Willie managed it well in the rubber game of the Philly series, making no obvious blunders. I believe Schow was the last man in the pen–save for Muniz–which is as it should be.

If Duaner Sanchez becomes an effective set-up man again, our bullpen should be close to top-of-the-line. Wagner, Sanchez, Heilman, Feliciano, with Smith and Schow as our (RL)OOGYs. and Muniz or Sosa as our long man looks pretty sweet to me.

I wouldn’t give up on Heilman yet. Schow was interviewed yesterday and set the record straight. Heilman has been a very effective reliever throughout his career, to the point where he is a borderline starter. He should be fine. People who rely exclusively on anecdotal evidence to talk about how he “only pitches well when the game is out of reach” or how he “always blows that really big game” or selectively recall games where he performs poorly should be greeted with a good dose of skepticism, to say the least. We’ll see how this season plays out for Heilman.

Yeah I’m juggling numbers and 7 pitchers is not a statistically significant number, and you can’t remove outliers when calculating a mean and probably a dozen other reasons why what I did was kinda bogus

… But the point is that the current overall 4.55 ERA of the BP is not likely to be a good predictor for the rest of the season.

0-2, 3.2IP, 5ER (12.27 ERA), 1BS

At the moment things are close to as bad as they could be – Wise and Sanchez on the DL, Heilman having a poor start and Sosa’s numbers distorted by one bad inning on a small sample size.

Even still, the bullpen’s ERA is a bad-but-not-awful 4.55

If you subtract Sosa and Heilman, the rest of the ‘pen has a very respectable 2.70 ERA so far.

Calling the BP an Achilles’ heel is close to panicky.