Estrada, Strickland Will Try To Bounce Back Out West

On Thursday, word broke that the Mariners had signed 30-year-old righty Hunter Strickland to a one-year , $1.3 million deal with incentives totaling about the same for games pitched and finished. On Friday afternoon, the Mariners’ division-mates in Oakland announced a deal of their own, for one year and for $4 million, with 35-year-old Marco Estrada. Both pitchers are 2019 bounce-back candidates, and both will spend at least a portion of 2019 in the AL West. Let’s discuss.

Given the terms of his deal, it seems reasonable to assume that the Mariners hope Strickland will be able to step into the ninth-inning role recently vacated by Edwin Díaz, perhaps in concert with Cory Gearren or Anthony Swarzak, or perhaps all by his lonesome, depending on how things shake out in spring training. That kind of uncertainty is the natural consequence of entering 2019 with a bullpen that’s lost Díaz, James Pazos, Juan Nicaso, and Alex Colomé to trade this winter and seems unlikely to welcome free agents Nick Vincent, Zach Duke, and Adam Warren back to Seattle. Seattle had an excellent bullpen in 2018 but doesn’t, in any meaningful sense, have that bullpen any more. Strickland is one of the new guard, here to carry the M’s over the water into the next phase of their rebuild.

Which makes the question of whether Strickland will be any good in 2019 something of an irrelevance to the Mariners’ long-term plans — if he’s good, he can be traded midseason; if he’s bad, it’s “just” $1.3 million — although it presumably remains of considerable importance to Strickland himself. For my money, I’d bet against renewed success in 2019. After routinely sitting in the low triple-digits with his four-fastball during his first three years in the majors (2014-2016), Strickland’s mean velocity on the pitch has dropped to 95.7 miles per hour, and his whiff percentage on the pitch has dropped from its high of 18% in 2015 to 8% last year. Those fundamentals have generated poor results across the board:

It’s hard to know what precisely brought on Strickland’s decline, but given that fastballs don’t usually get faster with age and that Strickland’s particular fastball is already getting beaten up at 95-96 miles per hour, it’s hard to be too sanguine about his future. Then again, given the contract he signed and the Mariners’ current insistence on trading away all their best players, there really is very little downside to this deal for Seattle. Just maybe reinforce the clubhouse doors.

There’s far more reason to be optimistic about the A’s bounce-back candidate, Estrada, despite the fact that his 2018 was if anything even worse than Strickland’s (the 5.64 ERA and 1.82 HR/9 are the figures that jump out at you most immediately). For one thing, Estrada has never really relied on his velocity to generate outs and so last year’s mile-per-hour slide from 90.1 to 89.0 on the fastball isn’t really something to worry about — in fact, it puts him right around where he was in 2016, when he put up a 3.48 ERA over 176 innings for the Blue Jays. For another, Estrada’s game has always been up in the zone and so (a) bad years like 2018 were always going to happen from time to time and (b) you don’t have to wish for too much positive regression on the HR/9 to get him back into a range (say, 2016’s 1.18, or his career 1.41 mark) where you know he can have success.

In Oakland, Estrada will join Mike Fiers, who re-signed with the club in December, and holdovers/questionable starting pitchers Daniel Mengden, Chris Bassitt, and Frankie Montas in an A’s rotation that will be held together by hope and duct tape until Jharel Cotton (Tommy John), A.J. Puk (also Tommy John), and Sean Manaea (shoulder surgery) return to the field at some point mid-season (and maybe Jesús Luzardo comes up at some point). Given the circumstances, and the budget to which the club has decided to hew, Estrada is exactly the kind of guy you’d want to see the A’s sign: healthy (he’s never had an arm injury we know about), inexpensive, and a plausible candidate for solid numbers in 2019. If he’s good in the early going next year, he can slot in at the back end of a rotation that has a reasonable shot at the Wild Card if everything goes right. If he’s terrible, chances are the A’s are too, and — again — it’s just $4 million. Even for the A’s, that’s manageable — their 2018 payroll was $66 million and their commitments for 2019 total just $69 million so far. What could go wrong?