Once their biggest question, the Astros' bullpen is now their bedrock

New York Times

6 days ago

HOUSTON — The Houston Astros' bedrock is a bullpen of waiver claims and castoffs, an eight-man embodiment of the franchise's elite pitching infrastructure. Half of them throw left-handed, including the highest-paid reliever in the sport. A minor-league Rule 5 pick with a righteous mustache and meager velocity builds the bridge to him.
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'We don't have the traditional bullpen,' Josh Hader acknowledged on Sunday afternoon.
The construction bucks convention, but is calming the biggest concern many harbored before this season began. Four more scoreless innings on Sunday lowered the Astros' bullpen ERA to 2.75. No American League relief corps has one lower. None allows a lower batting average, either.
Only the San Francisco Giants and Minnesota Twins entered Monday with a lower bullpen WHIP than the Astros, who salary-dumped their setup man this winter and signed no reliever to a major-league contract in response.
'I'd be lying if I said it didn't exceed my expectations, but we had high hopes,' pitching coach Josh Miller said. 'We knew we had talented guys, it was just (about) who was going to fill the last few spots.'
Those that have are keeping the Astros afloat, allowing their tepid lineup ample runway to correct itself while the team remains above .500. Bullpens house the most volatile position group in baseball, so sustaining this level of success will be borderline impossible.
That Houston is missing three starters from its season-opening rotation — and two who threw 312 1/3 innings last season — will only make the task harder. Workloads will grow, wear will wreak havoc and the same surprising unpredictability that Houston has witnessed with this group across 53 games could reverse course.
Still, ballclubs are buoyed by different positions during prolonged stretches of every 162-game season. Houston just completed a run of 17 consecutive games without an off day, a span in which starters Ronel Blanco and Hayden Wesneski suffered serious injuries.
Across that 17-game span, Houston's bullpen posted a 2.66 ERA while stranding 82.8 percent of the runners it inherited. Of the 18 earned runs Astros relievers allowed, six came during a 13-9 loss to the Cincinnati Reds on May 10: a game in which starter Lance McCullers Jr. secured one out. The two pitchers who permitted six runs in relief are no longer on the active roster.
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'These guys are getting opportunities to throw important pitches, and when you have success in those situations, you can build that confidence,' Hader said. 'Pitching, in general, once you have solid confidence in your stuff, it's really hard to beat when you can know you're throwing a pitch that you have full confidence in — one that you can either throw in the zone or get swing-and-miss with it.'
Hader is the lone household name, though new setup man Bryan Abreu has been among the sport's most unheralded relievers for the past two seasons. That Abreu has the highest WHIP in his own bullpen underscores the depth Houston has accrued around him.
Twenty qualified relievers entered Monday with a WHIP lower than 0.90. Houston's bullpen houses three of them: Hader, Bryan King and Steven Okert. No other American League team has more than one. Houston's Kaleb Ort has a 0.84 WHIP, too, but hasn't thrown enough innings to qualify.
No qualified reliever in the sport boasts a lower WHIP than Okert, a man who arrived in spring training on a minor-league deal and without any guarantees of a spot on Houston's active roster. Pitching coaches helped him improve the ride on his four-seam fastball to complement an already sublime slider.
Okert has struck out 27 batters across his first 23 2/3 innings. The 16.7 percent swinging strike rate he is generating is the 14th highest of any reliever in baseball, but third inside his own bullpen. Both Hader and Bennett Sousa are inducing swinging strikes higher than 18 percent of the time.
Sousa, Okert, King and Hader are all left-handed, a fact that would make former manager Dusty Baker faint, but now offers his successor so many options.
Hader's role as a $19 million closer makes him platoon neutral by nature, but both Okert and King are faring better against right-handed hitters this season than lefties. Even Sousa is limiting right-handed hitters to a .630 OPS.
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As a result, Houston's bullpen has faced the most left-on-right matchups in baseball. Righties have a .168/.220/.265 slash line against them. As a whole, Houston's bullpen — half of which is left-handed — is holding right-handed hitters to a .183 batting average and .261 on-base percentage. Both are the lowest in the major leagues. Only the Los Angeles Dodgers' bullpen has more strikeouts against righties than the Astros.
'It makes the job easy for Josh and Joe to navigate through lineups and strategically put guys in certain spots,' Hader said. 'When you have guys being able to throw secondaries for strikes, expand and also command the zone with their heater, it makes it harder.'
Take, for example, Sunday afternoon. Both Abreu and Hader had pitched on Friday and Saturday, thrusting that moustached minor-league Rule 5 pick into the biggest spot of the season.
King saw five right-handed hitters. He retired four of them, flummoxing them with a sweeper below the barrel and the 'funky' four-seam fastball the Astros have implored him to throw. King likes to say that before arriving in the Astros' system, he'd never been told he had a good fastball.
Now, according to Baseball Savant's run value metric, it is the best-performing four-seamer in the American League's best bullpen. Only the Chicago Cubs — King's previous organization — boast a bullpen that throws a higher percentage of fastballs than Houston's.
Astros relievers average just 93.8 mph on their fastballs, the eighth-slowest mark in the sport. Still, only the Toronto Blue Jays' bullpen has allowed less contact and generated more swing-and-miss. As Hader said, it's not traditional.
'Pitching, in general, once you have solid confidence in your stuff, it's really hard to beat when you know you're throwing a pitch that you have full confidence in,' Hader said.
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That fastball King throws averages just 91.9 mph. On Sunday, Randy Arozarena saw three that neared 94. He watched the last one halve home plate for strike three, keeping King unscored upon in 10 of his past 11 outings.
'The guy's got some,' Espada said, pausing before something unprintable came from his mouth. 'He's not afraid. He's not afraid. He's going to go after you. You're either going to hit me or I'm going to get you out. When you come in from the pen, you have to have that mindset. He has that mindset.'
He's not alone.
(Top photo of Bryan Abreu: Alex Slitz / Getty Images)