No one disagrees they need to improve but if you look at the history of elite bullpens how many are truely "built" in an offseason?
How many are just a random assortment of people with good stuff that managed to figure it out 1 inning at a time.
It's like a 4th line in hockey you don't spend 9m on it. You find 3 ELCs or min wage
Yeah, this is the issue with pens, obviously and is usually why people say that relievers are voodoo. Obviously the Jays can try and stack the deck by signing some talented relief pitchers but that's no guarantee. Romano is supposed to be elite and he was awful and now he's hurt. Swanson was supposed to be a proven track record guy and he's been terrible most of the season after being very good last season.
The other thing is that the market for pen arms is weird because teams will absolutely pay through the nose for closers because save totals make big bucks, but you can probably get 2 or 3 statistically comparable pitchers for what you'd pay for a single guy with closer experience.
What's probably the best option for the Jays is to go and get some undervalued middle/late relief guys with high leverage experience who
aren't name-brand closers, get a handful of guys who have good histories but are coming back form injuries or down years who are like lottery tickets, throw all the pitchers in the system that are below the likes of Tiedmann, Berreira, the guys they just drafted (I'm talking the likes of Jeunger, Danner, Cooke, Santos, Dallas, etc) and just let them duke it out. have as many guys as you can bring into spring training and just do a Thunderdome setup where the best survive and the others are reassigned to the minors or released from their tryouts or whatever. Because the only "sure" way to find good pen arms is to just give yourself as many chances as possible.
