The Cincinnati Reds had the best bullpen in baseball last year.
Among all major league bullpens, the Reds ranked first in ERA, saves, earned runs and runs allowed. Additionally, the bullpen finished in the top five in wins, BAA, OBPa, SLGa, OPSa and K/9 (per ESPN.com).
This year, the bullpen will have something to prove with the subtraction of Aroldis Chapman, who will be taking his talents to the starting rotation.
The team addressed this with the re-signing of Jonathan Broxton and the recent signing of Manny Para.
The Reds have re-tooled their bullpen a little bit in their last couple of months, but they still have a plethora of trustworthy arms.
One stat I will use repeatedly throughout this article is average leverage index or aLI.
According to Baseball-Reference, average leverage index is a measure of “the average amount of pressure the pitcher or batter saw in this game or season.” With 1.00 being average pressure, anything below 1.00 signifies low pressure anything above is indicative of a high-pressure situation.
Without further adieu, here’s the entire Reds’ bullpen ranked in order of their reliability.
Bullpen based on MLBdephcharts.com.
All stats courtesy of Baseball-Reference.com unless otherwise noted.