TEMPE http://www.philliesfanproshop.com/authentic-pat-neshek-jersey , Ariz. (AP) — Shohei Ohtani got a modest raise from the Los Angeles Angels after winning the AL Rookie of the Year award, agreeing to a one-year contract that boosts his pay to $650,000 from last year’s minimum of $545,000.Los Angeles announced agreements Monday with 22 players not yet eligible for arbitration. Ohtani has a split contract with a salary of $272,500 while in the minor leagues.The 24-year-old two-way star went 4-2 with a 3.31 ERA in 10 starts as a pitcher and played 104 games overall as a rookie, hitting .285 with 22 homers and 61 RBIs. He had surgery Oct. 1 to repair a torn ulnar collateral ligament, and the Angels think the earliest he could be ready to hit in games is in May. He isn’t expected to pitch this year.Ohtani left the Nippon Ham Fighters of Japan’s Central League after the 2017 season and signed with the Angels for a bonus of $2,315,000. He will not be eligible for salary arbitration until after the 2020 season.He will earn considerably more than Tampa Bay pitcher Blake Snell, last year’s AL Cy Young Award winner. The Rays renewed his contract Sunday for a salary while in the majors of $573,700, a raise of $15,500 and a figure $18,700 above the major league minimum, which rose to $555 Will Middlebrooks Jersey ,000. The Milwaukee Brewers are an outlier in the MLB postseason field, going up against three big-market franchises with superior pitching staffs."WhiteFanposts Sections News & RumorsAnalysisPodcastsProspects & DraftGame CoverageFull ArchiveMasthead Social Marlins Players on TwitterFish Stripes on InstagramMarlins Media Members Fish Stripes Best of 2018 Marlins StoriesScheduleRosterStatsCommunity Guidelines StubHub 鉁昅iami Marlins AnalysisYou still need quality starting pitchers to win the World Series#Bullpenning ain’t it, ChiefByMitchell CusterOct 11, 2018,4:00pm EDTShareTweetShareShareYou still need quality starting pitchers to win the World SeriesTroy Taormina-USA TODAY SportsUnorthodox pitcher usage was taken to a new extreme during the 2018 MLB season. Most famously, the Tampa Bay Rays went all in on the concept of The Opener. Someone smarter than me logged onto the ol’ Baseball Reference dot com and found out that in every year since 2014, the inning that yielded the most runs was the first inning. Whereas the closer, the save, and preserving a pitcher for the ninth had all gone by the wayside, it now became completely fair to allocate one shutdown pitcher for the first inning, to stifle the rising tide of first-inning runs.Their results with this approach were impressive. The Rays started the season with only three true starters— Chris Archer, Nathan Eovaldi and Blake Snell—and ended with just two: Snell and Tyler Glasnow (who was coming out of the bullpen with the Pittsburgh Pirates before he got traded anyway). In three out of five days, they gave the opening inning to their most dominant bullpen arms, and ended up going a very respectable 90-72. That would’ve been good enough to force a tiebreaker with the Atlanta Braves if they played in the NL East. Trust me that I understand the reasoning and why it makes more sense to employ an opener. As a student of analytics, I understand how http://www.philliesfanproshop.com/authentic-pat-neshek-jersey Jersey , unlike its ninth-inning counterpart, the opener actually responds to a quantifiable and observable trend.But can you be successful in the postseason against the very best competition without several legitimate starters?To a certain extent, perhaps. Recall that the Yankees gave the ball to their ace LuisSeverino for the 2017 AL Wild Card Game, but improvised that into a bullpen game after Severino recorded just one out in the first inning. The Yankees eventually won against the Twins and ended up taking the Houston Astros to the wire in the ALCS before their dramatic exit. Then, the Brewers swept the 2018 NLDS over Rockies in three games despite intentionally employing a bullpen game in Game 1. Brandon Woodruff pitched three innings of no-hit ball before CraigCounsell cheekily pinch-hit for him with Domingo Santana. Santana popped out to center field, burning a valuable bench bat. It didn’t matter—Milwaukee’s relief corps dominated the opposing lineup from there.However, these are still outliers. The common theme among the other three remaining teams in this year’s postseason field appears to be dominant starting pitching staffs with bona