The CC Watch... Latest: Who knows?

[joepepsi]

Suppan got a backloaded contract with a no trade during the early years. His contract was pretty much built to make sure he had no trade value.

That's an interesting take that hadn't occurred to me. Do you think players actually agree to backloaded contracts to discourage being traded?

[sveumrules]

suppan's career era is .01 higher than the league average, 4.63/4.62. his era+ is 100 on the nose. he is exactly what he is, a league average starter who will take the ball for 30 plus starts every year. in the current baseball economy he is probably being paid almost exactly what he is worth.

 

i also am pretty sure that the whole idea of timing his no trade clause and backloading the contract was done specifically to make him potentially tradable this offseason or next. they probably won't do it this offseason as he's coming off his worst campaign in quite some time. but depending on how the brewers defense shakes out for next year and what suppan's health is like he could be moved next offseason if he bounces back to career norms, slightly regressed for age.

[bobskube]

I, for one, was excited about Suppan coming. Now I realize better.

 

CC is the Greg Maddux of 1991. The Cubs did not want to pay and they paid long term. I really admire the Brewers for giving it their best shot and if they dont get him, so be it. At least we know that this is not a token offer.

[rluzinski]

suppan's career era is .01 higher than the league average, 4.63/4.62. his era+ is 100 on the nose. he is exactly what he is, a league average starter who will take the ball for 30 plus starts every year. in the current baseball economy he is probably being paid almost exactly what he is worth.

 

First, here is the NL average ERA for starting pitchers over the last few years:

 

08: 4.43

07: 4.65

06: 4.66

05: 4.25

04: 4.44

 

I'd probably use 4.5 as league average for a starting pitcher.

 

Second, you do not project a 33 year old starting pitcher with 2200+ innings by looking at his career ERA. His FIP and ERA from the last 3 years:

 

YR FIP/ERA

06: 4.70 / 4.12

07: 4.42 / 4.62

08: 5.51 / 4.96

 

Whether you use FIP or ERA, you are not going to get a 4.6 ERA projection for Suppan next year. 4.9 ERA? ZiPS says 5.04 ERA. He's not worth zero but he also no where near $12 mil.

[Ennder]

To be fair his deal was 4 years $42M which is $10.5M a year even if it was backloaded so it is bigger the next 2 years. I'm not sure I buy into the fact his projection should be seriously worse than what he put up in 2007 if he is healthy as his ERA/FIP were high mostly because of 1 bad start in CHI, 1 start he left with an injury and a few starts at the end of the year where he obviously wasn't healthy either physically or mentally(even as hittable as he is, he has never been THAT hittable before).

 

To me the question of what to expect next year is going to come down to health, if he is healthy I expect a 4.25-4.75 type ERA . If he isn't healthy then it depends on how many times they trot him out there and try to pitch through it.

 

So far Suppan has put up just about what I expected out of him when he signed for the Brewers. Mid to high 4 ERA and 190+ IP a year.

[DuWayne Steurer]

I'm not sure I buy into the fact his projection should be seriously worse than what he put up in 2007 if he is healthy as his ERA/FIP were high mostly because of 1 bad start in CHI, 1 start he left with an injury and a few starts at the end of the year where he obviously wasn't healthy either physically or mentally

So as long as we selectively remove all the starts that don't support the argument, he's an average starter.

 

I can buy the injury start, but the "few starts at the end of the year where was obviously not mentally or physically healthy"? I might be able to buy physical injury, but mental health?

 

So can we start cherry picking stats out of samples whenever we assume or suspect a player wasn't "mentally healthy"?

[Ennder]

So as long as we selectively remove all the starts that don't support the argument, he's an average starter.

 

I can buy the injury start, but the "few starts at the end of the year where was obviously not mentally or physically healthy"? I might be able to buy physical injury, but mental health?

You absolutely have to put starts into context to ever understand where a player is. Suppan in his last 3 starts was nothing like Suppan the rest of his career so I think it is safe to assume something was wrong. Now it may be that the 'something' is just natural age progression and it is going to repeat next year, but personally I don't think that is so, that is more of a judgement call. I personally think his injury was messing things up at that point.

 

His last 3 starts were 10.2 IP, 21 hits, 4 HR, 1.280 OPS against. In my mind that was more likely to be a physical issue than anything else. It wasn't just 1 bad start messing with his stats either, it was 3 completely abyssmal starts.

[DuWayne Steurer]

But those starts were part of his overall body of work, and can't be dismissed. They're as relevant as anything else he did over the course of the year, and I dont' think it's unreasonable to assume (as long as we're making assumptions) that a guy Suppan's age, and with his history of a pretty steady, high workload is going to break down somewhat at the end of a season, and probably sooner, the older he gets.

