The Blue Jays have reportedly acquired Clayton Richard, who was designated for assignment by the Padres on December 20th. Two days ago, the team officially signed Matt Shoemaker, a free agent non-tendered by the Angels in the fall.
You'll see a lot of Blue Jays fans decry these moves on Twitter and in comments sections - if you pay attention to those spaces - and it's not hard to see why. Richard is 35 years old, coming off knee surgery, a 5.33 ERA, and just 0.7 fWAR over 27 starts last season with about half of his innings coming in Petco Park. Shoemaker has only managed to make 21 starts due to nagging throwing arm injuries over the last two years and hasn't been great when he has pitched - his 4.64 ERA since 2017 is decidedly below average and Angel Stadium is about as favourable to pitchers as Petco.
These arms aren't saving your Blue Jays. The team will very likely be bad in 2019.
The organization was very open with their desire to acquire starting pitching but, like it or not, the reasons for that were probably:
To find 2019 innings in order to protect the younger arms;
To find potential pitching assets for 2020 and beyond; and
To put a more palatable 2019 product on the field.
And #3 was certainly the least important reason on that list, which means that the Blue Jays were always going to play the value game with their starting pitching acquisitions. Given the Blue Jays' team level projection (78 wins or so), a few extra wins in 2019 are not going to be very valuable to Toronto, so investing a lot in that area would not be wise.
The good news is that Clayton Richard and Matt Shoemaker, as unsexy as they may be, are definitely value-based acquisitions. Both of these arms are arguably underrated going into 2019 and we can see that reflected in their costs.
Richard seemed to figure some things out in 2017, at 33 years old, after several swing-man seasons. He upped his groundball rate to 59.2%, the highest of his full seasons as a starter, and for the first time in his career paired a K rate over 17.0% with a BB rate under 9.0%. His 10.7% K-BB was still bad, but he no longer ranked in the absolute gutter of that statistic. His game is predominantly contact control anyway, through the groundball, and with that in mind his career-best 3.76 xFIP and his solid 4.23 FIP reasonably seemed to be at least within the same ballpark as his true talent. The Padres rewarded him with a bit of guaranteed money on a two year deal.
Of course, Richard's 2017 resurgence did not carry forward to 2018. His strikeout, walk, and groundball indicators all tipped back towards his career means and he gave up a lot of runs. Being said, Richard's career means aren't correctly described as awful. It's never been pretty but he has shown the ability - at least when given the opportunity - to stay healthy and eat up innings while producing at a talent below league-average but certainly above replacement level. Importantly, the velocity and groundball rate were largely still there in 2018.
The price of one win on the free agent market is likely in the $9M+ range now. Richard has averaged 1.34 fWAR per 200 IP in his career. Steamer expects 1.9 fWAR in 2019, if we assume 200 IP. That projection is generous, but the Blue Jays are only giving up $1.5M and Connor Panas, who appears to be a non-prospect. The obvious value makes the move a no-brainer for this team.
Shoemaker is a very different story. Matt's career 3.93 ERA, FIP, and xFIP are both quite good and quite aesthetically pleasing. His 7.5 career fWAR nearly tops Richard's 8.3 career total, in only 44% of the innings. That equates to about 2.75 fWAR per 200 IP, or, a comfortably above average MLB SP. Yes, staying healthy is important and perhaps to some extent an inherent trait of some pitchers. Shoemaker has never actually been able to log serious innings and the last two seasons were particularly bleak.
However, as the production would prove, underneath the health questions is palpable upside. Shoemaker has a legitimate MLB out pitch. His split-change (I'll call it a splitter) was an elite weapon in both 2014 and 2016, when Shoemaker had it working. In 2016, the value his splitter produced was bested only by Masahiro Tanaka's splitter. The gap between Shoemaker and the rest of the field was also quite large.
Take that elite splitter, add in a decent supporting arsenal and good control, and you have the ingredients for Shoemaker's 2016, when his 3.5 fWAR was the 23rd best mark by MLB starters despite only 160.0 innings pitched. Indulge some bullshit extrapolation, but if you apply that pitching quality to a 200 IP year, Shoemaker would have produced 4.375 fWAR and ranked 15th in baseball.
Toronto will only be paying Shoemaker $3.5M in 2019 and he'll be controllable through arbitration in 2020, since he can't creep past 6.000 years of service time in 2019. With two years of control and obvious upside, Shoemaker jumps off the page to me as an actual asset. Roll in the health issues dampening his value and he's not that different from a guy like Aaron Sanchez. In fact, Shoemaker projects to be better than Sanchez in 2019, ignoring playing time. It would have been an egregious waste for Toronto to non-tender Aaron, obviously.
I think Shoemaker flew under the radar this offseason - it never made sense for the Angels to non-tender him and their mistake is Toronto's gain. Think of Shoemaker as a nice little buy-low trade, and not the scrap-heap pickup you might assume he is.
In Shoemaker, Toronto has added SP talent with upside that is controllable past 2019. In Richard, they've acquired a veteran innings-eater who can protect the young arms in 2019 and make the team a bit more palatable to fans, and he might not be as bad as people think.
With both of these arms, Toronto has given up almost nothing while successfully improving their depth and meeting the goals underlying their desire to add starting pitching this offseason.
You should get used to moves like this. Under Atkins and Co., Toronto's march back to the playoffs will be the result of a long series of sensible moves that are likely to import value to the organization. If you're hoping for some bold, risky, twitter-shaking blockbusters - in other words, Anthopoulous' legacy with this franchise - you might want to start following a different team.
Thanks for reading Blue Jays Add Underrated Pitching Depth in Shoemaker, Richard by Nick Hill. If you have any questions or comments relating to this article, we encourage you to leave them below. For all general inquiries, we can be reached at the following:
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