How will Bruce Bochy’s bullpen management adjust in Texas? No more ‘quick change’

As Bruce Bochy prepares for his grand return to big-league managing, one interesting question is tucked away amidst the excitement: how will the veteran manager deal with the rule changes? No, I’m not talking about the pitch clock or the shift ban — all managers will be dealing with the league’s new rules for the first time this year, so Bochy is more or less on an even playing field. But since the last time he managed in the big leagues, there have been other rule changes, namely, the three-batter minimum for relief pitchers.

Of note: there’s not an official name for this, but for the sake of not horribly screwing up my spreadsheet headers by typing out “an appearance in which the reliever faced fewer than three batters but didn’t finish the inning, such as was outlawed and is no longer legal,” I’m going to call it a “Quick Change” for the rest of the article and the spreadsheets. I might even sling in a “QC” if I feel saucy.

I decided to see if this rule would require some habit changes for Bochy. I started by going through his last season in San Francisco (2019), game by game, looking for instances in which he had used a relief pitcher in a way that is no longer allowed [ahem] a “quick change,” if you will. The findings were interesting. Out of 587 appearances by Giants relievers in 2019, there were only 65 instances in which a pitcher faced fewer than three batters. Of those 65, there were 40 cases in which the pitcher finished the inning and one in which a pitcher was injured mid-batter and had to leave the game. That leaves just 24 quick changes for the entire year.

But when you break it down by month, it’s a bit more interesting:

March/April: 2
May: 0
June: 1
July: 0
August: 2
September: 19

My first instinct was to look up the standings — maybe Bochy was more prone to use relievers for one to two hitters at a time because the Giants were in a pennant race and every out mattered? Uhh, no. The Giants finished with a record of 77-85, a whopping 29 games out of first place in the division, and 12 games out of the second wild-card position. So what could possibly have caused such a seismic shift in usag—

Will Smith had back tightness and is dsy to day. So the Giants leaned on their relievers to win 1-0 on a night when the only two remaining opening-day relievers in the ‘pen, Watson and Smith, were unavailable. … Oh, and LA hadn’t been shut out at home since May. Woweee.

— Andrew Baggarly (@extrabaggs) September 8, 2019

Ahhh, right. The 2019 bullpen was besieged by injuries. One reliever in particular, Fernando Abad, was responsible for both August quick changes and six of the 19 times it happened in September. Abad pitched in just 16 more big-league games after that season. On Sept. 24, Bochy made three quick changes, equalling the number of times he had done it from March through July combined.

Put another way, Bochy was basically just trying to get through the season with a decimated bullpen. And while the front office did provide a little help — Tyler Rogers made his big-league debut, for example — the team was 15 games out of first place at the trade deadline. There was no real reason to acquire bullpen help, so Bochy was left to do the best he could. If the Rangers do find a way to contend in 2023 (as has been president of baseball operations Chris Young’s assertion all along) then the front office would ideally make additions at the trade deadline — the sort of additions that would prevent Bochy from having to relive that awful final month in San Francisco.

So does that mean we have the answer to our question? It’s not his style, so no problem? Well, not exactly.

This line of thinking led me a little further down the rabbit hole. After all, the Rangers aren’t hoping to recreate Bochy’s final season in San Francisco, they’re hoping to recreate his years of playoff and World Series runs. So … how did Bochy traditionally handle his bullpen when the stakes were high? It was time for some more research. A lot more research.

I started by combing over every September game in years that Bochy’s teams made the postseason — 777 relief appearances over eight years, 105 of which qualified as quick changes. But much like the 2019 season, these numbers become more interesting when you start to separate them out by year and by franchise.

Wow.

Of course, league-wide usage of bullpens changed a lot between 1996 — when Bochy’s Padres first made the playoffs — and 2010, when he first took the Giants into October. But still, that is a vast difference in the way that Bochy managed a bullpen in San Diego and how he managed one in San Francisco. Here, let’s give you those same numbers, but instead of listing all the years separately, we’ll combine his four years in each city:

We simply don’t have the manpower to comb through every single relief appearance from every MLB team over those 20 years to compare, but having watched baseball regularly since around 1988, we know that relief pitcher usage has changed drastically in the last few decades. “Moneyball” came out in 2003, and analytics have — at first gradually, and then like a tidal wave — impacted the decision-making of managers around the game. It’s not unreasonable to assume that Bochy was simply changing with the times. But it certainly does appear that he bought into that change pretty heavily when the chips were on the table.

Before we get to the conclusion: we didn’t comb through 1,364 regular-season relief appearances to simply ignore Bochy’s postseason tendencies. After all, that’s where the Rangers hope Bochy will lead them, right? So here they are — this time separated by year and totaled by franchise.

So we have the numbers, but like any good statistician, it’s probably time to ask the question: do they mean anything?

We should start by identifying causation. It would be easy to say that Bochy’s teams had the most success when he was marching out there yanking relievers out of the game with reckless abandon. Look at his time in San Diego — the one time he made more quick-change moves, the Padres went to the World Series! Of course, it could just as easily be the other way around, couldn’t it? Those 1996, 2005 and 2006 teams might just have been a bit overmatched, not really allowing Bochy any opportunity to impact the game with a heavy hand on the bullpen phone.

And it’s not a direct correlation either. The highest QC% on the chart is from 2016 when they got bounced by the Cubs — though that was the result of one bad inning (their last of the season).

Sometimes these deep dives help us bring up pearls. Other times, we come back to the surface with an incredibly-detailed description of a corner of the ocean that probably doesn’t matter much.

When Bochy was managing in San Diego, he had Trevor Hoffman lined up for the ninth inning. When he was managing in San Francisco, he had rotations that included Tim Lincecum, Matt Cain and Madison Bumgarner (and that’s to say nothing of the various lineups). The Rangers’ roster in 2023 will be an entirely different animal from either of those organizations — an animal that we don’t even know the full shape of just yet as the free-agent and trade markets heat up going into the Winter Meetings.

“I think it’s as much about the construct of the roster (as anything),” Chris Young said at the GM meetings earlier this month in Las Vegas. “It’s providing options that have versatility and can get right-handers out, left-handers out. Ultimately, Boch is a smart manager. A lot of his bullpen management and usage comes down to preparation, and he’s great at that; it’s a very important element of his success as a manager and his strategy. So I have no reason to believe that he’s not going to be able to adjust to the three-batter minimum and utilize the bullpen to the same level of success that he has previously. It’s up to us to supply him with good options.”

Not just bullpen options, either. As with just about every discussion regarding the Rangers this offseason, talk about it long enough and it’s eventually going to come back to starting pitching. The stronger the rotation, the less exhausted the bullpen will be.

And that could prove to be important, especially when a manager is adjusting to a three-batter minimum for the first time.

(Photo: Thearon W. Henderson / Getty Images)