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Maddon Making Bullpen Trio Work

Things happen. Bullpens aren’t perfect, and more often than not, when a team loses a game that was resting on the shoulders of a bullpen arm, said pitcher is going to take some heat. Unfortunately, last week’s shocking loss to the Cardinals fell on the shoulders of Cubs reliever Pedro Strop. All runs surrendered are not created equally, some sting more than others and this especially rings true for relief pitchers. While giving up a two-out, two-strike home run in the ninth to Jhonny Peralta to lose the final game of the series isn’t something that Strop should ever get a pat on the back for, you must consider the context of the situation. We can unanimously agree for the most part that Strop should have put up a better fight against a struggling Matt Carpenter, whom he walked on four pitches that were nowhere near the strike zone, but you can’t fault him for giving up a home run to Jhonny Peralta, his 12th of the year while batting .298/.355/.473. It isn’t as if Strop had allowed a pitcher who isn’t bat his weight to go deep off of him. This was purely a mistake, the human side of baseball and of relief pitching.

For Strop, it just turned out to be the wrong pitch, to the wrong batter, at the wrong time. Which leads me into my next point—this Cubs bullpen has been quite impressive recently. Although, as our own Matt Trueblood pointed out, the bullpen’s success has been somewhat helter skelter and most likely won’t keep up with this song and dance much longer, yet it’s done a fine job carrying the Cubs this far into the season. The unnamed closer situation that Joe Maddon has created by using each of Strop, Hector Rondon, and Jason Motte in high-leverage situations seems to have us all holding our breath, waiting for it to implode. But it hasn’t done so just yet, and at this point—though I expect it to happen—I won’t be holding my breath waiting anymore.

Rondon has been brilliant through the first half and is currently putting up a 2.17 ERA in 39 games. The hard-throwing righty has not allowed an earned run since May 22nd against Arizona and has been absolutely lights out. His fastball usage has dipped over the course of each month, while the usage of his sinker and slider have slowly but surely increased. Rondon’s slider is nasty, and is currently sitting around 87.49 mph, a slight increase from April and May. Rondon’s whiff rate on the pitch is also steadily increased from 15 percent in May to a season-high 24 percent in July. He has also struck out 22.1 percent of the batters he’s faced and walking just 5.5 percent. I would think it’s safe to say that those are decently impressive numbers. Rondon doesn’t get a lot of attention for what he does in this mix, but maybe that’s just because he quietly executes his role in this Cubs bullpen, and he does it well. As Trueblood also pointed out in his piece this week, Rondon has been left out of some of the more high-leverage situations lately—taking on the role of middle relief, which seems to be working just fine for him and for the Cubs.

I’m sure many of you aren’t interested in hearing someone praise Strop after last week’s loss to the Cardinals to end the four-game series, but it must be done. Before that particular outing, Strop had only allowed two earned runs since May 29th, and lowered his ERA to 2.63. At one point in May, Strop’s ERA was as high as 4.38, but he has since managed to keep himself locked in. As we learned though, Strop is not without his flaws. Something that has become troublesome for Strop in 2015, is that his fly-ball rates have increased significantly. His HR/FB% is now 14.3 percent, up from 6.9 percent in 2014—and it feels as though each of those four home runs he’s given up have come in big situations. The last time we saw Strop surrender that many home runs was in 2013, when he gave up a total of five. Strop’s fly-ball ratio is now at 32.9 percent as well, up from 20.7 percent in 2014. That’s quite a leap, and a troublesome one. In relation to this, 2015 has also seen Strop’s line-drive percentage decline steeply from 24.3 percent down to just 14.1 percent. His BABIP however, is currently at a career low .183. The positive aspect in all of this is that when Strop isn’t letting the ball fly, he’s striking batters out at an incredibly impressive rate. He’s whiffing batters at a 29.1 percent rate, which is especially important to counter his high 11.3 percent walk rate. Strop has tweaked his repertoire a bit recently, increasing his sinker usage from 21 percent in May to 39 percent in June and now 43 percent in July while slightly decreasing the usage of his slider. In May, Strop was implementing the use of his slider 54 percent of the time, steadily declining it to 44 percent by July.

Strop is an impressive bullpen arm, and has been showing his worth in the role Maddon has set for him, but as I stated earlier: every pitcher is human, and the flaws of a reliever are often much more highlighted than anyone else on the team. But let’s not forget that in the matinee game of the doubleheader against the Cardinals, Strop went 1-2-3 in the eighth (Tommy Pham, Randall Grichuk, and yes, Peralta) on just nine pitches. Context is key in these situations. Strop may have his moments of error, but for right now he’s keeping them to a minimum.

Motte may be the most interesting case of them all. I’ve been watching him with intrigue ever since he so impressively got out of no-out, bases-loaded jam he got himself in against Cincinnati in June. Motte, who is now two years removed from Tommy John surgery, of course lost a few ticks of velocity, but when you were once touching 100 mph on your fastball, you should be able to afford to lose a tick or two of velocity. Motte, who has thrown as hard as 99 mph this past May but sits in the mid-90s, has become not just a hard-throwing righty in the Cubs ‘pen, but also a crafty one. His strikeout rate has seen a significant decline since returning from the surgery, once reaching as high as 30.8 percent in a full season, he’s now sitting at a well-below league-average rate of 16.1 percent. But that’s the part that makes him so interesting, he’s found a way to make it work by incorporating the “crafty” side of his, as Maddon called it, “primal” pitching style.

Motte’s groundball rate has dropped from nearly 37 percent to 32 percent this season, while he has escalated his fly-ball rate to a would-be career-high 50 percent. Before that number scares you, he’s also decreased his HR/FB rate by a great deal. Last season, Motte was giving up 20 percent of fly balls as home runs. In 2015, he’s given up just 5.9 percent. Motte has only given up three home runs this far into the season, which sets him on pace for the third lowest amount of home runs given up in his career. The now-crafty righty has also significantly decreased the amount of cutters he throws, in favor of throwing his incredible four-seam fastball that ranges anywhere from 95-99 mph these days. When batters are making contact on pitches Motte throws, it happens to just be the few he leaves right down the heart of the plate, and a couple that may be left a few inches off the plate. Motte tends to keep his pitches neat and up in the zone, favoring those higher pitches that hitters are prone to swing at, leading to the high fly-ball rate, but also weaker contact, as he induces many easy to catch pop-ups (leading to a nice 11.8 percent infield fly-ball rate).

No one may have official titles within this Cubs bullpen right now, but at the moment everyone just seems to be going with the flow and working in a great rhythm. And while the eventual arrival of Rafael Soriano and hopefully an increased role (and tick up in velocity) for Neil Ramirez could change how things are being run, the buttons Maddon are currently pushing without naming a closer have resulted in good things more often than not.

Lead photo courtesy of Brad Mills-USA TODAY Sports

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