Opinion: Signing relief pitchers to multi-year deals is stupid
The Dodgers just signed reliever Brandon League to a 3-year, $22.5 million contract.
I have nothing against League. After pitching poorly in his first few outings as a Dodger when they acquired him via trade, he rapidly improved, and in fact finished September with a 0.55 ERA. Overall, he had a 2.30 ERA for the Dodgers and pitched well as their closer after Kenley Jansen went down.
But I still hate this signing.
As a baseball fan since the mid-'70s, I have seen countless relief pitchers look unhittable one year and barely able to record an out the next. There are a few dominant, hard-throwing closers who buck that trend, such as Mariano Rivera. However, in most cases, signing a reliever to a large contract is a huge and unnecessary risk.
I feel that part of this is because relief pitching is a very psychological role. When you are getting everyone out and have an ERA under 2.00, it's easy to keep going out there and pitching with confidence. However, all it takes is one or two awful outings where you give up 6 runs in an inning, and your ERA balloons and suddenly the wheels can fall off. Relief pitchers don't have multiple innings to right the ship. They can't throw 9 straight shutout innings in one day to erase a poor previous outing's impact. A reliever who gives up a lot of runs has the unfortunate reality of knowing he will have to pitch about 5-10 straight shutout appearances to reverse the damage, and that can be very tough on the psyche.
Think of it this way: Say you're a winning 1-2 NL player, and you decide to take a shot at an excellent 10-20 game. Unfortunately, you run terrible and lose 10k. Next time you go back to 1-2, are you going to see it the same way? Probably not. You are going to keep thinking about how many 1-2 sessions you're going to have to win in order to get back that 10k, and the task will seem insurmountable.
Anyway, to me it seems that relief pitchers are extremely streaky, and that it varies from year to year which ones are good, which ones are bad, and which ones are terrible.
Brandon League has a career 3.60 ERA. He could be great with the Dodgers next year, he could be okay, or he could be awful. There's no way to predict it. And you really want your $22.5 million players to be somewhat predictable.
If I was the GM of an MLB team, I would invite a ton of players to spring training, both young AA/AAA types and established middle-relievers without jobs. I would sign the ones that look good to a 1-year contract for relatively little money, and release/demote the rest. Regardless of their performance, I would do the same the next year. If they wanted to leave the team for others that would sign them for multiple years, I would let them go.
There is never a shortage of middle relievers looking for jobs, and you can always find some that look surprisingly good and come cheap. As long as you don't get too attached to them, you can have an effective bullpen for very little money.
