With Devin Williams Sidelined, Pat Murphy's Bullpen Management Must Balance Matchups and Mentality

Pat Murphy has handled plenty of adversity in his 30-plus years of coaching. Losing players to injury is nothing new.

“You’re going to get dealt some cards that are not face cards,” he said in his first media session since the baseball world learned that Devin Williams will miss at least three months with stress fractures in his vertebrae.

Still, losing the best closer in baseball for an extended stretch is a gut punch.

“This hurts immensely,” Murphy said.

There’s a wide range of potential outcomes in the bullpen without Williams. The Brewers have enough arms with great raw stuff that they could survive in his absence. It’s hard for any team to rival the power arms of Trevor Megill, Abner Uribe, and Elvis Peguero, all of whom generate exceptional movement in addition to their premier velocity.

At the same time, the club has very few relievers who have proven themselves in high-leverage work over a full season. Beyond 33-year-old Hoby Milner, the track records in the bullpen are short. The Brewers already had enough uncertainty at various positions. They didn't need more.

The team is worse off without Williams, who blew just three save opportunities in 2023 and allowed earned runs in just six of his 61 appearances. Williams is so automatic in the ninth inning that anyone else will be a downgrade. Losing him also shakes up the bullpen hierarchy, leaving the Brewers’ first-year manager with a new challenge of finding the best way to line up his arms in the late innings.

Murphy’s preference is a closer-by-committee approach. He sees no need to handcuff himself by locking any of his relievers into a particular role or inning.

“I got this vision of this fireman’s hat that we’re passing onto different relievers every night,” he quipped.

Murphy likes the flexibility afforded by the committee arrangement. In particular, it gives him the ability to use his best reliever in the highest-leverage spot of the game, even if it comes before the ninth inning.

“It sometimes behooves you to say, in this situation, you might be better off being a little situational about it,” he said. “It’d be like, okay, the leverage is right now in the seventh. The biggest leverage right now is in the eighth. Worry about the ninth when we get there.”

While that sounds like the ideal setup on paper, it rarely holds up in practice. History shows that pitchers and managers gravitate toward defined roles, even if the original intent is to avoid them. Bullpens that begin as committees typically end up with a clear ninth-inning closer, an eighth-inning setup man, and a seventh-inning guy.

Murphy recognizes that such a structure is hard-wired into the game. He has a theory as to why it happens. It starts the first time the best reliever in an unstructured bullpen records the final three outs of a win. He began by setting the scene of the late innings in a close game.

“Everybody’s using their best arms [in the final three innings],” Murphy explained, “so there’s less runs scored in close ballgames.”

The initial ordering of relievers can be based on matchups. If those who throw the seventh and eighth work clean innings, no need arises to deviate from that order. The pitcher on standby as the fireman has yet to appear in the game.

“Nothing happened in the seventh. Nothing happened in the eighth. Okay, where is the situation for this guy?” Murphy asked rhetorically. “Well, we got to use him now, so it’s the ninth.”

If the situation repeats itself a couple of times, and the final pitcher successfully closes the game each time, it becomes harder for the player and the manager to separate him from that role. Murphy is a firm believer that the last three outs carry an added mental gravity, and it’s challenging to remove someone from that situation once they’ve proved they can handle it.

“The last three outs [mentality is] real. It’s different. The guy’s done it. He’s done it twice. He’s done it three times.”

All of a sudden, that pitcher has adopted the mindset of a closer.

“All the outside influences start telling them, ‘You’re the closer now.’”

There you have it. What started as a closer-by-committee setup is now a traditionally-structured bullpen.

The process all comes back to the prestige (and the money) that has become associated with recording the last three outs of a close win. So long as the strict closer role continues to be adulated by fans, the media, and baseball’s salary arbitration system, a reliever’s natural gravitation toward it will remain.

Murphy thinks the lack of experience in his bullpen could work to the club’s advantage in that regard. He’s hopeful that his young relievers will be able to maintain a broader perspective than that of veterans who have grown accustomed to stricter roles.

“I think our group in there, we’re young enough [that] I think we can understand, tonight it’s one guy, the next night it’s another guy.”

Despite what Murphy says about flexibility, the bullpen is likely to follow the more common path he described, in which the top relievers settle into specific innings. He probably knows it’s true, even if he won’t say it outright.

The real takeaway is that Murphy thinks deeply about these aspects of managing. He has an understanding of both strategy and mentality as it pertains to managing a bullpen. He'll need it as he tries to help this group find its stride without Williams as the anchor.