I did not think that Francisco Liriano was going to be a Pirate in 2015. I’ve written this and said this a few times, but I’ll reiterate it one more time in my mea culpa: Liriano is a good pitcher. He’s got his flaws, sure, but in two years with the Pirates he’s given them 323 1/3 innings and 338 strikeouts against 144 walks and 22 home runs to go with his 3.20 ERA and somewhere in the vicinity of 4-5 wins above replacement. In the two years combined, he was tantalizing enough to make you think that just maybe he’s got one more 200 inning run of dominance similar to 2010 somewhere inside of him. Francisco Liriano is not Jon Lester, but there’s only one Jon Lester on the market and there are at least four teams with money to burn interested in Jon Lester. My thinking since Liriano turned down his qualifying offer has been that Lester would sign, that some team (the Giants?) that lost out on Lester would buckle and give Liriano his fourth year, and that that would be a bridge too far for the Pirates to cross.
Instead, Liriano made up his mind a full day before Lester did, accepting a 3-year/$39 million deal with the Pirates (at this point it appears to be pending a physical). Obviously I don’t know what happened behind closed doors with Liriano’s agent and other teams, but it seems like you could pretty easily describe Liriano’s free agency as such: he became a free agent, the Pirates made him a fair offer, and once that happened he didn’t care what the Giants or anyone else had to offer. In trying to figure out the last time that the Pirates managed to actually re-sign a useful free agent on the free agent market, John Dreker came up Zane Smith after the 1990 season, and I think that fits. From a purely symbolic perspective, re-signing Liriano means a lot for the Pirates. The Pirates aren’t the Yankees and they can’t keep everyone (obviously), but it’s not 1996 anymore, either. It seems like a small point, but I think it’s important to note that things are consistently changing and moving in a good direction at PNC Park.
Of course, this has to be more than a symbolic move for it to work for the Pirates. At Bucs Dugout this week, David Manel put up a really great piece about the Pirates’ defense, and reading it made me think back to the interview I did with Neal Huntington a few years ago in which Huntington talked about marrying defense and pitching, and fitting your system to your personnel. The Pirates’ advanced defensive stuff is great. I suspect that they’re probably right on the cutting edge of doing exactly what Huntington talks about in that interview by tying individual pitcher profiles to specfic defenses in a way that we the public can’t fully grasp quite yet.
And yet, whenever I read about the defense in these terms, my first thought is always that I wish that it were less necessary. I think it’s fascinating to watch the Pirates find ways to get good results out of guys like Edinson Volquez and Jeff Locke and Vance Worley, but I’d much rather watch a starter come in and blow the doors off the walls with 11 strikeouts and leave no doubt as to what direction the game is headed in. In a rotation that could open 2015 with Locke, Worley, and an aging AJ Burnett, the Pirates needed another starter besides Gerrit Cole (who’s still a wild card, but that’s its own discussion) that’s capable of commanding a game from time to time. On his best days, Liriano does that. Even in a season like 2014, in which Liriano dealt with a few small, nagging injuries that seemed to limit him in the season’s first half and eventually caused him to miss time, he was just about a two-win pitcher, on the WAR scale. With a $13 million salary, that’s $6.5 million per win. That isn’t ridiculously expensive. Think of the deal in the same context as the Edinson Volquez deal from last winter, just on a larger scale. Given what we’ve seen over the last two years, it’s unlikely that Liriano will be worth less than $39 million over the next three years, and there’s a decent chance that he will be worth more or maybe even much more than that.
There has been some sentiment from Pirate fans since this deal went down that while it’s a nice deal for the Pirates, that it’s also sort of the minimum of what they should be doing. I don’t really disagree with that, but I think that that undermines how important it was to get one more upper-rotation starter back into the mix for the Bucs. Right now, the Pirates’ Opening Day rotation is probably Liriano, Cole, Burnett, Locke, and Worley. Without even considering how many healthy innings they might get from Liriano or what Cole will be like next year, I don’t think swapping Volquez for Burnett makes them worse than where they ended last season, and with Morton, Taillon, and Kingham all poised to pitch for the Pirates at various points in the late spring and early summer, I think it probably puts the Pirates in a position where the rotation is likely to get better through the year, rather than the roller coaster that we had to watch last year. The Pirates still have a bit of money left to spend, but they now have the luxury of knowing that they can put it towards whatever’s available without it having to go somewhere. If they find a starting pitching project that they like, they can spend some of it there (this is how I’d spend the money, because I’m still scared of Locke and even Worley, a bit). If they want to shell out a bit for a reliever to help strengthen the bullpen as opposed to digging through the couch cushions and hoping that a Radhames Liz or Josh Lindblom or John Holdzkom turns out to be made of gold, they could do that, too.
All of that is to say that, yeah, it’s fair to point out that this should only be a first step that’s getting the team close to where they were at the end of last season and not necessarily pushing beyond that and that, yeah, it’s easy to be cynical about a 3-year/$39 million deal being the largest in team history or lukewarm about the Pirates re-signing their own free agents, doing all of that ignores that this was still a pretty important move for the Pirates. Bringing Liriano back into the fold gets the Pirates to a place where it’s at least becoming easy to visualize how another starter and/or a deeper bullpen brings them close to where they ended last season, with quite a few spots where young players already in the organization can help them improve. Of course there’s work left for the Pirates to do, but their road through the off-season seems a little bit clearer now.
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