The Proletarianization of the Bullpen
Here’s a moment in baseball history you probably don’t remember unless you’re a Yankee fan of a certain age: the excitement around the 2008 Yankee pitching rotation. That was the year the team added three young phenoms to the staff: Phil Hughes, Joba Chamberlain, and Ian Kennedy.
It wasn’t exactly Maddux/Smoltz/Glavine—or even Generation K—but all three had shown glimpses of brilliance in 2007: Phil Hughes had taken a no-hitter into the seventh inning in just his second career start, before an injury forced him from the game. Ian Kennedy had given up just four earned runs in 19 innings over three starts in September. And, of course, Joba Chamberlain had emerged as an absolutely dominant setup guy down the stretch, pitching to an ERA+ of 1221 over 24 innings.
In 2008, it didn’t really pan out… Kennedy went 0-4 with and ERA of 8.17 and got pulled from the rotation in May. Hughes was 0-4 with an ERA of 9.00 before getting injured at the end of April. And Chamberlain started the year in the bullpen, and then hurt his shoulder as the team tried to move him to the rotation mid-season. That year, Yankees missed the postseason for the first time in 15 seasons.
But I want to talk about what happened next. After that disappointing season, Kennedy was traded to Arizona, while Hughes and Chamberlain were both shuttled back and forth between the Yankee bullpen and the Yankee starting rotation. Both were occasionally brilliant but frustratingly inconsistent as starters, but dominant as relief pitchers. Their top-line numbers from the years they were used both ways are pretty similar:
Hughes as a starter from 2009-11: 25-14, 4.81 ERA
Hughes as a reliever from 2009-11: 6-2, 1.44 ERA
Joba as a starter from 2007-09: 12-7, 4.19 ERA
Joba as a reliever from 2007-09: 3-2, 1.50 ERA
Despite these similarities, Hughes was kept in the rotation, and Chamberlain was moved to the bullpen permanently—he never started a game after 2009. But their careers unfolded in roughly the same way. They were occasionally valuable pitchers who stuck around for about ten years, but never reached the high hopes they set in 2007. The Yankees let both leave in free agency after the 2013 season.
What’s interesting about this story is that, while it wasn’t THAT long ago, it feels like a lifetime ago in baseball eras. In 2008, the bullpen was often a team’s soft underbelly, full of marginal players, and the conventional wisdom was still that relief pitchers were just failed starters. But this example shows that even then, it wasn’t really true. Chamberlain had not “failed” as a starter—at least no more than Hughes had. It was just decided, for whatever reason,* that he would better serve the team in the bullpen.
*The reasons for these decisions are likely pretty stupid. Surely there are some guys whose stuff translates more naturally to the bullpen, but in this case I think it was ~90% about first impressions. Hughes’ first big league appearances were as a starter, so when he thrived as a reliver, it was still seen as a temporary move. Joba, on the other hand, premiered as a relief pitcher, so when he struggled as a starter, it was seen as a reliever struggling to transition to the rotation, even though he’d been a starter in college and the minors.
But if Chamberlain was seen as more “valuable” in the bullpen, he sure wasn’t paid like it! The one area where the careers of Hughes and Chamberlain really diverged was lifetime earnings. According to Baseball Reference, Hughes was paid roughly $80 million over the course of his career; Chamberlain made less than $11 million. In other words, the main effect of keeping a guy in the bullpen is wage suppression.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting any grand conspiracy by GMs or front offices to keep pitcher salaries down. Indeed, the divergent way Hughes and Chamberlain were treated shows how arbitrary the process was. But any GM or front office executive paying attention to this story would have seen the obvious lesson.
Of course, there are pitchers that nobody would ever make short relievers, no matter how much you could save on salary; guys like Max Scherzer and Clayton Kershaw are worth it at almost any price. And on the flip side, there are certainly starters whose careers are salvaged by moving to the bullpen. Zack Britton, for example, struggled for three years as a starter before becoming an elite (and well-compensated) closer. But the vast majority of pitchers exist somewhere in the middle. It’s not always clear if a guy will be more valuable as a starter or a relief pitcher—but it’s never unclear where his earning potential is highest.
