Has Nervous Nellie Joe Girardi already burned out his three-headed relief monster?

Dellin Betances, Andrew Miller, Aroldis Chapman: three-headed monster.



Can the Yankees make a three-headed bullpen monster work?

If the Yankees wanted, their three-headed monster of relief could dominate without precedent.

by Dave Brown @answerdave Tuesday, Dec 29, 2015 cbssports.com
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This is, of course, nonsense because ...

One inning wonders do not pitch every day. Sunday, December 7, 2014

Am I the only who thinks the current conventional wisdom of shortening games through dominant one inning relief pitchers is silly? ...

In 1996 John Wetteland led the league in saves with 46 but pitched only 62.66 innings. Mariano Rivera did the heavy lifting with those 107 innings. At the time it was said that they reduced it to a seven inning game. In 2014 it's been said that some teams, most notably the Kansas City Royals, have reduced it to a six inning game...

But now three one inning relief specialists are the new model.  Let's look at those Kansas City Royals.

Rk	Pos	Name	Age	W	L	W-L%	ERA	G	GS	GF	CG	SHO	SV	IP	H	R	ER	HR	BB	IBB	SO	HBP	BK	WP	BF	ERA+	FIP	WHIP	H9	HR9	BB9	SO9	SO/W
6	CL	Greg Holland	28	1	3	.250	1.44	65	0	60	0	0	46	62.1	37	13	10	3	20	0	90	0	0	9	240	277	1.83	0.914	5.3	0.4	2.9	13.0	4.50
7	RP	Wade Davis	28	9	2	.818	1.00	71	0	11	0	0	3	72.0	38	8	8	0	23	0	109	3	0	1	279	399	1.19	0.847	4.8	0.0	2.9	13.6	4.74
8	RP	Kelvin Herrera	24	4	3	.571	1.41	70	0	12	0	0	0	70.0	54	12	11	0	26	0	59	3	0	1	285	282	2.69	1.143	6.9	0.0	3.3	7.6	2.27

162 games multiplied by 27 outs = 4,374 outs over a full regular season.  You can probably see where I'm going.  The three headed monster accounted for only 612 (204 * 3) outs, which is 14%.

However, if they accounted for the final three innings in all their team's games that would be 33%.  So the threesome, no matter how effective, can impact less than half the games...


Let's say the three pitched every other game no matter what the game situation.  That would be about 80 games, ten more than now.  But they would have no impact in half the games.  None...

The bottom line is that people who say that games can be reduced to six innings because a team has three lock down relief pitchers are mistaken... Especially since the managers use them in a blind formula, ignoring pitch count, and simply have them pitch a particular inning, they are restricted and that restriction limits the number of games in which they pitch.
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Joe Girardi: Nervous Nellie manager praised on MBL Network. Friday, May 20, 2016

Girardi got good performances from two inconsistent starting pitchers, then used all three of his killer relief pitchers to throw one inning each in one run games on consecutive days...

Brian Kenny and his three guests were practically licking themselves, they were so proud of how smart they are. Yeah, right.

After Girardi burned up his big three in the first of these two games I thought: oh boy, Girardi is going into Nervous Nellie mode early, mid May. He won't last the season and neither will his relief pitchers.

It's about managing limited resources. Both Yankee starters were not only pitching well but also had low pitch counts... Getting an extra inning from each of them and letting the non-Chapman guy pitch inning 9 in the second game would have saved three innings that could be used tonight and/or tomorrow by the big three. That's really bad resource management by any reasonable measure.
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Joe Girardi just can't stop being a Nervous Nellie manager. Saturday, May 21, 2016

Joe Girardi did it again today. He does it a lot. Today's example of his being a Nervous Nellie manager: Yanks led 5-1 in the 9th. Girardi let a lesser relief pitcher start the 9th. He allowed a leadoff single. Girardi had closer Aroldis Chapman warm up.

Two more batters needed to reach base just to bring the tie run to the plate. What the heck? Joe, settle down. The lesser relief pitcher finished the inning and the Yankees won. But come on.
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Thursday, June 2, 2016, 7:40pm, Comerica Park
Attendance: 28,213, Time of Game: 2:56
Yankees 5, Tigers 4

Pitching	IP	H	R	ER	BB	SO	HR	ERA	BF	Pit	Str	Ctct	StS	StL	GB	FB	LD	Unk	GSc	IR	IS	WPA	aLI	RE24
Michael Pineda	5.2	7	1	1	0	8	0	6.41	23	96	65	35	20	10	8	7	5	0	59			0.156	1.07	1.7
Dellin Betances, W (2-2)	1.1	1	1	1	1	3	0	2.81	6	25	14	4	2	8	1	1	1	0		1	0	0.034	1.24	-0.3
Andrew Miller, H (7)	1	1	1	1	2	2	0	1.25	5	24	13	8	3	2	0	1	1	0		0	0	0.010	1.39	-0.5
Aroldis Chapman, S (8)	1	2	1	1	1	0	0	2.61	5	16	10	7	0	3	4	0	0	0		0	0	0.089	4.37	-0.5
Team Totals

Gee, Yanks dodged a bullet. Each of the three monsters allowed a run. It was just dumb luck that the Yankees, shut out the night before in Toronto, scored four runs in the top of the 7th to break a 1-1 tie. Otherwise Girardi would have had another loss and only himself and his Nervous Nellie management style to blame for having already used his three top relief pitchers inappropriately in previous games.

The three will probably recover but the fact that all three were ineffective in the same game suggests that all three were stressed at about the same time in the season, which is only one third over. Girardi needs to manage his resources better. He tends to do that with the non-pitchers. Yesterday he even tried something that I had suggested to a friend a few weeks ago to infuse some pop into the Yankee lineup: replaced Didi Gregorius at shortstop with Starlin Castro who has been playing second base and finally put Rob Refsnyder at second. Castro was 1 for 4. Refsnyder scored 2, one RBI, 2 for 3, including a double for the second consecutive game; he had started in right field the night before.