Snobs vs. Slobs

Last night the Cubs continued their misguided march towards sorta contending by signing crafty lefty Ted Lilly to a four year, $40 million deal.

Ted Lilly is basically a league average to slightly above league average innings-eater. He’s not a pitcher to get really excited about. On the other hand, he will almost certainly improve the Cubs’ pitching staff, which is in dire need of someone like Lilly, who is a very good bet to start 30 times this season. Unlike the Soriano and DeRosa pickups, there’s just about as much good as bad to say about the Lilly contract. With that in mind, I thought I’d break down the deal into pros and cons:

Pros:
• Ted Lilly is pretty durable. Lilly has made 31 starts or more three out of the last four years. In 2006, Carlos Zambrano and Greg Maddux (when he was with the team) were the only pitchers to consistently take the ball every fifth day. The knock against Lilly’s durability is that he hasn’t broken the 200 inning mark in a season. That is a valid concern, especially at Lilly’s age (more on that in a moment). However, 200 innings or not, Lilly has still made those 30+ starts consistently in the last few years, and that is the positive to focus on here. Also, Lilly probably would have broken the 200 inning mark in 2004 if he weren’t pitching in the tough AL East. Oh, what a nice smooth transition into the next Pro:

• Ted Lilly’s numbers are skewed. I’m sure a lot of Cubs fans have been looking at Lilly’s numbers on ESPN.com or Baseball-Reference and wondering, “Why are the Cubs paying $10 million a year for a guy with a career 4.60 ERA?” Well, Lilly is actually a better pitcher than his ERA would indicate. A look at Lilly’s translated statistics from Baseball Prospectus shows that Lilly, when adjusted for current league averages, is actually better than his numbers indicate. Why? Part of this is because he has pitched much of his career in the American League East, a notoriously rough division, particularly when you played for the Toronto Blue Jays from 2004 through 2006. Not only did those Blue Jay teams have to face two of the most devastating lineups in major league baseball (Yankees and Red Sox) a disproportionate number of times in their schedule, half of the time they had to do it in the hitter-friendly Rogers Centre (and that’s not to mention having to face the Red Sox in spacious Fenway). I expect that Lilly’s ERA, and probably his innings pitched numbers, will improve drastically because of the switch to the National League Central. Not only is the talent level in the NL currently much lower than that of the AL, but Lilly will get to face a pitcher two or three times a game, which really adds up over the course of a season. And as if not having to face the Yankees and Red Sox lineups anymore weren’t good enough, Lilly now gets the unbalanced schedule against the weakest division in all of baseball. The Pirates, Brewers, Astros (and, except for Pujols and Rolen, the Cardinals) all have lineups as punchless as a boiled potato festival.

• The contract isn’t actually that crazy. The thin free agent market has caused insane contracts to be given out to players like Carlos Lee and Alfonso Soriano. These nutty contracts have shown us that this is a particularly bad season to try to be improving your club through free agency (which, naturally, is why the Cubs are more active than they’ve ever been… but that’s another blog for another day). The megadeals given out to a lot of the hitters will probably start to look particularly silly in the 2007 offseason, when the free agent market will have a lot more hitting talent in it than the class of ‘06. However, I believe that starting pitching will remain a premium, as we have seen the prices for even middling starting pitchers on the free agent market stay ridiculously high over the past few years. In a world where a 34 year-old Esteban Loaiza is making $7 million a year (from the Moneyball team, no less), Adam Eaton is making $8 million a year, and Eric “5.01 ERA” Milton is making $8.5 million a year, $10 million a year for Ted Lilly just doesn’t seem all that unreasonable to me.

Cons:
• Ted Lilly is no spring chicken. Though the per-year cost of the contract doesn’t concern me so much, the length and timing of the contract does. Ted Lilly will turn 31 on January 4, which means that his best years are likely behind him. However, that doesn’t mean he won’t still be able to be basically what he’s always been, which is a league average innings-eater; it just means he probably won’t be any better than that.

• Lilly doesn’t have the best injury history. Lilly’s injury history is littered with a bunch of shoulder tendinitis problems. He’s also had the occasional back spasm and bicep issue… but most of his injury problems have been with his shoulder. The “good news” about Lilly’s injuries is that it doesn’t seem like he has the sort of injuries that keep him out for an extended period of time, but rather he misses a start or two and is okay to go again. The bad news is that there seems to be an issue almost every year. One has to think that will catch up with Lilly at some point during the course of this contract; he will be 34 when it’s done.

• Lilly (sigh) walks a lot of guys. Lilly has walks per nine innings rate of 3.67 for his career. That’s not very good, and on a team whose pitching staff led the majors in walks allowed by about 50 last season, that’s even less good. In addition, Lilly’s walk rate is headed in the wrong direction. His walk rate has been over 4 per 9 in each of the last three seasons. The Cubs clearly still haven’t heard about these “walks” things, and are likely going to be bitten in the ass by ignoring them once again this offseason.