Just What is One Getting in Ubaldo Jimenez?
Let’s grant that there’s pretty much always something to not like about a given free agent. Baseball has a very limited number of truly extraordinary players, and those players seldom become free agents, at least before they start getting old. So any free agent will always have a more optimistic perception, and a more pessimistic perception. But no matter what could be said about other years, it’s felt like there’s been a lot of uncertainty within this year’s free-agent-starting-pitcher class. Teams didn’t know whether they could trust Matt Garza’s elbow. A year ago, Ervin Santana wasn’t good. A year ago, Ubaldo Jimenez wasn’t good. Masahiro Tanaka has never pitched in the States. Hell, the surest thing might be A.J. Burnett, and he’s old, and he just became an actual free agent the other day. For effect, let’s repeat that the surest thing within a given player pool might be A.J. Burnett.
Jimenez is probably the most mysterious out of everybody. He’s been an ace, he’s been a wreck, and he’s been everything in between. He’s not old, but he doesn’t throw like he did when he was young. Statistically, he’s coming off a bounceback season, having posted the same adjusted FIP and the same adjusted xFIP as Zack Greinke. The strikeouts were there, even if the old velocity wasn’t. On the surface, Jimenez and Santana look similar, in that they’re asking suitors to buy in to surprisingly successful 2013s. That makes them kind of difficult to trust. With Jimenez, though, it’s even more difficult. With Jimenez, it isn’t about all of 2013.
To just get right to the point: Jimenez made his 24th start on August 17th, in Oakland. He finished with a 4.00 ERA and a 4.33 FIP, and he’d averaged about 1.8 strikeouts per walk. Three of five pitches had gone for strikes. Batters had reached against him at a .335 clip. The average AL starter last year threw 63.5% of pitches for strikes. Jimenez had reached or exceeded that rate in five games out of 24. Jimenez looked better than he did the season before, but he remained ever so inconsistent. He certainly wasn’t putting himself in position to cash in on the free-agent market.
There were eight starts left. Over them, Jimenez ran a 1.66 ERA and a 1.28 FIP, and he averaged about seven strikeouts per walk. Two of three pitches had gone for strikes. Batters reached against him at a .270 clip, while slugging .307. Practically overnight, Jimenez went from source of frustration to dominant ace, and while maybe you could say the signs were there, that’s only true because of Jimenez’s background. There was no real indication he was about to turn the corner, when he did.
So, with Jimenez, it isn’t about believing in a bounceback full season. It’s about believing in a remarkable one-fourth of one full season, a fourth in which Jimenez threw a great deal more strikes even though he improved his rate of pitches in the zone by all of one percentage point. Usually I don’t like to break things down in this way — a season is a season, and the numbers at the end ought to be representative — but Jimenez only started to look like a guy a team would actually want in the second half of last August. That makes him all the more difficult to forecast.
Interestingly, Jimenez’s improvement coincided with a tremendous increase in innings caught by Yan Gomes instead of Carlos Santana. Gomes is, statistically and visibly, the better receiver, and down the stretch Jimenez was able to pitch to a slightly bigger strike zone. This made some difference, but it doesn’t explain all of the difference, and some of it could’ve been because of Jimenez himself instead of the catcher behind the plate.
There was also, for Jimenez, a slight late uptick in velocity. No matter what coaches might otherwise suggest, velocity is important, and this presumably helped Jimenez with his results, but his late velocities were also comparable to what he was throwing the season before, when he was a mess. In 2012, Jimenez threw 115 pitches at least 95 miles per hour. In 2013, that count dropped to 43, and 15 of those pitches came before Jimenez’s late-season breakthrough. This factor shouldn’t be overstated.
The thing I keep coming back to is the strength of Jimenez’s home-stretch schedule. Over a full season, we expect that the quality of opposition will more or less even out to approximate league-average. Over littler stretches, players can go through hell or skip through the flowers. Here, in order, are Jimenez’s final eight opponents from last August and September:
- Twins
- @Braves
- Orioles
- Royals
- @White Sox
- Astros
- White Sox
- @Twins
The Braves didn’t have a bad lineup, but in this particular game, they had to bat a pitcher, and they didn’t start Jason Heyward or Freddie Freeman. The Orioles didn’t have a bad lineup, yet against them Jimenez lasted just 90 pitches, with 62% strikes. The White Sox had a bad lineup, and Jimenez faced them twice. The Twins had a bad, strikeout-prone lineup, and Jimenez faced them twice. Joe Mauer didn’t play. Josh Willingham didn’t play the second game. The Astros had a bad lineup, and Jason Castro didn’t play. The Royals had a pretty bad lineup. Down the stretch, I’d say Jimenez faced one real challenge. He did fine in that game, but he excelled in the others.
