With the re-signing of Joel Pineiro last week, we’ve been writing a lot about free-agent pitchers and their values lately. So now is as good a time as any — before players officially declare for free agency Dec. 1 — to review the free-agent signings of the past season.

Is signing a free-agent starting pitcher a wise decision? The answer is, of course, "it depends." But we thought we’d look at the return on investment from all of the FA starters in 2007 to see if any general rules emerged. We like Pitching Runs Created as a counting stat for pitchers, so let’s begin by simply ranking all the starters who signed free-agent contracts for the 2007 season by PRC/$million this year (min. 20 PRC):

#Matsuzaka’s contract is listed at 6 years and 52,000,000, with his 2007 year at $6mil. However, since the Red Sox paid $50 million to acquire him, we’ve added that amount to his total and pro-rated the yearly additional cost, bringing his 2007 cost to $14,333,333.
^Pro-rated amount of Clemens’s total salary ($28,000,022) reported by Cots Baseball Contracts

Interestingly for St. Louis fans, the former-Cardinal pitcher who returned the most on his new team’s investment — at least in 2007 — was not Jeff Suppan nor Jason Marquis, but Jorge Sosa, who had some success starting for the Mets before finishing up in the bullpen. And Jeff Weaver made more than twice as much as Kip Wells yet mustered fewer PRC than his 2007 Cardinal replacement.

The obvious problem with evaluating free-agent contracts this way is that it only considers only the first year of the contract — for multiple-year deals, which are generally back-weighted, it gives the false impression that these contracts were good deals, while they actually might have a tremendous back-end burden. So we came up with a "burden factor" to roughly measure the amount of work the pitcher is going to have to do post-2007 to make good on his contract. (If you must know how we figured it, we first came up with the number of PRCs the pitcher would have to annually average after 2007 to have a modest 12.0 PRC/$Mil for the life of the contract. Then we divided the pitcher’s 2007 PRC by that "PRC Burden" to get the Burden Factor. More in a bit on how we came up with the 12.0 number.) So, for instance, last year’s prize FA, Barry Zito, is going to have to average 240 PRC a year to have 12.0 PRC/$Mil by the time his current seven-year deal expires (to give you some reference, Bob Gibson "only" generated around 179 PRC in 1968).

Only Orlando Hernandez even came close in 2007 to matching his PRC burden. And, as you can see, no one on the list had as many PRC in 2007 as he is going to have to average during the life of his contract to make that 12.0 PRC/$Mil mark. Quite obviously, with most, if not all, of these pitchers with their best years behind them, none is going to come anywhere close to averaging 12.0.

So why’d we choose 12.0 as the arbitrary number? It was about what the 2007 Cardinal pitching staff averaged:

By and large, the Cardinals actually got several good values for their money, with a couple notable exceptions. Not insignificantly, two of their top-paid pitchers, Mulder and Carpenter (who made $13.5 mil between them), generated only two PRC in 2007, a reminder that signing or extending the contract of older pitchers has an attendant injury risk. Clearly, the idea is to have as many Adam Wainwrights as possible. That’s easier said than done, but it points up the importance of hanging onto young pitchers like Anthony Reyes or even Brad Thompson, for the sheer possibility that they might break through. In his recent ZiPS projections for 2008, Dan Szymborski’s line for Iron Cap translates to around 59 PRC. If the Cap gets raised to $600,000 in salary next year, that would put his PRC/$Mil at 98.33 — not a bad return on the investment. If the group of 2007 free agents is any indication, it’s certainly better than what the free-agent market will be able to offer.

This entry was posted by Pip on Monday, October 22nd, 2007 at 1:53 am and is filed under analysis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.