An Inconvenient Truth

You'd never know it from listening to the corporate shills, but our bullpen is at best mediocre outside of Betances and Miller. All those "power arms" we stocked up with have been meh to worse.

Betances and Miller have pitched 28.3 innings (I don't know if this includes tonight's Miller appearance), allowed 0 earned runs, and have an ERA of 0.00. Fantastic.

Everyone else has pitched 62.6 innings, given up 22 earned runs, and have an ERA of 3.19 (don't know if Carpenter's debacle tonight is included). Not terrible, but if you take Betances and Miller away, one of the best bullpens in baseball drops to 13 out of 30. Middle of the pack, nothing special, not particularly fearsome or sharp.

Yes, that lets other teams keep the stats of their closer and 8th inning guy (if they have one) to improve their standing. So this isn't entirely fair.

But it's fair enough to show that we have a two-man bullpen and a bunch of also-ran inning eaters. Sunday's game, last night's game and today's game showed just how also-ran they are. We might be lucky we ended up 2-1 in those three, all things considered.

However, we will continue to hear that the Yankees bullpen has been stellar, with a 1.86 ERA. (Al Leiter just said so. Oh, Al.) Even though that number implies that the entire bullpen is that good.

Stating the obvious, I know, but it ain't.