Don't know that I've had a more frustrating season with a player than Doc Bryant. It's only 80 IP but man is it brutal to see a guy with his ratings get shelled every other start. I play in a hitters park but his home/away splits are pretty much the same.

Waiting for the inevitable poor performance followed quickly by catastrophic injury, lol.

Just venting, thanks for coming to my TEDTalk

I predict a stellar season 56 performance.

1) He's excellent, but he's not a Hall of Fame reliever; playing half his games in MAD (AL) I'd expect an ERA in the mid 3's. .
2) You're not going to get that mid-3s ERA if you keep trying to get 80-90 innings out of him. I don't mind loading him up like that-- he's probably your best relief pitcher-- but his ERA will slide due to in-game fatigue, to probably around 4 over the course of his career.
3) All that said, 6 is not 4-- you did get brutally unlucky this season.

I can see what happened here (I’m fairly certain anyways) games where he gave up 5 runs, games where he gave up 3. Hitting 20-25 pitches every outing. His pull rate was clearly set to 1.

even if I have a future hall of famer I will still set my entire bullpens rating to 5. On the days they have it they can stay in as long as possible, on days they don’t they get pulled and that way they don’t get embarrassed.

put him as the only SuA, keep him at 20 TPC and 20 MPC and put his pull rating to 5. Should get him closer to a 3-4 ERA next season.

All these guys are right. Look at his last season and this season. He went from one extreme to the other. What changed? Could be overuse, could be your team worsened, but it could also be pure variance based on matchups and schedule - he ran into better teams and better hitters and worse luck. What you see in these two seasons is absolutely his range of outcomes.

In addition to the stuff mentioned above, whenever there's a pitcher with an uncharacteristically bad performance, I always look at the defense around them. You have one RF with a .935 fielding percentage and 10 minus-plays, and another with a .950 fielding percentage and 5 minus-plays. Your left fielder is a negative fielder, as is one of your first basemen.

In a relatively small sample with a reliever, it only takes a few balls falling in here and there to blow up their ERA. Don't play a guy with 12 range and a 20 glove in RF and your pitchers will magically get a lot better.

I'll go against the grain and say this guy is totally capable of hitting 90 innings each year and that this is purely HBD's sprinkling of "variance" it adds to each season by making some players significantly better/worse than their ratings for a whole season. My only advice would be to not rage trade him because this is a one year thing and keep him in high leverage situations for the playoffs because in my experience the "player variance factor" resets at the start of the playoffs.

Agree with the above. 60 innings + a strong defense and he should be in good shape.