Lots of people ripping apart the Happ deal these days. Keith Law of ESPN has joined the party there too. He also rips the Estrada deal.
Law had an insider article last night that discussed the Happ deal. He was also on TSN 1050 this morning, which I missed, but I understand based on some tweets that he was rather negative about the signings.
I did read the insider article yesterday, or at least most of it. Law's argument was that the Jays are paying Happ based on his 2 months of success in Pittsburgh, which is too small of a sample size. But is that true? Well yes and no. Had Happ's season continued in Pittsburgh with his career norms then yah, nobody would have signed him for 3/$36M. But maybe 2/$20M? On the other hand, if Happ had a career like how he pitched for the Pirates in the final 2 months, then he would be up there looking for $200M like Price and Greinke. So no the Jays are not paying him based on those 2 months. I'd say the 3/$36M does reflect the potential upside that we saw down the stretch to some extent but nowhere close to fully expecting that. He's at $12M a year.....what half decent starting pitcher can you sign for under $10M a year?
The thing about Happ's Pirates success is that it wasn't a random fluke. Their pitching coach noticed flaws in his delivery and they fixed it. He was one of the best pitchers in baseball after making those changes. In Law's article he noted that Toronto wouldn't have the same coaches and defense. Well, yah they don't have the same coaches obviously, but does that mean that his mechanical flaws will return? Does that mean that he will unlearn what he learned about himself in August 2015? And the part about defense? Does Keith Law not realize how good the Blue Jays' defense is? That seemed like a really odd and weak point for him to bring up.
All year long Law and others were waiting for Estrada to fall apart. He never did and even pitched extremely well in the playoffs. I recall a September game in Yankee stadium where Estrada gave up 3 home runs. It brought out those, like Law, that waited all year to say that they told us this would happen. However, 2 of those home runs were Yankee stadium short porch specials. I realize those home runs still count and both teams have the same dimensions in which to play in, but at the same time it wasn't time to sound the alarms that Estrada was as bad as that one start (which the Jays ended up winning). I always find it interesting when the ones that criticize about making judgments based on small sample sizes are the first to say "told ya so" when a pitcher has one bad game (which wasn't so terrible since he only gave up 4 runs).
When a pitcher has a breakout year, it doesn't necessarily mean that they will revert back to career norms. It might of course, but if that breakout season came as a result of making substantive changes in delivery, adding a pitch, or pitching strategy, then there's reason to believe that the success can be sustained. Estrada would have to regress quite a bit to make his 2 year contract not worth it.
What we are seeing here is the result of the Jays trading away a ton of starting pitching depth in 2015. Going into the off season, there were just no arms available to pitch at the major league level. That forces the club to either sign free agents or trade away some bats to get pitchers. It was a scary position to be in given that a lot of free agents do not want to pitch in Toronto.
In the case of Chavez they were able to trade a bullpen piece to get him.
We tend to think of a starting rotation as 5 guys, but most often by the end of season there ends up being 10+ guys that make a start in the season. Injuries happen. Look what happened with Stroman last year. Signing a guy like David Price and not leaving any room in the budget to add other decent arms, is highly risky if not stupid. We could argue that the budget should be higher and that Rogers should go all out, but they are not doing that. The off season is still not over and I still expect some significant moves to be made so a lot of judging here may be premature anyway.
@bluejaystwit
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