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)

Surfing the Bullpenternet

A quick look at what others are saying about middle relief:

• ‘Anorexic’ Mets: Mets fans start sweating (and stop spell-checking) after they failed to sign Cordero or Linebrink. (Mets Fever)
• Yanks fans, on the other hand, are ecstatic that some other bonehead GM overpaid Linebrink before Cashman could. (The New York Yankees Baseball Blog)

• It may have been the going rate, but you don’t have to like the Linebrink and Cordero signings; why not try the “trial and error” method for constructing a bullpen? (Hardball Review)
• For his part, Keith Law sees a troubling trend this offseason: (ESPN Insider)
  

  After Steve Karsay’s four-year deal, signed before the 2002 season, went bust, we saw just one three-year deal given to a reliever (Armando Benitez, who threw 118 innings with a 4.55 ERA during the deal) until B.J. Ryan’s five-year deal, signed in November of 2005. That month, we saw the destruction of the market’s reluctance to give long-term deals to relief pitchers, especially middle relievers, and the result has been a relative flood of three-, four-, and even five-year contracts for such free agents. After two winters of these contracts, however, the track record is already not good.

• Dbacks fans give out unsung hero awards to Edgar Gonzalez, Brandon Lyon, and their pitching coach, Bryan Price. (AZ Snakepit)
• Did you ever wonder who owns the “Most Consecutive Games with a Home Run Allowed by a Relief Pitcher” record? Yeah, me neither. (Recondite Baseball)