On the day of baseball’s non-tender trade deadline, the San Diego Padres traded first baseman Yonder Alonso and lefty reliever Marc Rzepczynski to Oakland in exchange for left-hander Drew Pomeranz and minor-leaguer Jose Torres. For those interested, Craig Edwards examined the trade in a general way earlier this morning. The point of this post is to look more closely at one part of the trade: Drew Pomeranz.

If Pomeranz is just a good reliever, then the deal amounts mostly to this: three years of control for a good reliever in exchange for two years of a first baseman who can be league average two-thirds of the time. Maybe, to make a trade like that even, you’d have to add a piece or two to get Alonso, but that’s when the deal makes the most sense for the Athletics.

The deal makes better sense for the Padres if Pomeranz is a starter. And it looks like the team is considering him a starting pitcher for the time being.

The question of whether or not Pomeranz can be a good starting pitcher for the Padres hinges on three things, most likely: his health, his changeup, and his curveball. Earlier this season, I talked to the pitcher about all three.

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With the non-tender deadline approaching on Wednesday, deals for arbitration-eligible players were going to be much more likely than the big free-agent contract we saw the Boston Red Sox hand David Price on Tuesday. Teams, especially small-market teams like the San Diego Padres and Oakland Athletics, have a tendency to move around players whose production on the field is becoming less valuable relative to the increasing expense (due to arbitration) of employing those players. The A’s and Padres completed a four-player deal on Wednesday. Not surprisingly, three of the four players were arbitration-eligible. The Padres will receive starter-turned-reliever Drew Pomeranz and minor-leaguer Jose Torres while the A’s will receive first baseman Yonder Alonso and lefty reliever Marc Rzepczynski.

The motivations for both clubs are fairly transparent. Last season, the Padres attempted an experiment that involved putting Wil Myers in center field and putting Matt Kemp and Justin Upton alongside him. The experiment did not go well. Myers, who had been a right fielder, was ill-equipped to handle center field. Placing the poor defense of Matt Kemp next to him did not help matters. The Padres have apparently seen the error of their ways and will not attempt a similar alignment next season. Myers recently said he would prefer to play first base, and this trade will allow him to do so and leave the Padres open to pursuing a new center fielder while they spend a few years waiting for Manuel Margot.

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On Monday, the Detroit Tigers held a press conference to introduce their newest acquisition, Jordan Zimmermann. As has become customary on these occasions, Tigers’ owner Mike Ilitch attended the media session and fielded questions from reporters. Most of the attention following the press conference centered on Ilitch’s comments that he doesn’t “care about the money,” and instead simply “want[s] the best players.”

Of potentially greater significance, however, was a related statement Ilitch made in response to a question about whether he’d be willing to allow the Tigers’ payroll to surpass the $189 million luxury tax threshold:

“I’m supposed to be a good boy and not go over it,” Ilitch said, “but if I think there are certain players that could help us a lot, I’ll go over it. Oops, I shouldn’t have said that.”

Admittedly, there is probably nothing to this statement. Ilitch was likely just speaking casually, acknowledging that while the team’s payroll would ideally stay below the $189 million level, he could be willing to eclipse that mark for the right player.

At the same time, however, Ilitch’s choice of words was rather odd. By stating that he’s “supposed to be a good boy” and not exceed the luxury tax threshold, Ilitch’s statement would seem to suggest that he is under some sort of external pressure not to allow the team’s payroll to cross the $189 million mark. Along these lines, Ilitch then appears to quickly realize that he may have spoken a bit too loosely, leading to his “Oops, I shouldn’t have said that” line.

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The Red Sox just paid an enormous amount of money for the baseball-throwing services of David Price. The deal makes sense, as Boston struggled last year in that department, and now they’ve basically ensured, barring injury or anomalous performance, that they’ll struggle less in that department next season. Price is a an exceptional pitcher. That was a well-established fact before he was handed $30 million a year — dating back to his breakout 2010 campaign with the Rays, in fact. However, this past season provided glimpses at a repertoire that might facilitate the next stage of David Price, Pitcher, and it was centered around the use of his cutter and the improvement of his changeup.

Jeff went over the changes in Price’s cutter usage in late September, but the main premise is this: Price started throwing more cutters, throwing them harder, and locating them further inside to right-handed hitters toward the end of last season. As we’ll see, that impacted how successful his changeup was in different parts of the zone.

