In the full-season bullpen shuffle from which Pete Mackanin was forced to fill his late innings, only three relievers posed as year-long possibilities: Hector Neris, whose report card Tim Guenther wrote last week, Jeanmar Gomez, whom I will profile in a few weeks, and David Hernandez.
Hernandez’s 72.2 innings of work tied for the 15th most thrown by a reliever in the National League, not necessarily an ideal situation for Mackanin, but sadly more reliable than the majority of the one-in-one-out candidates that more accurately resembled a slow-moving line at the local overcrowded college bar than a functioning bullpen.