Estevez will be battling it out with incumbent Jimmy Herget, who had the second-most saves behind Iglesias last season Herget boasts some perfectly cromulent numbers as a late-inning reliever but without the strikeout flash you’d hope for in a closer, punching out just under 24% of batters faced. Estevez seems like the favorite to assume the bulk of closer duties, as it’s a role he stepped into at times in Colorado, and his career ERA of 3.57 away from Coors indicates his stuff–an upper-90s fastball with ride and a late-breaking slider–should play better when regularly thrown at sea level. Having traded away their closer, Raisel Iglesias, at last year’s trade deadline, it appears the Angels will be going with a closer-by-committee model, much to the frustration of fantasy baseball fans everywhere. In the first week of December they made their first major move to address the bullpen, offering a two-year big-league contract to Carlos Estevez, who’s had a journey surviving the Rockies that falls just short of Joel and Ellie’s in The Last of Us shortly after that, they signed former Guardians farmhand Justin Garza and veteran Matt Moore to one-year contracts.
However, this was a poor year for free agent relief pitching, with the best names flying off the board in a matter of days, so instead of going all-in at the top of the market, the Angels immediately went dumpster-diving, signing a plethora of also-rans and fringe arms– Jacob Webb, Chris Devenski, Jonathan Holder, Nash Walters, and Cesar Valdez–to minor-league contracts.
You’d expect a team that had a 2022 starting staff that put up solid numbers only to be felled by the league’s fifth-worst bullpen by fWAR to go out that off-season and load up on relief pitchers, generally the most plentiful and least expensive resource available in free agency.
0 kommentar(er)
