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1. JJ1986 Posted: October 12, 2011 at 11:26 PM (#3960950)Not much, if any. He doesn't strike guys out, walks quite a few, and is coming of his best full season babip year. His upside is basically a 2 win player, and he's probably worse. Unless you are really desperate for SP, you don't pay 10m for that...
I could see him getting something like 2/15.
A perfectly reasonable .286. Your statement is true, but misleading - the reason that it's his lowest full-season BABIP is that he's spent the vast majority of his career pitching in front of terrible defenses.
Actually, wins go for about $5M per on the FA market. A seven-figure deal is eminently reasonable for a two-win pitcher, particularly since the commitment here is only one season.
And that's without even getting into the fact that free agents of quality are simply unwilling to sign with the Pirates, even when the team has the highest offer on the board. There's next-to-no chance that the team will be able to spend this money on a player as good as or better than Maholm.
By which, of course, you mean "between 2.0 and 3.2 WAR in each of the last four years, per Fangraphs".
B-Ref doesn't see it that way, but go ahead and continue to be a dick.
1.5, 0, 3.7, 1.5, 0.4, 2.6
That's 1.58 WAR a year. Going last four, he averages 2.05. So, maybe he wouldn't be overpaid at 9.75 mil, but he's not really a tradeable commodity, which was what I was replying to.
I was wrong about his durability though. 183 IP average a year over the last six. That's pretty good.
Seems to be the very definition of league average, actually. But the variance in his performance would concern me. If I want a league average pitcher, I'd rather have one who falls into the 90 to 100 ERA+ range yearly, rather than anywhere from 79 to 114. And since his peripherals are underwhelming, I wouldn't expect that trend to change.
I will, thanks!
B-R WAR undervalues Maholm (like most Pirates pitchers) because it doesn't "know" that for most of his career the Pirates' team defense has been among the worst in the league, while Fangraphs WAR uses defense-independent numbers.
Your point about Fangraphs is noted and is interesting.
B-R WAR undervalues Maholm (like most Pirates pitchers) because it doesn't "know" that for most of his career the Pirates' team defense has been among the worst in the league, while Fangraphs WAR uses defense-independent numbers.
BRef does include some defensive adjustment in its pitching WAR.
Fangraphs problem is that it doesn't actually reflect the runs allowed on the field. They're using a predictive stat as a value stat, which is just plain wrong.
Yep. The rotation was in enough of a shambles last year that we ended up giving starts to Aaron Thompson and Brian Burres out of desperation, there's plenty of money to spend and no possibility of spending it on quality free agents since they flat-out won't sign here, and it was just announced that Charlie Morton had hip surgery that's likely to keep him out until right before the start of the season even in the best-case scenario. Declining Maholm's option is extremely stupid, under the circumstances.
B-Ref WAR has defensive adjustments built in (-13 last year, -1 this year for Maholm), but go ahead and continue to be wrong about everything.
edit: coke to snapper
Aren't we using a a value stat (WAR) to predict future value (whether he'll be worth $9.75M in 2012) here? I can see the argument for BBRef's WAR in determining past contributions (judging Cy Young candidates, for instance), but since we're using WAR to justify future salary, using the predictive stat seems like the way to go.
The mere fact that it has a defensive adjustment does not necessarily mean that the defensive adjustment being made is the correct one.
Particularly given that this year's FA SP crop kind of sucks. How many of the available guys are clearly better than Maholm? Sabathia, if he opts out. Wilson, Jackson, probably Buehrle. Kuroda, though his age makes him risky, and he might go back to Japan. Maybe Wainwright, if the Cards don't pick up his option, though a problem with his rehab is probably the only reason why they wouldn't. Maybe Dempster. And that's about it.
What's Pineiro going to get this offseason? How high would his price need to go before you'd see Maholm-for-a-minor prospect as a better option?
I don't know why you ever included the first two years, they simply can't be remotely as predictive as his last 4. if I weight his last three years (3-2-1) in my head, I come up with a 1.7-1.8 WAR average. And if his 0.4 year involved any injury issues, I'd throw it out and you'd average a 2.4 WAR.
The bigger picture is of course whether they plan to be competitive next year, and who they can get for his spot. I wonder if he would have taken something longer like a 2 year $14m deal, or 3 year $18m, to spread out their costs and lock down a reasonable price. And which essentially costs $750k less getting rid of their buyout obligation.
I'd discount the 2.6 though. No matter what snake oil Vlad tries to sell you, a .286 is not a reasonable babip for a guy who gave up 22% LD, who had never sniffed that kind of babip before.
1) we're going to try this year, in which case they probably can't assemble 5 good starters in time to contend and should keep Mohalm.
2) we're going to wait a few years. We don't think Mohalm is good, but we need to stay respectable and it's not like he'll be a burden to the next good Pirates team. We should keep him.
The only answer is they know they won't contend and are gonna be cheap as heck in the meantime. I don't know that that's really a feasible plan, at some point you have to start making steps forward, seems unlikely they'll just wake up in 2014 and be good after 16 losing seasons.