It's not like there's rhyme or reason to Suppan's statitstical distribution. He was bad in April. Very good in May. Average in June. He completely sucked in July. He was very good in August, and he completely sucked again in September.

I'm not worried about this or that start that we can cherry pick out to make the argument. Soup is what he is, an overpaid 4th or 5th starter who's got 2200+ innings of work on his arm. People like to point at Curt Schilling and Roy Halladay and say "Ben Sheets can be like those guys too!". I think baseball history is littered with a lot more guys that burn out after age 34 and 2200 innings than continue to be effective. At Soup's age, I just don't expect him to improve back to his mean.

[TooLiveBrew]

I dont' think it's unreasonable to assume (as long as we're making assumptions) that a guy Suppan's age, and with his history of a pretty steady, high workload is going to break down somewhat at the end of a season, and probably sooner, the older he gets.

 

But he takes the ball every 5th day! He's reliable! He's an innings-eater! http://forum.brewerfan.net/images/smilies/wink.gif

 

 

People like to point at Curt Schilling and Roy Halladay and say "Ben Sheets can be like those guys too!".

 

What do Schilling, Halladay, or Sheets have to do with this?

[clancyphile]

Well, 127 million over 6 years works out to be about 21 million per. That might be a bargain in just two or three years. Assuming CC stays healthy, the Brewers could always flip him down the line in a trade, with that type of contract.

Well worth doing, IMO.

 

And then, the Crew can turn its efforts to getting Ben Sheets back into the fold.

 

Sabathia-Sheets-Gallardo-Parra-Bush

[Ennder]

But those starts were part of his overall body of work, and can't be dismissed. They're as relevant as anything else he did over the course of the year

 

If you are going to stick to that argument then yearly stats are completely useless as you are dismissing part of his overall body of work which was the previous years. A single season is every bit as arbitrary as a single season minus 3 starts. Projection systems do exactly what I'm doing with Suppan, they regress back towards the mean and assume that a big jump in any given stat was probably a fluke of some type. I see no reason to expect a 5+ ERA out of Suppan next season as suggested above.

 

If I see two pitchers with a 3.50 ERA and one was steady all year long and the other one had a 3.00 ERA except for one start against say the Cubs where he gave up 12 ER I feel it is pretty safe to assume the 2nd starter is better. Those are exactly the types of guys I look for in my fantasy baseball leagues, the ones who had 1 or 2 miserable starts that likely are better than their overall stats would suggest and they pretty much always perform better the next year.

[tigerbrew]

What would people think about 6/127mil ? Heard second hand but comes from source inside MP.

That's a good offer, but I'd increase it to 6/138M so that CC can be called the highest paid pitcher in baseball and there would be no nonsense from that damn union.

[Invader3K]

Why are people talking about Suppan and his contract (yet again) in this thread? It really doesn't have much bearing on whether or not Sabathia will re-sign with the Brewers.

[rluzinski]

If you take out every start from every starting pitcher who obviously wasn't pitching like himself, you end up with a bunch of projections that are all screwed up. If you are going to do that, you might as well take away the games where they also weren't pitching like themselves and did better than you'd expect. I appreciate trying to put some of the numbers in context but what you do is throw out large chunks of data on a whim. You've done this with batters as well. You thought Estrada's projection was too pessimistic because of injuries. You spent a lot of energy arguing that Kendall's performance in Chicago should be weighed more than in Oakland. As it turned out, his projections were pretty much dead on for 2008.

 

I'm not suggesting that stat-based projections are as good as it get; that there is no other information that can be added to that projection to improve it. I just don't think you go about doing that in a very regimented way.

[Oldcity]

I'm definitely not a fan of a six year deal. I guess that rumor that the Brewers would be willing to offer more per year to get a shorter contract had no merit.

[Ennder]

You spent a lot of energy arguing that Kendall's performance in Chicago should be weighed more than in Oakland. As it turned out, his projections were pretty much dead on for 2008

 

I most certainly did not. My projection for Kendall from the projection thread was

 

Kendall .265 / .334 / .340

 

His actual stats were .246/.327/.324 which is pretty darn close to my expectations. What I said is that his stats were so miserable in oakland and his secondary stats so far away from normal that they probably wouldn't repeat and that is exactly what happened.

 

As for Estrada, how on earth was I to know he'd get hurt again and play through it. He was right in line with my expectations until the injury and then he fell apart and was miserable trying to play through it. Estrada got hurt in mid July when his OPS was sitting in the mid .700's and his legs bothered him the rest of the year and he posted an OPS of like .600 the rest of the way.

 

I also threw out the first half of Hardy's rookie year because I don't think it means anything which is why my projection was more optimistic than most and was pretty much right in line what he did. The biggest flaw with projection systems is that they don't have the ability to put anything in context(that is sort of what PECOTA attempts to do), they just regress everything and hope it works out more often than not.