Which makes it difficult to separate the pitching component from the hitting component. Without question, Jimenez deserves credit for shutting down his opponents, even if said opponents weren’t very good. They were all, if nothing else, selected to be major leaguers. But there’s reason to be wary, reason to be uneasy. Jimenez’s biggest swinging-strike game down the stretch came against a depleted lineup in an NL ballpark. His next two biggest swinging-strike games came against two pretty miserable Twins lineups. I feel comfortable saying Jimenez was pitching better. I also feel comfortable guessing he had a little help. It wasn’t his zone rate that shot up. It was his O-Swing%, which exceeded his previous career high. That could be the hallmark of some undisciplined hitters.
Jimenez, naturally, got attention for his turnaround. Here’s a thing. Here’s another thing. Here’s a third thing. Most people chose to focus on his improving mechanics, and his mechanics had long been a work in progress. They still are, and always will be. The pitch is that Jimenez has put it all back together again, and from this point forward he’s ready to be highly successful. Indeed, maybe he found something out. But this is a case where the numbers can say only so much — this is one free agent whose pursuit is going to come down to scouting and hope.
Ubaldo Jimenez is a free agent who was an inconsistent mess before closing 2013 with a stretch of eight magnificent starts. Though he didn’t pound the zone, he did generate a lot more strikes, throwing mostly to a different catcher than before. His stuff looked a lot like his regular stuff, his mechanics hadn’t been completely reworked, and his opposition down the stretch was bad. One of the two good lineups he faced didn’t have two of its better hitters, and it had a pitcher in it. Good luck trying to figure this all out. The answer probably isn’t on the Ubaldo Jimenez FanGraphs player page.
You’d think the safe thing would be to follow the strikeouts. Jimenez just racked up a bunch of strikeouts, and he’s likely to be something of a strikeout pitcher. But Ubaldo Jimenez as a free agent, most assuredly, isn’t a safe thing. He’s a mysterious thing, even more than most, and I don’t know if it’s even possible to approach him with confidence. In time he’ll sign a contract, handed his way by crossed fingers.
Jeff made Lookout Landing a thing, but he does not still write there about the Mariners. He does write here, sometimes about the Mariners, but usually not.
Jeff, not only do you do fine work, you do LOTS of it. Your output is remarkable.
Yeah, those of us that were fans of Jeff back in his Lookout Landing days were always amazed at how much stuff he could put out.
Jeff puts out more than my girlfriend 🙁
It’s too bad that so many show up here feeling like they got screwed.
I was thinking the exact same thing. If there were a wCA/d for fangraphs authors (word count average per day) Sullivan would be smashing the leaderboard.
Make that qawCA/d (quality-adjusted word count average per day). But ditto the sentiment.
xQawCA/D-
should be xQawCA/D+, not –
but good sentiment
Great write up, well supported conclusion, even though the conclusion is inconclusive.
This about nails it on Jiminez. Buyer beware here.
While I agree with the article in general (Ubaldo is inconsistent, and you can’t REALLY trust him), it wasn’t like he just suddenly became amazing during those last eight starts.
If you remove his five April starts:
27 starts; 2.72 ERA; 2.61 k to walk ratio; 9.9 k/9 (175 k’s).
If you remove April and May (10 starts; most likely you would need time to trust him after his abysmal April):
22 starts; 2.40 ERA; 2.61 k to walk; 9.68 k/9 (141 k’s).
His post All Star break numbers:
13 starts; 1.82 ERA; 3.70 k to walk; 10.7 k/9 (100 k’s).
Obviously, his last eight starts were ridiculous, but he was actually pretty solid for most of the year.
Whether you trust him to carry this over is the question that you are trying to answer, and I don’t know that there is an answer to be gained.
He wasn’t solid most of the year. After his start against the Marlins on 8/2, the Indians trusted him so little that they bumped his next start, because it was coming against Detroit in a big series. Bumped him for a rookie who’d started all of one game in the majors to that point. From that point on, he took off. He velocity increased and he quit nibbling around so much and for the first time all year started working off his fastball. In his prior starts where he’d had a lot of success it was usually more because he had his off-speed stuff working especially well that day. I’d say his level of success at the end was definitely influenced by the quality of his opposition but he was also legitimately pitching better than he had been.
while I agree with this generally, it’s possible to do this with a lot of players and make them look better than they are. Just as an example: Anibal Sanchez — 2.93 ERA first half, 2.20 ERA second half.
Obviously, the Jimenez gap is huge, which makes it more likely to be meaningful and indicate a trend in the right direction. But you can’t ignore the first half of the season, since it’s the second-best thing we have for predicting (behind only the second half), and cutting out bad months is a quick way to make any player look a lot better than they really are.