fide starting pitchers. Starting Rotation Stats of Three CS TeamsTeamIPIP RankERAERA RankFIPFIP RankfWARfWAR RankTeamIPIP RankERAERA RankFIPFIP RankfWARfWAR RankThe name of the game is depth in the rotation. Perhaps nobody embodies depth as well as the Houston Astros. They bring three veritable aces with them wherever they go, and put the rest of their very talented starters in the bullpen. This, in my opinion, is the most advanced thinking in the game. Just look at this:The fact that they have taken pitchers like CollinMcHugh and CharlieMorton—both of whom could be reputable starters on any other rotation—and have weaponized them into long-relievers is simply brilliant. But it all starts at the top with JustinVerlander, GerritCole, and DallasKeuchel. And the same concept applies to the Dodgers and Red Sox. After rolling out the front end of their dominant staffs, they stash their fours and fives in the bullpen. The more a starter can stretch out a game, the less pressure there is applied to the ‘pen. There is perhaps no better example of what an even-keeled manager and a dominant startercan do for a team than what happened to the Los Angeles Dodgers in Game 3 of the NLDS. After an incredible performance in the Dodgers’ Game 163, WalkerBuehler was given the rock against the Atlanta Braves in SunTrust Park’s first playoff game. Buehler ran into trouble when he got the yips in the second inning and walked the pitcher to load the bases for Ronald Acu帽a Jr. After going down in the count 3-0 and receiving a pity strike on ball four Jake Arrieta Jersey , Acu帽a seemingly broke the game open.What did Dave Roberts do? Did he panic? Did he scramble the jets and bring in KenleyJansen immediately? He didn’t. Buehler went on to pitch three more innings after the launch, in which time the Dodgers tied the game up at five. Given, AlexWood came in out of the pen and surrendered what would be the game winning home run to FreddieFreeman; that one is on Dave Roberts for feeding Wood to the proverbial Rancor of lefty pitchers. But although Roberts lost the battle, he won the war. Instead of emptying the coffers in Game 3 and scraping the bottom of the barrel for innings in Game 4, his trust in Buehler gave him the ability to soften the blow on the bullpen. The next day, after RichHill turned in a shaky four innings, Roberts saw his jugular moment, and then released the hounds to secure the series win. He could only do so because he had perfectly preserved his arms.To be fair and honest, the tension between deciding whether “to bullpen, or not to bullpen” comes down to whether a team is a have, or a have-not. The Astros, Dodgers, and Red Sox don’t have to worry about bullpenning, because their starting staffs are so dominant—they have the resources to keep such a deep staff. Smaller market teams like the Brewers, Rockies Nick Williams Jersey , and Athletics have to get creative.But suggesting that the Yankees—who have the rotation depth to run game plans like the Astros and Dodgers—should forego stretching out their starters to put the ball in the hands of their relievers every day, for more than an inning or so, is a treacherous proposition. We’ve seen what happens to relievers who get overworked in one series via AroldisChapman in the 2016 World Series and BrandonMorrow in the 2017 World Series. The best teams win the war of attrition through quality starts, followed by production from their starters-turned-long relievers. Shallower teams get stuck in the trenches.The critique isn’t necessarily on today’s managers for choosing how to manage their staffs; I’ve said it a million times that we can’t even imagine how hard it is to manage an MLB playoff game. It’s more an opinion that if there’s a team with real aspirations of contending in a given year, they have to create depth in both the starting rotation and the bullpen (assuming they have the resources to do so). But a team with said resources that chooses to rely on a corps of 11 pitchers for abbreviated, daily starts will not be able to compete with a team with starting depth in a seven-game series.This is one of the hottest debates in the game today. I’m usually on the more progressive side of arguments like these, but I find myself here coming from a more traditional school of thought.Think I’m wrong, or that I missed something? Drop a comment below! I’d love to see what you all have to think.Statistics courtesy of Fangraphs.com, Baseball-Reference.com, and MLB.com