How to read the site at a glance

A lot of information is encoded into Inside the Pen visually. Colored bars, badge positions, opacity tiers, hover tooltips. Once you know what to look for, you can read a bullpen at a glance. This is the visual tour.

Anatomy of a Pitcher Card

Every pitcher on a team bullpen page lives inside a card like this one. Five different pieces of information are encoded in it visually, before you read a single number.

Handedness bar. The teal-blue bar running down one side of the card tells you which hand the pitcher throws with. The bar is on the right side here, meaning Yates is a right-handed pitcher. A bar on the left side would mean a lefty. Scan a bullpen vertically and you can count lefties without reading names.

Role badge. The red CL pill in the top-right corner marks the team's named closer. When a team is using a closer-by-committee, that single badge is replaced by an orange "Committee" pill instead (see Closer Situation below).

Effective Rating bar. The horizontal bar next to "Effective Rtg" runs from red (weak) through yellow (average) to green (elite) on a 0 to 100 scale. Yates's 77.3 lands in the "above average" tier and renders yellow. Every effectiveness bar on the site (cards, Spotlight, Likely to Pitch, etc.) uses the same 6-tier color scale, so the color means the same thing wherever you see it.

Fatigue %. A read on how heavily the pitcher has been used recently. Lower numbers mean more rested; values trending negative mean he's been used harder than his baseline. Yates's –2.0 is well within normal range.

Pitch Arsenal, ordered and opacity-weighted. The badges along the bottom of the card are ordered most-used to least-used, left to right. Their opacity reflects how often each pitch is thrown: the bold FF (Four-Seam) is his primary, the faded FS (Splitter) is a secondary option, and the barely-visible ST (Sweeper) is in the mix but rarely thrown. Hover any badge and a tooltip reveals the exact usage percentage. The screenshot above captures that tooltip live: "Four-Seam Fastball thrown 54.2%."

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Bullpen ERA Rankings & Breakdown

The Bullpen ERA Rankings page sorts every team by recent bullpen ERA. Each team has a card that summarizes the unit and (for premium members) expands into a per-pitcher breakdown, so you can see exactly how the team bullpen ERA for the season was calculated.

Reading the example above:

• Rank #1, BP ERA 2.72, Season IP 142.1. The headline numbers for the bullpen over the displayed window.
• 7D Change. An arrow shows direction of travel over the last week (a dash here means no change vs. the prior reading).
• Committee callout. The team's closer situation surfaces right in the header, with the named pitchers linked. See Closer Situation below for how that state is determined.
• Season Breakdown (premium). Click Season Breakdown on the right and the card expands to a full per-pitcher table: IP, ERA, K%, BB%, HR, BF. Pitchers on the IL are shown grayed out with their IL designation, so you can see who's contributing versus who's contributing from the trainer's room.

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Inning Entered Superscript

The tiny number floating above an IP value is the inning the pitcher entered the game. In the cell shown here, 1.0⁷ means the pitcher came in for the 7th inning and threw exactly one frame. The bottom row, 24-15, is pitches and strikes (24 total pitches, 15 of them strikes). You'll see this format on the Bullpen Usage day grid, in pitcher game logs, and in the last-5-outings table of the Pitcher Spotlight panel below.

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The Pitcher Spotlight Panel

Every team bullpen page is built around two stacked views: the sortable bullpen usage table up top, and the Pitcher Spotlight panel directly below it. Click any pitcher's name in the table and the Spotlight reloads in place with that pitcher's stats. No page change, no scroll jump. The fastest way to compare two relievers is to click one, glance, then click the other. See it live on the San Diego Padres bullpen page.

