Some thoughts about pitcher scarcity and age

[Frobby]

54 minutes ago, Redskins Rick said:

I thought Elias was only handing out 1 years?

He said the O’s have made multi-year offers to several pitchers this offseason, so that’s not necessarily the case.  

[Redskins Rick]

2 minutes ago, Frobby said:

He said the O’s have made multi-year offers to several pitchers this offseason, so that’s not necessarily the case.  

He was also quoted in an interview on 105.7 as saying it was hard to find FA outside of the 1 year deals.

It was wrote up also in the Baltimore Sun, but Im hitting the paywall. UGH

[HakunaSakata]

48 minutes ago, Redskins Rick said:

He was also quoted in an interview on 105.7 as saying it was hard to find FA outside of the 1 year deals.

It was wrote up also in the Baltimore Sun, but Im hitting the paywall. UGH

Right click on the link to the article and save it to your desktop then click on it (the article should load). 

[Slight Upward Arc]

59 minutes ago, Frobby said:

He said the O’s have made multi-year offers to several pitchers this offseason, so that’s not necessarily the case.  

I find that hard to believe though. Even if it’s technically true. Like if he offered Rodon 3/60. Technically a multi-year offer, but in reality it isn’t in good faith or real in any way. After liftoff turned into slight upward arc, I’m in believe it when I see it mode with this regime. 

[Redskins Rick]

20 minutes ago, HakunaSakata said:

Right click on the link to the article and save it to your desktop then click on it (the article should load). 

Thank you, used to be able to use incognito option and they figured out how to stop that.

[Redskins Rick]

17 minutes ago, Slight Upward Arc said:

I find that hard to believe though. Even if it’s technically true. Like if he offered Rodon 3/60. Technically a multi-year offer, but in reality it isn’t in good faith or real in any way. After liftoff turned into slight upward arc, I’m in believe it when I see it mode with this regime. 

Doesnt matter if he offered any or not.

His actions do speak loudly, in his tenue here, he has signed no FA to anything longer than 1 year deals.

[Frobby]

2 hours ago, Redskins Rick said:

Gibson at .7 rWAR.

Makes this deal, so crazy.

How do you find rWAR? Im familiar with oWAR and WAR, none of the stat places seam to show it, Im sure its something Im doing wrong.

Just wondering what Rodon's rWAR was.

rWAR is just the term for WAR as calculated by Baseball-Reference.com. fWAR is WAR as calculated by Fangraphs.   

[Sports Guy]

1 hour ago, Frobby said:

He said the O’s have made multi-year offers to several pitchers this offseason, so that’s not necessarily the case.  

Ye, 2 year deals at 3 million a year.

Edited December 19, 2022 by Sports Guy

[LTO's]

5 minutes ago, Sports Guy said:

Ye, 2 year deals at 3 million a year.

Their offers are strictly based on what they project the player's value to be over a set period of time and they don't budge from that. Supposedly they offered Taillon a multi-year deal but less than he ultimately got from the Cubs. This is how the Astros have operated for their entire run.

[eddie83]

2 hours ago, Redskins Rick said:

He was also quoted in an interview on 105.7 as saying it was hard to find FA outside of the 1 year deals.

It was wrote up also in the Baltimore Sun, but Im hitting the paywall. UGH

I thought he said in regards to starters you see production drop after one year. 

Edited December 19, 2022 by eddie83

[Number5]

2 hours ago, Redskins Rick said:

Gibson at .7 rWAR.

Makes this deal, so crazy.

How do you find rWAR? Im familiar with oWAR and WAR, none of the stat places seam to show it, Im sure its something Im doing wrong.

Just wondering what Rodon's rWAR was.

Actually, while Gibson pitched to a 5.05 ERA in 2022, resulting in a .7 rWAR, his FIP was 4.28, which resulted in a 1.8 fWAR.  IMO, fWAR is better than rWAR as a tool to help project future results for pitchers, since it tries to account for team defense differences and park factors.  His 2022 fWAR was better than both Wacha and Eovaldi.  The fielding behind him let him down a bit in 2022.  Theoretically, the Orioles' defense and The Wall would help him.  Not a crazy signing at all, IMO.  Eovaldi and Wacha are both some 4 years younger than Gibson and therefore are better candidates for multi-year deals, with Eovaldi, in particular, presenting a higher upside.  On a one-year deal, though, Gibson seems to be a decent signing to me. 

