An intriguing deal with RHP Chad Green
Two years and $8.5M doesn't begin to describe the weird contract the Jays have just handed out — nor does it capture how valuable the former Yankee could be if he returns from injury at his best...
Just as I was about to finally cave and try to wring some content out of the barren baseball landscape of late January by compiling into one post a bunch of small news items not particularly interesting to me — the fences are going to be different (¯\_(ツ)_/¯), some spring invites were announced (meh), Scott Rolen is going to the Hall of Fame (GBOAT!), etc. — the Blue Jays have gone and actually provided us with something worth talking about: a two-year, $8.5-million deal with an injured 31-year-old reliever!
Now, it may seem as though I’m saying that like it’s a bad thing, and I suppose that ultimately it could be. But this situation actually has potential to be a real win for the Jays — and one for Chad Green, who has managed to get at least a little bit of financial security despite having gone under the knife just months before his first crack at free agency in a pro career that began in 2013.
Green threw his final pitch for the Yankees back on May 19th of last year, exiting a game against the Orioles early due to right forearm tightness. Ultimately it was determined that Tommy John surgery was required.
This was a blow on multiple levels. Not just a massive hit to his free agent case, it meant no longer being part of the high-flying Yankees of early last season, and came about fairly surprisingly.
“I was like, 'maybe it's just some inflammation because the initial tests weren't too far off of how I normally feel,’” Green explained to reporters, including SI’s Max Goodman, when addressing the media prior to his surgery. “I was just pretty sore in one area. But then, I was kind of worried the next day when I got up and it didn't feel any better and almost worse than it has in the past six years or so.”
The surgery was performed by the Dr. Keith Meister (aka “the Keithmeister”) in early June, meaning that Green is not going to be pitching until midseason at the earliest.
According to all kinds of reports that surfaced on Tuesday, when he does return, it will be as a member of the Blue Jays. Michael Marino had it first. The Jays have since made it official, announcing that Matt Gage has been designated for assignment in order to clear a 40-man spot.
And that’s where things get kind of fascinating. Green has lowkey been one of the better relievers in baseball over the last several years. When he returns to the mound he’ll do so under the terms of one of the most creative contracts we’ve ever seen the Blue Jays hand out. And that eventual return is going to have some pretty significant implications on other members of an already — some might even say impressively — crowded Blue Jays’ bullpen.
So let’s talk about it…
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Green Monster
Back in July, with the trade deadline approaching, I wrote a piece about trying to fix the Jays' then-beleaguered bullpen, which included the following note on the difficulty of assessing relievers statistically:
Before we try to answer that let me say that evaluating relievers is not as easy as it is starters or position players, because the samples are small — especially only halfway through a season — and very context-dependent. WAR is a counting stat that strips out context that is crucial to the role of a reliever and tilts toward innings pitched. WPA (win probability added) is interesting, but also a counting stat and not predictive. ERA isn't great not only because of how the subjectivity of errors comes into play but because relievers often enter the game to clean up somebody else's mess. FIP, though it ignores a lot, gets closer to the essence of what we're looking for here, but it can get funky in small samples because of home runs. There's really no perfect, all-encompassing stat for this, but something like K-BB% is a quick and dirty number that, for my money, does a good job. You want your big bullpen arms to avoid walks and to rack up strikeouts, and this stat seems to do a pretty good job of identifying the best relievers in the game.
Though not a word you typically want to use when you’re talking about statistics, this feels right to me — particularly in a way that a conceptually similar measure like K/BB would not. We can see each pitcher’s K/BB in the chart above, and the number in that column that clearly jumps out is the 34.00 next to the name of Joe Mantiply of the Diamondbacks. Mantiply has literally walked only one batter this season, while striking out 34 in 33 innings. Clearly he’s having a great year. But that 26.8% strikeout rate is a whole lot closer to average than the rates being produced by the other guys on the list, which means that a lot of his outs are coming from balls in play — and balls in play are dangerous for relievers. Adam Cimber does a really good job of inducing poor contact, for example, but because he doesn’t strike guys out his ideal role is really more as a seventh inning guy. Balls in play miss gloves, find holes, dribble into no man’s land, etc. To induce poor contact you need good command, and while command is important, it’s the combination of command and swing-and-miss stuff that truly makes a pitcher elite.
First of all: Oof. Remembering how the Blue Jays’ season ultimately ended makes looking back on that last bit somewhat difficult.
