Jon Garland and the San Diego Padres had a mutual option in place for 2011, one that would have seen Garland make $6.75 million next season had it been picked up. Garland, not too surprisingly, declined his side of the option, making him a free agent.
Garland, of course, will hope to capitalize on a season in which he racked up innings (200), won ball games (14), and posted a low ERA (3.47). Garland went a long to reestablishing himself as a legitimate innings-eater, but upon closer inspection he really didn’t improve his performance much at all.
His strikeouts-per-nine did increased nicely to 6.1, but he also posted a higher walk rate and significantly lower BABiP than in previous years. Garland performed well, no doubt, but much of his perceived increase in production can be largely attributed to Petco Park, good defense, and plain old good fortune.
Now, despite that, Garland should fetch a decent enough deal on the market, because he is an established middle-of-the-rotation guy, and that certainly has its value. Plus, as mentioned, he’s coming off what may be looked upon as a sort of breakout year.
Let’s say, just for argument’s sake, that Garland can rake in a three year, $24 million deal, giving him added security (and more per year) over the one year option that was on the table with the Padres. On the other hand, Garland could have accepted the $6.75M figure and pitched another year in pitcher-friendly Petco Park and possibly increased his value even more come offseason 2012.
Frankly, if I were Garland, I’d rather have ~$7M in 2011 and, say, $24M from 2012 through 2014 than $24M for the next three seasons and who knows what come 2014 (after, in all likelihood, Garland’s performance has declined to a point where he won’t garner much attention on the market).
Of course, that route is slightly more risky, because if he falls apart and/or gets injured next year, he may never get that lucrative free agent deal. Still, considering his past durability and performance, I think his choice to decline the option will hurt him monetarily.
Well reasoned argument, and I think it’s right on the money. But look at it from the Padres perspective. Isn’t it setting a bad precedent?
In the case of both Garland and Torrealba, there’s the danger that San Diego will be seen as the place for average or formerly injured players to re-establish their credentials. The Padres would be nothing more than a waystation of baseball. That fits the Padres’ current financial circumstances, but what are the implications for a future when the Padres want to keep a FA on the team for more than a year (or two)?
It looks like the team is setting itself up for permanent second tier status when it can’t fill holes from the outside for more than a year at a time. At what point do the Padres need to expect a better commitment, or at least remove the “mutual” part of contract options?
While none of your points are wrong, they ignore the inherent risk in being a pitcher. Garland’s always been something of a workhorse and if that catches up to him next year, that’s $24 million he’s never going to see again.
As far as San Diego becoming a waystation, I think that’s the plan. I don’t think the Padres will ever be in the running for a Carl Crawford but even if they do, I don’t think he’ll look at the Padres signing mid-level veteran arms to one-year deals and think it means anything to him. At the same, maybe Javier Vazquez will and he’ll sign with the Padres. With Latos and Richard, and hopefully Luebke and Castro, filling spots already, the Padres don’t have to go out and build an entire rotation. They just need to fill some holes.
I’m with Ray on both points.
24 million in the hand (which sounds high, but whatever) is worth 30.675 in the bush. His chances of signing a 6.75M, one-year deal AFTER a 3/24 contract are at least as good as his chances of landing a 3/24 after spending 2011 with the Padres.
The Padres plan is absolutely to be a free agent pitching waystation. They don’t have the cash to get proven big-time contributors, and not many hitters will want to come here at all. Sometimes you might catch lightning in a bottle on an el cheapo one year deal, but usually you’re hoping to get league-average performance while your homegrown or traded-for players provide the above-average horsepower.
If the Padres suddenly found themselves with the resources to bid for top-tier free agents, a past history of signing guys to 1-year deals won’t hurt them. Petco will hurt them with position players and won’t help all that much with the pitchers looking at 5+ year deals, their competitiveness will matter to everybody, but what they did when they were poor won’t matter.
You can do away with the mutual option as long as you’re willing to pay more for the first year. It doesn’t go away for free.
Good points, guys.
Like mentioned, Garland is essentially taking the safe route, and guaranteeing at least a solid contract, coming off a good year.
Had he gone the other route and taken the option year, he would have had another opportunity to pitch in arguably the best environment in MLB, and cash in on a deal as good, if not better, than what he’ll get this offseason (of course, yes, he could collapse in some way and never get that deal — that’s the risk).
I suppose it comes down the the player’s/agents level of risk aversion. In this case, Garland is taking the safer scenario which will, in my opinion, net him less total dollars over the long haul (on average). Then again, he’s at least assuring himself of a nice deal.
As for the Padres’ perspective, I’m glad we’re moving on from Judy. I feel like we can do better than barely better than replacement level.
