C.C. Sabathia
Probably the biggest free agent prize this off-season will be C.C. Sabathia. Sabathia is coming off back to back monster years in which he carried his team into the postseason. Sabathia joined the strong but in need of help Brewers about half way through the year. He went on 3 days rest for his last 5 starts (including 1 postseason), and helped overcome the Mets in order to take the wild card on the last day of the season.
Over the past two seasons Sabathia has recorded 515ip (including postseason starts). That is a TON of innings these days. The good news if you are worried about Sabathia’s high innings count, is that he has been used in a relatively safe way. According to Keith Woolner of Baseball Prospectus, in his research essay on “Pitcher Abuse Points” there is a strong correlation both with decline in performance and injury risk for every pitch thrown over 100.
The implications for pitcher usage are rather straightforward; starting pitchers should, in general, be held to 121 or fewer pitches (Categories I, II, and III)… However, even though extenuating circumstances may call for pushing a workhorse starter to a Category IV start (up to 132 pitches), or even a low Category V start, it should be viewed as nearly inexcusable to let a starting pitcher exceed 140 pitches in any start.
Managers who allow pitchers to throw too many pitches in a start may not be only jeopardizing that pitcher’s future, but hurting his current team’s chances at success as well. For the benefit of another half inning of work from a tired starter, a manager may be gambling with that pitcher’s next 4 or 5 starts at the very least. The evidence shown here shows that a season-long strategy to maximize the effectiveness of a pitching staff through managed workloads makes sense, even under an urgent “we need to win now, the future will take care of itself” philosophy.
Woolner then had a part two of the essay where he looks into whether or not this Pitcher Abuse Point System has any correlation with long term injurys. His conclusion there are that there is a strong correlation between pitch counts and pitcher injuries.
The research presented here has shown, in essence, that not all pitches are created equal. It is the high pitch count outings that represent the greatest risk for both short-term ineffectiveness, and long-term potential for injury… It’s important to note that the Workload Stress factor is not a prediction of injury risk for a specific season, but rather a risk of injury over several years of pitching at that level….we can confidently say that PAP^3 yields information about pitcher performance and durability not answered by pitch counts alone under current playing conditions. Long pitch count outings noticeably decrease expected short-term performance, and high stress workloads over time increase the chances for serious injury.
Woolner also introduces a pitcher abuse metric called “STRESS”
The key element of the findings above is that more PAP for any given number of pitches leads to higher risk. This leads to the concept of using PAP/NP [NP = number of pitches] as a measure of how intense or stressful a pitcher’s pitches have been. I’ll refer to PAP/NP as “Workload Stress” or simply “Stress”.
Woolner finds some benchmarks in his STRESS metric that can help us determine whether a pitcher has been abused.
Over a quarter of pitchers with career Stress factors above 40 have suffered a major injury at some point during the time of the study, compared with less than 15% of those with career Stress factors below 20.
So pitchers who have Career stress factors under 20 have been handled with kid gloves, and pitchers with STRESS factors over 40 have been abused, anywhere in between 20-40 is fairly normal for a workhorse pitcher.
Here are CC Sabathia’s career STRESS factors.
2008 – 29
2007 – 17
2006 – 19
2005 – 7
2004 – 21
2003 – 17
2002 – 17
2001 – 17
So remember under 20 is very safe, handled well, CC was under 20 most of his career with 21 in 2004 and 29 this year. The danger zone is over 40… CC has never even gotten to 30 or above. So in terms of abuse on his arm, it doesnt exist, at least as far as excessive pitch counts are concerned.
Sabathia’s pitching skills are as good as anyone in baseball. According to his PITCH F/X card (courtesy of Josh Kalk) Sabathia’s average fastball this year was about 95mph, which is great velocity for a lefty. Josh Klak wrote an analysis of Sabathia’s “stuff” for The Hardball Times this year. His comments on his slider are as follows
Sabathia’s slider is one of the game’s best pitches when he gets five inches of horizontal movement, but when he is getting eight or nine inches of movement that pitch simply becomes unfair. If it takes slowing it down to 80 mph to get that movement, then that is exactly what Sabathia should do.
Josh Klak also has some nice comments about Sabathia’s change up.
Sabathia also throws a change-up to right-handed batters that has a decent 8 mph difference from his fastball and tails down and away compared to his fastball. While this is Sabathia’s third-best pitch, he is willing to throw it on any count and can throw it for strikes if he wants to. It doesn’t get the same swings and misses his slider gets, so he prefers the slider as his strikeout pitch, but he throws almost 30 percent change-ups to right handed batters, so he mixes that pitch in very well. I suspect that if Sabathia’s fastball and slider weren’t quite as dominant, his change-up would get more respect. Despite being a good pitch, it isn’t in the same ballpark as his other two pitches.
Sabathia’s skills translate to his actual numbers as well. His K/9 was 8.9 this year his BB/9 were 2.1, so he strikes out a lot of batters, but doesnt issue very many free passes. This tells you something about how well he controls the strikezone. In addition CC keeps the ball on the ground, inducing ground balls close to half of the time a batter puts the ball in play. Ground balls are much less likely to go for an extra base hit, and are clearly almost never going to go for a home run, which allows you to limit the damage. He has shown these skills for the past two seasons, and has demonstrated potential for these skills in the past.
So now we get to the question of how much money is a) CC worth, and b) CC going to get. Well believe it or not ladies and gentleman, baseball General Managers do not just take a wild guess at what to pay a player, there is a lot of considerations put into how much someone is worth.
Well J.C. Bradbury over at Sabernomics, has this to say:
According to my projected marginal revenue product model, Sabathia will be worth $144 million for a six-year deal, which translates to $24 million a year. (If you’re not familiar with my model, it is based on recent performance and takes into account aging and league salary growth.)
So which teams are going to be willing/able to spend this kind of Money. Well the obvious choice is the New York Yankees who have supposedly made him priority number one, according to John Heyman, and other sources. Its widely speculated that CC would prefer to play on the west coast, though he shot down those rumors the day that the Brewers were eliminated. Out of the west coast teams, the Dodgers have the money, but pitching isn’t a perceived need, and right now it appears Manny will be top priority, I don’t see them spending $20 mil + on two different players. The Angels may be interested if Mark Teixeira walks, but I think they would prefer to sign Tex. The A’s and Padres will not even get involved, and the other West coast teams are the Giants who have Lincecum, Cain, and are locked into 5 years at just over $100 mil. The Diamondbacks are pretty much set at starting pitcher with Webb and Haren, and just don’t have the market to spend $144 million on one player. I won’t even talk about the Rockies.
A dark-horse candidate I could see getting involved here is Texas. The rangers have a good young team, but are desperate for an ace pitcher. They have been willing to overpay to get pitchers to sign there, and to be honest if they landed CC, in combination with some of their other arms, its a pretty good team. CC has hinted he may give the Brewers a slight hometown discount, but for some reason I just cannot see them breaking the bank.
Somehow I think that the yanks will open up their pocketbook and given the other situations, CC will take the “crazy” money in NY.
