Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Hot Stove Update: Giants avoid arbitration with Casilla; Mets Trade Present for Future

The Giants avoided going to arbitration with Santiago Casilla by signing him to a 3 year/$15 M contract with a vesting option for a 4'th season which can become a club option with a buyout.  Casilla held the Closer role for much of the season after Brian Wilson's injury and racked up 25 Saves.  Even though he eventually lost the closer job, the Saves would have factored into his arbitration value which MLBTR projected as $5.4 M.  After hitting the wall as the closer and blowing several Saves, Casilla got his feet back under him and pitched some very important innings down the stretch and in the postseason as more of a high leverage guy who could be brought in to get high leverage outs in one inning then stay in the game for another full inning.  Pretty valuable stuff.

Still, this looks like at least a moderate overpay both in annual salary and in years.  Casilla has a great arm, but he also has a history of multiple injuries and had blister problems last year.  The Giants found him in the minor league FA market and have had success finding gems in that market all along.  They picked up a guy this year, Fabio Castillo, who could easily be the next Santiago Casilla.  That doesn't count the raft of high velocity bullpen arms they have drafted in the last two years.  By the time Casilla's contract runs out, those guys are going to be backed up like the ships in LA Harbor during the strike!

Around the League:

The Mets traded R.A. Dickey to the Toronto Blue Jays for top catching prospect Travis D'Arnaud and pitching prospect Noah Snydergaard.  BA had D'Arnaud ranked as Toronto's #1 prospect heading into 2013 with Snydergaard ranked at #3.  These rankings were made before the trade with Miami.  This trade makes a lot of sense for both teams.  The Blue Jays are in full win-now mode after the trade with Miami while the Mets are building for the future.  From a fantasy perspective, D'Arnaud could be the Mets starting catcher out of spring training.  He should be followed closely in spring training and is somone worth considering as a late round draft pick or early add depending on the depth of your league.

19 comments:

  1. As long as he gets that first strike early, he is one of the best relievers on this team. Confidence is his big issue. This contract hopefully will let him know that the Giants have confidence in him.

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    1. He is a little too wild for my taste. I also think he got a bad rap from when he was closing last season. He CAN close, he's just not a great closer. He IS a great setup guy though. In 2010 and 2011 he had an ERA below 2. If he could do something even comparable to that over the next three seasons as a setup guy, then this signing was a steal.

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  2. I'm a bit skeptical as you seem to be DrB. The Lefties are another story all together, but a righty power arm that has some up and down history with nagging injuries and confidence issues makes this seem like a bit of an overpay.

    This is my feeling: They give him his 5.4 for arb and let the situation play itself out. In that time, Sabes can determine if some of his dumpster dives and/or minor leaguers are worth trading in for Casilla as he exits. It just seems that even if Casilla put up the same sort of numbers this year, not many teams would jump on him for multiple years at 5mil+. Seems like they could have just waited and likely got more boom for their buck.

    My one gut feeling is that Bochy knows how to manage a bullpen better than anyone in the league. He obviously thinks this is what's best for the team going forward or else it wouldn't have happened... Maybe Rags and Boch see/know something we don't? We'll see...

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    1. I'm not saying it's a terrible decision and I'm certainly not going to go all MCC/Sabes is an idiot over it. Just seems a bit on the rich side to me.

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    2. My feelings are (1) Bochy is a great bullpen manager, and here is dealing with a player whose skills and deficiencies he knows extremely well;
      (2) the Giants pitching experts, including Tidrow, Righetti, and Gardner, the latter two of whom also know Casilla very well, are close to if not at the very top in MLB;
      (3) since Casilla was mediocre with the A's, and yet after exposure to these experts, turned out to be a pretty fine reliever with the Giants, the experts probably have an especially keen knowledge of what Casilla can and can't do;
      (4) Bochy, Tidrow, et al., and certainly Sabean too, are accountable to ownership, fans, and the players on the team, unlike any of the bloggers who care to air their inevitably less informed judgments about the salary or the number of years;
      (5) when the non-accountable bloggers slip green accountant's eyeshades onto their brows, to opine about a budget that they've never seen, within a market they know only second- or third-hand, how much credit can even their best friends give their pronouncements?

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  3. Wow! I made the mistake of going over to MCC just to see what they were saying. You know, keep an open mind to alternative ideas and such. Nothing like a Grant Brisbee article and a MCC comment thread to make you want to change your thinking and proclaim this the best decision Brian Sabean has ever made!

    So how can you say the Giants put too much resources into the bullpen when they've been doing if for just about forever and now have 2 rings in the last 3 years to show for it? Is it possible that just maybe that Brian Sabean knows more about where to allocate resources than us kibbitzers on the internet do, or even other GM's in the game?

