another chance to kneel before the relief pitching guru GM, Kevin Towers:

“There’s a lot of wear and tear on these guys over a year or two years,” says San Diego GM Kevin Towers, whose team led the majors with a 3.01 bullpen ERA this year. “It’s such a heavy workload, you have to be careful.” [. . .]

Towers says he prefers to limit his spending on relievers.

“There are guys out there,” he says. “You have to put them in the right situation.” [. . .]

“Bullpen depth is almost as important as quality,” Towers says. “You almost need to have five guys you trust from the sixth inning on. Starting pitchers don’t go as deep into games these days, and if you depend on a couple of guys, you’ll be using them every night.”

 

• Keith Law gives faint praise to the Francisco Cordero signing, noting that the Reds got the best guy out there…but gave him the second largest contract for a relief pitcher for a “ridiculous” four years: (ESPN Insider)

“It is irresponsible for any GM to give a reliever a four-year deal, but it’s even more so when the deal soaks up over 10 percent of the signing team’s payroll and the GM is only under contract for the first of those four years. There’s way too much chance of this deal going south before it’s over or even half over, even if it clearly does make the Reds better in 2008.

• Braves superfans look way down the pike at the performance of their relief pitchers in the Mexican Pacific League (Mexicans!), Venezuelan Winter League, and the Dominican Winter League: Edgar Osuna is turning into a Class-A Loogy. (Talking Chop)
• Finally, if you’re running out of ideas for what to get the kid who has everything? How about a LSU Tigers relief pitcher bib? (Cafe Press) [in fact, there is a wide variety of relief pitcher gear over at Cafe Press - and no, none of it is ours...yet].

Cleans up messes for $18,999,992.01 less than Scott Linebrink