Digging into the Mysterious Case of Kyle Lohse
So Kyle Lohse finally found a job, landing with the Cardinals at 1-year, 4.25 million, plus incentives.
I think it is safe to say that in NO WAY is this fair market value for a pitcher of Lohse’s abilities and background, not in an offseason when Carlos Silva extracted a 4-year, $48 million deal from the Mariners, and just one year after Adam Eaton got a 3-year, $28 million contract from the Phillies and Jeff Suppan got 4 years, $42 million from the Brewers.
To find a comparable deal, you’d have to go back a long time. In 1998, for example, the Texas Rangers signed 30-year-old starting pitcher Mark Clark to 2-year, $9.3 million dollar deal after Clark had given an extremely Lohse-like performance the year before, going 9-14 with a 4.84 ERA for the Cubs.
Of course, that deal was widely panned at the time, and didn’t work out very well for either the Rangers or Mark Clark (who was out of baseball after the contract), but the point is that it was more than TEN YEARS AGO, when baseball had far less money than it does now, that a Kyle Lohse-like pitcher was given less than $5 million a year.
So basically, this deal is a huge steal for the Cardinals. In the best case scenario, Lohse pitches well, saves the bullpen for half a season, and then the Cards can flip him to a contender at the deadline, getting one or two good prospects after having paid Lohse less than the typical signing bonus of a first rounder.
In the worst case scenario, if Lohse sucks or gets injured, the Cardinals will only be out 4.25 million bucks, which in this day and age is the kind of spare change major league teams can find in their clubhouse couches. The Cards wouldn’t even have to buy out Lohse’s option year, because they didn’t even give him an option year. And keep in mind, Kyle Lohse has never been on the disabled list for a even a single day in his whole career.
In fact, Justin Inaz over at “On Baseball…and the Reds” breaks down the numbers and shows that Kyle Lohse is probably worth about the same as Carlos Silva, and that in an ideal contract both pitchers should have gotten about around $7 or $8 million per year for a 3-year deal.
So given that the Cardinals seem to be paying Lohse a little over half of what he should be worth, at almost no risk, and may very well be able to flip him for prospects, why is Cardinals GM John Mozeliak so down about the signing? In fact, he actually laments to the AP reporter,
“If it were a perfect world, we wouldn’t have had to go down this path. But it’s not and we’re going to need someone to pitch every fifth day.”
And how the heck can we explain how Lohse lasted so long on the free agent market without getting a better deal?
I think part of the answer has to be Scott Boras. With messy, high profile breakups between Boras and players like A-Rod, Gary Sheffield, and Kenny Rogers hitting the newswires this offseason, and now Boras’s failure to get reasonable contracts for actually semi-valuable major leaguers like Jeff Weaver, Corey Patterson, and Lohse, we may be seeing a decline and fall of the once-mighty Boras Empire. It seems as if both teams and players may be tiring of Boras’s negotiating style, and while teams may still be willing to talk to Boras when it comes to signing superstars, they simply don’t want to deal with the bother when it comes to the mediocre players.
Another reason may be a glut of amazing young talent this year, as Sarah discussed in a recent post. But I think there is something else in this case, something that has to do with Kyle Lohse in particular. The USS Mariner and East Windup Chronicle have supported the theory that this offseason baseball front offices have suddenly discovered the sabermetric idea of “replacement level” players, who can deliver almost the same 
performance as the lower tier of major leaguers at a vastly reduced cost, but I have a really hard time buying that argument. While certainly there are a *few* GMs around the game that have embraced some sabermetric ideas, there are plenty of counterexamples of GMs who seem just as enamored of big names and veteran experience as ever.
No, I think what is going on here is that GMs are looking at the same old thing they have always been looking at, which is so-called intangibles. Kyle Lohse has long had a reputation as an selfish underachiever, going back to his Minnesota days, and the fact that he went with Scott Boras as his agent despite being a fifth-starter type only added to this reputation. I don’t think all that many GMs were looking too closely at Kyle Lohse’s actual numbers or his marginal value over a “replacement level” player. They were just considering his reputation as a guy who simply doesn’t have the right “makeup” to make the most of his talent, a guy who isn’t a “winner” or simply doesn’t have enough “heart,” and decided that that simply wasn’t the type of guy they wanted to be bringing into their clubhouse, regardless of the cost.
