Chad Gaudin, Forever an Athletic
This one is pretty easy. Chad Gaudin kills righties and makes perfect sense coming out of any team’s bullpen. The Oakland Athletics need relievers, well, healthy relievers. Gaudin comes cheaply since he’ll be cashing two paychecks (roughly $700k from both, Oakland and the Yankees), and his performance speaks for itself.
Through nearly 600 career innings in the Majors and with 75 starts, somehow Gaudin has maintained a decent FIP at 4.5.What makes that career FIP interesting is that, as mentioned, he is a righty killer, but lefties punish him. As a starter, Gaudin would face lineups loaded with southpaws. His career totals for batters faced are 1,267 lefties and 1,389 righties, which only makes sense, given that Gaudin has a career 5.16 FIP versus lefties and 3.97 versus righties.
If used in a strict role where Gaudin only faces batters of the same hand, it would be easy to see him performing better than his FIP projections of 4.58 (CHONE) and 4.42 (ZiPS). Also worth noting: Those projections include a combined 52 starts. Expectations for his performance would alter by something like an entire run per nine innings if he became a full-time reliever.
The move represents a return to Gaudin’s old stomping grounds. Oakland is actually the organization in which Gaudin has pitched in the most games for as he did so during a three-year stint that stretched between 2006 and 2008. With the collective health of Andrew Bailey and Michael Wuertz questionable and opening day a week away, Billy Beane recently added Edwar Ramirez to the bullpen mixture as well.
One more time for redundancy’s sake: This move just makes sense.
Good luck to Chad Gaudin, I was sad to see him leave the Yankees after giving 110% down the stretch last year.
Wait a minute, according to a commenter in the other Gaudin article he’s completely worthless.
According to commenters in other articles, everybody is everything and anybody is anything.
I see this as a good pick up for the A’s. The A’s know pitching, they know what he can do, what he can’t do, and will use him properly. Gaudin will do well for them.
Question for you, RJ – I think I read hear the other day that Gaudin was released by the Yanks early enough that they wouldn’t be on the hook for his entire 2010 salary. Any truth to that?
Thanks –
Yes, and that might be why this happened. 700k is all they are beholden to him, as opposed to 2.3 million.
As Matt said, yep–and to further clarify, there are usually 2 deadlines for releasing players who have non-guaranteed contracts so that the team doesn’t owe them the entire amount of said contract.
The earlier deadline is frequently called ’30 day termination pay’, because all that’s owed the player is 1/6(one sixth) of that year’s salary–I think that assumes that the typical season length is 180 days. Hence, 1/6 of 180 is 30. If a team is able to make a decision on a player early enough, they save a little more by owing them less.
The later deadline–the one the Yankees used on Gaudin–is frequently called the ’45 day termination pay’, because the team owes the player 1/4 of that year’s salary. Gaudin was set to make $2.95 million under the terms of his 1-year contract with the Yankees, and now he’ll make $737,500 from the Yankees and $700,00 from the A’s–which is now guaranteed, since it’s after the deadline–but it’s not much and they could eat that much if they had to release him. This 2nd deadline is usually right around March 30 or 31.
Note that this happens at least once or twice every March. Don’t know if it happened last March, but I do recall the Blue Jays doing the same thing to Reed Johnson 2 years ago, and the Cubs promptly signed him. He retained his arbitration-eligibility at the end of 2008, and stayed with the Cubs through the end of 2009.
(Which brings up another point, that the contracts received by arbitration-eligible players, whether through arbitration or direct negotiation, or NOT guaranteed. Which is why this can happen.)
hi chad wondering if we are related i am from east coast quebec? our names, last, esp, r unusual.