However, to their credit, the Jays have very clearly made a concerted effort to address exactly the issue I was talking about. Anthony Bass had just a 20.6 K-BB% when he joined the Jays last summer — not quite elite, but better than any other reliever on the team at the time. Erik Swanson, acquired for Teoscar Hernández back in November, was in the top five in baseball by the metric in 2022 (29.5%). And now here we have Green, who ranked 11th by K-BB% in 2021, and going all the way back to 2017 ranks seventh.
Now, obviously Green’s addition comes with a major caveat in the form of the whole “elbow reconstruction surgery” thing, but if he gets back to being the guy that he was before the injury the Jays could really have something. Mid-90s fastball, curve at 85, very good extension, great fastball spin, ability to occasionally go beyond three outs (he logged 83 2/3 innings over 67 appearances in 2021). There’s a lot to like!
And the results speak for themselves. Exclude a bumpy rookie year back in 2016 and Green has a 2.96 ERA, a 3.01 FIP, 11.8 K/9, 2.2 BB/9, and 7.8 fWAR for his career in just 338 innings. That's an average of 1.5 WAR for every 65 innings — a total number of frames that Green has reached in four of the last five non-pandemic seasons. For context: Jordan Romano has yet to reach the 65 inning mark in a season, and last year set a career high with 1.6 WAR — a mark Green has matched or bettered four times in his career.
This, obviously, is not to say that anyone should expect Green to be Romano’s equal going forward. It’s to show just how dominant a pitcher he’s actually been in his career so far, even if he doesn’t quite get the headlines or have the wow factor of guys who are out there throwing 100+ mph.
And maybe he should!
All that said, many things could still derail this deal. Green’s successful recovery from surgery looms largest, but there are other red flags here. He has a lot of innings on his arm, plus, as we can see in the Statcast percentile rankings above, even at his best, batters do tend to hit him pretty hard when they manage to put the ball in play. His HR/9 has tended to be on the high side — though this is possibly a Yankee Stadium effect. And in 2022, he saw his average fastball velocity dip from 95.8 to 94.8, with his strikeout rate sliding below 30% for the first time since his rookie year, all the way to 25.8%.
That rate was still above average, and his 9.6 K/9 still looks pretty good, but the combination of slipping velocity and the tendency to get hit hard could pose a problem down the line. The injury may have been the cause of what we're seeing in those numbers, of course. Though I think it's also worth noting that Green tends to gain velo as the season progresses — meaning we should be cautious about reading too much into the early radar numbers we'll start hearing on him this summer, and probably about last year's numbers too.
So, there’s risk that Green won’t be the same guy that he was before, but I think it’s mitigated on one hand by the fact that even the early-2022 version of him remained beyond serviceable, and on the other hand by the structure of the deal itself…
The wacky contract
The deal between the Jays and Green is not the club’s first foray into the injured reliever market. Back in early 2021, the Jays gave a $5.5 million deal, with $4.5 million in potential performance bonuses, to former Padres closer Kirby Yates. And they did this knowing not only that Yates had previously come to an agreement with Atlanta, only to have that team walk away due to concerns in his medical, but after having issues with Yates’ medical themselves. According to a report from the Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal at the time, the Jays and Yates had originally agreed one a one-year, $8.5 million deal, only for the club to get cold feet and restructure.
Less than two months after coming to terms, and before he’d ever thrown a pitch for the team, it was announced that Yates would need Tommy John surgery — the second of his career — and miss the entire season.
I bring this up not only because it’s an example of why these sorts of deals should never be assumed to be slam dunks — though I don’t think anybody today feels the kind of reticence over Green as they did over Yates at the time — but also because it seems that the Blue Jays have learned a lesson about how best to execute deals like this. Rather than leaving themselves exposed the way that the did with Yates, they’ve guaranteed the money over two years, and included layers of options to help share risk between both sides.
For all of our sakes, I’ll just let Shi Davidi of Sportsnet explain the basics of the complicated structure:
Under the incredibly creative contract, Green is guaranteed $2.25 million this year, after which the contract can extend in the following ways:
• First, the Blue Jays get a club option covering the 2024-26 seasons for $27 million over three years, with annual performance bonuses of up to $1 million based on games pitched;
• If the Blue Jays decline that option, Green gets a player option for the 2024 season worth $6.25 million with up to $2 million in bonuses based on games pitched;
• If Green declines that, the Blue Jays get a final $21-million, two-year club option covering 2024-25 with annual performance bonuses of up to $1 million based on games pitched.
