Bullpen Usage & Reliever Ratings, or BURR, is an idea that Flowers and Mans have been playing around with since the 2017 season. The reason for their focus is simply that bullpens are a more important part of the modern game than ever before. You know what we mean. Whereas at one time starting pitchers threw 220 innings, then 200… now 180 is the new baseline for upper end hurlers. Starting pitchers just don’t deep into games any more. Plenty of teams are using The Opener, further limiting the innings out of the starting rotation. The facts are obvious to all. Starting pitchers simply do not eat up as many innings as they used to, so we need to be more focused on bullpen in the game of fantasy baseball.
WHY IS THERE A NEED FOR BURR?
Our understanding of bullpens needs to grow/improve since the men that relieve are throwing more innings and, therefore, they are growing in importance in the game of baseball.
1 – Bullpens are throwing more innings than ever before. Here’s the amount of innings thrown by relievers the last 10 seasons. Check out the massive explosion in innings the last few seasons, especially in 2017.
Bullpen Innings | |
2009 | 15,014.2 |
2010 | 14,244.1 |
2011 | 14,228.0 |
2012 | 14,737.2 |
2013 | 14,977.0 |
2014 | 14,261.2 |
2015 | 15,184.1 |
2016 | 15,893.2 |
2017 | 16,469.2 |
2018 | 17,422.1 |
2019 | 18,265.2 |
2020 | Covid |
2021 | 18,212.2 |
2022 | 17,776.0 |
2023 | 18,103.1 |
16,000 innings were hit for the first time in 2017.
A year later they hit 17,000 for the first time.
A year later they hit 18,000 for the first time.
Flat out… bullpens matter a ton in all types of fantasy play.
Bullpens matter a massive amount in the DFS game – or in daily lineup change leagues – where you are looking at just one outing meaning everything. Let me ask you daily players… do you look at the bullpen when you set your lineup each day?
I’m going to bet that while you might, you don’t really use bullpens as a deciding factor when splitting those hairs for your starting lineup, right?
You worry a lot about batting orders trying to get that extra plate appearances, right?
You need to factor in bullpens in as strongly when setting those lineups accounting for the relative strength, or weakness, of the staff you are asking your hitters to face. It’s great to face a Cole Irvin type of starting pitcher, but what if the bullpen is nails? Do you factor that in to your decision, or are you merely looking at the starting pitcher matchup? If a team’s pen is struggling, that’s a significant advantage given that pens are throwing more innings than ever. What if the pen is mowing batters down?
It’s not just about those season long leagues that set their lineups daily either. Those of you in weekly setups can benefit from BURR as well. If you see a 4-game set coming up with a team that has a bullpen to exploit, fill your lineup with batters against that unit. If there’s a 4-game set against a team with dominators, perhaps it’s time to fade the batters that week.
More innings for pens equals more attention needed when analyzing matchups. Hence the need for BURR.
WHAT DOES BURR RECORD?
It’s a somewhat lame name that we came up with, blame Mans (actually it was equally Jeff and Ray’s fault), but what it represents is illuminating.
We will start out with the simple fact that BURR isn’t overly complicated. Everyone loves WAR, thinks it’s great, but I’m here to tell you that 99.82 percent of folks that use it have zero idea how to figure it out. Even if you look at the equation, you’re no closer to understanding it.
BURR is different.
BURR takes into account 14 different categories for bullpens. The measure takes into account categories such as workload/usage, save success, strike and walk rates, batted ball data etc. It is pretty darn comprehensive if we do say so ourselves.
HOW DO YOU READ BURR?
BURR attempts to record/represent the value of those bullpens by taking into account those 14 different categories for bullpens, and then puts those numbers into the context of league average before giving one, easily readable number. Here is the key to use with what you read below.
Under 1.00 = Any number under the league average is a negative for the bullpen and a positive for the batter. Any number under 1.00 is a bullpen to attack for the offense.
1.00 = The league average
Above 1.00 = Any number above the league average is a positive for the bullpen and a negative for the batter. Any number above 1.00 is a bullpen to avoid for the offense (RED).
THE HIGHER THE NUMBER THE BETTER THE BULLPEN AND THE WORSE IT IS FOR THE BATTER.
TWO ISSUES TO ADDRESS IN-SEASON
(1) There might be short periods of time when a bullpen doesn’t allow a homer over the period of time being reviewed. To be clear, with BURR, that short period of time is 14 days. When you have a zero in a category, there is no way to compare it to the league average (0.00/1.25 as an example gets you an answer of zero). In that situation, the fairest way to deal with the situation is to give the team…? We’ve decided to do the following. We’re going to award the team that hasn’t allowed a homer a mark of 1.50 for each of the HR/9 and the HR/FB category. In addition, saves can be an issue. If a team doesn’t post a save in the period under review, I will list their mark for the period being reviewed as 0.50.
(2) Because of the vagaries of the home run, we could artificially adjust the numbers, again what happens if we’ve got a period with zeros, but that seems counterintuitive. As such, we’ve decided to do the following. (A) We will remove the two homer columns if we are looking at 14 days of time meaning that BURR will cover 12 categories when looking at two weeks. (2) When looking at 30 days, or the entire season, we will add those two cats back in, to get to our original total of 14 categories.
TO PURCHASE THE GOODS
Both the SMASH Report and the ADVANTAGE Score can be found exclusively at Elite Data (you can find links to the report if you go to the top of the page, hover over ELITE DATA and then scroll down to MLB PLUS).
Both reports are part of the MLB Data Plus package at Fantasy Guru. You also get access to the BURR Report (Bullpen Usage and Reliever Rating, the Bullpen Usage Chart, Projected Data, DFS Projections and more.
HERE IS THE LINK YOU NEED TO GAIN ACCESS TO BURR.
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