victor page wrote:Surely the Jays can do better for $15M a year than Angie Burnett. The guy has great stuff but no heart - he won't pitch through a little pain, his ERA is higher than Jesse Litsch, He's never going to pitch for a playoff team (unless the Angels sign him to be their 4th starter or something like that).
He remids me of Ted Lilly - a talented pitcher but not a winner. The Jays didn't miss Ted Lilly for one minute. It will be the same with Anna Burnett.
I actually agree on the subject, but not at all with the reasoning. Burnett is a solid second starter, and these days a solid second starter who has the stuff to repeat that performance on a yearly basis is worth eight figures a year...4 years/$54m is reasonable within that environment.
But the Jays shouldn't be trying to win playing by those rules. Those rules work only for a select few, and one really has to view the game as having two distinct financial markets; the top tier, comprised of the Yanks, Sox, Mets, Cubs, Dodgers and Angels, and the rest. A number of teams (Detroit, Seattle, Atlanta) have spent themselves into the same tax bracket, but lack the resources to do so indefinitely. Many others don't even try. Yet when it comes to above average but not elite pitchers (and to a lesser extent position players), just about every team in the league is willing to spend like the big boys.
Which is idiotic. What we're dealing with is a system that overrewards marginal success: a guy who is around 90% of league average for three to four years is going to earn a couple mil a year, if he sticks around at all. A pitcher at the league average with some semblance of stuff has suddenly become worth $6-8m a year, usually with long contracts. And a pitcher like Burnett (or if you're talking about the fusion of overpayment and unrealistic expectations, Lohse or Silva or Suppan or -- projected to be 10% better than league average -- is poised to earn $12-14m a year and no one blinks an eye. You're unlikely to find a better example of diminishing marginal returns in the business world.
Why does it continue? Because if you have enough cash, the model works. The league averaged 774 runs scored and allowed this year; add 10% to the runs scored and take away 10% of the runs allowed and you have a team that leads the league in run differential. Problem being that you can't half-ass it, which is what many teams try to do...you either spend
all of that money, or you try a different formula, because all of the returns are in that narrow gap between 90-95 wins; it's worth paying through the nose for those last couple wins to get into the playoffs (and compete when there), which is why the top spenders are willing to dump huge amounts of cash. The middle road simply leads to an unbalanced team on which a couple of above-average players are making more than a quarter of the team's salary, meaning that too many important spots are filled on the cheap, and too many corners cut in the organization as a whole to support that top-heavy structure.
That's where the Jays are right now. They're forking over the cash for the $100/bottle wine, but when the dinner menu comes they balk and order the house salad. Even if the rotation was healthy going into next year, re-signing Burnett means cutting a lot of corners to keep the team financially healthy: with Rios and Wells set to receive huge pay hikes, there'll be no money remaining to add the pieces necessary to make this a playoff team, and that's not even taking into consideration the strength of the division.
For that reason, the Jays need to stop playing the big boys' game. They need to start valuing players not on their worth relative to the market, but relative to the team's financial state and expected performance. If Burnett can be replaced by a guy who does 80% as well and makes one-fifth of the price, you're looking at $40m over four years freed up to address other issues. In today's market, the best pitching is young pitching...they're cheap enough that you can have all sorts of veteran insurance policies, yet good enough (if you have plenty of them) to provide returns that approximate your average overpriced team of vets. Look at the Rays; their pitching staff is dirt cheap, yet extremely effective because they've focused on the bottom of the pyramid.
...that rant completed, I just want to mention that the 'AJ Burnett, shrinking violet' thing is patently absurd. In his last six starts, all of which were against teams above .500 and while the Jays were mounting their late-season charge, Burnett had an ERA of 1.90, WHIP of 1.06, an average of 7.3 IP/game, and six straight quality starts. Would that every pitcher in the Jays staff could be as not-winner-y as Burnett was from August 29th on.