Saunders Lackluster in Arizona
The Arizona Diamondbacks’ decision to trade Dan Haren for Joe Saunders and prospects was largely panned around the sabermetric community, and indeed, much of the baseball community at large. Mostly, that is because Dan Haren is just a really fantastic pitcher, but the fact that the return was two unimpressive prospects and a back-end starter like Joe Saunders simply made the trade an unacceptable squandering of resources on the part of the Diamondbacks. Saunders’s performance in Arizona to date has done nothing to dispel this notion.
Prior to the season, now 29 year old Saunders was projected for a FIP in the 4.70s by both CHONE and ZiPS, a mark that would put him well below average, but still provide value. These projections were effectively right on with Saunders up to the trade, as he posted a 4.68 FIP with the Angels. That kind of mark would place Saunders as about a 1.5 WAR pitcher over 180 innings, an total which he is close to reaching this season and reached in both 2008 and 2009.
But much like pitching in Arizona mistreated Dan Haren, it hasn’t been kind to Saunders. Unsurprisingly, with many starts at Chase Field, a homer-friendly park, Saunders’s HR/FB rate has jumped from 9.0% with the Angels to 12.5% since the trade. Despite a drop in walks, the extra home runs allowed have taken Saunders’s performance down to nearly replacement level. His 5.22 FIP has been worth all of 0.2 WAR for the Diamondbacks in his 55 innings with the club.
His ERA is a slightly more palatable 4.88, and of more encouragement to Arizona, his xFIP is at 4.89, a level that is definitively better than replacement if nothing else. CHONE’s most recent projections have him at a 4.75 “neutral ERA,” which implies he is basically still the same pitcher as he was in Anaheim, although it would not be surprising if his home run issues persist, given his career numbers and the park effects in Arizona.
Unfortunately for the Diamondbacks, that pitcher isn’t going to approach what Dan Haren provided them nor what he likely would’ve provided over the next three years. Saunders isn’t cheap, either, as he’s already making $3.75 million in his first arbitration year and can probably expect a raise to the $5 million to $7 million range, despite his poor season, a number that will be awfully close to free agent market value for a player only in his second arbitration year.
Saunders hasn’t even been the “winner” that Jerry DiPoto described as one of the reasons for bringing in Saunders over Haren. Saunders has only won two of his seven decisions and has a -0.50 WPA to go along with that poor record. Joe Saunders simply hasn’t been the guy needed to justify the trade. There was never any reason to believe that he would be, and there’s no reason to believe that he will be in the future either.
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I love flashbacks to terrible decision making.
+1.
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How come xFIP is just scaled to the league-average HR/FB% without considering the HR factors of the given parks? We wouldn’t expect a flyball pitcher like Saunders to be unaffected by the move to Chase Field, so why does xFIP pretend that he is?
Moreover, why do we pretend it’s simply luck? If a guy is giving up bombs to the deep bleachers, I’m not inclined to think those are “unlucky” fly balls going for hrs. It’s certainly a useful tool, but too many people aren’t familiar with the limitations of these formulas and trumpet them around as gospel. A lot of fg readers are just as dense as old school media pointing to wins and losses.
I have to be honest, I never use xFIP at face value anymore. Sure, it works for a large number of pitchers, and is shown to be as predictive as FIP (or maybe more, not sure). But in my mind there’s just way too many pitchers that come in way below the league average of HR/FB (and way above, although they are fewer because they tend not to last in the league) for it to be straight luck.
Matt Cain, Cliff Lee, Ubaldo, Josh Johnson, Justin Verlander all run way below year after year.
Conversely the reason Kirk Saarloos and Josh Towers aren’t in the majors this year is not due simply to bad luck, and I doubt Brett Myers is going to throw up 8 more seasons after this one to counteract his tendency to give up the long ball during the entire first half of his career.
Matt Cain and Verlander post consistently lower FIP than xFIP’s because they play in highly pitcher friendly ball parks. Homeruns anywhere else end up being mere fly ball outs, if Matt Cain ever has to pitch in Texas, NYY, Cincy, he’d be exposed badly.
Yeah, I hate that people use the term luck. Even if they are referring to statistical variance, in reality they are discounting the possibility of equations inability to capture everything in the game. Some of the models are getting better, but until they incorporate everything (which won’t happen for a long long time) calling the unknown aspect entirely luck is quite foolish.
I like to use xFIP to compare a pitcher against themselves, not so much for comparisons against peers.
The HR/FB normalization can be awfully brutish.