As long as you could claim relief pitchers were just failed starters, then this pay disparity made some sense. But now, in 2022, that idea is harder and harder to justify. Bullpens are deeper than ever before, and being used more frequently as a result. Some of the most intimidating pitchers in baseball are guys who come into the game in the sixth inning and throw 100mph. Clearly, these are not all just fringe big leaguers or salvaged pitchers who couldn’t hack it as starters. At some developmental level, there is a decision to convert guys who could be good starters into relievers. That’s how you end up with guys like Devin Williams, Ryan Tepera, Kendall Graveman, Andrew Kittredge, Seth Lugo, Jonathan Loáisiga, and so many others—guys who are neither closers nor starters, but are still elite pitchers. It seems like every contending team now has two or three guys like this, when just a few years ago they hardly even existed.
Again, I don’t think GMs are sitting in their offices, twirling their mustaches and plotting how to pay players less. In every individual case, it’s much more innocent than that. No pitching prospect is ever a guarantee, and developing a major league starter takes a lot of work: He must develop secondary pitches, learn how to work through a lineup multiple times, build up the arm strength to throw ~180 innings a year, etc. Something could go wrong at any point, and even pitchers who ultimately pan out face setbacks. So there’s always a reason for a team to say, “Maybe this guy will be better off as a two-pitch reliever.” It’s only when you zoom out and see the larger trends that it becomes a problem.
In a piece I wrote during the lockout, I noted how this new regime affected Dellin Betances. Around the same time the Yankees were giving up on Chamberlain/Hughes, they grew impatient with Betances’ development as a starter and converted him to a reliever. The result was the kind of dominant reliever they hoped Joba would become—between 2014-19, Betances struck out 607 hitters in 373 1/3 innings. But then, right as he was about to hit free agency, he hurt his shoulder, and since then he’s thrown only 13 1/3 innings, and now he’s on a minor league deal with the Dodgers. There’s a decent chance he will never pitch in the majors again.
This might seem like a cherry-picked example… except it appears to be happening again on the very same team. Chad Green was ALSO converted to a reliever in the minors by the Yankees. He ALSO had a five-year period of dominance: Between 2017-21, he struck out 424 hitters in 322 1/3 innings. And, as if on cue, Green is ALSO experiencing a troubling dip in fastball velocity as he is poised to hit free agency this fall. Meanwhile, the team is relying more on Michael King, a former starter who has emerged as a elite relief pitcher… lather, rinse, repeat.
This is the worst part about this new system—the way it just uses pitchers up, and then discards them at seemingly the exact moment when they are poised to cash in on their performance.
But it’s also annoying for fans. This new way of using pitchers is just not as fun. They all seem like cogs in a larger machine, easily replaced and without any idiosyncrasies or personality.
When Karl Marx wrote about “proletarianization,” he wasn’t EXACTLY talking about bullpen usage in baseball, but he also wasn’t NOT talking about that either. He was predicting that capitalism would convert more and more people—peasants, artisans, small shop owners—into wage laborers. This wouldn’t happen out of any grand conspiracy, but simply because capitalism was so productive that it would inevitably concentrate more and more wealth into the hands of the ownership class, leaving those without capital with no choice but to sell their labor. In other words, it would flatten almost anyone into interchangeable cogs in the capitalist machine.
And that is precisely what seems to be happening in baseball bullpens. Relief pitchers are getting better, but the result is also that they are becoming more and more interchangeable. Throwing 99mph fastballs used to be special—now it’s typical. Strikeouts used to be exceptional—now they are expected. And young phenoms like Joba Chamberlain, who come up from the minors and seem unhittable out of the bullpen for a few weeks, used to be exciting—now they seem to come off an assembly line every few months.
None of this is the players’ fault. All they’ve done is what they’ve been asked—and they’ve done it exceptionally well. The problem is that we’ve designed the game in a way to optimize the return on capital instead of optimizing the experience for players and fans. Marx may not have been a baseball fan, but he would’ve seen this coming…