Zach, Garland was a lot better than that. 106 ERA+, 28.3 VORP, 1.8 WAR aren’t fantastic numbers, but they’re solidly above average, and average is a lot better than replacement level. He was our second-most-valuable full time starter. 6.75M is a good price for that kind of performance.
A lot of the pitchers on the free agent market now come with major health questions. Garland doesn’t. We could get better performance, but we could also get 45 bad innings from somebody like Rich Harden.
Not sure where you’re getting 1.8 WAR. Fangraphs has him valued at 0.8. Is that Baseball Reference’s number? Personally I think Fangraphs does a better job than they do in determining value, but whatever.
I think that Garland’s performance was somewhat fluky, and he’d be extremely unlikely to repeat it again in San Diego or anywhere else. It resulted from a confluence of ballpark, defense, and luck on balls in play. His ERA outperformed his FIP and xFIP by nearly a full run, and I wouldn’t expect that to happen again.
I think Garland is a serviceable 5th starter, but $6.75m is more than we can pay for that. I think we have pitchers in house who can give us 190+ innings of 4.40ish FIP pitching for significantly less.
His Fangraphs WAR looks weird to me, because they show Garland being 3.6 WAR in 2007, with a higher xFIP than he had for us and only 4 more innings. Somehow he’s 4x more valuable? The Baseball Reference and Fangraphs WAR numbers for previous seasons are much closer than they are for 2010.
Garland’s been a consistently above-average pitcher (but usually not by much) since 2001. His 2010 ERA+ was right in line with his career mark of 104. In 11 seasons Baseball Reference has him with 22.5 WAR, which makes his 2010 mark close to average. I don’t see much flukiness about it. His walks went up, but he knew that walks wouldn’t hurt him as much at Petco.
It’s not mind-blowing performance, but you also don’t need to protect his arm. Latos and Stauffer should still be carefully handled next year.
A replacement level pitcher is somebody like Germano or LeBlanc. Garland is a major improvement over that.
I think FanGraphs uses FIP for WAR, right? And the FIP on his player page may not be park or league adjusted.
In any event, it depends on what you’re trying to do, as to whether you use ERA, FIP, or something else to measure pitcher value.
I believe that WAR is park adjusted, or at least it is for batters. I assume that the Padres pitchers came in so low because they took a big hit thanks to Petco.
As far as whether or not we should have retained Garland, I’m worried about finding another pitcher who can eat up innings like he did. Outside of Richard, I don’t think anyone with the club now has a chance of crossing the 200 IP mark.
If the Fangraphs WAR is based on xFIP, then it would be at least park-adjusted for HR. I can’t see how Garland’s 4.93 xFIP in 2007 led to him being 4x more valuable than his 4.35 xFIP in 2010.
Agree with Ray on the innings. Even if one of our youngsters besides Richards was ready to throw 200 without jeopardizing his future, what are the odds that he’d do it to the tune of a 100 or more ERA+? Garland leaves a pretty big hole in the rotation, more from durability than from performance, although his performance was a lot better than a “serviceable 5th starter.” If he had legitimately been our 5th starter, we’d have been in the playoffs.
Fangraphs pitching WAR is based on FIP, which is then park adjusted. His FIP wasn’t much better than league average, and when you adjust for Petco, league average isn’t worth very much.
As far as I know, FIP is not park-adjusted. xFIP is. Or do you mean that Fangraphs does the park effect calculation between the FIP and WAR stages?
It would be very surprising if Garland had been worth 2-4 WAR most seasons of his career (per Fangraphs), didn’t pitch noticeably worse in 2010 (an increase in walks, but also an increase in strikeouts), but somehow his value plummeted. He posted a better xFIP (adjusted) than many previous seasons, which should take Petco out of the equation.
Both BP and BRef show Garland has being well above-average. BP shows him at 4.2 WARP, tied for his most valuable season. BRef, as mentioned earlier, puts him right in the middle of his average career. I won’t put too much weight into a Fangraphs number that is so much different than other value measures and so different from previous Fangraphs valuations of Garland’s own performance.
Fangraphs does the calculation between the FIP and the WAR stages. There’s a whole section on their site as to how they calculate pitcher WAR.
The difference between Garland and years past is the park adjustment. In previous seasons, his 4.40ish FIP was done in hitters parks (Mostly Chicago, with a little bit of Arizona). In those parks, a 4.40ish FIP is worth 2-3 WAR. In San Diego, it’s not worth much at all because Petco is such an extreme environment. The data apparently shows that achieving a league average FIP while pitching in the most extreme park in baseball isn’t that hard to do.
The disconnect seems to be in how park adjustments are done, and the base number to use. Fangraphs uses FIP, BRef uses tRA (I think, I could be wrong). I think the logic behind using FIP rather than another number like tRA or SIERA is that because we’re trying to figure out what value the pitcher alone gave, we should go with the number that completely excludes fielding and BABIP luck.
