Since 2016 is an even year and the San Francisco Giants have won the past three even-year World Series, it stands to reason they will be front and center in the mix for a postseason berth next season. That means they'll need to accumulate seven months' worth of pitching, rather than the customary six.
The Giants have been one of the clubs most closely connected to Zack Greinke in the free-agent rumor mill. Getting Greinke, who along with David Price represents the biggest prize on the pitching market, would come with the added benefit of keeping him out of the hands of his most recent club, the hated, division-rival Dodgers. Would this be a wise investment of resources for the club representing the closest thing to a modern-day baseball dynasty?
Well, we start with a simple quiz. Who were the only two Giants starters to pitch enough innings to qualify for the NL ERA title in 2015? One is easy, their ace lefty and 2014 World Series hero Madison Bumgarner. The other was ... unheralded rookie Chris Heston. Nothing against the rookie right-hander, but that fact, as much as anything, tells you why the Giants were not playing meaningful baseball this October.
The Giants rotation actually appeared well-fortified heading into the 2015 season, with Jake Peavy, Matt Cain, Tim Hudson, Tim Lincecum and Ryan Vogelsong all backing Bumgarner and affording the club insurance should one member break down. Unfortunately for the Giants, all five guys (after Bumgarner) did break down at one time or another, physically or performance-wise. Now, with Hudson retired and Lincecum a free agent, the herd has been culled somewhat, and the Giants are clear players for free-agent pitchers.
What about Greinke? Well, all things considered, he seems like a good fit, and the club does have quite a bit of salary coming off the books. Dig a little deeper, however, and some potential concerns surface.
Breaking down Greinke's numbers
By traditional metrics, Greinke was quite possibly the premier hurler in the NL last season. His 1.66 ERA led all of baseball and was even better than teammate Clayton Kershaw's and NL Cy Young winner Jake Arrieta's. Thankfully, however, we have moved well beyond ERA in terms of tools used to measure pitching value.
Let's step backward here and take a somewhat unorthodox look at the building blocks of pitching performance. There are two basic components: 1) what occurs when the ball is put in play and 2) what occurs when it isn't. The first is measured by what I call "contact score." Take all the K's and walks out of the equation, compare the run value of all batted balls allowed to the league average and scale it to 100. The availability of granular, batted-ball data enables us to go even further and calculate adjusted contact score, which takes BIP (ball-in-play) authority into account.
The second component -- what happens when the ball is not put in play -- clearly refers to a pitcher's ability to maximize strikeouts and minimize walks. How can we put a number, scaled to league average of 100, on a pitcher's ability in these areas? Well, we can calculate an unadjusted contact score, as indicated above, as well as a calculated component ERA in the same manner after adding back the K's and walks. Then we divide the calculated component ERA by the unadjusted contact score, and voila, you have the K/BB Contact Score Multiplier, which measures a pitcher's prowess when the ball is not put in play.
I went back over the past seven seasons and calculated the K/BB Contact Score Multipliers for every ERA-qualifying starting pitcher -- 574 in all -- and placed the averages into buckets. There's an average range, as well as ranges from 0.5-1.0, 1.0-2.0 and 2.0 or more standard deviations above or below the league average. The table below shows the multipliers for these ranges (more explanation below the table).
The higher the K rate (moving right to left along the top of the table) and the lower the BB rate (moving bottom to top along the left side of the table), the lower the multiplier, yielding a lower calculated component ERA when multiplied by the contact score.
Let's look at Greinke's 2015 season utilizing this data. He had an incredibly low Unadjusted Contact Score of 55 last season, best in the major leagues. Greinke's K rate was between 0.5-1.0, and his BB rate was between 1.0 and 2.0 standard deviations above average. Thus, his multiplier was 89.1, and his calculated component ERA (subject to much less random fluctuation than actual ERA) was an amazing 49.
There was, however, a great deal of good fortune in Greinke's 2015 season that isn't immediately apparent. First, he yielded a very low liner rate (19.1 percent), which ranked in the 17th percentile among NL qualifiers. Why is that a big deal? First, liner rates allowed are extremely random and fluctuate quite wildly from year to year for most pitchers. Secondly, and even more importantly, Greinke's liner rate allowed ranked between the 82nd and 92nd percentile in three of the past four seasons and was above the average of NL qualifiers every year between 2009 and 2014. If anything, Greinke's true talent is represented by a high liner rate allowed, not a low one. His 2015 percentage is clearly an outlier.
In addition, Greinke's popup rate allowed (62nd percentile in 2015) was much higher than the norm for him (between 8th and 26th percentile from 2012-14), and his fly ball rate allowed (50th percentile) was his highest since 2009. Even more importantly, his K rate dropped from the 92nd percentile in 2014 to 73rd in 2015. There are an awful lot of fluky one-offs and negative trends in his granular 2015 numbers.
