The bullpens that are struggling fall mostly into two buckets. The teams that went into the season hoping they could make things work without a true “ace” type reliever in their bullpen (MIN, LAA, SFG, COL, WSN, ATH) or teams whose best relievers have missed time due to injury (CIN, BAL, HOU, DET, KCR).
PIT and CHW are right behind those teams, but they at least spent a little money bringing in Soto and Seranthony (plus having talents like Montgomery and Taylor in the wings)
TB could have fallen in that first committee group, but also, it shouldn’t be a huge surprise to see Baker pitching this well (plus the Uceta/Cleavinger injuries).
STL spent on Stanek ($3.5M), I guess, and had O’Brien and Romero. We’ll see how this bullpen fares moving forward. Overall, it’s been better than expected.
TEX is an outlier maybe, but Junis ($4M MLB contract) and Latz (good starter turned reliever) are doing the heavy lifting there.