Can A's Afford Three Lefties in the Bullpen?

Lucas Luetge's perfect two innings Monday against the Rangers are a strong selling point for him to join Jake Diekman and T.J. McFarland as lefties in the bullpen.

When the A’s set their opening day roster last March, there was one left-handed reliever on it, Ryan Buchter.

By season’s end, five other lefties had pitched out of the bullpen, including Wei-Chung Wang, Jake Diekman, Nick Martin and rookies A.J. Puk and Jesus Luzardo, both of them filling in while being groomed to join the starting rotation.

Of the non-fill-ins, only Diekman, picked up midseason from the Kansas City Royals, is still with the team. Luzardo is in the starting rotation. Puk is dealing with shoulder issues that may limit him to bullpen work in the early stages, but he’s destined for the rotation, too.

Even so, the A’s are in position to have a heavily left-handed slant to the bullpen when the season starts in a couple of weeks.

Back in November, the A’s claimed lefty T.J. McFarland off waivers from the Arizona Diamondbacks. Later that month, they signed Lucas Luetge, who’d pitched in the minor leagues for the D-Backs, to a minor league deal and brought him to camp.

Diekman will certainly be on the roster and McFarland probably will be. The unknown is Luetge, who had a nice year at Triple-A for Arizona – 55 games, 68 innings and a 2.83 ERA – but who hasn’t pitched in the big leagues since 2015.

Luetge’s pitches are released from a wide arm angle which gives both his slider and curve the kind of movement that have proven particularly tough on left-handed hitters. A’s manager Bob Melvin told the San Francisco Chronicle that the breaking pitches Luetge offers make “a left-hander uncomfortable.”

He debuted with Seattle in 2012 with decent success in the lefty-on-lefty role, a 2-2 record and 3.98 ERA in 63 innings covering 40.2 innings. Lefties hit .193 against time. His success waned over time, and by 2015 he was back in the minor leagues.

The A’s like what they’ve seen from him, but with the three-batter minimum rule instituted this season, a lefty-on-lefty specialist isn’t widely thought viable in Oakland, even with roster limits up to 26, 13 of whom can be pitchers.

That made Luetge’s Monday night showing in Surprise, Ariz. against the Texas Rangers a huge step forward for him. He pitched two innings, faced six batters, three lefties, two right-handers and a switch-hitter batting right-handed. He set all six down in order, striking out two.

More than that, Luetge’s performance came not against scrubs but against six batters who will be in the Rangers’ regular lineup – Shin-Soo Choo, Elvis Andrus, Danny Santana, Joey Gallo, Rougned Odor and Todd Frazier.

It’s been a while since the A’s have been able to trot out three lefties from the bullpen. Last year lefties came out of the pen 109 times to throw 118 innings. Those numbers could spike substantially and give Melvin more options if Luetge can replicate that kind of showing the rest of the spring and force his way onto the roster.