It would be nice to think that we are finally getting to an era when pretty much all GMs all around the game are finally coming to terms with spreadsheets and new statistics and are willing to break down numbers in a systematic way to evaluate players more rationally. But I don’t think we are quite there yet. I mean, this is an offseason in which JP Riccardi, a one-time disciple of Billy Beane who has long been touted as one of the more stats-friendly GMs in the majors signed David Eckstein to be his starting shortstop because he thought he needed to be bringing more “gamers” into his clubhouse.
I think that, ironically, the more statheads raise a hue and cry about how overrated a player is, the more attractive many GMs actually find that player. Because in their minds, if a player is outperforming what you would expect, that is not evidence of a routine statistical anomaly or a small sample size but actually just additional proof that that player has “heart,” “grit,” or “intangibles,” and that he is a “gamer” or “just knows how to win.”
Kyle Lohse is the opposite, a player who has consistently underperformed expectations, which I think goes far toward explaining why most teams wouldn’t touch him with a 10-foot pole this winter, and why even the Cardinals are left feeling icky after signing him, despite the fact that they will probably be getting tremendous value out of the deal.
February 17th, 2008 at 2:04 pm
Sarah, I have to question what I find to be an unreasonably high “A-” grade.
The Torii Hunter deal is a lot of money over a lot of years to a player who is already in decline. Matthews is a vastly superior defender in center field at this point, so the Angels got a small increase in slugging at the cost of a big drop off on defense and worsening the logjam they already had at outfield/DH. And I’m not sure Vlad actually even needs “protection” in the lineup in any usual sense, given how he swings at everything. Basically, I think it was a non-existent hole that the Angels didn’t need to fill, and certainly not at that price. The Angels were not one aging Torii Hunter away from the World Series last season, and this deal probably means that Reggie Willits is going to ride the pine, which is a big blow to the offense.
The Garland trade probably helps the team a bit, but that was a pretty fair trade all around – I wouldn’t say it was a huge steal for the Angels to lose their gold-glove good-hitting shortstop.
And that’s it. That’s all the Angels did this offseason. Sure, they are going to contend this season, albeit not particularly due to anything they did this offseason, but rather due to the fact that the rest of the AL West still sucks. So I don’t think they ought to be graded highly for what they did *this* offseason. I think a B- or a C would be more apt.
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February 17th, 2008 at 3:27 pm
Nick, the Angels won 94 games last year, so it’s not like they limped into the postseason and needed major upgrades. They easily won their division, and they’ll win it again this year. Sure, the AL west is weak, but to me, that means the Angels had less on their to do list this offseason. Finally, in working on this post, I accepted the commonly received wisdom that they needed another big bat to protect Vladimir *and* add some power to a lineup that was sorely bereft of it. Torii Hunter still has two-to-three good years left—yes, his deal was a bit over-generous, but that’s as far as I can go. I was internally debating whether to give them an A- or a B+, but in the end, I gave them the higher grade because barring disaster, they’re a lock to go back to the postseason this year. A C or a B- just seems way too low for a deep as deep and as talented as the Angels.
Also, I have to say, I’ve noticed that this “they were not one _____ away from winning the World Series” phrase is a favorite Nick construction. But I’m on to you! Hardly any team is ever just one player away from the World Series—it’s the makeup of the team as a whole that’s so important. So, that seems like a fancy straw man to me, Nick Kapur. And I will not be dragged in by it!
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February 17th, 2008 at 11:08 pm
Sarah, it sounds to me by your definition that it would have been impossible for the Angels to get a bad grade this offseason, short of some sort of massive fire sale to slash payroll, because you seem to be grading them based on how many games they can be expected to win this season rather than on what they actually did this offseason.
