Bullpen Games Keep Paying Off In The Postseason

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NEW YORK, NY – OCTOBER 08: Louis Varland #77 of the Toronto Blue Jays pitches during Game Four of the American League Division Series presented by Booking.com between the Toronto Blue Jays and the New York Yankees at Yankee Stadium on Wednesday, October 8, 2025 in New York, New York. (Photo by Daniel Shirey/MLB Photos via Getty Images)

I know that there are a lot of baseball fans who dream of a day when we can once again see a Madison Bumgarner-style ace take a team and carry it on his back to a World Series title.

Instead, we have games like Wednesday, where the Blue Jays knocked out the Yankees in a game started by reliever Louis Varland and finished by a never-ending wave of seven additional Blue Jays relievers.

Love them or hate them, the bullpen game is a strategy that is working consistently for playoff teams. We wrote about this last year, and if anything the trend has grown since.

This postseason, teams are 5-0 in bullpen games, and no team that has used a bullpen game has been eliminated, at least yet. The Blue Jays are in the ALCS having used a bullpen game to knock out the Yankees.

The Brewers are one win away from a spot in the NLCS having used a bullpen game. And the Tigers, who love the bullpen game more than anyone, are playing a deciding Game 5 against the Mariners.

Last year the Dodgers used a trio of bullpen games in the postseason on their way to winning the World Series. The Mets used the strategy in winning the Division Series. It didnâ€t work in the LCS against the Dodgers, but they were foiled by a Dodgers team that was bullpenning themselves.

Between the 2024 and 2025 postseasons, teams are 10-4 in bullpen games. Teams using bullpen games have won eight postseason series in the past two years (a number that would climb if the Tigers and/or Brewers win their series). Since 2019, teams are 19-15.

From 2015-2018, there was no postseason game that could be called a bullpen game. Since then, they have quickly become a fixture in the playoffs.

Defining a bullpen game can be tricky. For these purposes, weâ€re not calling a game where a team uses an opener and then hands it over to a starter to hopefully turn over the lineup two times.

The Blue Jays ALDS decider was indisputably a bullpen game. Not one Blue Jays pitcher threw two innings in the deciding game that eliminated the Yankees.

What happened in the other ALDS game was a little trickier. On the same day in Detroit, the Tigers staved off elimination in a game where Casey Mize, one of the teamâ€s starters, threw three scoreless innings, and then was pulled to turn the game into a bullpen game.

Mize is a starter, but  the design was to only let him pitch three innings, even when he dominated early on.

“When I talked to Casey, I took him in the tunnel. Those cameras are a funny thing; they follow me everywhere. I just wanted to tell him that the best chance for us to not only keep this game close but win this game was to continue to throw different pitchers at them. It’s been a successful strategy for us. Casey definitely could have gone out, but when the game dropped us off at Naylor and we have our full allotment in the pen, including Troy, Tyler, I knew Finnegan, Vest was going to throw career-high pitches if we needed, we were all hands on deck. And so the aggressive move to the pen was to try to give them a lot of different looks,†Tigers manager A.J. Hinch said.

It seemed like a risky move at the time, as Tyler Holton, following a short Mize outing for the second straight time this postseason, failed to get an out.

But Kyle Finnegan, Troy Melton (a starter in another Tigers†bullpen game this postseason) and Will Vest held Seattle relatively silent as the Tigers rallied back to beat the Mariners and force a deciding Game 5.

The Brewers used Aaron Ashby and Jacob Misirowski in shortened stints earlier this week to go up 2-0 in their NLDS series.

This year, weâ€ve already seen five bullpen games this postseason. Last year there were nine. Even with none in 2022, there has been an average of five per year since 2019.

And all of that makes what Cam Schlittler did this postseason seem even more special.

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