It didn't. He was just pitching in front of the worst defense in baseball. Oh, and the bullpen ###### him to the tune of a 65% strand rate, too.
It's a one-year spike. His career LD% is a perfectly normal 19.1%.
And, as previously noted, the reason his BABIP was so high in most of his past seasons is that the Pirates' defense has been somewhere between poor and cataclysmically bad for most of his career.
Aren't we using a a value stat (WAR) to predict future value (whether he'll be worth $9.75M in 2012) here? I can see the argument for BBRef's WAR in determining past contributions (judging Cy Young candidates, for instance), but since we're using WAR to justify future salary, using the predictive stat seems like the way to go.
I was just discussing how WAR was being used in the thread to describe his past performance.
You don't want to use either to predict future value. You want to use a projection system. But, I guess we're a little stuck until ZiPs and CAIRO, et al come out.
1) we're going to try this year, in which case they probably can't assemble 5 good starters in time to contend and should keep Mohalm.
2) we're going to wait a few years. We don't think Mohalm is good, but we need to stay respectable and it's not like he'll be a burden to the next good Pirates team. We should keep him.
Or they can get a 1B who can get an OPS+ above 80. Or a catcher above 66. Or lock up McCutchen long term... or... or... or... Even the shunned Pirates can find better ways to spend 15% of their payroll, than a potentially average pitcher.
Yep. I'm sure Huntington and co. thought long and hard about this and are completely aware of Maholm's value as a league-average pitcher, their potential place in the standings next year, and how the money could be spent elsewhere. I'm inclined to think they have an idea of what they're doing, even if it's a potentially bad one.
Let's be pessimistic and say he's a 1.5 WAR pitcher. If wins are really worth $5M, his "value deficit" is only .3 WAR.
Even from a nerd-in-his-mom's-basement view, this looks like a pretty silly move.
They already have one of those.
They have one of those, too - and like Maholm, they announced that they're going to let him walk this offseason, for reasons that remain obscure.
They've been trying to do this for a while, but thus far McCutchen has been unwilling to give up any of his FA years, and there really isn't any point without at least one of them.
Unless he can play both 1B and RF at the same time, it would be good if they could get somebody who can hit his way out of a paper bag to fill the other spot.
They have one of those, too - and like Maholm, they announced that they're going to let him walk this offseason, for reasons that remain obscure.
So they, in fact, do not have one of those...
Or 5m, apparently, according to the latest Mets thread. Mike Pelfrey is a very similar pitcher, an excellent comp for Maholm, but most there don't seem to want him around at 1/5. Well, Sam M. doesn't, anyway.
The calculation with the Mets is different, because free agents are generally willing to sign with them if given a competitive offer. Unlike Pittsburgh.
The Mets can spend that money on Pelfrey, or they can offer it to any of the other free agent starters this offseason, and still have a reasonable chance of successfully getting that other player under contract. The Pirates can spend $9M on Maholm, or they can wait until the second week of January and maybe sign whatever sad-sack Kyle Davies type no longer believes he'll get any offers from other teams. Those are really the only two ways this can go for the Pirates.
Alex Presley probably deserves to start the year with the RF job, as well as he played last year. And there's always the chance that Derrek Lee might re-sign... snerk...
Sorry, couldn't keep a straight face long enough on that Lee bit to finish getting the sentence out. It's been obvious he didn't want to stay from the moment he got here, of course.
Let me rephrase: Their ability to have one of those is in no way dependent on the resolution of the Maholm situation.
Sure, he's fragile and a below-average glove. He's still better than anything they're going to be able to attract in free agency, and he's miles ahead of the other in-house alternatives. I still can't believe they decided to waste a spot on the 40-man roster on Matt Pagnozzi...
You may be right about what the Pirates can get in free agency--although a lot of that depends on how often you think Doumit can take the field--but for a team whose payroll is likely to be less than $100 million combined the next two years, dedicating $15.5 million over that period to a guy who has never played in 125 or more MLB games in a season seems like less of a clear-cut decision than you're implying.
I wonder if there is an MLB bulletin board for GMs somewhere where people can post things like "I'm gonna cut this guy, offer me anything and he's yours", or maybe an email list, or if it's all done 1-1.
If there was one, somebody here would have hacked into it by now...
Have the Pirates been giving out competitive offers and I missed it?
Best available word is that he's healthy.
Yes. There are quite a few examples over the past five-or-so years of a mid-to-lower tier turning down a superior offer from the Pirates in favor of an inferior one from someone else (less money, fewer years, starter vs. bench player, ML contract vs. minor-league deal, etc.). Bill Mueller, Luis Vizcaino, Rocco Baldelli, Daniel Cabrera, Will Ohman, etc.
Would you? A 100 ERA+ isn't going to lift a team like the Pirates to the playoffs, but a 114 combined with some other things going well might.
I have been trying to find a guy like that for my OOTP team all month!
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