Relief pitching is one of the most volatile positions on a baseball team.
If the Red Sox are going to make a hard push on a relief pitcher it will probably be in late July when they know exactly how they are performing for the season and who has emerged as the most dominant relief pitchers available for trade. There’s no reason to go overboard now.
Besides, Matt Guerrier only looks dominant from the surface.
This is a tough time of year for Red Sox news. The only Thanksgiving scraps the team was willing to give us involved a reliever and a backup catcher. It would have been nice to have some fireworks as we turned the page to December, but Larry Lucchino already said it wasn’t the size of the splash, so it’s going to be pretty quiet until they sign Adrian Beltre, Carl Crawford or Jayson Werth.
Which brings us to Guerrier.
If you had never heard of Guerrier prior to the Red Sox being linked to him earlier this week, then don’t feel bad. Guerrier once told the St. Paul Pioneer-Press, “There are a lot of guys in the National League, even in the American League, who have never heard of me.”
Dave Littlefield, (Portland (ME) High School graduate), the former General Manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates, has certainly heard of Guerrier. Littlefield traded reliever Damaso Marte and infielder Ruddy Yan (career minor leaguer) in 2001 to the Chicago White Sox for right-handed pitcher Matt Guerrier. Guerrier had been 18-4 in AA and AAA the season before and appeared to be on the fast track to big league starter.
But after being traded to Pittsburgh, Guerrier’s development stalled and the Pirates began to sour on the young righty after two lackluster seasons. Littlefield allowed Guerrier to reach waivers in 2003 and he was claimed by the Minnesota Twins.
Guerrier is a big-framed, right-handed reliever who is experiencing his first taste of free agency. After pitching seven seasons for the Twins and establishing himself in 2010 as a Type-A free agent, the team declined to offer him arbitration and Guerrier was free to test the market.
The problem is that Guerrier is rumored to be looking for or expecting $5 million dollars (the arbitration figure the Twins would have had to pay him) and if that’s the case – forget it.
Guerrier’s concerns are over the large discrepancy between his surface stats and his peripherals. On the back of his baseball card, Guerrier appears to be a dominant reliever throwing over 70 innings in 2010 with an ERA of 3.17 and a WHIP of 1.10.
But flip to your Fangraphs’ version of Guerrier’s baseball card and you see some numbers that make your raise your eyebrows.
Fangraphs is one of the greatest baseballs sites in existence and whether you call the stat ‘BABIP’ or ‘hit rate’, you immediately become suspicious of Guerrier when you study his numbers.
You can question Guerrier’s .236 BABIP from 2010 as pitchers have little to no control of batted balls and when you consider that the league average usually sits around .290-.300, you start wondering about sustainability. How do you think Guerrier strung together that 3.17 ERA? With an unsustainable hit rate. The gap between his ERA and xERA (4.33) is over a full run. And to make matters even more bizarre, Guerrier’s hit rate in 2009 was 22%. It would be inconceivable to expect a repeat of that in 2011.
But wait, if he posted two straight years of dominant hit rates then it’s certainly possible that he could do it again, right? Yes, but in the seasons that his hit rate corrects itself, the gap in ERA and xERA vanishes and you have a 4.50 ERA pitcher instead of a guy with a tidy sub-3.00 ERA as Guerrier was in 2009.
In reality, Guerrier is probably going to get a raise from his 2010 $3.25 million dollar salary when he signs a new contract this winter, but it will not be from the Boston Red Sox. It’s not just hit rates (BABIP) either. Guerrier’s strand rate (74.4%) is pretty favorable as well. It’s a nice trait to have in your reliever, but isn’t something you want to bank on, especially when the price figures to be high.
People are already pointing to Joaquin Benoit’s deal as setting the bar for relief pitchers this offseason. That might be the case for Benoit who was a 1.5 WAR in 2010. But Guerrier was a .2 WAR and didn’t display any of the dominance that Benoit did for the Tampa Rays. His 70 IPs in Minnesota were near the top of the League but he was simply mediocre with stuff and very fortunate with luck.
Benoit struck out 11 batters per nine innings while Guerrier’s K/9 was a pedestrian 5.3. While he may have a knack for stranding runners and getting his batted balls hit to defenders, it’s not a trait you are going to risk millions on.
You look at his strand rates and hit rate and you think “fortunate”. Then you look at his historical data and think “maybe that’s just him.” Either way, Guerrier probably shouldn’t make more than $950,000 dollars based on WAR, but some team will bring him in and hope he can continue the fortune.
He’s definitely a workhorse though and on a team that finished the season with one of the American League’s worst bullpens, the Sox need to find some weapons back there. Daniel Bard is the best pitcher on the back end right now and Jonathan Papelbon will hopefully regain his form. But guys like Scott Atchison and Hideki Okajima are throw away players at this point. The team needs a dominant lefty specialist and another power right-handed arm — but they both will need to come on the cheap.
Under normal circumstances last year, the Red Sox probably would have made the move to get Scott Downs at the deadline. Though with the state of the team in July 2010 it would have been foolish to deal prospects when your season is completely unstable and so the Red Sox stayed put.
Without a rash string of injuries again, July 2011 should provide the Red Sox an opportunity to go acquire someone dominant for the stretch run like Bobby Jenks or Heath Bell, both free agents after the 2011 season. Now is simply the time to stockpile cheap arms and projectable back-end pitchers.
The Red Sox might sign a free agent reliever this December, but they certainly won’t be overpaying for any of them.