Ben and Sam banter about the Tony Cruz trade and then discuss a slightly (but only slightly!) more momentous move, the Red Sox signing David Price.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
For the second time in as many years, Mark Trumbo has become to a fanbase one of those “Remember when we had Mark Trumbo?” guys. He received less than a year’s worth of playing time in Arizona before being shipped to Seattle where he received less than a year’s worth of playing time before being shipped to Baltimore.
That Trumbo has been traded three times in two years is, in some ways, revealing on its own. Good players get traded, too, but more often its the players with glaring flaws who find themselves repeatedly expendable and repeatedly dealt. As a bat-only, power-and-nothing-else guy, Trumbo fits the mold.
Trumbo is in his final year of arbitration and will be a free agent next offseason, meaning that he’s likely to become the answer of a trivia question to a third fanbase before too long. For the Orioles, Trumbo probably serves as a stopgap. He’s set to earn something like $9 million in arbitration, which made him a non-tender candidate for a Seattle team that’s looking to become more athletic.
One-dimensional non-tender candidates in their final year of team control don’t tend to carry too much in the way of trade value, and so all the Orioles had to give up for Trumbo’s services was Steve Clevenger. Clevenger is a soon-to-be 30-year-old catcher who bats left handed and is out of options so he’ll see some playing time in Seattle, but also seems likely to see playing time in Triple-A. He’ll do some things for the big league club, but he won’t do more things. He hasn’t hit much, but last year he hit a little, and he doesn’t carry any kind of defensive reputation one way or the other. Seattle doesn’t have any left-handed catchers in the high minors and he can also play some first base, so in that way, Clevenger is a fit in the loosest sense of the word. This is more than enough about Steve Clevenger.
| 11:22 |
: So, after a slow start, we have something to talk about. David Price to Boston, Greinke likely choosing beween LA and SF in the next day or two, and of course, the rumored blockbuster of Yonder Alonso to the A’s.
|
| 11:22 |
: With the winter meetings kicking off Monday, let’s get our speculation game on, and try to figure out what is going to happen over the next few weeks.
|
| 11:23 |
: The queue is now open, and we’ll get started around noon.
|
| 11:24 |
: Also, you’ll note that the Jotcast team made a bunch of improvements to the chat software after feedback from you guys last week, so feel free to keep providing more; their responsiveness means that we can hopefully make this a great experience for both chatter and reader.
|
| 11:52 |
: Alright, let’s start a few minutes early, since the queue is already filling up.
|
| 11:52 |
: Thoughts on the M’s dumping Trumbo? Does Aoki provide similar value for (probably) about half the cost?
|
On Tuesday night, the Red Sox made David Price the highest paid pitcher in baseball history. Dave Dombrowski is clearly a Price fan, having previously traded for him while running the Tigers, and made good on his stated desire to bring a #1 starter to Boston. Of course, at $217 million over seven years, Price certainly isn’t coming cheaply, and the Red Sox throwing money at free agents certainly didn’t solve their problems a year ago, so it’s fair to be somewhat skeptical of this kind of team-building approach. But, rather than simply paint with broad strokes, it’s instructive to look at how pitchers who have performed similarly to Price have fared during the same stretch of their careers as the Red Sox just signed Price for.
To identify a list of similar pitchers, I used the FanGraphs leaderboard to identify pitchers in the last 20 years who had compiled between +26 and +34 WAR in their age-24 through age-29 seasons; this gives us a group that approximates the +30 WAR that Price put up during his six years as a full-time starter. Nineteen pitchers have accomplished this feat, Price included, though a couple of them — Felix Hernandez and Clayton Kershaw — are present-day peers, and thus, don’t have anything to tell us about how pitchers like this perform in their early 30s. So, excluding those two, we’re left with 16 pitchers who were comparably dominant during their 24-to-29 seasons.
