Last week we took a look at the prospects for the Tigers starting pitching. Today we’ll take a look at who the starters will hand the ball to. Last year the bullpen allowed 285 earned runs in 553 innings.

Closer:
Going into 2003 the bullpen was supposed to be a relative strength. Matt Anderson was going to be the closer and Franklyn German was going to be his setup man. Instead, both of them spent signifcant time in Toledo. Anderson lost his 100mph fastball and had to learn to pitch. German lost all recognition of the strike zone while in the majors, walking 45 in 44 2/3 innings. On the bright side he also struck out 41.
That left the closer role up for grabs, and nobody really grabbed it.

This year German, Anderson, and Fernando Rodney will most likely compete to be closer. If German can get a handle on the strike zone the job the job could be his. Fernando Rodney allowed too many baserunners (15 per nine innings), but his K/BB ratio was almost 2. Despite an ERA of 6.06 his dIPS ERA was an impressive 3.61. I’d say that going into spring trainig Rodney is my pick for the job.

Setup Men and the rest
Jamie Walker was solid as the left handed specialist. The main knock against Walker is his propensity for allowing home runs. However, his HR rate improved last year while is K and BB walk rates per nine both moved in the wrong direction. His ERA+ of 130 still makes him the ace of the bullpen.

Al Levine was picked up as an affordable free agent. His career ERA+ is 126, and since 1998 his worst year was 102. One word of caution is that Levine’s career K/9 rate is 4.4 but he dipped down to 3.8 last year.

Danny Patterson will try to regain his form from 2000 and 2001 when he was an effective reliever for the Tigers. He did pitch in 19 games last year and his periperhal stats were pretty good. He finished 9 games and picked up 3 saves.

Rule 5 Guys
The Tigers picked up Mike Bumatay and Lino Urdanata in the rule 5 draft. Bumatay is a lefty who during his minor league career strikes out 10.3 batters per nine innings and strikes out 2.5 batters for every walk allowed. In Pat Caputo’s BA chat, he indicated that Bumatay will probably stick but that Urdaneta probably won’t.

Who’s missing
Most missed will be Steve Sparks who ate 90 innings last year. Wil Ledezma and Matt Roney, last year’s Rule 5’ers will probably be in Toledo to start the season. Chris Mears was removed from the 40 man roster to make room for Pudge. However, if Urdaneta is let go, there could still be a spot for him. As for Chris Spurling, I just don’t know what will happen with him next year.

The projection
I’m honestly at a loss for how to project what this bullpen will do. Levine and Walker are the only two known quantities. In my starter preview, I predicted that the starters would throw 972 innings, which leaves 486 innings for the pen (I just estimated innings at 9*162=1458). Working off Levine and Walker’s past performances, I expect about 120 innings from the two of them, and applying their dERA from last year that would yield 67 runs. That leaves 366 innings for the rest of the bullpen.

A replacement level bullpen (25% below league average) would have a dERA of 5.66 and would allow 230 earned runs in the remaining 366 innings. Hopefully, you would have better than replacement level closers. A league average bullpen eating the rest of the innings would have a dERa of 4.53 and allow 184 earned runs. While I doubt the Tigers will be league average, I think they would be better than replacement level. So I would expect the bullpen to allow between 251 and 297 runs. We’ll split the difference and call it 275.

Combined with the starters projection of 553 runs that means the Tigers pitchers will allow 828 runs if they had a league average defense. That is an improvement of 100 runs over last year’s team.

Now for the disclaimers. This is a very rough estimate, and it makes lots of assumptions. Given the Tigers youth and turnover, that’s about the best that I could come up with however. Now that I’ve done the math, an improvement of 11% seems aggressive. Time will only tell how it all plays out.

I got stats from a variety of sources including ESPN.com, Baseball-Reference, and Baseball Cube. All the defense independent stats were the work of Jay Jaffe at Futility Infielder.

In the next couple weeks I’ll take a look at the hitters and the offense.