The All-Star Break is four days long. The Pirates have four All-Stars. This is a meaningless coincidence, but I have started series on far flimsier grounds. Welcome to Four All-Stars in Four Days.
When I was a kid that devoured Pirate lore like a hung-over Pac-Man in a maze full of bacon pellets, there was always one stat line that stood out to me above almost any other one. It was so random and so weird that it felt alien, like it had come from a world that couldn’t possibly exist anymore. It was Roy Face’s 18-1 out of the bullpen season in 1959, and to be frank, it still kind of blows me out of the water today.
Now, obviously a lot of that record is context and a lot of it is a relic of a bygone era of relief pitching, but it was a big deal at the time. In my favorite Pirate VHS tape to cite when I tell these stories, Battlin’ Bucs: The first 100 years of the Pittsburgh Pirates, there’s a clip of Roy Face on the Ed Sullivan Show (presumably around the time of the 1960 World Series), explaining how he threw his forkball. As a child of the early 90s, I knew of two appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show: Roy Face, and the Beatles.
The reason that Roy Face stands out is because he’s an outlier. He was one of the very first closers and the Pirates of the late 50s and early 60s used him in a way that even the firemen of the years ahead of him weren’t used (compare his usage in the late 50s to even, say, Kent Tekulve). That 18-1 record can’t be matched by a reliever (or by anyone, probably) and it’s always going to stand out and catch the eye of anyone that sees it. I don’t know if I’d say that Melancon’s an outlier, necessarily, but he’s certainly a unique pitcher that’s had a fantastic and fascinating career with the Pirates.
The Pirates have a pretty clear organizational philosophy when it comes to relief pitchers, and it’s that relievers are a replenishable resource. In order to be a good reliever, you need to be able to throw hard, you need a second pitch, and you need to be able to chuck those two pitches in the general direction of the strike zone. The Pirates have found good relievers in countless places during the Neal Huntington era; the dumpster of free agency, the waiver wire, the Rule 5 draft, independent baseball, out clauses in contracts, trade throw-ins, the draft, converted starters just laying around in their own system, etc. etc. etc. The Pirates find these guys, straighten them out, put them on the mound for as long as they hold out, and then find someone else when they burn out. That’s harsh, but it’s the reality of the bullpen in a small market.
For some wider context, let’s look at FanGraphs’ reliever WAR standings since the beginning of Melancon’s Pirate career in 2013. There are a total of 25 relievers that have a total of 2.5 WAR over these past 2 1/2 seasons. That’s less than one reliever per team that’s been able to average one win above replacement for 2 1/2 years. Melancon is sixth on that list, behind Aroldis Chapman, Kenley Jansen, Greg Holland, Koji Uehara, and Craig Kimbrel. Those six and Dellin Betances are the only relievers to average two wins above replacement over the last 2 1/2 seasons.
Melancon’s reliability over these last two years has been incredible. His ERA has been between 1.39 and 1.90 in these three years, his walk rate has been below 2.0/9 innings and his groundball rate is always around 60%. His strikeout rate has been pretty consistent at just about a strikeout per inning, except for his slump at the beginning of this season. And speaking of that slump: by pretty much all indications, he’s back. His strikeouts are back, and his walks and ground balls are right where they’ve always been. His velocity is back, his arm slot is back. For most relievers, diminished velocity and a funky arm slot is worse than a disaster. For Melancon, it was just a hiccup.
Of course, a reliever that dominates over a several year span is rare, but not it’s obviously not necessarily unique. Melancon’s only sixth on the WAR list, after all. The way Melancon’s gone about it, though, doesn’t fit in with what we expect from a dominant reliever in 2015. Let’s use those same seven relievers above (Chapman, Jansen, Holland, Uehara, Kimbrel, Melancon, and Betances) and just look at their strikeout rates:
- Aroldis Chapman: 16.43 K/9
- Kenley Jansen: 13.74 K/9
- Greg Holland: 12.92 K/9
- Koji Uehara: 11.43 K/9
- Craig Kimbrel: 13.39 K/9
- Mark Melancon: 8.37 K/9
- Dellin Betances: 14.07 K/9
Melancon is 66th in strikeout rate out of relievers that have thrown at least 120 innings since the beginning of 2013. We’re watching an incredibly strikeout heavy era of baseball, and relievers tend to have higher strikeout rates than starters for obvious reasons. Melancon has been one of the very best relievers in baseball in recent years (you can make a strong argument that he’s better than sixth, because FanGraphs pitcher WAR is based on FIP and FIP likely underestimates ground-ball heavy pitchers some) without an overwhelming strikeout rate. It’s been an incredible performance over the last 2 1/2 years, and it’s something worth appreciating this All-Star Break
Photo by Jared Wickerham/Getty Images
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