Now, the changeup: we often hear about how difficult they’re to learn. They’re a “feel” pitch, and we’re told that, because of that, they need a lot of work — work that usually comes from experience. It takes confidence to throw any type of pitch well, and when confidence is lacking in a particular offering, the pitcher is reluctant to throw it very often. This is a little different for left-handed pitchers: as Eno pointed out in this piece, left-handed starters throw changeups 65% more often than right-handers do. Lefties inherently have a difficult job because the majority of hitters are right-handed; to combat this, they throw more changeups, the pitch with the best reverse platoon split.

Price has always thrown a changeup, going back to his debut in the league. And, fitting the narrative that changeups are found with more experience, he’s thrown them with increased usage every season of his career. Take a look at his pitch usage every season since 2010:

In 2015, he cracked the 20% mark with his changeup usage, and he’s now transitioned firmly away from using his curveball as his main secondary pitch. In truth, he had already transitioned away from that approach beginning in 2013, but this year marked not only another increase in usage, but a few other adjustments that merit attention from us.

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For the second time in as many years, Mark Trumbo has become to a fanbase one of those “Remember when we had Mark Trumbo?” guys. He received less than a year’s worth of playing time in Arizona before being shipped to Seattle where he received less than a year’s worth of playing time before being shipped to Baltimore.

That Trumbo has been traded three times in two years is, in some ways, revealing on its own. Good players get traded, too, but more often its the players with glaring flaws who find themselves repeatedly expendable and repeatedly dealt. As a bat-only, power-and-nothing-else guy, Trumbo fits the mold.

Trumbo is in his final year of arbitration and will be a free agent next offseason, meaning that he’s likely to become the answer of a trivia question to a third fanbase before too long. For the Orioles, Trumbo probably serves as a stopgap. He’s set to earn something like $9 million in arbitration, which made him a non-tender candidate for a Seattle team that’s looking to become more athletic.

One-dimensional non-tender candidates in their final year of team control don’t tend to carry too much in the way of trade value, and so all the Orioles had to give up for Trumbo’s services was Steve Clevenger. Clevenger is a soon-to-be 30-year-old catcher who bats left handed and is out of options so he’ll see some playing time in Seattle, but also seems likely to see playing time in Triple-A. He’ll do some things for the big league club, but he won’t do more things. He hasn’t hit much, but last year he hit a little, and he doesn’t carry any kind of defensive reputation one way or the other. Seattle doesn’t have any left-handed catchers in the high minors and he can also play some first base, so in that way, Clevenger is a fit in the loosest sense of the word. This is more than enough about Steve Clevenger.

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On Tuesday night, the Red Sox made David Price the highest paid pitcher in baseball history. Dave Dombrowski is clearly a Price fan, having previously traded for him while running the Tigers, and made good on his stated desire to bring a #1 starter to Boston. Of course, at $217 million over seven years, Price certainly isn’t coming cheaply, and the Red Sox throwing money at free agents certainly didn’t solve their problems a year ago, so it’s fair to be somewhat skeptical of this kind of team-building approach. But, rather than simply paint with broad strokes, it’s instructive to look at how pitchers who have performed similarly to Price have fared during the same stretch of their careers as the Red Sox just signed Price for.

To identify a list of similar pitchers, I used the FanGraphs leaderboard to identify pitchers in the last 20 years who had compiled between +26 and +34 WAR in their age-24 through age-29 seasons; this gives us a group that approximates the +30 WAR that Price put up during his six years as a full-time starter. Nineteen pitchers have accomplished this feat, Price included, though a couple of them — Felix Hernandez and Clayton Kershaw — are present-day peers, and thus, don’t have anything to tell us about how pitchers like this perform in their early 30s. So, excluding those two, we’re left with 16 pitchers who were comparably dominant during their 24-to-29 seasons.

How’d they do from ages 30 through 36? Well, take a look.