This is great stuff. Really though, just tossing out “buyer beware” is meaningless. As stated, all the remaining pitchers are pretty big risks, and who knows if Burnett is really a free agent or just trying to squeeze more money out of the Pirates. If a team such as the Blue Jays that could make a playoff run with some health or luck could get him around 3/39, if would be a well-calculated risk, “buyer beware” or not.
I hope you mean the Blue Jays should be trying to get Jimenez for 3/39, not Burnett…
Another thing of note is the number of letters in his name. He has 6 letters in his first and 7 in his last. Such a combination allows the name to sound more pleasant, which increases the person’s confidence, which in turn increases the person’s ability to bounce back from tough situations such as a mechanical breakdown like Ubaldo experienced.
Whoever signs him, guess we won’t know if they evaluated him correctly until looking back at the end of next year/his contract.
Isn’t this true of every contract ever?
I mean, it’s only instructive if we look at what somebody should have known, but we aren’t going to know if somebody provided value until they actually play.
Concise, well-written, enlightening. Great work Jeff.
I didn’t realize people were discouraged from intelligent discussion and criticism. Personally, I find those comments much better than the endless onslaught of “thank you master”. I love Jeff’s work, and think he did a great job here. But I also think people should be giving their opposing comments.
You sound like a joy to be around.
And your hair. Is. STUPID.
Why don’t you go back to your home on Whore Island!
Here’s another way of looking at it. Ubaldo’s xFIP the last 5 years: 3.59, 3.60, 3.71, 4.98 and 3.62. If a club signing him takes the view that it is getting a player who is likely to post an ERA similar to 2013 in 2014 and years following, the club gets what it deserves. If it takes the view that he is likely to post an ERA somewhere between 3.70 and 4.00 in a neutral park, then it is within the zone of reasonableness. The contract figures being bandied about reflect the latter kind of expectation.
Excellent comment, Mike. Those xFIP numbers show a consistently above average but not top flight pitcher with one horrendous outlier season.
Jiminez looks like a good risk as long as a team doesn’t pay him like an ace.
Jeff admits that he hates to chop up the season, so I’m interested in to why he didn’t chop off his horrid start. That seems just as fair to me as boiling his season down to, “He played bad teams.”
We’re talking about a guy here who had one horrendous season. The post above mine seems pretty reasonable (noting his xFIP the last 5 years). In other words, I would take Ubaldo Jimenez at 3/$39MM ten times out of ten over Garza or Nolasco at their contracts.
He had an FIP and an xFIP over 4 in April, June, and July. Good in May, but that was quickly forgotten. His repertoire is pretty clearly diminished a good amount from what it was in his Colorado days. He’s always been interesting, but it was only that late stretch that really turned him into some kind of premium free agent.
I’m still a little unclear as to why we are breaking this down month to month (first time ever on Fangraphs?), but if we look at the entire first half he posted an xFIP of 4.16. If a guy can post an equivalent FIP (which he did not) for 200 innings then that is a relatively valuable pitcher.
If you’re reasonably sure you can get that, with the possibility that he can pitch like the guy that was phenomenal at the end of the year or somewhere in between, then 3/$39MM sounds like a no-brainer.
For chrissakes, Tanaka has never thrown a pitch in this country and he just cost the Yankees $150MM +. Matt Garza has a greater than 50% chance of going on the DL, and he just cost the Brewers $50MM. Ricky Nolasco constantly underperforms his peripherals, and same deal.
3/$39 PLUS a draft pick. Depending on when that pick is it could make the cost higher (and potentially much higher) than Garza/Nolasco, etc.
I don’t think the analysis here would point to 3/39, or any specific number, being a bad deal for a team acquiring Ubaldo. It’s more like why, despite coming off a 3-WAR deal, Ubaldo’s struggling to land a high-paying deal. If you just look at Ubaldo’s yearly numbers here, it would be a bit inexplicable that his demand is so low, since 2012 was the only year he wasn’t worth at least 3 fWAR. But Ubaldo’s a case where the yearly numbers are a bit misleading. He was worthless for pretty much 2 entire years. In 2013, he was worthless in April, from May-August he was basically an okay 5th starter who usually needed 100 pitches and a bit of luck to get 15 outs, and then for 8 weeks he pitched like a top of the rotation starter.
Knowing all that, I’d still take him at 3/39, but that would be near the upper limit. If he reverts to pitching like a 5th starter, it’s not like it’s a total waste (Hughes got 60% of that and hasn’t even been an okay 5th starter), and he has a lot more upside than a Scott Feldman. But it’s not like if you sign him you can pencil him in for 3 WAR, as his year-to-year FIP-based WAR might suggest.
Here is what you [the Yankees] are getting in Ubaldo Jiminez,an overpaid,dead arm that will be useless when they really need him.