Rodon isn't comparable to the other pitchers being discussed here.  It would have been great if the Orioles could seriously enter the market for Rodon, but it appears that the budget simply wasn't there.  It's not like Elias chose Gibson over Rodon.  I've seen a lot of posts citing Gibson as a #5 MLB SP.  While that might be true for the Yankees or the Dodgers, it simply isn't for most MLB teams that can't spend a gazillion dollars annually.  The guy has consistently been a #3,#4 SP in the majors for a long time.  There are simply far fewer really good SPs than we tend to think.

[Frobby]

7 minutes ago, eddie83 said:

I thought he said in regards to starters you see production drop after one year. 

What he said was that when you sign a FA pitcher, their first year is likely to be their best year.  And that makes sense, since free agents are usually at an age where performance begins to decline, if it hasn’t already, and injuries can occur that hamper the pitcher’s performance thereafter.   

And yet, we also know there will be  numerous exceptions.   I’d bet if I looked at 100 past FA pitchers on multi-year deals, the most common best year would be the first, but it might not be the majority of cases.  Pitchers aren’t metronomes; their performance can fluctuate up and down.  
 

[Sports Guy]

59 minutes ago, LTO's said:

Their offers are strictly based on what they project the player's value to be over a set period of time and they don't budge from that. Supposedly they offered Taillon a multi-year deal but less than he ultimately got from the Cubs. This is how the Astros have operated for their entire run.

We don’t know what the offers are.

Also, I would hope people would be smart enough to sense the sarcasm there.

[tabletop]

49 minutes ago, Frobby said:

What he said was that when you sign a FA pitcher, their first year is likely to be their best year.  And that makes sense, since free agents are usually at an age where performance begins to decline, if it hasn’t already, and injuries can occur that hamper the pitcher’s performance thereafter.   

And yet, we also know there will be  numerous exceptions.   I’d bet if I looked at 100 past FA pitchers on multi-year deals, the most common best year would be the first, but it might not be the majority of cases.  Pitchers aren’t metronomes; their performance can fluctuate up and down.  
 

I dug through the last 5 or 6 years in a different thread and went through pitcher by pitcher and the outcome was that most pitchers had a better year after their first year. IIRC, only one offseason resulted in even half of them having their first year be their best year and that was the COVID season so it's hard to really say if that's a true test or not.

[SilverRocket]

On 12/18/2022 at 9:06 AM, Frobby said:

I just had a look at the list of pitchers who managed to accumulate 2+ rWAR in 2022.   It amounts to 91 pitchers, only 68 of whom are starters.  Barely more than two starters per team.  So, when you are thinking about who is a “TOR starter,” or a “no. 2” or “no. 3” starter, think about that!

To break it down a little, 48 of the 91 pitchers (28 of the 68 starters) fell between 2.0-2.9 rWAR; 21 (18) between 3.0-3.9; 10 (all starters) between 4-4.9; 8 between 5.9-5.9; 3 between 6.0-6.9; and one lone pitcher (Alcantra) at 8.0.

This is interesting. One thing to note is that you can't just add up the WAR of your roster and expect that many wins because you do have a certain number of innings to cover, somewhere in the 1420 to 1450 range. If your main guys can't cover that then you have to dip into the rotating bullpen or spot start guys. If you look at the Oriole pitchers with negative WAR in 2019 and 2021, you can see how much that hurt, around -8 rWAR each of those years. The 2022 team was nowhere near as bad, at -3.2 rWAR (mostly from Bruce Zimmermann). That's where an innings-eater like Lyles or Gibson can help, even if they're unimpressive, as at least they take innings away from the fringe pitchers.

This isn't rocket science; we all acknowledge the value of Lyles' innings in 2022. But I think it points to the flaws of the WAR stat for pitchers, because to cover these innings over a full season, the replacement can be way worse than 0 WAR. It's not like position players where a replacement is much more likely to be ~0 WAR because you don't have to worry about workload in the same way.

With the Gibson and Givens signings, it looks more like the O's are more about limiting the damage like last year. For the regular season, maybe that's the most economical option.