Maybe we just disagree slightly on what these grades actually mean, but this is why I always use the phrase “offseason grade” on my posts, to show that I am grading teams on what they actually did this particular offseason. If a team gives a ridiculously long and expensive contract to a player that is not really going to help the team in any way, they should start out with a pretty low offseason grade, in my view, and if they don’t really make any other brilliant moves to offset that bad move, then their grade should remain low. Regardless of how many wins we might expect them to get, if their offseason was sucky, than it was sucky.
The fact is, any team can be improved. Even a team that won 94 games last year. I actually agree that the Angels could do with a bit more power in their lineup. But if you are sacrificing defense and OBP to add that power, it is very questionable if you are even helping your team at all, especially when we are not talking about a tremendous amount of power here in Torii Hunter.
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February 18th, 2008 at 11:56 am
We seem to mostly disagree about what the Angels needed to do to increase their competitiveness, and whether or not they addressed those needs. I don’t think they had to do much, so the bar there is low. When I see that they added a solid starting pitcher and a good, reasonably powerful hitter to their lineup, I think they did what they set out to do. Yes, they overpaid for Hunter—but they’re a big-market team, and they can afford to. I disagree with you that Hunter is in decline—I don’t see the evidence of that in his numbers. I also disagree that they’ll sit Reggie Willits. But time will tell.
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February 18th, 2008 at 1:31 pm
I love OBP as much as the next guy. And trust me, the next guy seems to love it. A lot. Like, to an unhealthy, unnatural, dirty, filthy extent.
Anyway… Um… Reggie Willits still isn’t a very good player. They won’t miss him in the lineup. Besides, the AL West is shaping up to be a terrible division anyways. The only team I can see cracking .500 is Anaheim.
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February 18th, 2008 at 8:00 pm
Reggie Willits has an OBP of almost .400! He could easily steal 30 bases next year—40 if he played every day! Paul, I’m shocked at you.
Shocked.
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February 18th, 2008 at 10:09 pm
I didn’t say that Willits sucked. I said he isn’t a very good player. He had a very high BABiP last year and I’m not convinced that he’s the type of hitter who can sustain that over another year. Which probably means that his already meager slugging percentage is also going down. Again, as you know, I’m a big fan of OBP. But you can’t overstate its value when the guy can’t slug .350 in a “breakout” year.
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February 19th, 2008 at 1:40 am
I guess when I said that Torii Hunter was “already in decline”, I was talking about his defense rather than his offense. When Hunter first came up, he was one of the best defensive centerfielders around, and he still has that reputation, but he was actually a below average defender in center last year, going by the numbers.
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March 18th, 2008 at 8:55 am
That’s an interesting conclusion, Nick. I think it’s probably a combo of all these factors—the more savvy GMs don’t want Lohse because of sabermetrics, the old-school ones didn’t want him because of his craptastic “intangibles,” and the rest didn’t want him because they didn’t want to pay Scott Boras money to get him. Plus, the young talent available in baseball right now means that there’s only a weak inducement to overcome these hesitations and sign him.
It’s like a perfect storm designed to screw over Kyle Lohse.
As for what is “fair market value,” some would say that “market value” for anything is what the market pays for it. The market only paid 4.25 million for Lohse, thus that *is* his market value.
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March 18th, 2008 at 11:21 am
Well, I don’t know. All the reports say that the Phillies offered Lohse 3 years, $21 million, which Boras turned down. So obviously the market for Lohse was not necessarily locked in at $4.25 million. I think obviously there was also some Boras-Lohse stupidity, but then again, it’s hard to blame them if they looked at the Carlos Silva contract and said, wow, we can get more than this…
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March 18th, 2008 at 11:24 am
Well, I don’t know. All the reports say that the Phillies offered Lohse 3 years, $21 million, which Boras turned down. So I don’t think the market for Lohse was necessarily locked in at $4.25 million. Obviously, I think there was also some Boras-Lohse stupidity, but then again, it’s hard to blame them if they looked at the Carlos Silva contract and said, wow, we can get more than this…
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March 18th, 2008 at 12:18 pm
Well, I also think that sometimes, baseball contracts aren’t pegged to any sort of reality, as I’ve mentioned before. They just seem sort of random. I guess if this can happen “up,” such as when players are way overpaid, then it can also happen “down,” as it may have happened in the case of Lohse.
