First,  this Ken Davidoff column about the swagger that comes from having three pitchers that are lights out, such as the Blue Jays and the Rays had this past season.  The Yankees want to own that feeling instead of heading into those teams ballparks knowing they weren’t going to have a chance to breath for the next three games.  Now, they thought they had that this past season, but the freak accident to Chien-Ming Wang and the decline of Pettitte lacked the fear-inducing power that a Beckett-Matsuzaka-Lester combo did last year.  Now for a moment, think about how many NL teams have a 1-2-3 combo.  Not many.  The Cubs and the Dodgers might have had three truly strong pitchers, but once you get past that, well you find strong 1-2’s but then a huge drop off to three.  Think Diamondbacks and Mets.  Even the Cubs and Dodgers weren’t season long swagger filled 1-2-3’s, but came to that near the end.  Its the lack of 1-2-3 types of rotations that lead to no clearly strong teams, as weaker pitchers are consistently going to give u 3-5 runs, and two going against each other are going to give games back to other team.  That could be one reason why there are so many teams that never get far away from the .500 mark in the National League.  That third pitcher is the difference maker.

As for bullpens, Ben Shpigel writes about the Mets and their sad bullpen.  A couple of weeks ago, a story came out that said the Mets might bring all their bullpen pitchers back despite the number of games that they helped decide in the last couple of weeks of the season.  The bullpen’s inability to hold the lead was a big part of their collapse this season.  That article was one part filling newspaper space, one part temperature taking for the fans and one-part PR put out to make getting relief pitchers through trade easier and cheaper.  Shpigel’s article lays out the problems with keeping those pitchers even in very clear-cut roles and with trading them away.  He gets it right when he says the top-notch closer doesn’t help if the next best pitcher in the bullpen is a big step down.  The lead will be blown long before you get to the closer, as Mets fans can tell you from the last two seasons.  The real problem for the Mets is that they have some very young arms which might be fine stepping into specific roles, and most likely they will be called upon to fill holes rather than to be part of the plan, but its hard to really know their effectiveness.  The veterans who were quite unpredictable last year have less value in the trade market and to the Mets themselves.  I would be bet the team has a couple of guys reviewing statistics trying to find specific situations where any one of those guys were clearly successful. That point of success could either become  selling point to a team looking for say a two-out runners on specialist, or it could simply help the Mets organization know who to go to when.  The big stat the Shpigel points out that is significant, though any fan watching might have been able to guess, is that the Mets bullpen had an average of .89 innings per relief appearance, the second lowest in the Majors, and second to the Cardinals.  The Cardinals though had very specific roles for their guys, where the Mets just seemed to be randomly trying anything.  The Mets also lead the Majors with 3.44 relief appearances again.  The Mets clearly have to get a closer, but they need to make sure that the money spent on that person isn’t wasted by the mediocre players used between the starter and the closer.  And it takes some very smart folks, and a lot of careful maneuvering to head into a season feeling like you know who those pieces might be.