How’d they do from ages 30 through 36? Well, take a look.
| Pitcher | Innings | WAR | WAR/200 IP |
| Mike Mussina | 1,444 | 36 | 5 |
| Roy Halladay | 1,413 | 35 | 5 |
| Andy Pettitte | 1,282 | 28 | 4 |
| John Smoltz | 813 | 24 | 6 |
| Javier Vazquez | 994 | 19 | 4 |
| Roy Oswalt | 832 | 16 | 4 |
| CC Sabathia | 861 | 15 | 3 |
| Dan Haren | 958 | 12 | 2 |
| Kevin Appier | 930 | 11 | 2 |
| Justin Verlander | 557 | 11 | 4 |
| Zack Greinke | 425 | 10 | 5 |
| Johan Santana | 482 | 8 | 3 |
| Jack McDowell | 327 | 5 | 3 |
| Jose Rijo | 86 | 2 | 3 |
| Ben Sheets | 168 | 1 | 1 |
| Brandon Webb | 4 | 0 | 0 |
At the top, we see four very obvious success stories, with Mussina, Halladay, Pettitte, and Smoltz all maintaining their dominance, putting up performances as good or better than they did early in their careers. This is the kind of performance the Red Sox are clearly hoping for, and if he pitches like any of these four, this will go down as maybe the most successful free agent pitcher contract in baseball history. These four represent the best case scenario, and show that yes, it is indeed possible for a pitcher to maintain greatness even after turning 30.
David Price can opt out of his seven-year, $217 million contract in three years? That’s either terrible for the Red Sox or a boon for the Red Sox, depending on how you think about it.
It’s terrible for the Red Sox!
It’s power in the hands of the player, since it’s a player option. If Price plays well, and the market continues to grow, they’ll have paid $30 million a year for three years and will have to get right back into negotiating with their ace, along with every other team.
If he gets hurt or plays poorly or the market doesn’t perform the same way going forward, they suddenly have to pay yesterday’s going rate for an overpriced, possibly hurt, aging ace… for another four years.
And before you say that it’s great for the Sox to be able to walk away if they feel the market will overvalue their pitcher… they could trade him if the market valued their under-contract ace more than they did. They would have a way to react other than just walking away, and they’d presumably get some sort of return for their asset.
It’s great for the Red Sox!
The opt-out makes it more likely that they get three good years from their investment and move on. It has to make it more likely than it would if the team gave him a seven-year confirmed deal, at least. That might be a matter of semantics, but it’s a fact. And teams prefer fewer years and higher average annual salaries, since it allows them to avoid larger commitments and work with greater flexibility.
After having typically appeared in the very hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have been released at FanGraphs in recent years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Atlanta Braves. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.
Batters
While it’s possible that Atlanta might extract two or more wins from other positions around the field this next year by means of platooning, the algorithm inside Dan Szymborski’s computer indicates that there’s only one player likely to surpass that threshold by his own self — namely, Freddie Freeman. The first baseman has recorded declining batting figures over the last three seasons (150 wRC+ in 2013, 141 wRC+ in 2014, 133 wC+ in 2015), but almost all that is a product of fluctuating BABIPs — and even the low end of that range is sufficient to render him a solidly above-average player.
Unfortunately for the 2016 edition of the club, Freeman is the only above-average — and perhaps even just average-average — player on the team. Newly acquired shortstop Erick Aybar is a candidate to provide adequacy — and, given sufficient playing time, young catcher Christian Bethancourt could possibly do that, as well — but the roster offers little else in the way of a reliable source of wins.
So David Price and the Red Sox have agreed to a seven-year deal worth $217 million, pending a physical that Price will presumably clear with some ease. As part of the terms, Price can opt out after year three, and sometimes pitchers do that, and sometimes they don’t. We’re in a weird place, where this was entirely predictable, for any number of reasons, and at the same time, we’re talking about the biggest pitcher contract in the history of the sport. That shouldn’t be something you just calmly nod at, but though this wasn’t a foregone conclusion, it was at least a popular guess. Price reunited with Dave Dombrowski on a team in need of an ace. Word is Boston blew the competition out of the water, which is what they figured to do.
Writing about these giant free-agent contracts is always a challenge. People want to know, “is it worth it?” and the bigger the contract, and the longer the contract, the more assumptions there are being made. You have to guess a player’s skill, and decline. You have to guess what a win is worth, now, and many years down the road. You have to guess at inflation, and around everything, you have to guess at a team’s success or failure. In the end, you’re left guessing. The teams themselves are left guessing. It’s not like they know the future much better than we do. It’s not like they understand injury risk much better than we do. Numbers are put on paper, and players sign on lines, and, subsequently, life happens. Each contract might turn out to be good, bad, or anywhere in between.