Alright, so let’s consider how this might play out, shall we? Basically, what we’re looking at is this:
• Green is a $2.5 million pitcher this year, which is an enormous win for the Jays if he comes back pitching the way that he always has — particularly if he is able to do so on the best-case-scenario end of his recovery timeline. The one-year anniversary of his surgery will be June 4th. There will be a lot of baseball still left to play at that point.
• If Green isn’t effective or healthy it will obviously be a poor outcome for the Jays, but at less than half of the one-year guarantee that went up in smoke when Yates required surgery — and nowhere near the expectations that came with that deal. There is an extra potential penalty in the fact that the club will then be on the hook for another year of Green at $6.25 million, though that’s hardly an outrageous number to spend on a one-year deal for a bounce-back candidate with a track record as strong as his — even if, in this hypothetical, he’s coming off a rough 2023.
• If Green pitches well in 2023, there’s a chance the Jays might actually pick up that three-year, $27 million option. I don’t think that’s particularly likely, given the way we’ve seen them operate, but this really just gives them the right of first refusal on what could end up being a below market rate deal. For example, Taylor Rogers got three years and $33 million from the Giants back in December coming off a season with some pretty similar rate stats to a typical Green campaign — and a 4.75 ERA!
• If the Jays decline their first option, Green and his camp have a decision to make. If he pitched poorly enough that $6.5 million (plus incentives) is a good deal for them, it’s a simple one. If he pitched reasonably well, he’ll decline the option and send the ball back into the Jays’ court. The club can then cut bait, if they so choose, and be glad to have received one year of his services for just $2.25 million — also good news for Green, who will then hit the open market in a reasonably strong position. Otherwise, they can exercise their option and keep Green. He gets a good payday out of it, and the Jays end up with a much better deal than the Rogers one (or Kenley Jansen going to Boston for two-years and $32 million), having already gotten a strong finish to 2023 out of him for hardly any money at all.
It’s maybe not foolproof or anything, but this deal has upside for Green, upside for the Jays, an element of flexibility preserved, and shared risk for both sides that really shouldn’t hurt either very much. The Jays could end up paying $8.5 million for very little, though that’s really not a lot for two cracks at trying to get something out of one of the better relievers in the game. And Green could end up leaving some money on the table by allowing the Jays such control over his future free agency, but in return gets $8.5 million in security right now, which could grow to over $30 million in a “worst case scenario” for him.
Seems pretty good to me.
Quickly…
• As noted above, in order to add Green to the 40-man, the Jays have designated Matt Gage for assignment. That’s an interesting one in a couple of ways. For one thing, it takes the number of lefty relievers on the 40-man — assuming Yusei Kikuchi is going to end up starting the year in the rotation — down to just one: Tim Mayza. Erik Swanson’s splitter is an incredible weapon against lefties, and he was used more against them than right-handers by the Mariners in 2022, so that mitigates the loss. But it’s a bit weird!
• Maybe there’s another move on the horizon for Gage — overseas wouldn’t shock me, though I base that on absolutely nothing — or the Jays simply think they can sneak him through waivers. His strikeout numbers were down in 2021, and his wasn't especially impressive in his brief time with the big club last year, but I thought he held his own fairly well, and his numbers at Buffalo — 2.34 ERA with 46 Ks in 41 1/3 innings —were decent, if a bit walk-heavy (9.5%).
• There are a few non-roster invitees who could theoretically provide some depth in this area for the Jays going forward. Among them is Brandon Eisert, a guy who keeps racking up strikeouts at every level despite not getting raves about his stuff. Lefties slashed just .222/.282/.287 against him for Buffalo last year, so maybe there’s something there? Jimmy Burnette, who struck out 56 over 37 1/3 innings for New Hampshire after striking out 38 in 19 innings for Vancouver last year is another interesting name on the NRI list, though walks have really been an issue there. Paul Fry, a former big leaguer, mostly with Baltimore, will be in camp too. (Also some lefty named Tiedemann.)
