The San Francisco Giants' five-year, $90 million deal with Jeff Samardzija appears to pay him for the pitcher he should be rather than the pitcher he is. He's moving to a very favorable environment for a pitcher looking to convert potential into performance, but the risk of ineffectiveness doesn't seem to be priced into this deal.
Samardzija has the size and stuff to be a top-of-a-rotation starter, and I imagine that possibility is what motivated the Giants to give Samardzija this deal. If he becomes a 5-WAR pitcher, it's a bargain, and looking at his physical ability alone, you'd have every reason to think that ceiling is within reach. Samardzija's fastball has consistently averaged 94-95 mph since he became a full-time starter, and he has one of the hardest two-seamers in baseball, a pitch he used more frequently with the Cubs than he did with the White Sox.
In his best season, 2014, he was primarily two-seamer/slider/splitter, with the slider being the big swing-and-miss pitch, and I'd guess the Giants will return him to that formula and de-emphasize the four-seamer and cutter. The 2014 season saw him post a career-best 50 percent ground-ball rate, but it dropped to a career-worst 39 percent last year as he changed his pitch mix.
Get ground balls with the two-seamer, and let the Giants' good infield defense convert them into outs; get strikeouts with the slider and sometimes the splitter; and maybe get a boost from moving from a good home run park (for hitters) to a bad one, and you've got some cause for optimism that he can be the No. 2 starter the Giants need behind Madison Bumgarner.
The reality check here is that Samardzija has never been that guy. By Baseball-Reference's valuations, which rely on ERA, Samardzija was a replacement-level pitcher last year, when he led the AL in hits and homers allowed, which is, to use a bit of technical jargon, no bueno. He has had just one season, 2014, when he was worth more than 2 WAR (2014, 3.7 total). By Fangraphs' version, which ignores sequencing and normalizes BABIP -- that is, it imputes a "neutral" batting average allowed on balls in play -- he has never been worth less than 2.7 WAR and reached 4.1 in 2014.
I'm as big an advocate of such context-independent metrics as anyone, but I have a hard time calling Shark's 2015 season a 2.7-win performance with a straight face, especially since his BABIP allowed was right in line with his career norm as a starter. He was lousy from the stretch all season, and that's just as likely to be a question of approach or mechanics as it is bad fortune. It's one more thing for the Giants' coaching staff, pretty widely regarded as one of the game's best, to attack once they get Samardzija in Scottsdale, Arizona, for spring training.
The Giants badly needed a starter -- they could probably use one more, in fact -- after a year in which only Bumgarner was even league-average for them. Their second-best starter was rookie Chris Heston, a 27-year-old sinkerballer who gets killed when he leaves the ball up and doesn't have an above-average secondary pitch; the more the league saw him, the worse he got, and he posted an ERA near 5 in the second half.
Tim Hudson retired, and Matt Cain's outlook is not good after a 5.79 ERA in 60 major league innings. Cain's eight-year extension runs through 2017; including the buyout, he's owed $49.5 million, and he might not be good enough to make the team on merit right now. At the time the Giants gave him that contract, he looked like a very low-risk pitcher. He was young, never hurt, highly effective and still improving. It seemed like a smart move to lock up an ace, and yet he will probably have been productive for only three of the deal's eight years.
It's a sobering example for any team, but the Giants had to look at least once at Cain and wonder how Samardzija, with nowhere near Cain's track record of performance, is worth this kind of guarantee.
Returning to the question of their rotation, the Giants can now at least roll out Bumgarner, Shark, and probably Heston in three spots, and Jake Peavy, if healthy, in one of the others. While adding a second free agent to provide some bulk innings would help, they might also be able to backfill any openings from within their system, with command right-hander Clayton Blackburn ready to be their fifth starter now and lefty Adalberto Mejia not that far behind him. Any alignment of Peavy, Heston, and those two prospects filling the last three spots is probably a win or two better than the analogous pitchers from their 2014 rotation.
It's not the move that pushes them right up with the Dodgers and -- gasp! -- the Diamondbacks, but the Giants had no choice but to sign a starter who might give them 200-plus innings. Samardzija, if nothing else, should give them that.