Since Pavano Signed…
Yesterday we looked at Mike Hampton and his many injuries, and so it only made sense to today take a look at another member of the FIP—Fraternity for the Injury Prone—Carl Pavano. Prior to the 2005 season Yankees GM Brian Cashman inked Pavano to a four-year deal worth around 39.95 million dollars. The signing came on the heels of two very solid seasons from the righty once traded for Pedro Martinez. Aside from W-L and ERA, Pavano had decreased his BB/9, WHIP, HR/9, BAA, BABIP, and FIP each year from 2001-2004, leading to a rise in his K/BB and LOB%.
Unfortunately, his K/9 also took hits in each of these years. All told, the Yankees looked like they might have been getting a good #4 starter albeit at a steep price. Now, at the end of that contract, the deal looks like one of the worst ever handed out, not just because Pavano’s pinstripes performance lacked quality for the most part, but because those performances were so few and far between.
Since signing with the Yankees, Pavano has made 19 starts, pitched in 111.1 innings, with an FIP upwards of 4.70. He missed the 2006 season completely, made just two of those nineteen starts in 2007, and Cashman seems to believe that he won’t recover from his latest surgery in time to pitch this year, meaning the Yankees would have paid 40 million dollars for 17 starts of below average pitching in 2005, and two relatively meaningless starts in 2007.
Pavano’s contract bothered the players, as well, never the more evident than in the book Living On the Black in which Mike Mussina scoffed at a contract offer from the Yankees that there was no way he would accept less money than Carl Pavano.
He also took criticism for withholding injury information from the Yankees, after breaking his ribs in a car crash. He didn’t tell the team until he was scheduled to come off the disabled list for a different injury. I cannot imagine how that conversation went down.
Cashman: Well, Carl, we’re activating you and will schedule you in the rotation.
Pavano: Oh wait, I forgot to tell you…
Cashman: (sighs) What now?
Pavano: I actually have broken ribs.
Cashman: How long have you forgotten to tell us?
Pavano: A few weeks.
Cashman: Were you planning on telling us?
Pavano: Well… not really… but now that they hurt alot…
What the future holds for this once promising prospect is yet to be seen, but just like Mike Hampton will likely forever be remembered for his injuries, Carl Pavano will likely go down in baseball lore as one of the worst retrospective contract signings in the history of the game. Since Pavano signed, he has made 19 starts… in that same span, Roy Halladay has 23 complete games.
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At least Pavano had the decency to get out of the way, instead of actually hurting the team by performing horribly on the field. Hampton’s deal is far, far, far worse. In another universe bad. More years, more money per year, and just as much missed time, but also two years of horrifically awful performance. Zito’s deal is already worse, and will likely, by the end of it, be the worst deal in sports…ever, both in retrospect and given that it was amazingly stupid at the time of the signing. The only way Pavano hurt the Yankees is that he didn’t pitch in 2004. Given their endless coffers, they’ve planned around him since then. It’s one of the least-productive contracts, but not REALLY one of the worst.
I agree that it was smart for him to get out of the way but I’d still rank this right up there given that 40 million dollars were paid to a guy who barely pitched and wasn’t terribly effective when he did pitch.
The Pavano deal, at the time, I considered a bit suspect. He seemed like a good #3-#5 pitcher but there definitely were red flags, mainly his decreasing K/9 and injury prone reputation.
Both Hampton’s and Zito’s contracts were terrible in the sense that lots of money was/is paid to pitchers who are hurting their teams for the most part. With Pavano, it’s lots of money paid for nothing. To me, least-productive qualifies as worst, regardless of semantics. If I’m paying you to do a job, I want the job done; not completing the job by either not performing or performing terribly isn’t as relevant to me as the fact that the job is not being completed.
But if the job is being completed by others, better, then that is better for the team than doing what Zito is doing.
Also, Pavano made far, far less than Hampton or Zito. Those contracts are in another galaxy of awful.
Exactly. We’re essentially on the same page. The Zito and Hampton are worse because it’s more money for production that hinders the team… Pavano’s contract was just a waste.
What’s strange is that he actually took less money to come to the Yankees. Detroit offered him $50 million over the same 4 years (if there’s a source, it’s an ESPN magazine from that off-season)
Dan, yeah Pavano made it clear to his agent that he wanted to be a Yankee.
i’ve done this math before but can’t remember the exact figures…
but have a little fun and figure out how much the yankees paid pavano per inning pitched and per out.
the numbers are staggering.
Hmmm, yeah. Which is worse: scrambling to find a starting pitcher because your regular starter is unavailable, or scrambling to find a reliever because your regular starter just gave up a bunch of runs in the early innings? Seems like in the case of the perpetually-injured player you’re starting each game no worse than 0-0, whereas with awful starters like Zito you’re quickly in a hole. The Yankees can just proceed like Pavano (and that $40M) never existed, whereas the Giants have to try to win games despite Zito’s best efforts to make them fail. And of course Zito’s money is a much bigger chunk of the Giants payroll (which doesn’t feature Yankeesesque infinite elasticity).
$2.9 million per run above replacement level pitcher according to Baseball Prospectus, or about 15-20 times more than the market value of a marginal run.
“The Pavano deal, at the time, I considered a bit suspect. He seemed like a good #3-#5 pitcher but there definitely were red flags, mainly his decreasing K/9 and injury prone reputation.”
I’m a Yankee fan who liked the deal at the time. He was coming off of 2 200+ inning seasons and a great post season, the Yankees have tried almost everything this decade to improve their rotation but most seem to backfire. If Pavano turned out to give merely 180-200 innings a year with league average pitching, the contract would have been more than fine given the current set by recent free agents.
As for every Yankee move that has backfried, I liked most of them at the time… In no order: Weaver, Contreras Randy, Brown, Vazquez, and Pavano. The only ones that were bad not only after the fact but also at the time were Jaret Wright and Kei Igawa in my opinion, the rest were at worst justifiable as an improvement in the rotation short term based on recent results.
Simmy, what I meant was that Pavano looked like he could be capable of being a good #3-#5 pitcher but that his injury prone-ness, and decreasing K/9 in the NL, before even moving to the AL were red flags that should have suggested maybe he’s not the guy the Yankees thought they would be getting.
I actually thought Vazquez deserved more time in pinstripes. Jaret Wright didn’t make sense, no, and Weaver’s a case where perhaps the mental makeup and scouting department could have helped a bit more because his numbers were pretty good coming in.
Ha ha ha – Pavano is enjoying his $$ while we all are sweating – he does not care. Got a multi million farmhouse in Florida with a bunch of cutie babes, watches Tampa bay games with wine and cheese. News is, dude got his own plane too.