Maybe a little harsh to say the Skaggs is ‘unimpressive’. If you mean that he’s more projection than performance then that’s fair, but he does have the ability to redeem this deal a bit.
Perhaps Moore was talking about Patrick Corbin and Rafael Rodriguez and didn’t factor in Skaggs. Either way, I wouldn’t consider Corbin an unimpressive prospect, either.
Yeah, the author failed to make any case that the two lefty prospects (Corbin, Skaggs) are unimpressive. In fact, the peripherals on both look outstanding.
Haren is a very good pitcher, but he also costs $13M per year over the next two seasons. He’ll have to remain very good, and very healthy (as he has been in recent seasons, to be frank) to deliver on that cost. Arizona may have chosen to pass on that risk.
Saunders is a mediocre pitcher, but he comes at $6-8M less than Haren, and Skaggs/Corbin are arguably the two best pitching prospects the Angels obtained in the 2009 draft.
I think the misleading description of the prospects and the deliberate omission of Haren’s contract cost makes this bit of analysis more opportunistic and self-congratulatory than it could have been.
Is Saunder’s really going to come in at 6 to 8 million less? He’s making 6 million this year isn’t he? And will likely get a raise.
At least this balances out the Hudson-Jackson trade. If Kenny Williams would stop sending good young pitchers into the NL West for has-beens that would be great
Que?
Meaning AZ stole Hudson from ChiSox for Jackson, which balances out with them getting rooked by getting Saunders for Haren.
Further proof of the inferiority of the AL. He just can’t cut it in the NL West.
This article contrasts nicely with the following analysis clipped from Keven Baxter’s National Baseball column in the Los Angeles Times on September 11:
“The Haren deal was especially lopsided — in favor of the Arizona Diamondbacks, who acquired Saunders, a 29-year-old left-hander still two seasons from free agency, then had to fight the urge to burst out laughing when the Angels agreed to throw in reliever Rafael Rodriguez and minor league left-handers Tyler Skaggs and Patrick Corbin, two of the team’s top 12 prospects according to Baseball America.
It was a curious trade, one in which the Angels took on more than $33 million in salary obligations over four seasons. Yet, Reagins says he would make it again if had the chance.”
Sigh.
I don’t understand
Since the deal, the “unimpressive” Corbin has put up a 1.38 ERA in eight starts at High-A, striking out 10.4 per 9IP, and the 19-year old Skaggs has a 1.69 ERA in four starts, with an even better strikeout ratte, and K:BB ratio of 5:1.
But it says a lot about Moore’s analysis that he even gets the number of players ion the deal wrong. There were THREE players sent to AZ in addition to Saunders, not two. Given this sloppy fact-checking, difficult to take his analysis of the deal too seriously, especially since he thinks Saunders was the centerpiece of the trade for Arizona.
Agreed that these are embarrassing oversights for the author.
It’s clear he didn’t bother to look the prospects up. Saunders was just backfill for this deal — it was really about the prospects.
This trade won’t be truly assessable for another three or four years.
I’m sure all we have to do is give Joe Saunders some time.
That pedigree talent in in there somewhere….
I was against this deal from that get-go, but if Tyler Skaggs develops into a solid MLB pitcher, it won’t look quite as retarded on the part of Dipoto.
This deal really isn’t about Saunders as it is the prospects, unfortunately the author completely ignored that to slander the diamondbacks. Meanwhile, Daniel Hudson has been the best pitcher in the national league since the dbacks acquired him from the white sox.
Um, do any of you citing Corbin’s stats actually know what kind of stuff he has? He is basically another Joe Saunders, folks. That was also one of his comparisons. Look at Saunders MiLB stats, especially I think his 2005 season in AAA, where he pitched dominantly in the hitter friendly PCL. You’d think he was a stud lefty
Corbin is a future 4/5 pitcher. The only saving grace for this deal is Skaggs, who could(if all things go right) develop into a low end #2 pitcher, or a good #3. The RP they got is garbage, and RP are a dime a dozen anyway…
Most obviously, Corbin is three years younger than Saunders was in A+ ball. I think you mean 2006 Triple A for Saunders, but even there – as a **25-year old** he struck out a feeble 6.5 per nine IP. That’s not “dominantly”. The only time Saunders was even above 7.1, was in 2007. when he was optioned to Triple-A in his third major-league season. He never even approached the 9.8 K rate Corbin has shown this year, while still in his teens.
Wow. I like Skaggs, and Corbin could be a viable major league starter, but I don’t know if it’s necessary to defame the author this vigorously. Nice to know Fangraphs commenters haven’t lost their edginess.