What's happened to Ollie Perez?

[Web Jim Edmonds]

4.1IP today Vs the Nats. 7ER 3K's and 3BB's for a 9.31ERA. 12 Million smackers a year. I remember how Rick Ankiel sort of....lost his pitching skills and never got it back. The same has seem to have happened to Ollie, even though he's not throwing pitches to the back stop. He's 100% healthy, what is the problem and is there any chance of Ollie turning this around?

And Part 2 to the question, what would you like to see happen if you team had Ollie?

 

 

(edit: more explicative thread title --1992)

[kramnoj]

He's not exactly a model of consistency, as shown in 2005 and 2006. He also led the NL in walks last year, which I hadn't known until just looking him up at b-ref.

 

I don't think there's much question the Mets overpaid for Perez, and I don't even recall teams competing for his services. It's like the Mets declined to go for Lowe and figured they would be getting a deal with Perez instead.

[logan82]

Perez was proposed as an option this offseason. Link

 

He was a Type A so the Mets were his only real option as I doubt anybody else would have given up the pick to sign him.

[kramnoj]

I should have been more elaborate. The Mets were bidding against themselves at that salary. I don't recall any other team being linked to an offer that was close to 3/$36M. They probably could have got away with a 2/$20M deal, and I don't think anyone would have topped it. Maybe even less.

[rluzinski]

He's a 4.25 - 4.5 kind of pitcher, so $12 mil a year isn't crazy. As fans, we have no idea what could have gotten him.

[kramnoj]

so $12 mil a year isn't crazy

 

It's not crazy, but it's not just about paying for a statistical formula. It's about finding the market value for a player and not having to exceed that more than neccessary.

 

As fans, we have no idea what could have gotten him.

 

I know you're fond of hyperbole, but clearly we have some idea. There is a general idea for people who follow such stuff to know how much teams are willing to spend in a year and where their weaknesses are. We knew that pitchers like Garland, Wolf and Looper weren't going to get what they would have received in previous years. We knew that fewer teams were spending money. It was a buyer's market for pitchers that weren't at the elite or near the elite, and the Mets paid retail when they should have gone wholesale.

[JoeHova]

I still like Perez but he hasn't looked good so far. As krmanoj pointed out, he's had whole seasons like this in the past so I think it's too soon to count him as washed up.

[Schlitz001]

I thought I read that he came into spring training with 15 extra pounds and a poor attitude. If that's the case it doesn't suprise me that he is not performing like last year.

 

Jerry Manual is threatening to send Perez to the bullpen or AAA (which he would have to sign off on) if he don't start pitching well. It sounds more like an empty threat to me. Perez has been a decent pitcher in the past and is making too much money (I know, I know) to send down to AAA for any period of time unless something is severly wrong with his mechanics. Plus he has a start coming up against the Phillies who he had a good outing against earlier in the year.

 

He's still young and I think he can pull it together.

[endaround]

He's a 4.25 - 4.5 kind of pitcher, so $12 mil a year isn't crazy. As fans, we have no idea what could have gotten him.

 

No he isn't. That's the whole problem. His FIPs the last 4 seasons: 6.25, 5.61, 4.35, 4.68. He's more 4.5-4.75, ie Branden Looper.

[rluzinski]

Marcel, which uses FIP as a foundation, projected a 4.22 ERA. CHONE said 4.26. ZiPS isn't a big fan (4.83). Marcel and CHONE expected a slightly improved walk rate from 2008 but also assumed his strikeout rate would slightly decrease.

 

Perez certainly has a unique history with the walks but having a reasonable (although not good) walk rate for 2 years suggests his days of walk rate over 5 are behind him. 4 starts really doesn't change much, IMO.

 

What is a 4.5 ERA from a starter worth on the open market? I guess that's open for a significant amount of debate. I think we can all agree that it's not worth $12 mil/year. I'm suprised fangraphs has his 2008 season as worth only 1.3 wins and $5.8 mil. I guess it depends heavily on what you think a replacement starting pitcher is. I think I would have been happy to get him for 3/24.

 

As for his salary, I shouldn't have said "no idea" but I don't think we should assume that any time a team is interested in a player, it becomes public knowledge. I think there's a lot of negotiating that goes on behind close doors. that the public never finds out about As a result, I 'm not sure how acurate we can get when we try to speculate on what it would have taken to get a specific player. Just my opinion.

[endaround]

I'm not saying the Brewers could or even should have got him. I'm saying the Mets are really overpaying for a guy based on "Stuff" and a low ERA in 2007 that was a combination of low BABIP and giving up lots of unearned runs. The projected difference between Odalis Perez and Oliver Peerz is slight but one's an NRI and the other is making $12m guaranteed.

[kramnoj]

I don't think we should assume that any time a team is interested in a player, it becomes public knowledge.

 

This is true. But we do have an idea of how much their payroll is going to be and where they are looking to spend money. Not precise information, as I was surprised to see the Indians pay 2/$20.5M for Kerry Wood, but a general idea.

 

After Lowe signed, the only team that was interested in signing a pitcher to big money was the Mets (the Rangers were negotiating with Sheets, but they weren't going to go after Perez and his asking price). IIRC, the only other players remaining that were going to get big money were Dunn and Manny. There were more pitchers available than teams willing to spend $10M/year on a player. Perez isn't so much better than the other pitchers remaining that he was worth twice as much as the other pitchers. This is basic supply/demand stuff that the Mets didn't exploit.

 

Now for the Mets, this isn't tragedy. They probably felt that Perez had extra value because he was a player that their own fans recognized. If they had cheaped out on Perez and signed Garland/Looper instead, the papers would have had a field day, especially with the opening of a new park and missing out so closely on the playoffs the last couple of years. But they did overpay, which is all that was originally posted.

[Diskono]

Didn't he lose a ton of velocity after 2004? I don't remember if there was an injury, but it really hurt him then, and it looks like he's lost a couple MPH so far this season. Maybe he just needs to get back in shape.

[crewcrazy]

For what it's worth, I believe Ollie is one of the pitchers who's been blaming his early-season struggles on pitching in the WBC. He pitched for Team Mexico, but I don't have the numbers on IP for him.

 

There's been some speculation in New York that a lot of the problems are just mechanics. Paul Lo Duca was on a sports show out here, speaking from experience as he caught Perez when he was still in New York. Lo Duca proposed that Perez's herky-jerky delivery is basically a recipe for disaster when it comes to control because he'll struggle with release points and arm slots, and when he starts thinking about that stuff too much on the mound he tends to lose his precision.

 

The New York media is actually floating the idea out there that the Mets should yank him from the starting rotation and put him in the bullpen, but that'd probably go even worse. He'd be almost Turnbow-like in that role...they're probably better off seeing if they can send him down to AAA for awhile to work out his mechanics, even if he signed a $30 million deal.