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    1. They just don't learn. They thought that this was true last off-season too: why are the Giants signing Affeldt and Lopez? We need a hitter.

      Turns out we did need a hitter, and he returned, Buster Posey, and Sabean got others who complemented him, Pagan, Melky/Pence, Scutaro.

      And they are so certain that the Giants are devoting too much resources in the bullpen. What studies shows that they are? Heck, current saber understanding of the value of the bullpen is pretty routimentary right now, WAR just looks at their overall pitching without taking into context the situation he is pitching in. The leverage situation is recognized, at least, but not taken into account when calculating the WAR for relievers (or starters for that matter, when they pitch deeper into the games or complete them). So how can they definitively say that too much resources is being devoted, there isn't even a realiable measure of this yet!

      Even further, how can we rely on what he is saying? He has gotten it wrong, taking the big picture view, for the past 5 seasons. He angrily told me off, saying that I was correct once, in 2010, but I would turn that around to him, when has he BEEN CORRECT? If it were up to him, we would have Smoak instead of Posey, among other great ideas he has proferred.

      How can anyone watch what the Giants did in the 2012 playoffs and not say that we need all the guys back and doing what they do so well? And one of the arguments against is that replacement relievers are easily picked up on the cheap, but these people apparently forgot about how badly our bullpen was during the rebuilding period when we were losing, particularly after we lost Nen. Where were the easily acquired replacement relievers? And if great bullpens are so easy to find and build, then why don't every team do that? Why doesn't every team start the season with a great bullpen? That just goes against all economic theory and logic, there is a lot of value that a bullpen can provide, yet the leading theory is that we can find this valuable resource on the cheap whenever we want?

      Or how about this, where can we find a reliever with a 2.22 ERA over the past three seasons for under $5M for the 2013 season? Theory don't always hold up when reality is faced.

      There is also value in knowing what you got in hand, due to all the medical procedures and evaluations the team has done with the pitchers. The Reds would have loved to have gotten that info when they gave nearly $10M to Madsen to close for them. Maybe that money would have gotten them over the Giants in the NLDS, the teams were so close. That's why the study shows that teams generally know when they have a great prospect and when they can trade away a good prospect, teams know their players much better than the other teams do, so they should enter into any trade with a caveat emptor.

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    2. OGC - I would comp the Giants to what went wrong, where it went wrong. 2004, Hermanson has to go to the pen, Herges, Brower, Eyre, Felix, Christensen. Tyler Walker and Wayne Franklin lurking! 2008, Wilson was shaky! Yabu, Tyler Walker still lurking, Captain Jack and Hinshaw, Misch, Sadler and Brad Henny-Henn. And ROMO lurking! ERA+ is not a perfect stat, but it tells a snapshot story. The guys in those 2 pens had pretty miserable numbers. Not nearly enough Ks, too many Hs and BBs.

      So 2009, you have Wilson, Medders, Howry, Affeldt and Valdez. Backed by Miller and Romo. Howry was 35 at the time, shuffling him off makes sense. Medders was given a shot in 2010, found lacking, and got shuffled along. One key factor is the Giants do give their guys multiple times to stick. I think Casilla has passed this test, as has Affeldt. As has Romo. There is huge value in having the guys you know. You know when they are pressing and you need to pull or rest them. You know which hitters give them fits. Going through B/R and looking at the Giants pen from 2008-12 you see the progression, the strength and the inconsistencies. Like Sabean said at the beginning of the year, there is always one guy who surprises each way. The Giants are actually acknowledging that relievers can be inconsistent. So they are just hedging their bets. All it takes is cashish. The hard part - finding the guy who can spot their pitch - is already taken care of.

      The pen has not been the problem the past 4 years. No need to go trying to make it the problem to save a few million bucks. We still have plenty of gas can moments as it is.

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  4. The one really definitive advantage the Giants had during the playoffs was their bullpen depth. From the 4th inning on, if a starter ventured south Bochy could and did yank them and bring in the pen for 6+ innings. No other team had this advantage and watch what happened when Dusty or The Cards had to stick with their wobbling starter just a hitter or inning too long. Latos comes to mind.

    The Giants earned their WS wins on the backs of their pitching staff - the whole staff - and it paid off. So yeah, I get the economics argument, but sometimes the sum is greater than the individual prices.

    That said, I am surprised at the years given that the Giants will likely have DD or stud Farm arms ready to step in by 2014. Casilla is a proven closer arm and that has been worth a couple of WS, I can take cheering for more, right?!

