You Don't Target Middle Relief, It Just Happens

Sometimes being lucky is better than being good. Twice in this offseason, Omar has chosen to do without a good reliever, and twice he has gotten lucky by getting him back. Like Blake McGinley before him, Orber Moreno is still a Met.

The New York Mets announced today that they have signed righthanded pitcher Orber Moreno to a minor league contract and invited him to major league spring training camp.

While I wasn't happy with the decision of non-tendering Moreno, I have been pleasently surprised with Omar's approach to building the bullpen. You see, most fans believe that throwing money at "Proven Veteran Reliever" in the mold of Mike Stanton and Steve Kline is the way to a reliable bullpen, but as Peter Gammons shows us, that is not always the case. For the most part, relievers are unreliable, so for a team with limited resources [everybody but the Yankees] it makes little sense to commit $3 million for a guy like Weathers when guys who can do the same job are available at the minimum down in the minors. Avkash, of the excellent but now defunct Met blog the raindrops, tells us what smart organizations should be doing in light of these circumstances:

[What] a smart organization does in light of the unpredictable nature of bullpens [is to collect] a bunch of young, cheap, and interchangeable arms with good predictive indicators, i.e. strikeout rates. You then mix and match until you find something that works.

Obviously, its hard to imagine a team with a rookie manager in a big city like New York employing this strategy. With that in mind, a better strategy would be to target guys who have are above average but had off years, sign them to $1M contracts and reap the benefits of their regressions to the mean. With an excellent pitching coach, a pretty good pitcher's park and a CF that catches everything, there is no reason not to follow the model these guys having been using successfully for more than a decade now.