Astros Add Luke Gregerson, Possible Trade Chip
The Astros have made it clear that they intend to upgrade their bullpen this winter, chasing Andrew Miller and David Robertson with significant four year offers before watching both sign with other teams. So this morning, they turned to Plan C, reportedly signing Luke Gregerson to a three year, $18.5 million contract, according to Bob Nightengale.
The big question hanging over this move, and the pursuits of Miller and Robertson, is why the Astros are spending money to sign free agent relievers. Expensive bullpen arms have historically proven to provide the lowest return on investment in baseball, and the Astros are not in a position to sacrifice significant future value for a modest short-term boost. Why would a team that has been so set on building for the future suddenly shift gears and sign an aging reliever who probably won’t still be an effective arm by the time the Astros are ready to contend?
Well, I’m just speculating here, but perhaps the Astros signed Gregerson with the clear intention of trading him this summer for something that could be a part of their future. As we see every July, the markup on useful bullpen arms is ridiculously high in-season, and with so many teams currently in go-for-it mode, the Astros are positioned to be one of the few teams able to take advantage of what should be a very strong seller’s market.
When everyone is buying, being the only team with stuff to sell is a great position to be in, but first, you have to have things that the buyers want. As long as he continues to pitch relatively well, contending teams will want Gregerson in July, especially if the Astros agree to pick up a bit of his future salary. And in effect, the Astros could essentially be buying themselves a pretty decent prospect.
Let’s say they hold him until mid-July, so they’d have paid him $3 million of his $6 million 2015 salary, then agreed to pick up $5 million of the remaining $15 million he was still owed. An acquiring team would only have to absorb $10 million in salaries for 2.5 years of relief work, which would look like a bargain at a time when there are going to be few other options to upgrade in-season. And so, the Astros could likely extract a solid young player in return, essentially buying that prospect for $8 million in salary.
The Astros have money, so they can afford to gamble the $18.5 million in guaranteed money that Gregerson can still be effective for a few months. If it doesn’t work out, well, they’re out $6 million per year in a few years where they probably weren’t going to win anyway, and premium free agents aren’t taking their money until they get a little more respectable anyway. Yeah, Gregerson could suck, and then they’d have “wasted” that money, but it’s only wasted cash if you could have spent it on something better. If no one wants to sign with the Astros, and the alternative was to not spend it, then it’s not a waste even if he’s lousy and nukes his own trade value.
If he’s not lousy, and his trade value is buoyed by the Astros willingness to pay down part of this contract in July, then the Astros might have just found a way to make themselves an even more attractive seller in a market where there is going to be very little competition.
Dave is the Managing Editor of FanGraphs.
One potential way we might be missing the value of elite relievers is that the relationship between WAR added and WPA added isn’t linear and one-to-one.
If you have a weak bullpen, adding an elite arm can have a multiplicative effect if you properly deploy him in the highest-leverage situations. I can’t find the article that demonstrated this, but basically there’s a decreasing marginal utility associated with having multiple elite relievers, but the first one is actually worth much more than their raw WAR total would suggest.
We account for leverage in reliever WAR. It’s baked into the calculation.
Yes, but WAR is by construction supposed to be context-neutral. WAR accounts for leverage, but under generic assumptions about rest-of-bullpen. Joshua_C’s point is that it is precisely the Astros’ context that is affecting the value here.
Dave–yeah, Plucky made my point. It’s not that elite relievers are inherently (or in a context-neutral sense) more valuable, it’s that they’re marginally more valuable depending on the rest of the bullpen.
So I’m not saying there’s some kind of systemic error in WAR–I’m saying that a team’s context can affect the marginal value they’d assign to a reliever quite adversely.
Not sure if this is the article you’re thinking of, but I wrote about this for THT this past season – http://www.hardballtimes.com/leverage-matters-when-to-invest-in-the-bullpen/
Doesn’t necessarily mean that the first elite reliever is worth more than WAR suggests, just that you have to account for the bullpen construction when determining how valuable a reliever is to an individual team. Astros don’t have any great relievers, so being able to give Gregerson their highest leverage innings and bump everyone else down the ladder makes him more valuable to them than he might be to a team that already has one or two elite relievers.
