to the marlins bullpen, real fans please read

Where was this rage before the season started? The only thing I heard was the Calero issue (generally agreed, though he was among the bigger overachievers last year and there were concerns about his arm apparently going into 2010). Where was this rage before 2009?

This was more or less the opinion everyone has before every Marlins season regarding the pen:

“I don’t know these guys, and they might be retreads, but I trust Larry Beinfest and our organization!”

When it works, everyone’s OK with it. When Meyer, Sanches, and Calero worked last year, no one complained. This season, it’s not working, and now the “spend money on the bullpen” bandwagon shows up.

Let’s have the offseason discussion. Who should we have gotten? Here were a few free agent options:

Fernando Rodney (CHONE-projected 4.58 ERA/4.50 FIP for 2010)
Brandon Lyon (3.66/3.75)
Matt Lindstrom (3.83/3.82)

Our guys were a little worse than Lyon and Lindstrom, but Lyon got paid $5M a year for his mediocre play, and Lindstrom got $1.7M in arb after we traded him. Meanwhile, Burke Badenhop was about as good as Lindstrom and got paid very little. He flopped so far this season, but the team certainly didn’t expect that.

The bullpen is a crapshoot, and paying free agent dollars to bolster it is usually a mistake unless the player is well above average. So much can go wrong in the small samples of bullpen innings that pens can look good and bad within the same year with no real talent level change. The way the Marlins do it, at least they won’t be saddled with contracts like Rodney’s or Lyon’s.