Remember last year when Brian Bruney showed up at Spring Training and everyone was amazed because he looked like a completely different person? Well, according to the Daily News he’s lost even more weight.
Bruney, who figures to be an important part of the Yankee bullpen this season, lost about 16 pounds over the winter, meaning he has dropped approximately 40 pounds since the end of the 2007 season. He is now 219 pounds – the first time he has been under 220 since his junior year of high school – and eager for a potential breakout year.
That’s pretty amazing. I am a huge fan of Bruney’s stuff, and he really did make a lot of improvements last year. Beyond just losing weight he also pulled back a bit on his fastball and had much better control. When he went down with the foot injury I was very disappointed, but when he came back from his injury he pretty much picked up where he left off.
Comparing his 2007 and 2008, the improvement is clear:
Year W L ERA G IP H R HR BB SO HBP BABIP LD% GB% FB% FIP 2007 3 2 4.68 50 58 44 28 5 37 39 3 .277 17.1% 30.8% 52.1% 5.38 2008 3 0 1.83 32 34.1 18 7 3 16 33 1 .200 13.8% 42.5% 43.7% 3.45
There are a few unsustainable things from his 2008 (LD% and BABIP to be specific) but his FIP shows us that he didn’t just get lucky. If he can keep his GB% up, that will help a lot as well as it will keep his HR numbers down.
Just to dive a little further into things, here are his numbers before and after the injury (not as advanced, sorry), just to see if there was a huge difference in performance.
W L ERA G IP H R HR BB SO HBP BABIP Pre 1 0 1.59 9 11.1 7 2 2 6 12 1 .185 Post 2 0 1.96 23 23 11 5 0 10 21 0 .190
And the good news is: Not really. He kept up his good K and BB rates after returning from lisfranc Hell. 11 innings and 23 innings is a very, very small sample size but I choose to look at it with hope rather than skepticism. 23 appearances in August and Sep/Oct is enough time for that BB rate to escalate from “getting closer to good” to “totally awful” again and it didn’t.
Another interesting thing to note is that in his limited 2008 action, he used his slider a whole lot more than in previous seasons, and he evolved into more of a two-pitch type reliever. Here are the records of this on Fangraphs:
Year Fastball Slider Curveball Changeup 2007 82.2% (93.5) 10.9% (82.4) 0.3% (78.3) 6.6% (85.5) 2008 65.9% (94.0) 30.1% (87.7) 4.0% (86.6)
Interestingly, his average fastball speed actually decreased from 2007 which is something I wasn’t expecting to see.
Wrapping up, here is a fun chart from Fangraphs showing his BB/9:
Holy BB/9
Yep, it was pretty terrible previous to this year (so bad it doesn’t even show up on the graph even), which means merely below average looks good and is a dramatic improvement! Here’s his K/BB ratio charted the same way:
Inching towards "good" !
Much, much better in 2008. Again, after posting terrible numbers average is an impressive feat.
Relief pitching is very volatile and it could all go out the window in 2009, but there are definite signs of improvement in Bruney’s game. While it’s not clear that his weight loss has anything to do with his declining walk rate, it does show his commitment to refining his pitching and staying in shape. I certainly hope it works because he is going to be a very important piece of the bullpen this year.
