2 years, $7.5M. I am reminded of the Kyle Farnsworth contract of yesteryear, but Farnsworth had a 5.25ish FIP the two years preceding his signing. And a mid-4s ERA. (The craziest thing I have learned today is that Farnsworth had a 3.10 FIP last year. 3.10!! Joe Nathan had a 2.88 FIP. Excluding Mulvey's few innings last year, no one else on the Twins had an FIP better than that. I'm not saying that that necessarily justifies the Royals' contract, but Farnsworth seemingly pitched well for the Royals last year??)
Looking at LaTroy's fangraphs page, his salaries over the years struck me as intriguing. From 2002-8, he played on many different contracts, but always made between $2.8M and $4.4M in any given season. And now he'll continue that for the next two.
Fangraphs has his performance over the last six years valued at about $2.2M/year. And LaTroy is older now. And free agent prices seem generally to be going down this winter. It seems like a bad deal, but LaTroy probably won't completely melt down and he'll probably remain the so-so reliever he's been for a while now. And even as a bad deal, not the sort of thing that sinks your franchise.
The Randy Wolf deal is nearly as mystifying to me. $10M/year for 3 years for a 33-year-old pitcher who has had one, maybe two $10M seasons in his career? When teams were paying $4-4.5M per win? It seems like a reach. And while Wolf has been healthy for two years now, going back five years, he's only averaged about 130 innings a season.* Is he really that much less of a health risk now? If all of my sentences end in question marks, does that make this signing seem more questionable?
*In comparison, Carl Pavano has averaged 113 IP/season over the last five years and Rich Harden has averaged 99 IP/season over the last five years.
Farnsworth had a .387 BABIP and a 67% strand rate...
was he really actually that unlucky?
or does a ridiculous BABIP like that possibly mean that he got crushed when batters put the ball in play? I've wondered that about BABIP lately.
Farnsworth had a 3.78 tRA, for something like a 133 tRA+. So if he was getting "crushed" no one was scoring it as line drives.
Relief pitchers are such tiny samples to begin with, that I essentially will believe just about any amount of luck or unluck.
I thought maybe it had something to do with line drive rate, but that's right in line with his career average. He also had the highest groundball rate of his career...
And the Royals were the worst defensive team in MLB.
Yuniesky??
second highest, per StatCorner (45 pct of 111, compared to 49.5 pct of 184 in 2003). He had a very low 5.26 pct HR/BIA and a solid 17 pct LD rate. His 3.00 tRA was his best since 2005.
and Brandon Lyon's shiny ERA convinces the Astros to sign him to a 3 year deal
I expected most of these guys to sign for 1 year deals in spring training or something
Generally, I don't think there are a ton of bad deals out there, but that's a horrible, horrible contract. I mean, maybe $5M/year doesn't really completely kill you on the field, but it's certainly not helping and Ed Wade would probably be better off spending that money on liquor and women.
And the MLB Network scroll said that the Astros were planning to use LaTroy as their closer.