A Modest Addition for a Modest Cost.
The Astros acquired Kendall Graveman at the trade deadline to boost a beleaguered bullpen. The story of 2021 repeats itself in 2023. If Graveman and Martin Maldonado team up for a strike ‘em out, throw ‘em out double play to win the clinching game of the ALCS, I wouldn’t be opposed to it.
Of course, it is different than in 2021, and not just because Carlos Correa will not be on the end of any potential Graveman-Maldonado double plays this October.
Graveman is a much more modest addition in 2023 than he was in 2021. In 2021, Graveman quickly picked up the role as team’s 8th inning setup man for Ryan Pressly. This year, he will slot behind Bryan Abreu and Hector Neris as setup men, and likely behind Phil Maton.
A Worse Track Record in 2021
Graveman’s performance this season is worse than it was in 2021. You can see this in the chart below, which shows Graveman’s stats from 2021 with Seattle (in 33 innings) and in 2023 with the White Sox (44 innings).
Graveman is striking out fewer batters, walking more, and allowing a higher rate of home runs. None is ideal, and, as a result, his FIP is 4.85.1 This is obviously worrisome to us Astros fans.
Throw Strikes, Kendall
The biggest issue for Graveman is his control. This season, he has thrown balls on 37.8% of the pitches that he has thrown—which is 129th best among the 165 major league relievers “qualified” major league relievers. He throws 55.6% of his pitches out of the strike zone. According to Baseball Savant, that ranks 304th out of the 323 pitchers who have faced 150 of more batters this season.
And you can see that all of those out of zone pitches have produced a lot of walks—Graveman’s 10.8% walk rate is at the 17th percentile in the majors.
Now, despite the high walk rate, Graveman has kept batters to a weighted On Base Average of .303 this season. That’s the wOBA of a light hitting infielder (some batters with a .303 wOBA this season—Isiah Kiner-Falafea of the Yankees; Luis Rengifo of the Angels).
Graveman does this by managing contact pretty well. He has allowed an expected batting average of .227 and an expected slugging of .383 this season in Chicago. He is at the 78th percentile in barrel rate.2
It would be obviously good if Graveman could improve in Houston since his performance has tailed off this season. One potential improvement that Graveman could make—throwing his 4-seam fastball more often. This season, opponents are 2 for 27 against Graveman’s 4-seamer with only 1 extra base hit. Graveman has increased his usage of this pitch this season to 18%, up from 14% in 2022 and 9% in 2021. Might he throw more of this pitch in Houston?
Still Need a Starting Pitcher
I argued previously that the Astros have to address starting pitching at the trade deadline, seeking someone who can be part of their playoff rotation. That is still true, and General Manager Dana Brown has continued to state that he sees a need for starting pitching.
The need for bullpen help was less acute, but still existed. The Astros have slipped to 13th in the majors in bullpen ERA. They have gotten excellent performances from four members of their bullpen—Ryan Pressly, Bryan Abreu, Hector Neris, and Phil Maton—but there are concerns about workload, especially for Abreu, Neris, and Maton. The hope is that Graveman can work as a leverage reliever with these four. One question about that is does Dusty Baker trust Graveman as much as these other four relievers.
Korey Lee, a Former Top Prospect
To acquire Graveman, the Astros traded Korey Lee, one of their former top catching prospects. I say former because it was clear to me in March when the Astros gave Cesar Salazar a spot on the 26-man roster ahead of Lee that the front office made the evaluation that Lee would not be a starting level catcher.3
My opinion that the front office did not see Lee as a future starter only strengthened as he stayed in Sugar Land throughout 2023. Lee has nearly 800 plate appearances in AAA, and no player needs that many for development. That’s the playing time pattern of a player parked in AAA as a depth piece.
So in Graveman, the Astros in 2023 get a player with a modest potential to help them in exchange for a pretty modest return. Graveman is not likely to replace Pressly, Abreu, or Neris as the top leverage arms in the bullpen, but if he can pitch some leverage spots and allow those pitchers more rest, he will bring value. To do that, he needs to throw more strikes.
An Expensive Bullpen
There is another important element of this Graveman trade to discuss—his contract status. Kendall Graveman is not a rental. He is under contract for the 2024 season, as part of the 3 year/$8 million a year contract he signed with the White Sox after his 2021 playoff run with the Astros.
Graveman will be part of the 2024 Astros as well. And he will be the third highest paid member of the bullpen in 2024 behind Ryan Pressly (at $15 million) and Rafael Montero (at $11.5 million). Of course, that presumes the Astros do not sign another free agent reliever. Both Neris and Maton will be free agents after this season, so the Astros could re-sign one or both at a higher salary or pursue a different free agent reliever.
We will see what the Astros do with the rest of their bullpen in the offseason, but one important note about the Graveman trade is that the Astros continue to put a great share of their payroll into their bullpen. This has now continued from James Click to Jim Crane to Dana Brown heading baseball operations. All three have put great monetary value on the Astros bullpen.
We hope the results follow this year as they did in the last two playoff runs.
FIP stands for Fielding Independent Pitching and creates what the ERA for a pitcher should be based on the three factors he controls—strikeouts, walks, and homers. The presumption behind the measure is that other stuff (hard hit at ‘em balls and ground balls with eyes, hard hit doubles to the gap and those that get tracked down by good defenders) are all basically luck and will even out over enough innings.
Barrels are the “perfect combination of exit velocity and launch angle,” according to Mike Petriello who helps manage Baseball Savant for MLB. If you’re a pitcher, barrels are bad.
Most on Astros Twitter—including some of what I regard as the smartest accounts on the site—disagreed with my take on Korey Lee at the time. You can go that tweet here and see their responses.