Article: What Went Wrong for Brennan Bernardino in 2024?

[Alex Mayes]

Brennan Bernardino turned heads 2023, but after a solid start to 2024, he became a liability in the second half. What went wrong?

Brennan Bernardino had a trying 2024. He started the year at triple-A Worcester only to be called up when injuries forced the Red Sox to add a left-handed reliever on April 9. He started the season on fire, carrying a 0.78 ERA his first 23 innings in Boston. Then the wheels fell off. Bernardino was shuffled to a low-leverage spot unless Alex Cora absolutely needed a left-hander. What went wrong last season? Let’s see if we can dig a bit to find out.

Pitch Mix Changes
Although Bernardino considers his breaking ball to be a curveball, his arm angle and movement profile essentially make him a classic sinker-slider guy with an east-west movement profile. His sinker averaged 15 inches of break to his glove side, while his curveball averaged nearly 17 inches of break to his arm side. In 2023, he posted a 3.20 ERA, a 1.30 WHIP, and a 3.41 FIP. He was reliable. You knew what you were getting when he came jogging in from the bullpen, but the pitch mix worked, and Bernardino's side-arm approach forced batters to beat the ball into the ground. In 2024, he kept the sinker and curveball while adding a cutter and a slider. The pitches were very similar in terms of both movement and velocity, and neither performed especially well. The cutter lived right in the heart of the zone and the slider sat squarely on the inside middle part of the plate. It wouldn’t be a huge stretch to say that adding focus on these two new pitches caused his main pitches to falter some.

Pitch Location Issues
In short, Bernardino couldn’t miss bats when he would attempt to nibble on the edges of the plate. His chase rate rose from 18.5% in 2023 to 23.5% in 2024 but his whiff rate on those chases fell from 50% to 33.6%. Even when he hit the edges of the zone, hitters were swinging more and making more contact. That forced him to try and throw a bit more over the heart of the plate with his newer pitches, and they got lit up there. The heat maps below show Bernardino's curveball location (courtesy of Baseball Savant).

 

The left shows 2023, and you can see that Bernardino lived on the corner, down and away to lefties and down and in to righties. The right shows 2024, when Bernardino didn't seem to be executing any particular plan. The location of his curveball likely contributed a ton to his issues last year. Although it's less extreme, Bernardino's sinker showed a similar shift away from the corner and toward the middle of the zone. According to the pitch modeling metric Location+, Bernardino went from an above-average 102 in 2023 to a below-average 97 in 2024.

Between the changes to his pitch mix and his location struggles, Brennan Bernardino went from the go-to left-handed reliever  to the mop-up lefty. If he doesn't demonstrate improvement during spring training, it’s entirely likely that Brennan Bernardino is on the outside looking in again as the Red Sox start their season.

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[moonslav59]

148 pitchers had 70+ IP from 2023 to July 18, 2024. Bernardino's 1.1 fWAR placed him top 60.

He placed 41st in FIP at 3.33.

19th in ERA- at 63.

(105th in WHIP at 1.32 is not good.)