With most of the early spring training talk about the Pirates being extremely positive, their bullpen is sort of the elephant in the room. Obviously Tony Watson and Mark Melancon are great and John Holdzkom was promising down the stretch last year, but the Bucs’ bullpen blew a lot of leads last year. They did so especially when asked to throw more than two or three innings in a game, which happened quite a bit with last year’s patchwork rotation. They were specifically missing was a reliever capable of working either as a situational lefty or as a bridge to the late innings after Justin Wilson dropped off from his 2013 breakout. Wilson was summarily traded to the Yankees, officially opening his spot in the bullpen.
Enter Antonio Bastardo. Bastardo has been up and down in his career in Philadelphia, with much of the “down” being tied to a high walk rate and a high fly-ball rate that leads to a relatively high home run rate. He strikes out a ton of hitters, though, (324 in 259 career innings), he’s equally tough on lefties (career .621 OPS against) and righties (.644), and he’s had a couple of excellent years in Philadelphia. If you assume that Ray Searage and Jim Benedict can help his control (they seem to be able to help most pitchers’ control) and move Bastardo from the hitter-friendly Citizen’s Bank Park to the pitcher-friendly PNC Park, you can see exactly how Bastardo can improve into a really good reliever in 2015 without assuming that Searage and Benedict will work their magic to get more ground balls out of Bastardo.
It’s entirely possible, of course, that the Pirates have some roadmap to make Bastardo more of a ground ball pitcher. They’ve had their eye on him before, and I tend to assume that whenever they show extended interest in a pitcher, it’s because they see something that they can work with. That being said, I sort of like the fact that Bastardo doesn’t slot as neatly into the Pirates’ general vision for a pitching staff as you might expect. It suggests that the club isn’t going to be a slave to their own internal dogma about pitching; Bastardo is a pretty good reliever that will be helped by a change in circumstance in a similar way that AJ Burnett was on his first trip to Pittsburgh, he fills a role that the Pirates need, and so they went out and got him despite the fact that he’s only got a ~30% ground ball rate. I like to see that sort of flexibility in thinking, and I think the team will be better off for it.
<500 is an ongoing series previewing 2015 for each key Pirate in fewer than 500 words.
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