Last year, it was Kelly Johnson and Jeff Francoeur. This year, the Braves have elected to bring back reliever Blaine Boyer for a bit of nostalgia... and perhaps something more.
Boyer, as you may recall, was drafted all the way back in the third round of the 2000 draft. He was not a marquee farmhand (though he did make #10 in Baseball America’s 2005 ranking of Braves’ prospects), but did make the jump from AA straight to the majors later that year, and had a successful rookie season in relief with the big club (3.11 ERA, 3.13 FIP, 0.6 fWAR in about 40 innings of work).
After that, injuries and the usual reliever variability took their respective tolls. Boyer was an unlucky/ineffective workhorse on an unfortunate 2008 Braves team, and was traded to the Cardinals the following April. That was the beginning of a very pinball-esque set of transactions for him, as he then proceeded to join and play for 11 organizations (including the Cardinals twice, and the Hanshin Tigers in Japan) from 2009 through 2016. And now he returns to where it all began.
As a reliever, Boyer began his career as a pretty generic hard thrower. Starting in 2009, though, he morphed into something very different. Among the 136 relievers with at least 250 innings pitched since 2009, Boyer has:
- The lowest strikeout rate (11.9%, next closest is 14.5%, and there is no gap nearly that large between any other two relievers in the sample);
- A below-average walk rate (7.6%), better than about two-thirds of the relievers in the sample;
- A strong stinginess in terms of giving up homers (20th among the 136 relievers, at just around one homer per 18 innings pitched); and, weirdly enough
- One of the worst ERAs and FIPs among this group, though actually not that bad in a vacuum (3.82 ERA, 3.92 FIP). It’s just that not-particularly-effective relievers generally don’t get retained to pitch 250 innings over seven seasons, especially when they don’t strike guys out.
If you’re interested in learning more about Boyer, I highly recommend this interesting and recent article from Travis Sawchik at Fangraphs. It remains to be seen whether Boyer can continue his mystifying pitching ways, or whether he’ll continue to have success (he’s been pretty good the last three years with his weird M.O.), but it should be entertaining... if he even makes the roster, that is.
The deal itself is just a minor league commitment, so there’s no real harm if the Braves find other bullpen options, and Boyer should be able to latch on with another team anyway.
To end, here’s a weird fact about Blaine Boyer: he spent 10 days undercover in overseas brothels working to root out underage sex slavery, as part of some work with non-profit Exodus Road. (For more info, see Tom Hadricourt’s piece in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, and Tim Keown in ESPN The Magazine.)