Well, last week sucked so bad we’re now a Rays site. All the good will built up in a nice two-game sweep of the floundering Yankees is gone after three dismal losses at the hands of the Braves and a series loss to the Rockies. Ryan Church, the one Met who hasn’t been frustratingly inconsistent all year, set Tuesday’s bag of dog shit on fire, rang the doorbell and ran away with a concussion, his second in 2008. He’ll likely be heading to the DL. Awesome.

Anyway, all of that means that Willie Randolph had been sitting on the hot seat, a nice eight-game winning or losing streak away from either ending this discussion or getting fired. The popular perception is that this Mets team is under-performing its level of talent, and some of the fans and media are blaming Willie. Willie hasn’t helped himself, either, complaining about how he is portrayed on the very network his employer owns and making vague charges of racism.

Now, we all know the manager isn’t the one who lines out in consecutive at-bats to end a first-inning, bases-loaded threat; it’s the players. Any manager will tend to get credit or blame for events over which he has absolutely no control. That’s unfair, but it comes with the job.

But one area that a manager does control is his bullpen usage. When to pull a pitcher and who to replace him with, based on the situation (score, batter, inning, etc), is directly under a manager’s control. And this is one area where Willie Randolph’s decisions have been especially . . . bad. Particularly in the case of the recently DFA’d Jorge Sosa, which is still bothering me.

Now, let’s get this out of the way right now: I am in no way trying to say that Sosa was any good. Like everybody else (except Sosa himself, I guess) I was very happy when the Mets chose to DFA him and keep Joe Smith instead. Compared to 2007 when he was at least passable, in 2008 Sosa’s strikeouts were down, his walks were up, and his home runs were way up. I’m not going to show you all the graphs here because a) it’s depressing, and b) I am very lazy, but basically he got worse at everything. But why?

Well, if you look at a comparison between what Sosa’s pitches were doing in 2007 versus 2008, you can see that he had been getting similar velocity and movement on both his fastball and his omnipresent slider. His problem was with his change – the changeup that he threw almost exclusively to try to get lefties out. Not coincidentally, while Sosa’s numbers so far this year against right-handed batters had been pretty bad (.801 OPS), against lefties (1.147 OPS) they were truly awful.

Which brings us to Willie Randolph’s bullpen usage. Sosa’s particular brand of suckitude was exacerbated by the way Willie Randolph chose to use him. Sosa has had a pronounced platoon split for his entire career – he’s basically a ROOGY. But for some reason, Willie Randolph had him pitching to a whole bunch of lefties. Of the 107 batters faced by Jorge Sosa this year, more than 36% of them were left-handed.

And he wasn’t just facing punch-and-judy hitting lefties, sandwiched between two righties with the bases empty and two outs. On one memorable occasion in Chicago, Sosa was specifically brought in with two men on to face lefty Felix Pie. On the bench at that time: left-handers Schoeneweis, Feliciano, and Wagner. We’ll forgive Randolph for not using his closer in that situation, but what is Sċhœnëweίβe doing on your roster if not to get outs like that?

Compare that with Randolph’s usage of Joe Smith, who has pitched almost exclusively to righties, despite a better OPS than Sosa against both left- and right-handed batters. Or with Heilman, who’s pitched to 44 lefties this year, despite allowing them a mind-boggling 1.389 OPS.

I realize that a manager can’t afford to go matchy-matchy with every batter; at some point, every pitcher is going to have to go up against a batter from the opposite side (unless they play for Tony La Russa) and that these are awfully small sample sizes. But it seems like Willie is willfully ignoring the platoon splits for his bullpen. Or maybe, once Willie has decided whether or not a pitcher can get both lefties and righties out, he refuses to change his mind, evidence be damned.

Again, this is not to say that Sosa was a great reliever who would have been lights-out all season long if it weren’t for Randolph’s crummy decisions. His numbers against righties were pretty uninspiring, and he probably only hung around for as long as he did because “he could pitch every day.” Hey, I got a rubber arm – if the Mets want somebody to give up grand slams every day, I can do that. I’ll even work for league minimum.

You could lay some of the blame for this on Omar, because these were the pitchers that Willie was given. But Sosa should have been confined to situations that would help limit his exposure. And that’s my problem with Willie’s bullpen management: he’s not putting the relievers in a position to succeed. He isn’t using pitchers in situations that help emphasize their strengths and camouflage their weaknesses. Or worse, he seems unaware even of what his bullpen’s strengths and weaknesses are.

