no. i'm not saying it is the only reason, but it could be a contributing factor. it does stand up to scrutiny
i'm not saying the bullpen was crap, but at 540 inning pitched, if other teams have mercy on you during a blowout and spare you 10 runs (1 per 16 games) over the course the of season, they save you from having a 3.5 ERA which over the history of baseball might drop you out of the top 50, 100, whatever. and also maybe not too many bullpens pitch 540 innings. so you just end up being the 7th best bullpen on a team with crappy starters.
the fifth in the league ranking is better and more relevant. the 7th all time thing is one of those stupid overly defined stats
the workload makes the achievement impressive. but that is counteracted by the laying down effect. i dont know which effect is stronger. and i'm pretty sure you didnt figure it out in the less than two minutes it took you to reply to my post. so i think you need to scrutinize it a little bit
I really don't, and here's why: time and time again, it has been shown that, on average, there is no "clutch" hitting in baseball. That works both ways: the majority of players don't step it up in critical situations or shrink in them, nor is that the case in non-critical situations. Baseball is not like other sports, like football and basketball, where for multiple reasons (including the physically exhausting nature of the sport) people often "let up" on obviously inferior opponents. In baseball, teams are encouraged to score as many runs as they can, however they can, with minor exceptions like not stealing when you're up by ten runs (incidentally, stealing is rarely a good strategy unless you're really good at it, so this may actually be HELPING these teams). If that were not the case, we would see fewer runs scored, on average, in later innings (since in any blowout teams should be "laying down" around that time). In fact we do not see that at all: the only inning in which more runs are scored is the first, and when you break down the data you find that that's only because leadoff hitters tend to have really high OBPs and score a few percentage points more frequently than other hitters on average (which only really matters in the first inning).
You'd have a
much stronger argument if you were talking about the pitching side of things, as (again for physical reasons) teams frequently will let their B or C level relievers pitch in games that are not close, and/or take out their starters earlier in these games. This in part helps explain why the losing team sometimes seems to be able to score more runs in blowouts than in close games. But the only reason for that is because for pitchers, time spent in the game is (or at least is thought to be) directly related to their effectiveness and in how many games they can appear. For batters, that's not a real consideration. That also, if anything, should make the bullpen's achievement
more impressive--if, according to you, we were on the losing end of so many blowouts, it is a credit to our bullpen that even our "B team" of relievers managed to do pretty damn well.
I could keep going, or I could point to a bunch of other teams with poor offense and defense but lousy bullpens, but I don't know if it's really worth it. Ultimately, even if you were right (which I would say there's a > 99% chance you're not), the bullpen can only pitch to the hitters it faces. You can't "blame" them for pitching behind a crappy rotation and/or anemic offense.
