There's bad starts and then there's whatever Brayan Bello has been doing in a Red Sox uniform. The Orioles teed off on him at Fenway on Wednesday, the Sox were buried before half the crowd had found their seats, and by Thursday morning Bello was packing for Worcester. The data has been screaming this for months — he's a bulk reliever wearing a starter's costume — and the org finally blinked.
Baltimore hung a 6-spot on Bello in the first inning at Fenway, with Coby Mayo trotting around the bases.
Jared Carrabis has been beating this drum for a while, and watching Bello get dragged again clearly broke him in real time. The pitch data isn't subtle — opponents are hitting .327 with a .924 OPS against his two most-used pitches, the sinker and cutter, per Carrabis. Add the four-seamer and it climbs to .349 and a .968 OPS. That's not a slump. That's a guy whose entire arsenal is getting barreled.
Carrabis laid out the ugly slash lines against Bello's primary pitches.
Brayan Bello’s two most used pitches are his sinker and his cutter. Opponents are hitting .327 with a .924 OPS against him when he goes to the sinker and cutter. Throw in the four-seam fastball and it’s .349 with a .968 OPS.
The kicker, as Carrabis told it the next morning, is that Bello reportedly went into the postgame and told reporters to stop asking him about the bullpen — he's a starter, he'll figure it out in the big leagues, thank you very much. Cue the demotion notice a few hours later. You can't script it better. Insist you're a major-league starter, get sent down to Worcester to prove it.
The sequence of Bello's quotes and the demotion, in order.
Brayan Bello with another dog shit start, tells reporters he’s a starter and to stop asking him about the bullpen, says he’s going to work through it in the big leagues, promptly gets demoted.
Over at Picks Central, Mike Mutnansky took his swing at it too — Bello's in Triple-A now, and the message from the desk was a very direct figure-it-the-fuck-out. Which feels like the only available response at this point. The Sox have one (1) series win at Fenway all season, the IKF quotes are painting a dysfunctional org, and the AAA bus is now the team's pitching solution.
Mutnansky's Picks Central rant on Bello's AAA demotion.
And the cherry on top: Boston rolls into the Bronx for a Red Sox-Yankees series that nobody can muster any energy for. Sox fans are miserable because the team is broken, Yankee fans are miserable because Aaron Judge is hurt, and the great rivalry of American sports is currently a wake. Bello in Worcester might honestly be the most interesting Red Sox storyline of the week, which tells you everything.