What I don’t get is the xFIP. That’s supposed to be adjusted, and his 2010 xFIP was 4.35. Not a terrific number, but among NL starters (180 IP), he’s 6 places behind Richard and sandwiched between Santana and Pelfrey, but his WAR is nowhere close. That’s four guys with xFIPs in the same neighborhood, all of them playing in pitcher’s parks.
If he had really benefited so much from Petco, I’d have expected to see a bigger gap between his FIP and xFIP. My gut tells me that Fangraphs’ adjustment factors are radically overstating how much Garland benefited from his home park and defense.
Zach, I disagree with your last sentence, at least partially.
When looking back at value I think it is completely fine, if not preferable, to just look at ERA (or RA for Ben ; ).
Take an extreme example, a guy who let’s say pitches 10 no-hitters in a season with league average peripherals. Sure, he was probably extremely lucky, but he really was the guy on the mound for all those outs, and luck or not, he had tremendous on-field value.
Now, if we’re looking forward and trying to project a pitcher — or trying to isolate different pitching qualities and remove things like fielding performance and luck/randomness — then sure, FIP, SIERA, etc. are all preferable.
Myron,
The problem with using ERA or RA to get pitcher value is you’re crediting them with value that doesn’t belong to them. It belongs to the fielder who saved the run. Isn’t that why we include defensive metrics when calculating position player WAR? if we gave the position players credit for runs saved, and then used ERA or RA for pitchers, aren’t we double-counting some value?
To go with your example of the guy who pitches 10 no hitters but has average peripherals, seems like his fielders should get the lion’s share of value for saving all those runs. The pitcher didn’t do anything special, his defense did.
Tom,
xFIP is adjust for a league average HR/FB rate. It’s not designed to track value, but rather predict performance going forward. Straight FIP is used to track value because it tells you what actually happened, in terms of Ks, BBs, and HRs. The pitcher gets credit for not giving up those home runs.
xFIP tells you what you should expect going forward based on a league average HR/FB rate, because as far as we can tell a pitcher doesn’t have any control over that.
Also, if you want to know why Garland’s WAR was so much lower than Richard’s, look at the home run numbers. Richard had slightly more strikeouts, slightly fewer walks, and significantly fewer home runs. So while their xFIP is close, Richard gets credit for actually preventing those home runs.
Zach, I’m not sure that the value doesn’t belong to the pitcher. What if he allowed extremely easy to field balls in play?
Either way, I think when looking at value in a retrospective manner it is a more appropriate method than using FIP or any other ERA predictor.
Another factor that stats like FIP ignore is sequencing of events — nine singles spread out over nine innings is certainly better than nine singles allowed in one inning and zero for eight.
Overall, when I think about value, I’m thinking about runs, not theoretical runs or runs based on an estimator.
Of course, for many purposes, such as predicting future performance, FIP and similar metrics can definitely help and are much better than plain old RA.
I think Fangraphs is operating under the standard DIPS framework, where the pitcher has little to no control over what happens once a ball gets put into play. So the sequence of events doesn’t matter, nor does the type of contact, since the pitcher has no control over that beyond ground ball vs. fly ball, and that gets accounted for in HR rate.
Oh yeah, I understand that, I’m just not sure it’s really what we want to measure here — it definitely isn’t the only thing to measure.
The questions basically becomes — do we want to know how many real runs a pitcher saved or how many theoretical runs he saved based on league average BABiP, sequencing of events, etc?
Both answers have value depending on what you’re trying to find out.
I dunno, the way I see it, Garland’s just become flat out, more hittable..and pitching in the most pitcher friendly ballpark in the majors wont cover that up. His walks are up, more than they ever have been before..AND THATS WITH HALF HIS STARTS IN PETCO..
so teams that reside in ballparks that arent particularly conducive to smothering homers, will realize that money spent on him, can go to other needs.
If Jon Garland wants to prolong his career anda reap financial benefits along the way, with extensions and more money, he needs to stick with the bigger ballparks, PERIOD.
But maybe he doesnt care about upping his value by pitching in PETCO one more season…maybe he’s just interested in puttin in the a years worth of work like he did, and stealin a multi year deal from some team stupid enuf to give it to him. Quite frankly, I wouldnt pay Garland a deal beyond two years, and even then Id think twice.
More troubling than anything else is what Garland’s decision says about his expectations. He expects the Padres to be cheap and to not compete, and would rather take it somewhere else next year. I don’t blame him a bit.
How can this team have any expectation of competing in their division if they’re going to run a $40 million payroll? All the good players will get out as soon as they can, the free agents will just not come at all.
It’s tough to compete with such a small payroll, but teams have certainly done it in the past, including the Padres last season. Hopefully the payroll will start to increase in the coming years, giving the front office a bit more flexibility.