Quote (Lakeshow906 @ Nov 16 2020 05:38pm)
The Braves have announced a 1-year, $11 million deal with LHP Drew Smyly
11m for Smyly?
Seems like a bit much with how teams have already been pitching pennies with a likely chunk of revenue being lost because of Covid next season.
When free agency opened, the widespread expectation was that the Braves would add to their rotation after watching a carousel of inexperienced prospects and veteran stopgaps try to hold down the fort following injuries to Mike Soroka and Cole Hamels in 2020.
Those who have followed the club closely over the past few seasons might have expected to see general manager Alex Anthopoulos strike early, as well; last year Anthopoulos inked each of Travis d’Arnaud, Chris Martin and Will Smith before Thanksgiving. Cole Hamels was signed in the first week of December. A year prior, Anthopoulos signed Josh Donaldson on Nov. 26.
Anthopoulos has exhibited patience -- namely waiting out Dallas Keuchel in 2019 -- but he’s also shown a penchant for proactively completing some of the offseason’s heavy lifting early in the winter.
As such, few would’ve been surprised to hear that the Braves would make a notable rotation signing in mid-November. Few would’ve been surprised if said splash came with an $11MM price tag. But there was certainly some surprise yesterday when the Braves announced that left-hander Drew Smyly was the recipient of said $11MM contract. A smattering of Twitter reactions to our post on Smyly signing:
“11 mil! HOW?”
“Fully guaranteed $11mm? Wow”
“11 million for him???? Omg”
“What in the moneyball is this?”
And from our comments section…
“So Braves won’t pay O’Day $3M, but will give Smyly $11M?”
“I thought it said $1 mil at first, had to do a double take. Seems like quite a bit for a guy that’s oft injured in recent years”
“This is a bigger mystery than why the Braves took all of Melancon’s contract in that trade.”
The majority of replies were in this general vein, and as one might expect, the replies to the Braves’ announcement of the signing on Twitter were even more aggressive. Admittedly, even as one of the MLBTR staffers who was pretty bullish on Smyly, the size of the contract was a surprise to me. Does that make it a bad signing, however? Of course not. Let’s dig into just what the Braves may have seen and why they may have jumped at this moment.
First and foremost, while many Braves fans were hoping their club would jump in on the bidding for Trevor Bauer -- as is the case with fans of most teams -- it’s arguable that they don’t “need” a front-end starter. That’s a dubious claim, of course, as Bauer makes any pitching staff better, but the Braves are better positioned than many clubs throughout the league in terms of the pitching depth they already have atop the rotation.
With Soroka, NL Cy Young finalist Max Fried and Ian Anderson -- who arguably should’ve been an NL Rookie of the Year finalist -- all set to return, the Braves already possess a strong top three. Bauer would have made them better, but with needs in the bullpen and perhaps at third base and/or in the outfield, it’s defensible not to dump the presumable bulk of their offseason resources into signing another high-end starting pitcher.
The main shock appears not to be on the acquisition of Smyly himself -- though there’s some of that in fan reaction also -- but the price point. Eleven million dollars in guarantees is more than double what we put down in our Top 50 predictions at MLBTR, although Connor Byrne liked Smyly in the two-year, $16MM range early in talks and I was in the $10-12MM range over two years. While the eventual price point might’ve been a surprise, it wasn’t necessarily a surprise that Smyly was a more coveted starter than many casual fans would first expect.
First and foremost, on a rudimentary level, Smyly’s 2020 results were quite good. He missed time due to an injured finger in his pitching hand, but when Smyly was healthy he worked to a 3.42 ERA with a ridiculous 42-to-9 K/BB ratio in 26 ⅓ innings.
Forty-two strikeouts in 26 ⅓ innings is impressive without digging further, but let’s add some context. There were 323 pitchers who tossed at least 20 innings in 2020. Only 11 of them struck out a greater percentage of the hitters they faced than Smyly’s 37.8 percent. Only 12 starting pitchers (again, min. 20 IP) notched a swinging-strike rate greater than Smyly’s 14.6 percent. No pitcher in baseball saw hitters make less contact on swings at pitches outside the strike zone than Smyly; when opponents offered at pitches out of the zone, they put the bat on the ball at just an abysmal 42.9 percent clip. Shane Bieber (44 percent) and Jack Flaherty (43.5 percent) were the only two other pitchers under 45 percent in that regard. In fact, over the past 10 years, there are only two starting pitchers who have had a season with a better O-Contact%: Shohei Ohtani in 2018 and Noah Syndergaard in 2017.
