I really think the Pirates are going to try bullpenning this season.
ETA:
And Smoker has 2 more options left, so he's easily sent to Indy if he doesn't break camp with the team.
Yeah, it seems like a good low key card to play. IF we do bullpenning, one of the keys is going to be utilizing guys with options in order to have enough depth to pull it off. I still think it's a stretch... the game is moving in this direction, but it's extremely disadvantageous for players who want to make money in free agency, and the speculation I've always read is that you'd basically need 5 teams to collude and decide they'll try it together. I think going full-on into it is kind of impossible, especially since the labor situation is already starting to look very bad from the players perspective.
However, I wonder if we might see something that approximates bullpenning in certain ways. I'd be interested in thinking more about how feasible this kind of an idea is, especially since we aren't going to get any more interesting news for several weeks, it seems. All that I really have in mind is taking an approach where you are much more aggressive with the hook after two turns through the lineup for certain pitchers. To an extent, teams already kind of do this with their #5 starter. Taking an old friend under consideration, if you look at Morton's game log, twelve starts were less than six innings, and thirteen got into the sixth inning, with a handful of those reading 7 or 7.1. Now, obviously, that's just kind of par for the course with a backend starter, and it helps things considerably when your fifth starter never flames out with less than 5 innings. But as I recall, in part due to his pitch count, Morton was often simply only tasked with pitching 5 innings, and then you had the bullpen take over.
Essentially, all this might really boil down to is trying to have very good middle relief, and using it more often. Try and spread out your more dependable innings eaters (though whether we will have any is worth pausing to debate), and then for two or three turns through each rotation, assume you will only get five innings, and plan bullpen usage accordingly. It's here where I think a slight bit more strategy enters the mix. Depending on who we are talking about, maybe there's a combination with an almost designated sixth starter who you try to use for a four inning closer for one situation - just as an example, maybe Glasnow plays off somebody in this role, etc. Where it becomes a bit more feasible to me is how you deploy Rivero. Especially now that he doesn't need to worry about stacking up saves to make money in arbitration, he should absolutely be used in leverage situations, up to and including a situation where you put him into the sixth or seventh inning of a one-run game fresh, and either use him to close it out, or close - use him to get through the hard part of the order, use him until you add some cushion runs late, etc.
These might just be different ways of framing how good it is to have a bullpen as a weapon, and I think ultimately it comes down to what kind of surrounding cast will be there with Rivero. If two or three of Crick, Feliz, Neversaukas, Leathersich, Glasnow, Musgrove, Kingham, Holmes etc can play this role, then you have some reasons for optimism. Add in Kontos, and hopefully using somebody like Schugel to get out of jams, and maybe we'll see a bullpen like we used to have. A whole bunch of ifs involved, but that's basically always the case with the bullpen, and it's definitely pretty clear that the whole entire bullpen can make a pretty dramatic difference for a mediocre team.