MLB.com: Barmes deal done

Brian McTaggert is reporting for MLB.com this morning that Clint Barmes has officially signed with the Pirates for two years and $10.5 million. I said I’d write more when the deal was official, so let’s get two it. I’ll start with two statements: I’m pretty sure that Barmes will be better than Cedeno in 2012, and if Barmes can hit enough that he’s as good in 2012 and 2013 as he was in 2011, it’ll be a good deal worth every penny for the Pirates and there won’t be anything to complain about here.  

That said, there are a number of things that just don’t sit well with me about this deal, and they all have more to do with the process that leads to signing Clint Barmes more than the actual signing of him. The first part that bugs me is the age. Barmes will be 33 in March, Cedeno will be 29 in February. Barmes’s main value is in his defense, because he generally scores as both a better and more consistent shortstop than Cedeno. You can compare their advanced fielding numbers at FanGraphs (Barmes, Cedeno) and over their careers we’ve got a pretty good sample size for each at shortstop (3,748 innings for Barmes, 4,492 for Cedeno) and you can see that both UZR and DRS say that Barmes is better than Cedeno (UZR says Barmes is good where Cedeno is average, DRS says Barmes is spectacular while Cedeno is below-average). 

What worries me is the age, of course. At 33, Barmes is pretty clearly past his prime and while he’s known for his defense, he doesn’t have a great arm for a shortstop. It was a big enough concern for the Astros that they were going to start Tommy Manzanella, who’s bat is the equivalent of taking Barmes’s bat and dividing it by Ronny Cedeno’s bat, over him at short when 2011 began. That means that if he loses a step this year, he won’t have a Jack Wilson Laser Cannon to make up for it. Basically, if you’re going to sign a shorstop and pay a pretty good price for him solely based on defensive purposes, you’d better be damn sure that he’s going to be a very good defensive shortstop. Barmes might be. Heck, he probably will be, but I’m not sure that’s good enough for me. 

Let’s move on to Barmes’s bat. His career 94 wRC+ isn’t great, but it’s much better than Cedeno’s 67. What worries me is that I think he’s going to get eaten alive in PNC Park, and because I’m pretty sure that park adjustments don’t use splits for handedness, that’s something that’s could affect Barmes quite a bit more than we might anticipate. I pulled up Barmes’s home run chart for 2011 last night and posted it on Twitter. Every home run he hit went to left/left-center and his average homer length was a paltry 376.5 feet. You can click through by season and see that the same thing is generally true of him every year, except that he’s not hitting the ball as far as he used to me. If you go back to his FanGraphs page, you’ll see that Barmes hits a ton of flyballs every year. So he’s right-handed, he pulls the ball a lot, he’s starting to lose his power, and he hits a ton of flyballs. I hope I’m wrong here, but I’m not seeing a guy that’s going to hit well in PNC Park. Honestly, it wouldn’t surprise me if his batting numbers with the Pirates over the next two years are Cedeno-esque.

Therein lies my problem with the deal: Barmes is probably either equal to or an upgrade on Cedeno, but not dramatically so. Possibly not even noticeably so. In that situation, I’d much rather have the guy on a cheap one-year deal than the guy on a slightly more expensive two-year deal, because it would force the Pirates to re-address the situation after 2012. This just feels to me like they’re punting on really upgrading the position for two years. That’s fine if they’re really planning on upgrading the team somewhere else, but thus far this winter they’ve replaced Doumit and Cedeno with Barajas and Barmes, and on the whole it’s hard to see how the duo the Pirates have is a lot better than the duo the Pirates had.