Zach Duke signed a three-year/$15 million contract with the White Sox yesterday based on his insane/improbable emergence as a relief ace with the Brewers last year. Neil Weinberg at Beyond the Box Score was apparently fascinated by Duke’s breakout season last year and so he takes a look today at the value of one good year vs. a career of mediocrity.

It’s obviously only one season’s worth of innings from a reliever, but it’s about 60 fantastic innings not heavily distorted by a platoon. He faced a roughly equal number of righties and lefties and had pretty similar results. I’m not going to sit here and argue that the thousand innings that came before should get thrown out or that he’s a true talent relief ace based on one year of data, but he’s demonstrated the ability to perform at a high level with no BABIP luck, HR/FB% magic, or really well targeted appearances against weak lefties. He legitimately pitched well for those 60 innings.

Having watched Zach Duke pitch so much from 2005-2010, I find this all fascinating and a little unbelievable. Good for you, Zach Duke!

0 comments

Jon Heyman reports Russell Martin will turn down his qualifying offer in a confusing sentence with so many commas and em dashes that he might as well write a Pittsburgh Pirate blog with a name cribbed from a rhetorical Simon and Garfunkel question:

Russell Martin, extremely popular on the free-agent market after his big year, will officially reject the Pirates qualifying offer for 2015 by Monday’s deadline — no surprise considering word is, he’s already got four-year possibilities and may even get five.

I know that we’re all putting on our strong, “Maybe the Pirates will bring Russell Martin Back” faces, but honestly, I told Mike Grau on his radio show yesterday that I thought the Pirates chances of bringing him back were more or less 0% and I’m going to stick with that. He’s one of baseball’s  best catchers in a free agent market in which he’s basically the only catcher available. He’s gonna get paid.

0 comments

There’s not a whole lot of new news here, but Jon Heyman gives us the first Russell Martin update of the off-season:

Pittsburgh, which extended the $15.3 million qualifying offer that he will surely turn down, is said to be quite interested in bringing back Martin to the point of going to unusual lengths for them to try to make it happen. The Pirates, as was reported here, made a multiyear proposal during this his walk season, and while such a late try was a long-shot, it is believed to have been a serious effort on their part.

He adds that the Cubs and Dodgers are likely going to be big players for Martin, the Blue Jays are interested, and that Martin’s agent is presumably looking for a five-year deal since that’s what Brian McCann, Yadier Molina, and Miguel Montero all got in recent years.

So, to recap: a lot of teams want Martin, including the Pirates, and the deal he signs is going to be for many years and many dollars, which probably doesn’t bode well for the Pirates.

0 comments