I think the biggest difference is he had more money to allocate to relief pitching in '04 than in '03. They kept scraping the bottom of the barrel from ST on through the trading deadline in '03, trying to find bargain basement deals. In '04 they went out and picked up Tavarez and traded for Ray King.

We also got much almost twice as many innings out of Isringhausen in '04 (75.1 vs 42), and Kline had a bit of a down year in '03 (3.82 ERA), but bounced back nicely in '04 (1.79 ERA).

Without reading the article, it's clear that the Cardinals were horribly unlucky, personnel-wise, in 2003 and extremely lucky in 2005.

Much of the time health dictates who will pitch a lot of innings out of the bullpen, and then sometimes it's just a matter of which random, replaceable staff filler has a good year instead of a bad year. We were just as likely to get the 5.39era 2002 Julian Tavarez last year as the one we ended up getting---the 2.38 version. Similarly, Steve Kline, after two mediocre seasons, regained his excellent form of 2001.

Then we had Izzy for sixty-some games last year, instead of just 40 as the year before, Calero recovered nicely from his exploded knee from June 2003,

Jocketty has to be given credit for acquiring the consistent arm of Ray King in the Drew deal after rolling the dice and failing on such projects as Esteban Yan, Russ Springer and Pedro Borbon. But then again, he DID roll the dice on those guys in first place, and on lance Painter and Al Levine, etc. etc., apparently choosing the quantity-over-quality method of building a bullpen. That he was smart enough to learn his lesson for 2004 is to his credit, but again, the pen stayed relatively healthy (as did the rotation, putting less pressure on the pen) and the team was served by the type of bounce-back seasons from a couple of veterans who could just as likely have tanked that make you realize that sometimes, as Joaquin Andujar said, "you never know."

That's a nice piece. I more or less skimmed it, but I didn't see any mention of at least one crucial piece of difference in bullpen performance between 2003 and 2004, and that is the performance of the rotation.

It was difficult also to make much sense of how much work the bullpen did in each year, since those main numbers were "sans Izzy" and Izzy was hurt for so long in the beginning of 2003. It appeared that the 2003 bullpen was used a lot more.

I guess I'd like to know if we leaned on the bullpen more in 2003 (because of a weaker rotation than 2004) and also what kind of situations (inhereted baserunners as well as average # innings before first bullpen pitcher appears) they faced as compared to 2004 -- the whole darn team was better. That will probably be impossible to easily compare because of the Izzy factor.

It will be interesting to see by how much the BP comes back down to earth next season.

Ryan, I looked into the starter question when commenting on GUB. The starters in 2004 only pitched 17 or so more innings than in 2003, but had an ERA nearly a half-point lower. Also, there were no significant injuries (except for Carpenter for about 2½ weeks in September, when rosters were expanded) or long periods of poor performance in the rotation like there were in 2003. Those non-bullpen problems had to have played at least a small part in the relief pitching disaster that was 2003.

I noticed the same thing MO Boiler... I checked that expecting to find a significantly higher number of innings pitched by the '04 rotation than the '03 rotation, but just now as I read your comment, I remembered something. You also have to keep in mind that even when a reliever makes a start, it counts as a start, yet it depletes the bullpen. In '04, our main 5 starters combined for 154 starts and 963 IP. In '03, the top 5 guys managed 135 starts and 840.1 IP. Now, that's a little misleading, as I included Simo as the 5th guy, when he only got 2 more starts and 12.2 more innings than Haren, but still it shows that there were some inconsistendcies in the rotation, and you'll remember that Calero had a start, and Fassero had (gasp) 6.

Actually, I probably would've included Haren in the '03 estimate, because when he was on the team, he was primarily used as a starter (I believe he effectively took Simo's place in the rotation after August 1 or so) -- so the difference isn't quite as substantial as the 120 IP you cited, but it's still plenty -- especially when you note the Cards pitched 10 less innings in 2004 as a team (i.e. added in to the difference).

John, you'll have a hard time convincing me money was the difference. Aside from Isringhausen, the Cards didn't spend that much more money on the pen in 2004 than in 2003. Fassero made $1.25 million (plus another quarter million buyout), and they wasted a couple million on Hermanson, Levine, Hamilton and a couple other projects.

Salvo, I'm uncomfortable attributing most of the difference to luck. A bullpen strategy based on Fassero, Hermanson, Springer, Eldred, Painter, Levine/Hamilton and maybe some minor league free agents sounded like a bad idea from the outset. There's an obvious pattern to that that 2003 crew BTW, almost like the Cardinals made a conscious decision to go bargain-hunting for pitchers coming off injuries. That might not be a bad idea, except that Levine was the only guy in that group who had been decent in the last five years, and they cut Levine after realizing he just throws slop.

Rob, I agree with your comment about "luck," and I wasn't trying to suggest that's all there is to it. My point was that a lot of factors went into the enormous swing from '03 to '04, and I believe, as I stated, that "luck" played a part when it came to getting the kinds of performances we did from Kline and Tavarez (who could have turned in the same types of less-than-stellar performances they had in recent years).

I did take Jocketty to task for attempting the "quantity over quality" method in 2003, and credited him with "learning from his mistake" by acquiring a guy like Ray King, who had pitched consistently well for years.

That said, if Kline, for example, had pitched as well in 2003 as he had in 2004, or as poorly in 2004 as he had in 2003, neither of those years' bullpen totals would have seemed as extreme (good or bad), hence the Joaquin Andujar tagline.

You're right Rob, it does seem like they spent about the same amount on the bullpen in both years. Maybe the difference in strategy could be attributed to the market then? Perhaps in '03, there wasn't anybody on the market that Jocketty liked enough to throw a couple mil at, so they decided to throw a half-mil at 4 or 5 guys and hope one of them came out worth the sum of their salaries. I could go back and find a list of free agent relievers from December '02, but I'm too lazy, and besides that wouldn't do much good, because we would have no idea why Jocketty might have avoided apparently good options that were right in front of him.