Jon Garland strengthened his grip on his legacy as baseball's most appropriately paid starter, signing a deal with the Los Angeles Dodgers that only guarantees him $5 million.
Garland went 14-12 with a 3.47 ERA for the San Diego Padres in 2010, his ninth straight season with a double-digit victory total. He broke 200 innings for the seventh time in eight years, and hasn't pitched fewer than 190 innings since becoming a full-time starter in 2002.
He's returning to a team that watched him throw five strong starts in six outings after a late-season trade in 2009.
And that netted him a one-year contract for $5 million, with a vesting option of $8 million if he hits 190 innings.
There's so much that's weird about it. For one, he declined a mutual option with the Padres for $6.75 million, only to get paid $5 million in 2010 money. This deal also makes it the third straight one-year contract Garland has signed, all with different teams, and this one's the cheapest yet in terms of guaranteed money.
- 2008: Diamondbacks, $6.25 million, plus $2 million buyout of mutual option year.
- 2009: Padres, $4.7 million, plus $600,000 if club declined the option.
- 2010: Dodgers, $5 million.
And then consider that he had a year slightly better than Jeff Suppan did with the Cardinals in 2006, and both pitchers similar in age, style and track record (Garland with slight edges across the board). Suppan signed for four years and $42 million. Garland will have pitched for six clubs over five years once the season starts. I know Suppan pitched well for a World Series winner, but that's an incredible disparity.
So, why do I care about Garland three years after he stopped pitching for the Sox? Well, I've always been a fan. He took the ball every start, worked his way through annual dead arm periods, turned in reliably solid seasons, defended his position well (great at starting 1-6-3s) and held runners. That's basically everything you can ask a pitcher to do.
I also like guys who routinely exceed their component stats. Garland doesn't do the "important" things well -- he doesn't strike guys out, he allows a lot of hits, he's not a sinkerballer, and he's not especially stingy with walks or home runs, but almost every year, the sum is greater than the parts. A Garland type will be dismissed or dumped on by sites that make the majority of their conclusions by reading numbers, and it's rewarding to know better because you watched a guy go to work for multiple seasons.
(Aside: FanGraphs wouldn't like Garland because it uses FIP for calculating WAR. By this rationale, throwing 200 innings of 3.47 ERA ball amounts to only 0.8 WAR, because his FIP was nearly a full run higher. Baseball-Reference.com uses runs allowed for its pitcher WAR calculations, and so he finishes with 1.8 WAR.
This is why I prefer B-Ref for pitcher WAR. I understand why FIP is better for instant and future evaluations, but WAR isn't predictive. So when trying to figure out what a pitcher brought to a team in a certain year, I'm not sure why he would get marked down for things that never happened, only because they "should" have happened. It seems arrogant to me.)
But also, it's worth noting that Garland's agent is Craig Landis, who also represents Paul Konerko. I'm not saying Konerko will give a team a sweet hometown discount like Garland gave the Dodgers. He has said otherwise, and on the flip side of the coin, Landis represents Aaron Rowand, and the two of them did a masterful job of getting overpaid by the San Francisco Giants. But I would keep an open mind when discussing the dollars, because at the very least, Landis doesn't seem to get in between his player and the team he wants.
*Remember when I wrote about how the Minnesota Twins' success in the ninth inning with Jon Rauch was virtually the same as it was with Joe Nathan? Joe Posnanski takes it a bit further and wonders if baseball is on the course for the Golden Age of the Setup Man:
The truth is that all the bullpen advances have had ABSOLUTELY ZERO EFFECT on how much more often teams win games they're leading in the ninth inning. Zero. Nada. Zilch. The ol' bagel.
Teams won 95.5% of their ninth-inning leads in 2010. Teams won 95.5% of their ninth-inning leads in 1952. [...]
Other than that, though, the best winning percentage for ninth-inningleads is .958. It has happened four times -- 2008, 1988, 1972 and 1965.That pretty much covers the entire spectrum of bullpen use. It doesn'tchange. Basically, teams as a whole ALWAYS win between a touch less than94% and a touch more than 95% of the time. This has been stunningly,almost mockingly, consistent. The game has grown, the leagues haveexpanded, the roles have changed, the pressure has turned up, but thenumbers don't change.
Posnanski points to Ozzie Guillen's usage of Matt Thornton to depict how managers might be happiest using their best reliever in the seventh and eighth, or whenever the situation calls for it. Here's hoping.
*J.J. looks at fair returns for Gavin Floyd, and figures that teams might not appreciate him enough to pony up the talent.
*Larry looks at Baseball America's projected 2011 lineup from its 2008 prospect rankings, and there's a very real chance that Carlos Quentin is the only position player standing. He also added a post reviewing the progress of some bullpen candidates in winter ball.
*Speaking of Konerko, Jon Paul Morosi of FoxSports.com is somewhat shocked there isn't a stronger urge for the Sox to re-sign him. I'm slightly dubious of this assessment, if only because Morosi pins Konerko's 2008 struggles on knee and oblique injuries. The bone bruise in his thumb was the killer.
*Over at Baseball Time in Arlington, my SweetSpot Network colleague Joey looks into whether Konerko would be a good fit for the Rangers, and he's quite apprehensive about the prospect.
*Speaking of former Sox, the Yankees double-dipped in South Side lore to fill out its minor-league bullpens, signing both Brian Anderson and Andy Sisco.
*The Mariners blog Lookout Landing (my favorite non-Sox team blog) has been posting the "Top Ten Unremarkable Moments" of the 2010 season. It's a brilliant concept, and I've been waiting/hoping the Sox would be involved in one of them. As luck would have it, they play a part in Unremarkable Moment #3.
