Written by Jeff Shand-Lubbers at Sporting Charts
As was pointed out the other day on Fangraphs, on its surface it just doesn’t seem right for a pitcher with an ERA last year of 4.96 to ink a 5 year contract for $90 million. Jeff Samardzija is far from an elite pitcher – in 8 seasons he has made one All Star team and hasn’t garnered a single vote for a Cy Young award. He has a single season with a WAR above 2.0, which came in 2014 when he posted a WAR of 3.7 between the Cubs and the Athletics.
At the same time, as with all free agents the Giants aren’t paying for what Samardzija has done in the past – they’re paying for what they think he can do in the future. Between pitching coach Dave Righetti and the move to a pitcher-friendly park in the National League, it’s certainly possible, and perhaps likely, that Samardzija can perform better in at least the first couple years of his new contract than he did in 2015.
That being said, pitchers with Samardzija’s track record typically aren’t given that type of money. The list below shows the 23 free agent pitchers (mostly starters) who between the 2006 and 2015 offseasons signed contracts of at least $50 million. This list excludes signings of foreign players (such as Daisuke Matsuzaka, Masahiro Tanaka, and Yu Darvish) and also excludes players who signed extensions with their existing teams (such as Justin Verlander and Clayton Kershaw, among others). This takes into account the value of the contract at the time of signing, thus doesn’t take into account inflation, and it also doesn’t take into account components of the contract that could have impacted their actual value (such as the amount of deferred money in Max Scherzer’s contract that lowered its actual value).
With all those caveats aside, here are the 23 players, sorted in ascending order by pitchers with the smallest career Wins Above Replacement at the time their contracts were signed:
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