Giants Invest In Jeff Samardzija, Dave Righetti

Want to know an easy way to provoke someone into complaining about how all professional athletes are overpaid? Tell this person there was a pitcher last year who led all of baseball in both hits and runs allowed. And I mean “led” in the bad way, not the good way. Let that sink in, then tell the person the pitcher was a free agent, and finally tell the person that pitcher signed for five years and $90 million. More often than not, a rant is going to follow. It’s going to be a weird rant, that misses the point about how much money there is floating around in baseball these days, and the reality is that players are getting less of the league revenue than they used to. But you already knew it would be a weird rant. That’s why you targeted this given individual in the first place.

There are people who like to say that free agency is about rewarding players for what they’ve already done. To some extent it’s true — free agents score when they’ve proven they can be good. But of course, free agency is really about investing in the future, and I’m not sure it gets more clear than it is right here, with the Giants paying pretty big money for a pitcher coming off a conventionally disappointing season. This isn’t about what Jeff Samardzija’s done, certainly not what he’s done most recently. This is about what the Giants think Samardzija is going to be. Heaven knows they weren’t alone.

The track record has been up and down. Samardzija was a bad reliever, then he was a good reliever, then he was a good starter, then he was a worse starter, then he was a good starter, then he was a worse starter. We’ve been over all this before, and Samardzija has never fully tapped into all of his obvious potential. People love him for his athleticism, and they love him for his relatively limited wear and tear, owing to his unusual background. The stuff is powerful. The most recent season is strange.

Two years ago, Samardzija came closest to putting it all together. It’s why Billy Beane paid as much as he did before the deadline. That’s the guy the White Sox thought they were getting, but instead Samardzija took a step or two backward. Absolutely, he was hurt by what turned out to be a dreadful team defense. And Samardzija might’ve had a psychological letdown when he didn’t get dealt. But Samardzija himself isn’t blameless — his own numbers turned the wrong way.

I don’t think we’re accustomed to seeing talented pitchers struggle under the coaching of Don Cooper. He’s supposed to be one of those guys who’s good for projects, or incomplete talents, so it’s not a good look for Samardzija that all of what happened happened. But now think about what the Giants and other teams saw. Clearly, there was a statistical decline. That’s a red flag. But it should only really be a red flag when it’s caused by something physical. Samardzija seems to be healthy.

Between the last two years, 106 pitchers threw at least 100 innings in each season. Out of them, Samardzija last year had the single greatest decrease in groundball rate. Also, out of them, Samardzija last year had the single greatest decrease in fastball rate. Samardzija became more of a fly-ball guy, and he became more of a cutter guy. But just stuff-wise, there wasn’t a conspicuous issue.

Looking at Samardzija’s pitches, he didn’t have any kind of major velocity decline. He didn’t have a major release-point change, and between the last two years, again, Samardzija’s pitches all maintained the same shape. The decline can’t easily be explained by a decline in stuff. The stuff was the same stuff. It was just thrown differently, and that’s what makes Samardzija’s future so interesting — it seems like it’s just a matter of a tweak or two and you might be able to get the guy back to what he was. Or at least, make him something better than what he was most recently.

Of course, all things considered, you’d prefer to give money to a pitcher who didn’t just allow dozens upon dozens of runs. No one loves what just happened to Samardzija, but that also kept his price down, relative to what it would’ve been if his 2015 looked like his 2014. In Samardzija, we don’t have a pitcher experiencing physical decline. The decline was just statistical, meaning it was probably just mechanical, and mechanics can be fixed when they go slightly awry. It’s not a guarantee, since Cooper didn’t get Samardzija fixed in the end, but now there’s another spring training coming, a spring training with a team with a real long-term investment. Down the stretch, the White Sox knew Samardzija was a goner. The Giants did this because they believe in Samardzija, and because they believe in Dave Righetti being good for Samardzija.

Righetti has proven his worth before, and negotiations wouldn’t have gotten to the $90-million mark if there weren’t a few other teams with similar levels of confidence. Ideally, what you have in a free-agent pitcher is success, stuff, and health. Samardzija has the latter two, and the first one more distantly, and because of the last two points, teams think he’ll get back to the first point. This isn’t even ace money. This is good-pitcher money. Not that much has to be fixed, and now Samardzija is going to a much more forgiving setting than he had this past summer.

You’ll never find a guarantee in free agency, and there’ll always be some reason to worry. Samardzija is a pitcher who has to be fixed, and you don’t go to the store to buy things that are already broken. But this shouldn’t be an irreparable break, and it stands to reason Samardzija has slightly lower odds of a physical break, because he hasn’t thrown all that much. Good deal, bad deal, I don’t know — as always, the future is complicated and mostly unknowable. But the Giants are a money-maker, and they’re going to be good. They appear to have one of the better pitching coaches, and the year before last, Samardzija was outstanding, throwing the same stuff he threw last season. If things go wrong, it’ll be easy to laugh about this, specifically because Samardzija just gave up more runs than anybody else. But it’s awful easy to see this working out. It’s awful easy to see 2015 as a blip.