People want answers. There aren’t answers. Not that we know. Years down the road, we’ll all have opinions of the David Price contract with the Red Sox, but we can’t know what those opinions will be. I’m sorry to have to put it like that, but let’s leave this uncertainty behind, shall we? Let’s just focus on what we do know. That’s as much as can be done.
In perhaps the easiest move to predict of the entire winter, Dave Dombrowski went and bought his new team an ace. And it’s the same ace he went and bought 18 months ago, for his old team, so I think we can say with a good amount of clarity that Dombrowski likes David Price. A lot.
To lure the best free agent pitcher on the market to Boston, the team gave him the largest contract for any pitcher in baseball history: seven years, $217 million. In addition to the $31 million annual average value, Price also gets an opt-out after the third year, so the deal could be viewed as a three year, $90 million contract, with a four year, $127 million player option that Price can choose to exercise if he gets injured or sees his performance diminish. So not only does Price’s deal beat Max Scherzer’s contract from a year ago in terms of total value and not include the deferred money that Scherzer took to get that total, but he also gets the right to hit the market again and get an even larger payday in a few years if he continues to pitch at a high level over the next 600 innings.
In terms of expectations, this deal beats the crowd’s estimate by $21 million, though my 7/$215M guess ended up being pretty close, though I didn’t think he’d also get an opt-out. Steamer projects him for +5.3 WAR in 2017, so based on our normal assumptions about the free agent market, the $/WAR framework would have had him at just a hair over $240 million. If you think the opt-out is worth about $25 million, then this is almost exactly in line with an $8 million per win estimate for free agents in this market.
| Year | Age | WAR | $/WAR | Est. Value |
| 2016 | 30 | 5.3 | $8.0 M | $42.4 M |
| 2017 | 31 | 4.8 | $8.4 M | $40.3 M |
| 2018 | 32 | 4.3 | $8.8 M | $37.9 M |
| 2019 | 33 | 3.8 | $9.3 M | $35.2 M |
| 2020 | 34 | 3.3 | $9.7 M | $32.1 M |
| 2021 | 35 | 2.8 | $10.2 M | $28.6 M |
| 2022 | 36 | 2.3 | $10.7 M | $24.7 M |
| Totals | 26.6 | $241.2 M |
It’s certainly a huge commitment, but it’s a huge commitment for a great player, and Price should help get the Red Sox back to being a playoff contender. Their work certainly isn’t done after adding just one arm, but this is a big first step for the Red Sox.
| 9:02 |
: Hi everybody! Let’s get this. Before we get going in earnest, can I just recommend this Biggie x Star Wars mashup album? I’m like a kid in a candy store over here. http://lifeafterdeathstar.net/
|
| 9:03 |
: Also note that this is our first time with JotCast, so bear with us if we’re a little slow tonight.
|
| 9:03 |
: so David Price… what say you?
|
| 9:05 |
: I say that you all are right – I think this is a win-win. Price doesn’t have to leave the AL East, and he gets paid like he should. The Red Sox get the ace they need. And a lefty to boot. I’m a big fan of this deal. I’m not concerned with the dollars.
|
| 9:05 |
: Hold on, just trying to get Jeff logged in here.
|
| 9:06 |
: The Red Sox were going to get some starting pitching somehow. I think this move should be look at in 3 months and then fulled evaluated
|
As a part of whatever their plan is, the Braves have reportedly made Shelby Miller available, and they’re taking calls from almost everyone. Miller has three more years of team control, so it’s not like he’d be just a short-term addition, but the Braves would probably like to exchange that for four or five or six years of control of somebody else. It’s nice to have three years of a good player, but it’s less nice when at least the first one will do little to get the team away from the basement. The goal isn’t the year ahead. The goal is survival, so that better years may come.
Even just on the surface, it’s no mystery why Miller has more than a dozen suitors. He’s a cost-controlled, 25-year-old starting pitcher who just eclipsed 200 innings. He played for a miserable team, explaining how he paired a lousy record with a sub-3.5 ERA. Miller still throws plenty hard, and he gained back a few strikeouts, while limiting quality contact. Miller, as is, is appealing. But I think here we could be looking at a brighter future than usual. You typically want to project a player based on what he’s already done. I think there’s a chance Miller’s on the verge of a breakthrough, making him simultaneously a veteran and a sort of prospect. The teams most interested in Shelby Miller might be looking to buy his promise.
