The Giants have lost consecutive extra-innings games, with the bullpen being a collective villain in both. The easiest way to notice a bullpen is when a team isn’t scoring a lot of runs, and the post-trade deadline Giants are in a bit of an offensive funk, so it takes a village to lose in extras. But the bullpen looked like it was going to be a problem entering last offseason, it looked like it was going to be a problem entering this season and it’s most certainly a problem now. If it was a lousy bullpen before, the trade deadline didn’t help much.
The Giants’ bullpen is a problem. It’s my job (and yours) to suggest solutions. However, before we start down that road, let’s consider another team’s bullpen problems first. This one’s actually fun, though.
The Dodgers have been struggling lately, with a recent seven-game losing streak and a rash of injuries. There are a lot of factors, but the bullpen is a quite prominent one, with $60 million man Edwin Díaz currently sporting a 9.82 ERA in 13 games pitched. His most recent outing was a calm, clean save in a one-run game, so maybe he’ll be at full strength by October, which is all the Dodgers really care about. But the bullpen around him has been struggling, too. Evan Phillips and Will Klein both had ERAs over 6.00 in July and then Klein landed on the IL with bone chips in his elbow. The middle innings, in general, have been a bit of a grind. It doesn’t help a bullpen’s workload that a chunk of the rotation is on the IL at any given time, either.
There are a lot of ways you can look at this:
• Good
• Love this for them
• Hope it never changes
However, you can also take a step back and appreciate how the Dodgers got here: By throwing every resource they have at their bullpen. They did exactly what the Giants didn’t: They spent, they spent some more, and they spent even more than that. They also developed their own high-leverage relievers (Edgardo Henriquez) and bamboozled other teams out of them (Klein, Alex Vesia). They were creative and proactive, willing to spend someone else’s money in the efforts to get that most elusive of baseball dreams: the trustworthy bullpen.
Yet here they are, among the great unwashed, scrambling for clean saves. There is no chaos quite like bullpen chaos, and no matter how hard the Dodgers try, every season you’ll have a great chance to watch all of private equity’s horses and all of private equity’s men try to put their bullpen back together again. “How to consistently make bullpens reliable and normal” is one of the great unsolved problems in baseball, along with player health.
Back to the Giants, where discussions of bullpen-related failures aren’t nearly as delightful. Consider the season ERAs of many of the recent bullpen stalwarts for the team:
Player
IP
ERA
23 1/3
3.09
27 2/3
2.60
40 2/3
2.88
55 2/3
3.40
I write Power Rankings every other week, which means that I often parachute into another team’s Baseball-Reference or FanGraphs page and take a quick look at the stats to get a general idea of what the team is doing. And if I looked at the Giants’ bullpen without knowing anything about it, I’d think they had problems at the back end (a dozen different pitchers with an ERA of 5.60 or higher). I’d also think their current core is shakier than their ERAs look, as that’s a poor statistic with which to evaluate relievers, and every single reliever in the above table has a much higher FIP than their ERA, suggesting that they’ve been lucky.
That’s what you’re always thinking when these folks come in, right? Here comes Mr. Horseshoe, ol’ Lucky Pants himself.
However! I would have also assumed that this bullpen was doing mostly good things. Look around at some of the contenders and compare the ERAs from their late-inning crew to the above table. Again, ERA is a horrible predictor of what a reliever is likely to do, and it’s not great even when describing what a reliever’s season has been like, but it still tells a story. ERAs that low mean that the absolute disaster outings have been limited, the complete meltdowns aren’t there. That should be a good thing.
Jason Foley took the loss for the Giants on Monday. He was one of the few free-agent signings the Giants made for their bullpen this offseason, a bet that he could be an effective reliever after rehabbing from shoulder surgery. He’s allowed five runs in eight innings since being activated off the IL. (Bob Kupbens / Imagn Images)
Instead, the entire bullpen has a remarkable capacity to share the mishaps evenly (and consistently). It’s almost inspiring. They’re a true collective. It’s always “next man up,” with a constant rotation of mostly effective relievers biffing at least one outing at the worst possible time, then resuming his business, as another mostly effective reliever steps up and biffs at least one outing at the worst possible time. It’s an egalitarian carousel of late-inning failure. Maybe it’ll get the Giants a higher draft pick next season; always look on the bright side.
So how do the Giants fix this? By hoping the bullpen sequencing gets less cursed by default? By helping the pitchers miss more bats, bringing the FIPs closer to the seemingly helpful ERAs? By spending money just like the Dodgers, which isn’t exactly likely?
No, it’s the same answer as it is for every other team: Figure it out as you go along, and don’t screw it up. The Giants are going to get a great look at Dylan Smith, whose slider shows high-leverage potential, and my prediction is that he’ll do enough to be on their 2027 Opening Day roster. The Giants will need to refine Keaton Winn’s command and help him find a bat-missing pitch other than his splitter, but he’ll be a strong candidate for next year’s bullpen, too.
And along the way, they’ll take chances on minor-league free agents and once-coveted relievers returning from injuries. They’ll make minor trades for minor leaguers, and they’ll make trades for relievers on another team’s active roster. They’ll promote prospects and convert starters to relievers when the rotation’s full, and they’ll check the waiver wire. All of it.
They’ll avoid the pricier closers, of course, and it’s morbidly amusing whenever a Giants fan calls for them to spend on a closer. This is the franchise of Mark Melancon and Armando Benítez, friend. Be careful with your words.
Which means they’re going to do the same thing as last offseason and just hope they’re better at it. While the most obvious answer of “just sign Tyler Rogers, you goobers” would have fixed plenty, they still don’t want to mess with the free-agent market. Tanner Scott, Edwin Díaz and Kirby Yates got $150 million from the Dodgers, and only Scott has worked out thus far, and it took a year of erratic nonsense to get there.
The real answer to how to build a reliable bullpen is this: Get a better lineup and a better rotation. That’s the actual answer to the bullpen riddle that plagues every team from time to time, and it’s why the Dodgers will probably be fine. They’ll cobble together enough outs from the rotation and enough runs from the lineup to win, even if the bullpen doesn’t steady itself. They’ll be fine. On account of the whole “having the best roster in baseball” strategy.
The next helpful Giants bullpen might arrive sooner than you think. Or it might not arrive for several more seasons, and you’ll quit your job and walk barefoot through the Appalachians to get away from baseball. The only way to get to that helpful bullpen, though, is to get better and more creative at finding pitchers who can prevent runs and miss bats. The Giants front office probably would have described itself as “creative at finding pitchers who can prevent runs and miss bats” before this season. They’ll need to figure out what in the heck went so wrong, but the ways they find (or build) these pitchers isn’t likely to change. They’ll just need to get better at it, or the next guys will.
In the meantime, the only guaranteed way to avoid the fate of the 2026 Dodgers is somehow to do exactly what they did: build a baseball team out of the best hitters and starting pitchers available. Anything less, and you’re leaving your fate in the hands of your bullpen every night. Giants fans could probably use a break from that.