Items to fix in a ballclub

[Torridd]

Concerning the Baseball America critique of our bullpen, it made me wonder if the bullpen is actually the easiest thing to "fix" on a team. How would you assess the difficulties in resolving the problems of a ball club? How would you rate creating success from, let's say, offense, defense, starting pitching, relief, catching (throwing out runners, sync with the pitcher), which I think should have a separate defense category from the rest, on a 1-5 model with 1 the hardest? Please add any that I may have missed. Is fixing these problems mostly about money? I would say that improving the bullpen, although not necessarily easy, is probably the easiest to fix other than finding a competent catcher.

[BTH]

From most difficult to least difficult:

1- Starting Pitching

2- Offense

3- Bullpen

4- Defense

5- Catching

 

There are only 2 catchers at the major league level, so I think that makes it the least difficult to fix. Defense can be taught to a certain extent. The others require more work, and starting pitching is most valuable, followed by offense, and then bullpen.

[Pancake Bear]

Depends how much of the bullpen needs fixing. One guy? Multiple guys? The closer? The degree of difficulty in fixing it will depend on just how much needs fixing. 

[sammyscioscia]

I'm assuming this is based on the law of averages so, based on that, offense is easier than second hardest, bats are a major surplus compared to starting pitching.  Position players outlast pitchers careers way more often, also get injured less seriously than pitchers (pitchers are more fragile, especially SP), so that makes defense easier to address, as well as offense.   And bullpens are so unpredictable, they should be 2nd most difficult as they require the most tweaking before and during the season.  Not sure why catching isn't just bundled into defense and offense.

1- Starting Pitching

3- Bullpen

2- Offense

4- Defense

5- Catching

 

[greginpsca]

Nothing is easy to fix if you don't have the resources to make those changes. Like prospects or trade chips on the mlb roster. Then there is money. Some teams , like the Angels, try to buy their way to make fixes. Teams that don't have the money, so they heavily depend on the draft. That is why a team like KC takes so long in a rebuild. And remember the Astro's tanking years?

[Angelsjunky]

A baseball team is a holistic entity. You can fix the defense, but it could be at the expense of the hitting. So I don't think you can really rank them like this because of the interconnectivity of the parts.

That said, the bullpen is, indeed, the easiest component to fix, and also the least important to a team's overall success. 

If we were to artificially separate the components of a team into percentages, I'd say that it is something like this:

Hitting 50%

Rotation 25-30%

Bullpen 10-15%

Defense 10%

The only factual basis is that scoring runs (hitting) is half of what a team does, and preventing runs (everything else) is the other half. 

The problem with this approach is that it doesn't take into account psychology or the interconnectivity I mentioned. Having a piss-poor rotation puts extra pressure on the bullpen; a poor defense puts pressure on the rest of the team. Not scoring any runs puts pressure on the pitching. Etc. Related to this, while things tend to average out over a whole season, there's also some degree of intangibles that come into play: luck, managing, timely hitting, etc.

Furthermore, the importance of the bullpen is relative to the rotation and can vary, thus the ranges I offered. If the rotation, on average, pitches 5-6 innings that means the bullpen needs to pitch 3-4, so is more important than the 30/10 split - more like 25/15. But if you have a great rotation like the 2019 Nationals, the bullpen is less important (and theirs sucked and they won the WS anyways).

All things tolled, a good recipe for success is to be at least solid in every aspect of the game and excel in one or two areas.