So what made Smyly so good in 2020? The left-hander posted a career-best 93.8 mph average velocity on his fastball and, perhaps even more importantly, threw his curveball more than ever (36.3 percent). The hook was a dominant pitch for Smyly. He threw it 174 times and generated 39 swinging strikes (22.4 percent). It was particularly dominant late in counts; Smyly faced 111 batters this past season and finished 50 of those plate appearances with a curveball. A whopping 27 of those (54 percent) resulted in strikeouts. The remaining 23 resulted in a .184/.200/.357 batting line.
Smyly doesn’t have gaudy spin rates on his four-seamer or on his curveball, and a good bit of the contact he gave up in 2020 was loud in nature. But he took his ability to miss bats to heights previously unseen, and that’s saying something for a pitcher who prior to Tommy John surgery in 2017 was quietly a high-quality, albeit oft-injured starter.
From 2012-16, Smyly worked a combined 570 ⅓ innings of 3.74 ERA ball with fielding-independent marks to match (3.82 FIP, 3.89 xFIP, 3.64 SIERA). Along the way he averaged 8.75 K/9, including a 10.4 K/9 peak in 2015 with the Rays. Fans of the World Baseball Classic may remember Smyly’s dominant showing in 2017 as well.
Tommy John surgery not long after he whiffed eight hitters across 4 ⅔ shutout innings versus a tough Team Venezuela lineup wiped out all of Smyly’s 2017-18 seasons. He returned in 2019 and struggled through a disastrous 13-game run with the Rangers before rebounding in Philadelphia to an extent.
Adding his Philadelphia rebound to his Giants performance, Smyly has a 4.15 ERA, 3.97 FIP, 11.1 K/9, 3.0 BB/9 and 39.8 percent ground-ball rate over his past 89 MLB frames. Given his huge uptick in velocity and missed bats in 2020, the Braves probably feel that his combined Phillies/Giants output is more of a floor than a ceiling for the time he spends on the mound.The upside is something closer to last year’s Gerrit Cole-esque strikeout numbers, although some regression surely is to be expected.
There’s clear injury risk with Smyly, of course, but the talent is obvious. The dissatisfaction with Smyly is something of an interesting dynamic, frankly. Many fans were upset that the Braves “overpaid” an aging Cole Hamels based on his track record. With Smyly, many of those same fans point to the lack of recent track record. The Braves, like every other club, are paying Smyly for what they believe he can do in 2021, though -- not what he’s done in the past. That was true of Hamels as well; it just didn’t work out because of an unforeseen shoulder injury.
Timing seems to be another point of frustration. Some will wonder why the Braves opted to spend this $11MM now, and the simple answer is likely that Smyly had other early interest. With so many clubs taking an increasingly analytical bend to roster construction, Smyly was a popular target. And if the Braves had him atop their list of one-year rotation targets and Smyly himself sought an early deal, this is a case of market factors driving a team to get its guy rather than wait for the next-best option.
Perhaps “better deals” will eventually arise, but every team in the market for pitching has gauged the asking price and market for every pitching option out there by this point. Odds are Smyly would’ve signed elsewhere with another club at a slightly lesser price in this same time frame had the Braves passed. Braves fans might find that preferable, but a run at Bauer or another free agent who might command a sizable multi-year deal never seemed like for Anthopoulos, given his clear affinity for short-term deals (Donaldson, Marcell Ozuna, Dallas Keuchel, Hamels).
Smyly’s deal won’t go down as any type of bargain, but the Braves paid what they needed to when they needed to in order to sign a pitcher whose swinging-strike profile is arguably the best on this year’s open market. It’ll look like Hamels all over again if his durability woes continue, but the upside with Smyly is greater than most would expect, and this front office group appears as though it won’t let past missteps dictate present-day decisions.
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