Yeah, I think so. Basically, the last sentence you wrote conveys my thoughts exactly–re-reading my first post I’m realizing it wasn’t clear that I meant value to the team, as opposed to context-neutral value.
Big market team owned by a war profiteer that has been behaving like the Rays for the better part of a decade now. Awesome!
I don’t think “decade” means what you think it means.
Fangraphs: please add a sarcasm font so we can distinguish humor from trolling
Stan: Having a big market does not magically turn into revenue. It gets intermediated by a TV deal. The Astros’ RSN just came out of bankruptcy, and the team has not gotten a single dollar of local TV broadcast money since June 2013. The debacle has been covered several times at fangraphs by Wendy Thurm. If you are still operating under the premise of that Forbes blogpost/online article, know that Forbes more or less disavowed it 3 days later
Have you considered the possibility their primary purpose is simply to get better and win more games? That at current $/war levels, spending less than 1-win money to add a reliever who will go to first or second in the leverage chain is good value on its own terms? And that when you are shifting into the get-better stage of rebuilding and have a bottom-feeding payroll, spending $ is better than spending prospects when it comes to player acquisition?
I’m aware have gotten a certain rep, but they are out of sell-everything-for-the-future mode and into make-the-mlb-club-better mode. Keep in mind this is a 3-year deal, and the Astros intend to be contenders in 2016-7
I think it’s a lot simpler than that. The Astros’ bullpen has been awful and Luhnow and the Astros’ FO have promised, in response to public pressure (and supported by Crane’s public statements), to improve the team next year. One relatively cheap way to do that (at least in total dollars) is through the bullpen.
The Astros simply aren’t “so set on building for the future” at the expense of improving their record in the short-term, which is why they didn’t trade pieces like Qualls and Fowler last year at the trade deadline.
How long until Astro’s transaction analyses do not have to include the “here’s how his trade value will be at mid-season” paragraph? 2017?
Miller, Robertson, Gregerson. That Fernando Rodney 2/14 deal doesn’t look so questionable anymore.
Given that they were also chasing Miller and Robertson, does this explanation/theory fit? Those other contracts would probably not have huge trade value in half a year and those seemed to be plans A and B.
Seems like the Astros just went down to the next best reliever, and perhaps this is trying to assign too much credit to the FO?
It’s kind of like Beane and the Jim Johnson deal (where “he can always flip him at the deadline” was one of the rationalizations)… sometimes a signing is just a signing and not the latest arbitrage or part of some bigger strategic move.
Larry Andersen and Jeff Bagwell endorse these signings.
Is Gregerson going to be closing games for the Stros or will he be in his typical set up role?
Pat Neshek!
109 combined IP in 6 seasons prior to 2014. You would think that GM’s would be smart enough to recognize fluky RP seasons.
Pitchers don’t increase their velocity by 1.4 mph through luck; that was through a mechanical change. Regardless, it didn’t cost them a draft pick and, if he does well again, he can be traded away at the deadline for something of value.
So, $31 million buys them two “maybe” trade chips if they don’t face predictable RP regression (Gregerson’s K rate is in decline and Neshek has an arm held on with staples). Even best case, no one is going to give up much in the way of prospects for a middle reliever. Seems a lot like flushing money down the toilet to me. Why not just give those innings to young live arms that they have a bunch of and develop a much better asset. Use the $31 million for an extension on a young SP or position player.
the Astros are not in a position to sacrifice significant future value for a modest short-term boost.
I’m failing to see how the Astros are sacrificing significant future value by signing Gregerson. He doesn’t cost them any future prospects or players, only money. In fact, he would seem to add future value, assuming he continues to pitch well.
I’m (very) later to this post, but why wasn’t Gregerson’s heavy use of the slider given as a potential negative? It seems like every other article about pitchers this offseason is beating this drum (for example, it’s part of autocomplete when typing Tyson Ross’ name).