David Price Comparisons

Pitcher	Innings	WAR	WAR/200 IP
Mike Mussina	1,444	36	5
Roy Halladay	1,413	35	5
Andy Pettitte	1,282	28	4
John Smoltz	813	24	6
Javier Vazquez	994	19	4
Roy Oswalt	832	16	4
CC Sabathia	861	15	3
Dan Haren	958	12	2
Kevin Appier	930	11	2
Justin Verlander	557	11	4
Zack Greinke	425	10	5
Johan Santana	482	8	3
Jack McDowell	327	5	3
Jose Rijo	86	2	3
Ben Sheets	168	1	1
Brandon Webb	4	0	0

At the top, we see four very obvious success stories, with Mussina, Halladay, Pettitte, and Smoltz all maintaining their dominance, putting up performances as good or better than they did early in their careers. This is the kind of performance the Red Sox are clearly hoping for, and if he pitches like any of these four, this will go down as maybe the most successful free agent pitcher contract in baseball history. These four represent the best case scenario, and show that yes, it is indeed possible for a pitcher to maintain greatness even after turning 30.

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David Price can opt out of his seven-year, $217 million contract in three years? That’s either terrible for the Red Sox or a boon for the Red Sox, depending on how you think about it.

It’s terrible for the Red Sox!

It’s power in the hands of the player, since it’s a player option. If Price plays well, and the market continues to grow, they’ll have paid $30 million a year for three years and will have to get right back into negotiating with their ace, along with every other team.

If he gets hurt or plays poorly or the market doesn’t perform the same way going forward, they suddenly have to pay yesterday’s going rate for an overpriced, possibly hurt, aging ace… for another four years.

And before you say that it’s great for the Sox to be able to walk away if they feel the market will overvalue their pitcher… they could trade him if the market valued their under-contract ace more than they did. They would have a way to react other than just walking away, and they’d presumably get some sort of return for their asset.

It’s great for the Red Sox!

The opt-out makes it more likely that they get three good years from their investment and move on. It has to make it more likely than it would if the team gave him a seven-year confirmed deal, at least. That might be a matter of semantics, but it’s a fact. And teams prefer fewer years and higher average annual salaries, since it allows them to avoid larger commitments and work with greater flexibility.

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So David Price and the Red Sox have agreed to a seven-year deal worth $217 million, pending a physical that Price will presumably clear with some ease. As part of the terms, Price can opt out after year three, and sometimes pitchers do that, and sometimes they don’t. We’re in a weird place, where this was entirely predictable, for any number of reasons, and at the same time, we’re talking about the biggest pitcher contract in the history of the sport. That shouldn’t be something you just calmly nod at, but though this wasn’t a foregone conclusion, it was at least a popular guess. Price reunited with Dave Dombrowski on a team in need of an ace. Word is Boston blew the competition out of the water, which is what they figured to do.

Writing about these giant free-agent contracts is always a challenge. People want to know, “is it worth it?” and the bigger the contract, and the longer the contract, the more assumptions there are being made. You have to guess a player’s skill, and decline. You have to guess what a win is worth, now, and many years down the road. You have to guess at inflation, and around everything, you have to guess at a team’s success or failure. In the end, you’re left guessing. The teams themselves are left guessing. It’s not like they know the future much better than we do. It’s not like they understand injury risk much better than we do. Numbers are put on paper, and players sign on lines, and, subsequently, life happens. Each contract might turn out to be good, bad, or anywhere in between.

People want answers. There aren’t answers. Not that we know. Years down the road, we’ll all have opinions of the David Price contract with the Red Sox, but we can’t know what those opinions will be. I’m sorry to have to put it like that, but let’s leave this uncertainty behind, shall we? Let’s just focus on what we do know. That’s as much as can be done.

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As a part of whatever their plan is, the Braves have reportedly made Shelby Miller available, and they’re taking calls from almost everyone. Miller has three more years of team control, so it’s not like he’d be just a short-term addition, but the Braves would probably like to exchange that for four or five or six years of control of somebody else. It’s nice to have three years of a good player, but it’s less nice when at least the first one will do little to get the team away from the basement. The goal isn’t the year ahead. The goal is survival, so that better years may come.

Even just on the surface, it’s no mystery why Miller has more than a dozen suitors. He’s a cost-controlled, 25-year-old starting pitcher who just eclipsed 200 innings. He played for a miserable team, explaining how he paired a lousy record with a sub-3.5 ERA. Miller still throws plenty hard, and he gained back a few strikeouts, while limiting quality contact. Miller, as is, is appealing. But I think here we could be looking at a brighter future than usual. You typically want to project a player based on what he’s already done. I think there’s a chance Miller’s on the verge of a breakthrough, making him simultaneously a veteran and a sort of prospect. The teams most interested in Shelby Miller might be looking to buy his promise.

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