The righty reliever may conjure unpleasant memories, but there remains promise under the hood.
If the name “Eduard Bazardo” sends shivers down your spine, I can’t exactly blame you. After sixteen middling innings in 2023 upon coming over in a small deadline trade from the Orioles for RHP Logan Rinehart, he started getting a bit more work in May last year to uh, mixed results. No outing, though, stuck out more than his disasterpiece on June 15th against the Rangers, when he strode in for the ninth inning with the M’s holding a commanding 7-1 and departed with the bases loaded and the score 7-3 with two outs. Thankfully for all involved, the M’s held on to win 7-5, but that’s the kind of outing that sticks with the perception of a player for a long, long time – I know I’ll remember being up at around 3:30am Iceland time watching Gameday in increasing horror.
But then something strange happened. Following that debacle, Bazardo made a handful of decent if forgettable (complimentary) appearances before being optioned back to Tacoma, but came back up for September, and enjoyed regular playing time down the stretch. Sure, it was still mostly low-leverage work outside from working a clean tenth inning on the penultimate game of the season and earning the win, but in only one of those nine outings he allowed runs to come across, and the wayward command that had long been his red flag had sharpened considerably, with just one walk over ten innings while punching a dozen tickets. He had done the nearly-unthinkable: he put a true nightmare appearance behind our collective memories, and in fact became one of my favorite bits of trivia about the 2024 Mariners.
Out of all Seattle pitchers that notched at least twenty innings last year, the guy with the best FIP was Eduard Bazardo at 2.70. He was even more impressive if you shrink the sample size look at his numbers post-6/15 meltdown: that FIP drops all the way to 1.80, and the ERA was south of three as well. In all, Bazardo’s season FIP was a bit more than full two runs below his ERA of 4.88. But why?
The easiest thing to point to would be his comically low strand rate, as just under half of the baserunners he allowed came up to score. Nobody – and I do really mean nobody – runs a LOB% that low, nearly twenty percentage points below 2024’s league average of 72.1%. Part of the problem was that four of his total fifteen runs allowed came home after he was lifted from the game and his successor failed to keep their inherited runners from crossing the plate and in turn dinging Bazardo’s strand rate. Outside of simple bad luck, too, Bazardo showed a combination that more often than not will lead to success: generating whiffs and inducing ground balls. His GB% of 55.4% (!) was once again tops on the team with a 20-inning minimum, and he was an xSTATS darling, boasting a sub-.200 xBA, sub-.-300 xSLG, and sub-.250 xwOBA. His slider – the pitch he leaned on the most in 2024 – showed swing-and-miss ability, too, earning a 33% whiff rate and an average launch angle of just 9 degrees, making most contact off it go straight into the ground.
Eduard Bazardo is out of minor league options, meaning 2025 will likely be his last chance in the Mariners organization to put it all together. Disasterclasses like June 15th might still be your predominant image of him, but after that was in the rearview, he emerged as an intriguing, if still yet a bit unproven, bullpen option. I would not be at all surprised to see him break camp with Seattle, with opportunities across all leverage situations available should he continue to perform.
Projections:
FanGraphs Depth Chart: 50 IP, 0.1 fWAR, 3.67/3.73 ERA/FIP
PECOTA: 20 IP, 0.2 WARP, 3.67/4.02 ERA/DRA
Over/Unders:
Eric: Under
Nothing I’ve seen from Bazardo the last two seasons would lead me to believe there’s much more to unlock in his skillset. He pitched twice as many innings in 2024 than 2023 and his bWAR went down 0.3 points to zero while surrendering almost four times as many runs. If we’re seeing Bazardo in any situations other than long-relief mop-up duty, something has gone very wrong.
Kate: Over?
The Nazca Lines. The Voynich Manuscript. Eduard Bazardo. These are history’s great mysteries. Bazardo’s Statcast page glows red like a submarine disaster movie, but the Mariners seemed hesitant to deploy him in any kind of high-leverage situation last season, often saving him for mop-up duty. The Mariners pitching brain trust clearly knows more than I, an idiot with an internet connection, but after seeing him do nothing but perform ably when called upon, it feels like an easy pick to take the over on him.