To Add Insult To Injury

It’s performance review week at my day job, which means I get to find out how many WAR my manager thinks I accrued last year. Based on that, she’ll assign me into one of four buckets: poor, developing, strong, and top. It’s one of those systems where the top and bottom levers are rarely exercised but the road to a “strong” is traversable ground.

At my workplace, annual compensation adjustments are directly tied to which category an employee falls into. In the lowest bucket — I’m sure someone’s fallen into it but I’ve yet to see or hear about it — you won’t receive anything, but after that it’s smooth sailing. The next rung up gets a cost of living bump or a little more, and the raises only increase from there.

It’s not a perfect system, of course. A couple of the performance inputs feel a little BABIP-ey, subject to the whims of Google’s search algorithms and the ability of our teammates. Speaking of teammates, clubhouse chemistry undoubtedly matters here: The camaraderie of your team and your relationship with management are like park factors, invisible mechanisms adding or subtracting a thousand bucks from what our $/WAR suggests we should earn. Still, the criteria is reasonably clear and the process about as transparent as I could ask for.

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Poor: Performance often falls below the expectations of the role despite support, follow-up and feedback.

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Baseball operates a little differently. Throughout a player’s time in the minors, their salary won’t fluctuate much and will stay pretty lousy all the way up the chain. Young big leaguers generally make the minimum, maybe a little more depending on the generosity of their employer. Sometimes you get a small raise, sometimes Houston gets mad at you for not signing a team-friendly extension and pays you as little as they possibly can. To the extent that arbitration counts as a performance review, it’s a chaotic and painful one. Not until free agency does a player really get a shot to earn what his performance says he should.

Of course, it’s not really fair at all, for all the reasons that have been covered ad nauseum in recent years, plus a few more on top of that. It isn’t fair if your free agency pops up during a pandemic. It isn’t fair if you become a free agent the year after clubs go on a rare spending spree. It isn’t fair if you got hurt a couple months before you reach free agency and it’s doubly unfair if the injury wasn’t your fault. This leads us to José Álvarez, who finally hit the market this past winter, 15 years, one nasty injury, and half a lifetime after signing with the Red Sox out of Venezuela in 2005.

A quick word on that injury: You may remember that Álvarez got hit in the beans by a 105 mph line drive from Lourdes Guriel Jr. last summer:

Álvarez getting the out was one of the more impressive athletic feats of the year. He collapsed after tossing the ball to first and was ultimately carted off of the field. He didn’t suffer any long-term physical damage, fortunately, but he wound up missing the rest of the season.

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Developing: Developing with opportunity areas that exist to reach consistent, strong performance.

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It took Álvarez a while to find a suitor this winter, and it was only over this past weekend that he finally put pen to paper. He inked a one-year, $1.15 million deal with the Giants, with a $1.5 million club option for 2022 and a $100,000 buyout if the Giants don’t pick it up. For Álvarez, it’s a decent landing spot. He joins a bullpen flush with lefties, but as a southpaw with relatively muted platoon splits, he fits better than you might think. He also reunites with Gabe Kapler, who managed him for two years in Philadelphia.

Álvarez probably won’t be the last guy to sign a big league contract this winter, err, spring. There are a couple of pretty good players still out there: Cole Hamels, Rick Porcello, Shane Greene. I’m not really sure what to make of Yasiel Puig’s situation at this point, but he’s lurking around too. For the most part though, the big signings are all taken care of, and cumulatively the players took a bath this year, signing for less money and less per player than any class in recent memory.

Per usual, the big free agents got their money. Topline figures are slightly muted by the unusual terms of Trevor Bauer’s deal, but the top six players in our offseason rankings actually beat most of our projections. But downstream, exceptions like James McCann and Liam Hendriks aside, the picture was grim, particularly among on the free agents who didn’t quite make our list. As mentioned above, there are a number of players still looking for work, and functional performers like Travis Shaw and Brian Goodwin could only find minor league deals.

And then there’s Jose Álvarez.

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Strong: Meets and sometimes exceeds performance goals.

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Álvarez came up as a starter in 2013, but has spent most of his career in the bullpen. He established himself as a reliable major-league reliever in 2015, when he posted a 3.49 ERA and 3.60 FIP in 67 innings. Since, his numbers have hardly deviated. Sometimes he’s been a little better, sometimes a little worse, but the delta has always been small.

His underlying skills have held steady as well. Neither his velocity nor his pitch mix has changed much in recent years. He pitched as something of a lefty specialist in Los Angeles but his four-pitch arsenal, headlined by a bat-missing changeup, is conducive to more regular work and he proved he could handle expanded duties in Philadelphia. Exciting? Not really. Useful? Absolutely: He’s racked up nearly 3.5 WAR in the last six years.

In that time, his salary has risen slowly but steadily. He didn’t earn much above the minimum until 2018, when his pay doubled. He crawled within a hair of $2 million in 2019 and would have eclipsed that in 2020 if not for a pesky pandemic. The going rate for one WAR on the open market is a moving target these days, but it’s hard to imagine Álvarez’s consistent production being worth much less than the approximately $3 million he was set to earn last season.

Of course, that’s not how things work these days.

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Top: Demonstrates exceptional performance.

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This both is and is not about José Álvarez, a player whose competency is outmuscled by his obscurity. When you google his name, the first Baseball Reference link will take you to a different Jose Alvarez’s page, a now 64-year-old righty who pitched a bit for the Braves in the 1980s. When you search eBay for his baseball card, you’ll find a couple — but also a far wider selection of Jose Altuve/Yordan Alvarez combo cards, and of course a few more for the elder Alvarez as well. Nobody is confusing him for a top performer.

On principle though, if we want the world to be as fair as we can make it, when someone does their job and does it well over a fairly long period of time, they deserve to be rewarded for it. If I’m having a good year, I expect to get a little something for the effort; if I’m having a good year and then I have to take time off because someone launched a projectile into my sensitive parts, I would expect the same. It didn’t work out that way for Álvarez, who wound up taking a 70% pay cut after six years of good work. Call it adding insult to injury.