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    1. I think years are fungible if the player performs well enough in the coming years. First off, Casilla got less than he would have gotten on the market. The $5.4M figure for him this season is his 3rd year arb. That roughly equates to a $7M free agent market price (with 80% of market assumption for third year). So at $5M for 2014 and 2015, he'll be underpaid for what good setup men who can close some are getting (League and Affeldt). Second, inflation in baseball had been rising roughly 10% per year, but had stalled in recent seasons, but with the Dodgers and Angels throwing around mad money, salaries are on the rise again, which should make his contract look even cheaper compared to what he can do in 2014 and 2015. Third, I don't expect any let-up in his performance in the next 18 months (James assumption for projection purposes is that the player can continue his current performance level for that long when doing his career achievements projections), so he should be tradeable for 2013 and 2014 off-seasons, if we ever need to, given his underpricing.

      That said, as I described in a comment elsewhere here, there is at least one spot open for 2013 right now, and I have to think that Kontos and Mijares are only probational holders of their spots in the bullpen at the moment. On top of that, Romo, Casilla, and Affledt have a history of having some sort of injury or period where they are used sparingly, and to believe that the Giants nice track record of good relative health in their pitching staff will continue all the time would be foolhardy. So while there are many potential arms ready to step up in 2014, there are a number of reasons to believe that spots could possibly be open by then.

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  5. I am with you in it being a tad rich, but if you look at the FAs available in winter 2013, it is either more expensive or its back to bargain bin. I'm not the hugest Casilla fan as a closer/highest leverage guy, but as a tough roogy and 8th inning guy, he's pretty solid. Did the Giants have to lock him up for 3 and an option? It shows what they think of him, that's for sure. So that begs the question: who are the guys best equipped to build a bullpen? Scrapheap, draft, free agent and trade? I would have to say the Giants are top 3 in baseball. So this is their move. Sounds good to me. Its only cash, and looking at the other deals pitchers are getting on the market, it actually looks good. Would you rather have League at 3/22.5MM or Broxton at 3/21MM? I wouldn't, I'll take Casilla hands down.

    Giants fans have long memories. Well, think back to 2002, 2003 and 2004. The pen is a very important piece of the puzzle. Saber fans love to throw on their eyeshades and yell about WAR and how a reliever such as Casilla might add .5 wins to the table. That loses sight of what he is - he's a building block to having a bullpen with depth. Depth to yank him if he's struggling in a game. Depth to withstand an injury. Depth to deal with one of those relievers having a bad year (yes, I'll agree with Sabers on this, it does happen, they are fungible). But what the rants are losing sight of is these stats are put up by the ability to spot a fastball and disrupt hitter timing with a change or a slider. Casilla has been pretty good at that. He definitely rates up there on my heart attack meter, but he's done way more good than bad. Might not be ready for prime time Wilson replacement, but that's all right, we'll talk about that later.

    Finally, hello Sergio Romo. This is all about caddying and insuring Romo is there at the end to be effective. You won't hear as much bitching about Romo getting locked up, because his stats are off the chart. That's the next step for Sabes, Tidrow and Evans. And then the Giants will have what every saber blogger wants: a flexible pen that uses its best relievers at the point of the game they need them most. Wow. You think anybody will notice?

    I thought Casilla would be trade bait like RamRam last year, but he's a bridge to all these high octane arms the Giants have been drafting. Hembree will get a chance to pull a Wilson and get used in low leverage situations at first, maybe go up and down to Fresno as he develops his breaking ball and change up. The Giants are top shelf at this part of the game. Good stuff.

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  6. Shankbone,

    Like that last little piece about Hembree. Wilson sort of got thrown into the flames ASAP, maybe these proven high leverage arms give us an opportunity to pick our spots and get Hembree in. Is he the RH BP arm everyone thinks "is coming" via FA signing? I think DrB is right about pretending we know about a bullpen... If there's one thing we can say about Sabes and Boch in the last few years it's that they know more about a bullpen than anyone in the baseball world. Almost fruitless to speculate what they will do, but it always seems to work out just fine!

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    1. Check Wilson's stat page. He was actually shuffled back and forth, and didn't start closing until his third year in the bigs. And that was with a pretty terrible team that wasn't contending! I think we are overlooking something big with pitchers/hitters. With hitters, the big test is the Eastern and AA. AAA/Fresno is looked upon as a place to stash reclamation and spot starters, and as a hitters league its looked on with heavy skepticism, fueled by the Giants history of AAAA players such as Linden, Bowker et al. But I think its a pretty steep test for pitching, and that might get swept under the rug. Guys in AA moving on are deemed "almost ready" but in reality have to work some more. Heston and Bochy are not near ready yet, Hembree struggled in AAA last year, maybe it was the injury but maybe it was the stuff. I think Hembree has a great chance to make the big club, but he needs to refine his secondary pitches otherwise he'll get slapped around. So I bet the gints will low leverage him this year and next.

