This week, the Toronto Blue Jays signed a pair of 34-year-old pitchers in Bud Norris and Clay Buchholz. Both veterans received $3M deals, with Norris' being of the minor league variety, although he will likely make the team.
These signings come about two weeks after Marcus Stroman notoriously lamented to a self-created media scrum that the team was lacking old guys:
"There is really no veteran presence anymore... It's me and [Kevin Pillar], John Axford, a few other guys, Justin Smoak. I can't speak any more highly that the game needs to get to a point where we're starting to put these veteran players back in the clubhouse."
Well Marcus, enjoy these veteran presents.
By the book, these signings are no-brainers; the cost is paltry and both players were productive recently.
Buchholz has been inconsistent his entire career, oscillating between productive seasons and injury or performance issues. In 2017, he missed nearly the whole year with a torn flexor-pronator muscle in his throwing arm, but in 2018 he bounced back with 1.9 fWAR, a 2.01 ERA, and a 3.47 FIP in 16 MLB starts. He threw 132 innings across all levels.
Aside from Stroman, none of the Blue Jays' SP contingent projects particularly well for 2019. Depending on which projection system you subscribe to Buchholz may be the team's 2nd or 3rd best SP for the upcoming season, which is rather telling.
The Jays' rotation could be the most fragile in baseball. Stroman and Sanchez have recently battled blister demons, with Sanchez' demon being particularly persistent; Shoemaker has been dogged by forearm injuries; Clayton Richard is recovering from knee surgery at 35; Ryan Borucki's K and BB rates from 2018 make me consider him fragile from a performance perspective.
Buchholz is, at the very least, one more tea cup for that SP picnic basket.
Adding veteran insulation is important because most of the Jays' SP depth is of the rookie variety. One more veteran arm in the mix makes it that much less likely that a young guy will be asked, through necessity, to carry a bigger load than he is capable of.
Frankly, this team could still probably use one more old SP.
If you're worried about Borucki, Reid-Foley, Merryweather, Thornton, etc. being blocked, don't be. In 2018 Toronto received starts from 14 different pitchers and multiple starts from 10 different arms. The young guys will get their innings this year.
One thing to keep an eye on with Buchholz is the velocity. He lost two ticks in 2017 with the arm injury and, despite the strong season, he never did get it back. If it dips any more, he might not have enough juice to survive.
Bud Norris has collected 47 saves in the last two years with a K/9 of 10.83 (good for 29th out of all qualified pitchers in baseball). His fWAR of 0.6 and bWAR of 0.4 are both much lower than most of the other pitchers on that K/9 leaderboard because Bud is homer prone. His HR/FB rate of 17.2% is the fifth worst in that timeframe.
Norris has been plagued by dingers his whole career. For MLB pitchers with at least 1000 IP since Norris broke into the league in 2009, he has the 21st worst HR/FB%. Even that is misleading to Norris' benefit; lots of the players with a high HR/FB% are groundball pitchers who can be quite good even with a high HR/FB% because they don't give up as many flyballs. If we look at HR% (FB% * HR/FB%) Norris was the 13th worst.
The home run issues might make the FanGraphs crowd overrate Norris a little bit, because the website displays xFIP which normalizes HR/FB% (it assumed deviations in HR/FB% are a fluke, which can be useful for looking at smaller sample sizes but less useful when looking at a long career).
A chasm between his career ERA and FIP is also evident though, which has lead to a pretty big gap in career fWAR and bWAR (11.5 vs. 5.0). It's not clear to me if this is random variation or if Bud has a tendency to get hit hard - even aside from giving up the long ball.
Regardless of where exactly his run prevention skill lies on the spectrum between his 3.59 ERA in 2018 and 4.21 mark in 2018, Norris will, barring injury, certainly make the team and be in the setup mix behind Ken Giles.
While Toronto keeps an eye on his numbers, hoping they can flip him at the deadline like they did with Seung-Hwan Oh in 2018, Norris might be keeping an eye on Marcus Stroman, ensuring that he follows all of baseballs unwritten rules.
Last year Norris was the villain in Mike Matheny's failing St. Louis clubhouse. The well-documented glimpses into the relationship between Matheny, Norris, and rookie Jordan Hicks were rather off-putting. Essentially, Matheny allowed and perhaps encouraged a toxic bullying mindset by Norris towards Hicks.
... Norris has been mercilessly riding 21-year old rookie Jordan Hicks since spring training, reminding him to be at meetings on time and publicly calling him out when he is lagging in any of the details a visitor might not notice, but other players do... Perhaps Hicks will one day appreciate the treatment? ”Probably not,” Cardinals manager Mike Matheny admitted with a chuckle. “But Bud’s going to continue to do what he thinks is right as a veteran, so you respect that.”.... Matheny said he has had conversations with Hicks to remind him that Norris’ badgering is a way to show he is invested in his success... Asked if he thinks it will one day pay dividends in his career, [Hicks] said, “I have no idea. No comment.”
Bad press is nothing new for Bud Norris, who seems to be a real dick. In 2015, the year of The Bat Flip, he made these distasteful and arguably xenophobic remarks, opining that foreign players should assimilate and conform to baseball's boring standards:
I think it's a culture shock. This is America's game. This is America's pastime, and over the last 10-15 years we've seen a very big world influence in this game, which we as a union and as players appreciate. We're opening this game to everyone that can play. However, if you're going to come into our country and make our American dollars, you need to respect a game that has been here for over a hundred years, and I think sometimes that can be misconstrued. There are some players that have antics, that have done things over the years that we don't necessarily agree with. I understand you want to say it's a cultural thing or an upbringing thing. But by the time you get to the big leagues, you better have a pretty good understanding of what this league is and how long it's been around.
It's a baseball version of The Monkey's Paw! Maybe Marcus should have been careful what he wished for, because a personality collision course with an old curmudgeon reliever is probably not what he envisioned when he asked for more veteran presence. It's hard to imagine a player that Bud Norris would like less than the eccentric, outspoken, and youthful Marcus Stroman.
Let's also take a moment to appreciate the irony of Bud Norris having to find work in a different country.
Maybe Norris has been humbled by the lack of market demand for his services and/or has learned his lesson from the bad press. Certainly these pitching additions help the Blue Jays on paper. Whether Norris will cost them more than that in the clubhouse remains to be seen.
Time and the 2019 season will tell.
Cover image source is Keith Allison on Flickr:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/keithallison/9052784957
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