 

I do my own projections every season for fantasy baseball, I take a look at baseball forecaster, pecota, zips and chone and then I bump the numbers for some players based on context and generally speaking the way I bump a player is right more often than not unless there is some injury etc the next year.

[DuWayne Steurer]

What do Schilling, Halladay, or Sheets have to do with this?

 

When people are complaining about Sheets and his durability, Schiling and Halladay are guys that are used as the measuring stick as far as what a pitcher is capable of after several injury plagued years. What I'm getting at is that they're the exception, not the rule. The context to Suppan is that he's had 2200 innings (plus minor leagues) piled on his arm. At his age, I don't expect him to improve back to his mean, I expect him to continue to decline, as most, I'm sure will.

 

When people want to project their favorite players, they always find a similar season or trend from a hall of famer or future hall of famer to point out whey their guy is going to do awesome.

 

If you are going to stick to that argument then yearly stats are completely useless as you are dismissing part of his overall body of work which was the previous years. A single season is every bit as arbitrary as a single season minus 3 starts. Projection systems do exactly what I'm doing with Suppan, they regress back towards the mean and assume that a big jump in any given stat was probably a fluke of some type. I see no reason to expect a 5+ ERA out of Suppan next season as suggested above.

With a guy Suppans age and workload, I think his most recent season should easily have more weight than others in any projection system. Regardless, you're still cherry picking by taking out a start in Chicago that he "got hit hard" in, starts at the end of the season that you feel he wasn't "mentally prepared for", which is simply impossible to know.

[Ennder]

Sure when you pull half a sentence out of my post and take it out of context it looks bad but whatever. We'll just have to agree to disagree about it which is fine. I think if you look deeper into the whys of a players statistics you get a better picture than just looking at the stats as a whole, you obviously disagree.

[DuWayne Steurer]

No, I don't disagree, there is a context to everything. I just choose not to remove the statistics that don't support my argument. Especially when you're removing 3 starts because you fell he wasn't mentally there.

 

At Suppans age and workload history, I strongly suspect that he's going to continue to trend downward, not improve back to number from even 2 scant years ago.

 

I can make a good pitcher mediocre if I selectively remove 4 starts from his stat line to support my case, and vice versa.

 

When you look at Suppan's month-to-month you can see he was up and down all season long.

[Ennder]

No, I don't disagree, there is a context to everything. I just choose not to remove the statistics that don't support my argument. Especially when you're removing 3 starts because you fell he wasn't mentally there

 

Of course I didn't actually say that. I also didn't really remove starts from anything, I just pointed out that for the majority of the season Suppan pitched just like every other year and I don't see a real reason for him to get significantly worse next year other than being more of an injury concern now.

 

Suppan hurt his elbow on July 6th and had a 4.30 ERA and a .799 OPS against with 53 K, 42 BB, 10 HR in 91.1 IP.

From that start on he had a 5.79 ERA, .900 OPS against, 37 K, 25 BB and 20 HR in 79.1 IP.

His career rates are a 4.63 ERA, .791 OPS against.

 

I don't see why it is such a crime to assume that the injury probably played a role with things in the second half, especially given the big spike in HR which is way outside his career rates. I still don't see a reason to think he will be a 5+ ERA pitcher next year if he is healthy.

 

Then again as someone already pointed out this thread is about Sabathia and Suppan really has little to do with Sabathia so I guess that will be my final post on the subject.

[Invader3K]

Maybe there should be a new thread called: "Why Jeff Suppan sucks so much," or "Why we hate Jeff Suppan."

 

But I hope Ennder's final line of his post rings true.

[jeffy]

Well, 127 million over 6 years works out to be about 21 million per. That might be a bargain in just two or three years. Assuming CC stays healthy, the Brewers could always flip him down the line in a trade, with that type of contract.

 

Of course, the risk of injury is the the biggest potential problem with a large long-term contract. I would also assume he would require a no-trade clause, to sign a contract with the Brewers.

[logan82]

How often do players with big contracts get traded without the original team paying some of the contract? I think the same thing people, myself included, said about Suppan when he was signed applies to a contract for CC. If he is playing well he is worth the money and we don't want to trade him, if he isn't playing well we can't trade him because nobody will want him.

 

If we sign him, we should be prepared to keep him for the duration of the contract. The reason a player like Peavy can be easily traded is because he signed a very team friendly deal at a below market price. That is not likely to happen with CC.

[ewizabeff]

Buster Olney seems to think CC should go to the Giants: link

[8brewcrew]

Buster Olney seems to think CC should go to the Giants: link

 

If CC signed with the Giants, then we would face him on opening day next year.