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  7. Just thought of something, if the Giants had 15 million to give Casilla why didn't they think enough of Wilson to give it to him instead? It also makes me wonder about guys like Hembree and Bochy who I thought would have been perfect replacements for Casilla in a year but maybe this signing means they aren't close to being ready? Maybe the Giants are working on trading some of their young arms in the farm system and wanted to make sure the Pen was good for a few years. On the surface it doesn't seem to be a great move but maybe we will find out in a few weeks or months what the plan was. Can't argue with bringing any of the bullpen arms back after what they have done over the last 3 years. Just don't go giving Mota a 3 year deal now Sabes!

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    1. Wilson was already damaged goods before he TJed again.

      Bottom line is, if he can't throw the slider, he's not going to be super-awesome with cheese. (And he couldn't throw that slider in '11.) I think the Giants felt that he wasn't ever going to get back to where he was.

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    2. The signing is mostly a sign of the market for relievers: you want a good reliever in your hip pocket, you need to give 3 years. Remember, we currently have one opening in the bullpen if any of the arms break out and take a job.

      Also, there can be other openings in the next three seasons. As much as I like Kontos, that's only one season and he didn't do so well handling inherited runners in 2012. So while he has a job for 2013, I think things can change quickly if he's not getting guys out. Same with Mijares. And Lopez's contract is over after 2013 as well. Plus Romo's health is not the best either. There are a lot of bullpen variables during Casilla's contract, and to expect all of them to work out to the Giants advantage would be foolhardy (and I should know, I was foolishly assuming that with some of opinions early on, not realizing how interlinked things were and while one might expect the better result on a case by case basis, when one looks at the big picture, you have to realize that things never end up perfectly, there will be unexpected bad things happening).

      Why would Sabean give Mota a 3 year deal now, after years of giving him minor league deals and especially after his PED suspension in 2012?

      This is the kind of unnecessary and unwarranted speculation that pervades other Giants watering holes that drives me crazy. Sabean would never do the vast majority of the stuff commenters think he would, but that would just start a torrent of anti-Sabean comments, as they recite the litany (it is almost like the Naysayers have a rosary bead of them to remind them) of offenses he did or supposedly did over the years. That's why most people with perfect memory, where everything is remembered, end up lonely, divorced multiple times, with generally poor personal relationships, because they don't forget any wrong thing their partner ever did, and reminds them of them as they have total recall (heard on excellent 60 Minutes feature on this "gift").

      The reason the Giants didn't offer Wilson anything is because they were not allowed to by the rules of the CBA. Their only two options were to offer Wilson a $6.8M contract for 2013 or to release him by non-tender. Anybody willing to give him $6.8M for 2013 giving the uncertainty of his health should not be running an MLB team.

      The Giants appeared willing to give him a low $3M base plus incentives but Wilson was insulted that the Giants let him go, so he's the jilted lover, going to other teams and trying to get his $6.8M. No team is biting right now, and I'll bet that he'll find nobody willing to bite and have to accept such a contract in Jan/Feb. Whether he gets over himself and rejoins the Giants or leave in a huff, I don't know.

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  8. If you look at his numbers for the last 3 years, they're pretty good.

    He had, of the 3 past years, a comparatively off year last year.

    They said he had a blister, and that's why he ran into problems.

    If that is true, and he's not prone to blisters, then, really, we're looking at a decent signing.

    If he has a year equal to his past 3-year average, then he'd get a lot more than a 2-year $10 million contract in the FA market.

    New financial realities...price is going up to maintain a solid pen.

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    1. His numbers as a setup guy are incredible, and thats what he needs to be. He can easily be worth his contract if he is anything like he was in 2010-2011

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  9. Grant helpfully points out, "The Giants are expecting about 250 innings from the top six pitchers in their bullpen this year, or about the number of innings you'd get from a frontline starter." Why not pay the pen's top six in toto what one pays Lincecum solo? Well, Grant thinks, it's because frontline starters are much more likely to perform reliably than pens are, and much more difficult to get on the cheap. As to performance, though, starters are one snapped ligament away from disaster; by dint of numbers and short stints on the field, bullpens diversify risk. It's a tenet on MCC that bullpen pitchers are fungible, and although MCC's claims don't prove anything, the truer this tenet is, the more the risk is diversified. The manager can plug a new arm in, to replace the disabled one. Not so, of course, with starters. As to getting a bullpen on the cheap, some reflection on Penny, Loux, Edlefsen, even Hensley as the year wore on, will show how foolish that is.

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