Andrew Miller’s Retirement Serves To Remind How Hard It Is To Find The Next Andrew Miller

Andrew Miller’s retirement last week provided an opportunity to look back at a fascinating career, one that began with Miller hyped as one of the best prospects in the game and ended with him racking up countless hours at the negotiating table trying to hammer out a new collective bargaining agreement that would benefit players with whom he’d never share a clubhouse.

The middle, of course, was pretty good and featured a six-year period from 2012 through 2017 in which Miller posted a 2.01 ERA, struck out 520 batters in 332 innings and accumulated 12.0 WAR (per Baseball Reference) in regular season play and recorded a 1.10 ERA with a strikeout-to-walk ratio of 48/8 in 32 2/3 innings as a versatile bullpen weapon.

In the process, Miller reset the market and expectation level for set-up relievers. He had just one big league save when he signed his most lucrative contract, a four-year, $36 million deal he agreed to with the Yankees following the 2014 season. After collecting 36 saves for the Yankees in 2015, he returned to a set-up role for the remainder of his career, during which he racked up 26 saves.

Miller’s career arc also provided the latest evidence in how hard it is to build a bullpen via free agency and how the best relief corps are usually not constructed but accidentally discovered.

The end of Miller’s peak came during a 15-month period for Cleveland, which found the centerpiece of a dominant bullpen with the type of random good fortune that can’t be replicated. Miller, acquired on July 31, 2016 from the Yankees during the latter’s first “fire sale” in a generation, joined a 20-something closer (Cody Allen), a homegrown starter turned middle reliever (Zach McAllister) and a quartet of set-up men who all made their big league debuts with other organizations (Nick Goody, Jeff Manship, Dan Otero and Bryan Shaw) in helping Cleveland post a major-league low 2.89 ERA from 2016-17. (In another example of the randomness of all this, Cleveland’s World Series window slammed shut with a five-game AL Division Series loss to…the “rebuilding” Yankees in 2017)

Trying to find the next Miller and/or that bullpen mix via the free agent market is a decidedly more volatile exercise. Twenty-seven set-up men signed multi-year deals as free agents between 2015 and 2018. (For purposes of this exercise, we didn’t evaluate free agent relievers from the free agent classes of 2019 and 2020 due to the unprecedented nature of the 2020 and 2021 seasons)

Those pitchers — including Miller, who inked his final contract, a three-year deal with the Cardinals, following the 2018 season — signed deals worth a combined $416.5 million and produced a collective WAR, per Baseball Reference, of 15.7. That’s 0.6 WAR per player, or the same WAR posted last year by 10 relievers ranging from journeyman Tyler Clippard to rookie Camilo Doval.

Of the six free agent relievers who posted a WAR of 2.0 or better during contracts signed between 2015 and 2018 — Yusmiero Petit (3.8), Jared Hughes (3.6), Adam Ottavino (2.9), Craig Stammen (2.6), Darren O’Day (2.1) and Chris Martin (2.0) — only Ottavino and O’Day had established track records as reliable late-inning options. And Ottavino struggled so badly in the second year of a three-year deal with the Yankees in 2020 that they traded him to the rival Red Sox.

All five relievers who signed multi-year deals following the 2016 season posted a negative WAR during their contracts — including Daniel Hudson, who had a WAR of -0.4 for the Pirates and Dodgers in 2017 and 2018 yet bounced back to become the Nationals’ closer during their World Series run in 2019, when he recorded the championship-clinching out.

Outside of Hudson and Miller — the latter of whom posted a 4.24 ERA and -0.1 WAR for the Indians in 2018 before recording a 4.34 ERA and -0.6 WAR for the Cardinals from 2019 through 2021 — nobody embodies the unpredictability of set-up men like Miller’s former teammate Shaw, who signed a three-year deal with the Rockies following the 2017 season and went 8-8 with a 6.17 ERA and a WAR of -1.4 for the Rockies and Mariners through the 2020 season.

Shaw returned to the Indians last season and posted a 3.49 ERA and a WAR of 1.3 over an AL-high 81 appearances while pitching alongside a 20-something closer (Emmanuel Clase), a homegrown fireballing set-up man (James Karinchak) and three other relievers who’d apprenticed elsewhere (Phil Maton, Blake Parker and Nick Wittgren). It was all very familiar and very different at the same time — and one more reminder of the many-layered nature of Miller’s legacy.