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March 18th, 2008 at 1:49 pm
To be fair, Mozeliak is one that is comfortable with at least some of the sabermetric principles. But being that the Cardinals already have four pitchers under contract that they expect to come back from injury this year, I think he’s saying he’d rather have had some of them healthy than having to go out and spend money on a pitcher that might be replaced by year’s end.
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March 18th, 2008 at 2:05 pm
I haven’t been following this too closely – but how badly must have Boras pissed Philly off? At one time, they were willing to pay $21m. Did Boras not go back to them because he was scared it would hurt his pride? Did he give Philly a chance to top St. Louis’ offer and they declined?
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March 18th, 2008 at 4:49 pm
You make very logical points, but having witnessed the Kyle Lohse era in Minnesota, I can say that he got exactly what he deserved. Sabermetrics can be a useful tool, but gut instinct needs to be used on Lohse. He’s a classic underachiever who will kill a team when they need him most. Good value or not, that’s a wicked intangible.
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March 18th, 2008 at 5:10 pm
Lyle Kohse (as we called him in MN) is also prone to fits of attacking the door to the manager’s office with a baseball bat. Have fun with that!
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March 18th, 2008 at 5:37 pm
Paul, I think Boras just way overestimated Lohse, and way overestimated his own skill. He thought he could leverage Philly up with another offer—the classic Boras tactic. When he didn’t get one, Philly realized their mistake, took their ball, and went home.
Regarding intangibles versus sabermetrics, maybe that classic debate doesn’t apply here. This Lohse situation is just a typical conundrum faced by any business—not just the baseball business. If you’re running a company, and you have the option of hiring a guy who has decent but not remarkable skills and who is sort of an ass to boot, would you hire him? Probably not. You certainly wouldn’t guarantee him $21 million. I know baseball execs aren’t usually this logical, but let’s not overthink this one.
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March 18th, 2008 at 5:58 pm
I think Pat Gillick was given a set amount of money to spend this offseason. In December, he offered it to Lohse, who turned it down. So, instead, Gillick gave it to Pedro Feliz. Then, when Lohse came back to accept the offer, the money was all gone.
Of course, I still can’t believe the Phillies, who are looking at a rotation that includes the struggling Kyle Kendrick and mind-bogglingly bad Adam Eaton couldn’t scrape together an extra $5 million for one year of Lohse.
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March 18th, 2008 at 10:47 pm
Yeah, I’m amazed the Phillies couldn’t scrap something together to sign Lohse in the end, especially with that injury to Lidge which threatens to send Myers back into the pen. I can only assume something must have become irrevocably broken in the relationship between Lohse/Boras and the Phillies. Like maybe Gillick said “you either take this offer now or we won’t talk to you again” or something.
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March 18th, 2008 at 11:44 pm
I think you’re missing part of what happened – Lohse/Boras either wanted to cash in like Silva, or get a 1 year contract so he can try to cash in again next year.
It’s quite possible that no one else offered a 1 year contract. Apparently even the Cardinals wanted an option for another year.
And it would be a sign of weakness for future negotiations if Boras let him sign with Philly for that cheap, even for a year, after getting (from his point of view) an insulting 3 year offer. The Cardinals didn’t have any real interest in Lohse until Pineiro went down.
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March 19th, 2008 at 9:14 am
JeremyR, I think you make a good point. A one-year deal would be preferable from the Boras POV, once the big deal failed to pan out.
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March 19th, 2008 at 9:47 am
Jeremy, I disagree.
In the ideal world, I think GMs would want all players signed to a one-year deal with an unlimited amount of team-controlled option years. No one wants to guarantee multiple years if they could avoid it. But really, they have no choice for the most part.
But in this instance, teams had that chance to offer a one-year deal which is something that all GMs should be looking for as long as there’s no no-trade clause. They just didn’t. And that’s what I don’t get.
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