The panel packs in everything you need to size up an arm without leaving the team page:

• Six headline stat tiles across the top: EFF, FTG, IP, G, ERA, FIP. The EFF tile carries the same color signal as the bar on the card. Miller's 99.2 underlines in green to flag elite effectiveness.
• Per-pitch arsenal sub-cards with usage percentage, average velocity, and average spin rate for each pitch the pitcher throws.
• Last 5 outings table inline, so you can see recent game logs without clicking through to the pitcher's full page. Look at the IP column: the small superscripts (¹·⁰⁸ etc.) are the inning the pitcher entered, covered in Inning Entered Superscript above.

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Closer Situation: Clear, Committee, Injured

The Closers by Team list tells you up front who's getting the ball in the ninth, team by team. Three possible states:

• Clear closer. One named pitcher, marked with the standard CL badge in the bullpen.
• Committee. Two or more arms are sharing the role. An orange "Committee" pill appears, and the closer block stacks the pitchers involved.
• Injured. The closer is on the IL. The IL designation shows next to his name and the interim closer is listed beneath him.

A few details to notice in the Twins example above:

• The Committee pill in the top-right replaces the single CL badge you'd see on a clear closer.
• Both Topa and Sands get a full card with their Effective Rating bar (in their team's accent color), fatigue, IP, ERA, FIP, and pitch arsenal.
• The Staff Notes block at the bottom is hand-written analyst commentary. When you see one, it's a real human read on the situation, not generated text.

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Pitch Arsenal, the Full Picture

The badges on a pitcher card give you a quick read on arsenal. The pitcher's individual page gives you the deep view.

Three things to read here:

• Doughnut chart with on-slice labels. Every pitch type is labeled with its share of total pitches right on its wedge, so you can read the mix at a glance. The legend on the right repeats the same percentages with full pitch names.
• Avg Fastball callout. The boxed callout in the bottom-right shows the pitcher's headline fastball velocity, using the faster of his Four-Seamer (FF) or Sinker (SI). This is the number that drives the Avg Fastball tier on the Tendency panel further down the page.
• Velo / Spin / Usage table. Below the chart, each pitch type gets a row with its average velocity (mph), average spin rate (rpm), and usage %. Pitches are sorted by usage.

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Likely to Pitch

On every game matchup page, a Likely to Pitch panel shows the relievers most probable to appear that day. The prediction reads recent workload, days of rest, fatigue, handedness matchups, and historical usage against the opposing lineup.

A few things to notice in this row:

• Each mini-card shows its own Effective Rating bar, colored the same way as everywhere else on the site. Higher / greener bars mean better recent form.
• Free users see the top few likely arms. Premium members see the full expected bullpen ranking for the game.

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Other Small Touches

A few more details worth knowing once you start digging in:

Sortable bullpen table. Every column header is clickable. Sort by ERA to find who's been hardest to score on, FTG to find the freshest arm, or EFF to see who's been pitching best. Click again to reverse the sort.

Spring training green tint. Game log and usage table rows tinted soft green are spring training appearances. They appear alongside regular-season rows so you can see who was throwing, but they don't count toward regular-season totals.

Date	Opp	IP	NP-S	SO	BB
Apr 02	vs LAD	1.08	16-11	2	0
Mar 18	@ TEX	1.07	14-9	1	0
Mar 14	vs SF	0.28	11-7	1	1

Snapshot vs Season Long Power Rank. The site publishes both. Snapshot reflects the last 7 to 10 days; Season Long reflects the full year. Anywhere a rank number appears, the type is labeled so you know which read you're looking at.

Roster status flags. Alongside the role badges, you'll see status flags next to a pitcher's name when he isn't fully active:

• IL-15 / IL-60 on injured pitchers, with the 15- or 60-day designation reflecting the length of the IL stint.
• MiLB on pitchers currently optioned to the minor leagues.
• Swing on starters who also work out of the bullpen.

Lock and Crown icons. Content gated behind a login is marked with a navy (free account required). Content gated behind a paid subscription is marked with an orange (premium required). Premium covers Advanced Stats, the Tendency panel, the full Likely to Pitch ranking, and the per-pitcher ERA Rankings breakdown.

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