There has been a lot of hand-wringing and general consternation over the Cardinal bullpen this offseason. To a certain extent, that makes sense; while the Cards’ relief corps in 2017 was, in aggregate, a fairly average sort of unit, or at least an innocuous one, the Redbirds’ record in close games (particularly, ahem, against the Cubs), seemed to magnify every misstep of the ‘pen.
Probably no other reliever from the ‘17 squad exemplifies more fully this dichotomy than Brett Cecil. For the season, Cecil was ultimately worth a little over a win by FanGraphs’ version of WAR, which is pretty good for a reliever.