Hello and welcome to the In The Pen podcast, a podcast about relievers, part of the

pitcherless podcast network. My name is Jake Crumpler, and as always, I'm joined by Rick Graham

pitcherless's bullpen expert. Rick, we are now like two weeks into the major league season. How is everything

going for you? And how are you feeling about the relief pitching landscape so far this year?

Yeah, I mean, it's exciting time, obviously. It's trying and for the most part of avoiding

catastrophic injuries, but obviously that's out of my control.

Relief pitchers so far have been, it was a little bit of a bumpy start, a rough start,

to say the least. But I do think, you know, we're starting to see, you know, things settle down,

see how bullpens are working themselves out and how roles are being, you know, established. So, yeah, it's, you know, things settle down, see how bullpens are working themselves out and how roles are being,

you know, established. So, yeah, it's, you know, we're getting there. I mentioned it's like today in my holdup article, it's like, this is kind of the calibration phase of like trying to figure out,

you know, just what the, what are the roles going to be like for each bullpen and, you know, who's going to be

an actual contributor. So, yeah, we're starting to find that out now. And, you know, also, you know,

there's been some injuries, but we're starting to see some guys, you know, rehab and come back.

And, you know, hopefully there's some, you know, big names that return from injury this weekend.

Yeah. Yeah, I think we're getting a pretty good idea of who's going to be the closers that are likely to lose their jobs.

So either guys that started out as the closer role and started to perform poorly right out of the gate or guys who are in closer

battles that have not won out on those. And we're also getting a good idea of those murky

situations like Milwaukee and Minnesota and some of the other ones, Chicago, the White Sox,

where we weren't totally sure who the closer is, but now we're getting a pretty good sense

and it will allow us to predict going forward much better as we sort of know that the roles.

But we still got a lot of stuff to work out and there are still injuries coming through the pipeline.

And there are a lot of early surprises that have caught our interest.

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