Thanks as always to Baseball-Reference and Josh Kalk. They know what they done.

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Jeff Mathews is a staff writer for MetsGeek whose writing can also be found at The Power of Hoodoo.

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9 Responses to “Jorge Sosa: How Did It All Go Wrong?”

1. Comment posted by littlefallsmets on May 28, 2008 at 1:27 am (#707773)

   Well, I mean, the dude learned under Joe Torre.

   Joe Torre is the Mr. Myagi of Misusing Relief Pitching.

   Willie is his Daniel-San.

   But point well taken… there’s a whole lot of situations wherein you just have to say “okay, they’re not at all what we hoped they were but they’re not THIS BAD… and Willie seems to be what took them to that next level of suck.”

   It is merely that it is a hard thing to prove conclusively.

2. Comment posted by Danny on May 28, 2008 at 9:52 am (#707838)

   I always thought Sosa’s biggest problem this year was with his fastball.

   One, he didn’t trust it or use it enough. Two, when he was forced to use it, he commanded it really poorly.

   And his slider just isn’t good enough to throw 60% of the time.

3. Comment posted by dcrockett17 on May 28, 2008 at 9:54 am (#707841)

   I don’t entirely disagree. I just wonder, in a general sense, what’s the effect size? Whatever it is, it seems swamped by the general suckitude of the relievers prior to Wagner, including but not limited to Sosa, all compounded by the brevity of a typical start.

   I’m not convinced Bobby Cox himself would do much better with this bullpen. I’m just not sure how can a manager have multiple lefty and righty specialists when almost all of them stink and you’re having to go to coax 3-4 innings out of them every night due to the starters’ general ineffectiveness or non-existent offense?

   This is one of the few instances where I’m more amenable to the whole “personality/style mismatch” hypothesis more than anything strategic.

4. Comment posted by madisonmetsfan on May 28, 2008 at 10:06 am (#707850)

   I just want to know what keys to hit to produce the German version of Show’s name.

5. Comment posted by sheadenizen on May 28, 2008 at 12:28 pm (#707989)

   after three dismal losses at the hands of the Braves

   by my count, there were 4 dismal losses to the Braves.
   I tend to agree that you can’t be pulling guys off the mound to face one batter at a time or you will quickly run out. And Willie seems to have learned how to manage Schoenweis, so he’s not totally unteachable. I think Sosa helped pitched himself off the team. It’s another example of Omar saying….well it worked last year. Let’s just do it again.

6. Comment posted by The Frito Pundito on May 28, 2008 at 12:58 pm (#708021)

   Do I read the charts correctly? Is Wagner really that much better against rightys than leftys? Weird

7. Comment posted by John Peterson on May 28, 2008 at 1:50 pm (#708095)

   This is quite the topic of late:

   The Book Blog

   Baseball Think Factory, on The Book Blog

8. Comment posted by soxy on May 28, 2008 at 3:52 pm (#708215)

   I’ve been saying something to this effect for awhile now. It seems like he puts his pitchers in a position to fail and when the succeed it’s despite him.

   I was at the Braves game when Church made that great catch against the wall to save the game. But in that case Schoenweis was in against righties when he is pretty much a LOOGY.

   During that game on 4/27 he came in and faced two lefties and got them out but then Willie left him in agains Francoeur who promptly ripped a double and then Texieria who almost hit a HR or at least a double if not for that spectacular catch.

9. Comment posted by Peter H on May 28, 2008 at 5:54 pm (#708328)

   Actually, I think Willie has done a much better job taking platoon splits into account this year. 50% of the batters Schoenweis has faced this year have been left-handed, which as good a ratio you can get from a LOOGY. 65 out of the 83 batters faced by Smith this year are right-handed.

   As Shea & dcrockett17 say, there are limits as to how much you can use guys as LOOGY/ROOGY specialists, especially when your bullpen is pitching 3 innings a night on a daily basis. You have to use some guys against both righties & lefties. Heilman has been awful against LHB this year, but he’s pitched well against them in his career overall. As your chart shows, all the other middle relievers, save Sanchez, have extreme platoon splits, so it’s not like the Mets have a lot of viable alternatives.

   As for Sosa, it’s not like Willie repeatedly used him in high-leverage sitatutions. His leverage index is sixth among Mets relievers. Basically, he was used in games when the Mets were already far behind & they needed somebody to eat up innings, so as to protect the rest of the bullpen.

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