Earlier today, Rob Biertempfel reported that he’s heard from a couple of sources that free agent pitcher Jorge de la Rosa, former of the Rockies, is going to be the Pirates’ top free agent target this offseason. I’m not all that surprised to hear this; I mentioned de la Rosa as someone I thought the Pirates might target just about ten days ago. Still, he would be a significant investment (Biertempfel guess four years and an eight figure salary), plus the Pirates would have to give up their second round draft pick for him as a type-A free agent. So would he be worth it?
I do think de la Rosa could be an excellent fit for the Pirates, for at least the next year or two. He’s got a good fastball and gets plenty of strikeouts, so he could help the team even if the Pirates fail to upgrade the defense. He’s left-handed, which means that not only would he benefit from leaving Coors Field, but he could also benefit from making half of his starts at PNC Park (Paul Maholm and Zach Duke pretty consistently pitch better at PNC than on the road, which I think may be due to teams playing righty-heavy lineups that hit into the spacious left field region of the park). He’s put up good FIP and even better xFIP numbers in Colorado (I think xFIP is especially important in his case since he pitches in Coors Field and xFIP uses flyball rate to estimate expected home run rate rather than using the straight homer rate, which could be skewed by Coors) and if the Pirates sign him he might see a production bounce for a year or two before he starts to hit the decline phase of his career (he’ll be 30 right around Opening Day). If you put him into a rotation with James McDonald, Ross Ohlendorf, and Paul Maholm, it might even look suspiciously like a Major League rotation (dependent on a lot of various factors, of course).
It’s not that cut and dried, though. He had shoulder trouble last year, which is never something you want to hear, and has never pitched more than 185 innings in a season. Still, let’s say the Pirates get lucky and ink him to a 3-year/$36 million contract with maybe some kind of vesting or mutual fourth year option. And let’s say he’s relatively healthy in 2011 and gives the Pirates 200 really strong innings and thanks to being out of Coors and in PNC, he has a career season. Where does that get the Pirates? Maybe 75 wins if a bunch of other things break right for them? Now they’re paying a 31-year old $24+ million depending on contract structure and maybe he’s already close to getting that option to vest if his 2011 was really exceptional. What if he gets hurt? What if they pay him a ton of money and find out that we’ve already seen his best seasons in Colorado? Now we’re paying a huge chunk of payroll in 2012 or 2013 or maybe even 2014 towards a guy not contributing to the team — our own personal mini-Barry Zito — in seasons when the front office has to be hoping that the young core will finally have the Pirates moving towards the top of the division. And what if that future Pirate team needs to trade for a shortstop or sign a free agent right fielder? Even if they can afford an $80 million payroll, de la Rosa’s contract could be a heck of an albatross if he’s not tradeable.
I do think that de la Rosa could be a good signing for the Pirates for all the reasons laid out in the second paragraph, but that doesn’t keep me from being worried about it. Given that he’s older and had a relatively late-career breakout, he’s very hard to project and signing him would commit a huge amount of payroll to a wild card in seasons that the Pirates may end up wishing that money wasn’t going to de la Rosa. I’m pretty sure he’d have a positive impact in 2011 (it might even be a big impact), but I’m less certain about every year after that going forward. Signing a pitcher to a big multi-year deal for what he can do in Year 1 is something the Yankees can afford to do, but it’d be an awfully big gamble for the Pirates, especially coming off of a 105-loss season and still a ways removed from having a competitive club.
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