• The other interesting element of the decision to DFA Gage is the fact that we’re not far away from pitchers and catchers reporting, which will allow teams once again to use the 60-day IL. I saw it theorized online that the Jays might hold off making Green’s acquisition official until both he and Hyun Jin Ryu are eligible to be placed on the 60-day. Moving Ryu to the 60-day would have freed up a spot for Green, who could have then been moved to the 60-day himself. Guess not! What that does mean is that they’ll have a couple of extra 40-man spots to play with in a couple of weeks.
• Not to be a broken record on this numbers game stuff, but it continues to be somewhat interesting to me that the Jays keep pressing forward with a bullpen that looks just a little bit on the rigid side. That could change quickly, of course, but right now Jordan Romano, Erik Swanson, Yimi Garcia, Anthony Bass, Tim Mayza, and Adam Cimber will comprise the core of the 'pen, with the final two spots currently looking like they'll go to out-of-options guys Trevor Richards and Mitch White (assuming again that Kikuchi ends up the fifth starter). Right now none of Green, Ryu, Zach Pop, Nate Pearson, Yosver Zulueta, Hayden Juenger, Hagen Danner, or (maybe eventually) Tiedemann have an obvious path into the mix without an injury to someone better or Richards/White being moved. Injuries and small moves are, of course, the kinds of things that do happen over the course of a season, and it’s not like those guys are pounding on the door just yet, but it will be interesting to see how it ultimately shakes out. Depth! A good problem to have.
• Sticking with the bullpen, the Jays announced on Tuesday that the club has replaced former bullpen coach and director of pitching strategy, Matt Buschmann, who stepped down to pursue other opportunities in mid-January, with two coaches. Jeff Ware, who was the pitching coach for Buffalo for the past two seasons (and was the 35th overall pick by the Jays in 1991), has been promoted to Assistant Pitching Coach - Bullpen, while David Howell, who started his coaching career at Driveline and was the team's Major League Pitching Strategist last year, will now serve as the club's Assistant Pitching Coach - Strategy. The team added that the remainder of the coaching staff will remain the same.
• I don’t have any insight into Buschmann’s departure — or, really, his role while he was here — but an interesting piece to revisit, considering Gage has just been DFA’d, is Arden Zwelling’s one for Sportsnet from back in June, when Gage was making his big league debut, and reminiscing about his interactions with Buschmann through the minor leagues.
• Sticking with the minors, TSN’s Scott Mitchell always does a great job of putting together his Jays top 50 prospects list — be sure to check out the main list, as well as his list of breakout candidates. Meanwhile, SI’s Mitch Bannon has a good one with Tucker Toman, the Jays’ 77th overall pick in last summer’s draft — but a prospect with first round talent, and a commitment to LSU he leveraged into finding the best situation for himself that he could. That was the Blue Jays, in part because of what he saw at the club’s Player Development Complex in Dunedin, and partly because of what he heard.
• THE RETURN OF THE GRIFF BAG??!?!?
• Lastly, and also speaking of the old days, I know I kinda downplayed it earlier, but it’s honestly cool as hell that Scott Rolen is going to the Hall of Fame. He only played 203 times for the Blue Jays, but it was right in the era when I was attending a crazy number of games in person, and even the version of him we got — which obviously had a lot of miles on it — was incredibly special to watch. Particularly great was his second year here, in which he slashed .320/.370/.476 over 88 games before being traded to the Reds while playing otherworldly defence at third base as a 34-year-old. The turf was wearing on him. The team was bad and about to get worse. It was a situation that we knew couldn't last. But it was great while it did. And then, as Shi Davidi pointed out in his excellent piece last week for Sportsnet, he left us with a pair of incredible parting gifts: José Bautista, who the Jays acquired in August 2008 to fill in at third base while Rolen was out injured, and Edwin Encarnación, who ended up being the prize of the deal with Cincinnati that gave Rolen his chance to play closer to home. GBOAT indeed!
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Yay for Brandon Eisert. It was the 18th of March 2022 and Happy Toronto Blue Jays fans were delighted to be finally getting some baseball. We were playing Baltimore and there was no tv coverage, but the mlb app did let you listen to Baltimore radio coverage. So it is the bottom of the last inning they are going to play -- I forget if that was the 9th, and here comes Brandon Eisert whom I have never heard of, and he *strikes out the side*. Happy ending for a Happy Day. And that's what baseball is for, isn't it!
Dr. Keith Meister (aka “the Keithmeister”). Thanks man, made me laugh out loud!