Taking everything into account, Greinke's Adjusted Contact Score taking BIP authority into account was 76 -- still very good but way above his unadjusted mark of 55. That's with a nearly optimal BIP mix that isn't likely to be even approached moving forward. In fact, Greinke's career Unadjusted Contact Score is a very ordinary 98.8. Over the past four seasons, it has been better -- both his unadjusted and adjusted marks are 87.2 -- but that is heavily influenced by 2015 and still not at the elite level.
Greinke's future
What does this mean going forward? Well, most expect Greinke to land a six-year contract at an annual salary of $25 million or much more in free agency. That would take him through his age-37 season. When you're paying a pitcher that much, you're expecting him to do a little more than simply take the ball every fifth day. You're paying for excellence.
In 2015, exactly 10 of 74 MLB ERA qualifiers, or 13.5 percent, were 34 or older. That's virtually identical to the percentage of qualifiers in that age range going back to 2009. To pitch 162 innings, regardless of quality, at age 34 is quite a feat, let alone at age 37.
How about the quality of those age-34+ seasons? There really are only four truly excellent seasons among the group: Chris Carpenter in 2009, Roy Halladay in 2011, R.A. Dickey in 2012 and Cliff Lee in 2013. These guys got it done in different ways. Carpenter was an exceptional contact manager with decent K/BB skills. Halladay was well above average across the board. Dickey's K rate spiked for that single year. Lee was an elite K/BB guy but an ordinary contact manager.
Bottom line: None of the four repeated that one exceptional 34+ performance. Due to injuries, Lee and Halladay never again qualified for an ERA title. Carpenter's contact management ability ebbed from excellent to merely solid. Dickey's downfall was probably the most typical, however. His K rate slipped, and thus his multiplier moved sharply from left to right on the above table. In 2012, it was 81.2. In 2013, just a season later, it was 100.4. And in 2015, it was 111.8. Given an average constant contact score, that's a 30-basis-point jump in his calculated component ERA solely attributable to K/BB slippage.
There are plenty of other cases in point. Justin Verlander's multiplier spiked from the 72.3 box in 2009 to the 106.8 box in 2014. Johan Santana went from 72.3 in 2008 to 94.6 in 2010. Getting back to Greinke, he lived in that 72.3 box as recently as 2011 but now lives in the 89.1 box.
Another factor: Across MLB, the K-rate bar is being raised to higher and higher levels, which makes it harder and harder to move leftward on the multiplier table. Did you know the average NL ERA qualifier struck out 8.06 batters per nine innings last year? With each passing year, that figure likely will continue to drift upward, while Greinke's decline phase continues and intensifies.
I would expect Greinke's window of potential excellence to close within the next three seasons, and that's if he remains healthy. The 90 contact scores, with 95ish multipliers -- that's an 85ish calculated component ERA -- will become the short-term norm. After that, you're flirting with merely an average starting pitcher being paid $25 million-plus per year.
The Giants' recent history
The Giants have been down this road before. The Barry Zito deal worked out terribly for them, though they made enough other good moves along the way to compensate for it. They're on the hook for $21 million per year for two more seasons to Matt Cain, who has pitched 150 innings the past two seasons combined.
On the positive side, they went year to year with Tim Lincecum and avoided a situation that could have rivaled the Zito contract in negative impact. Then there's the big one, locking up Madison Bumgarner early and locking up his prime years at well below market rate.
Also, it at least has to be asked whether it would negatively affect the clubhouse if Greinke were making $26 million, more than twice as much as a still-in-his-prime Bumgarner, to be a league-average pitcher in, say, 2018.
So then whom do they sign?
There are plenty of mid-level options on the pitching market who are good bets to be better than league average at fewer years and less than half the total cost of Greinke. Wei-Yin Chen, John Lackey and Hisashi Iwakuma are three examples; the latter two will get three guaranteed years, at most.
In addition, AT&T Park is quite pitcher-friendly; average to slightly better than average pitchers tend to "play up" there. If you're going to pay a premium to bring a player to San Francisco, pay a position player with proven line-drive power. Justin Upton has just that, he'll play the 2016 season at age 28, and his numbers were depressed by an unusually low liner rate last season (as Josh Donaldson's were in 2014 before he bounced back to normal level in 2015).
The Giants have some franchise-defining decisions to make this offseason, and conversations regarding Zack Greinke are likely to be among them. To consistently excel from the mid-30s onward, a pitcher generally must either be incredibly dominant, a la Curt Schilling, Randy Johnson or Nolan Ryan, or must possess a defining contact-management skill, a la Warren Spahn or Dennis Martinez (look him up). Greinke is neither and is trending further away from being that type of pitcher. The Giants should spend their money elsewhere and fortify both sides of the ball.