I’m still trying to wrap my brain around this whole Matt Capps thing, and clearly I’m not the only one. The official story seems to be that the Pirates and Capps weren’t close to a contract at last night’s midnight deadline and so the Pirates elected not to offer him a contract at all rather than fight with him in arbitration. This can’t be the whole story. Capps was terrible last year in all the ways the arbitration people won’t like with his high ERA, lots of home runs allowed, and huge blown save total. I know total career performance is considered, but I can’t imagine that Capps was in line for a huge pay raise of his $2.5 million 2009 salary.
My guess is he would’ve come in around $4 million, which is maybe more than he’s worth but would still be in a range the Pirates could afford with their payroll hanging around $32 million without salaries for Duke or Capps. Because some teams are always willing to overpay for a closer, the Pirates probably could’ve dumped him to another team right now (or at least this spring, after his contract situation is settled) and gotten something in return, even after his terrible 2009. It wouldn’t be much, it might be tantamount to nothing in the long run, but it would be something and that’s more than we got today.
Unless Capps is hurt, it’s also not crazy to think he’ll go back to being at least somewhat effective next year. In my mind, he got hit a lot harder in 2009 than he ever did, but his line drive percentage was down from 23% to 18.7% and his GB/FB ratio, which is never great, improved to 1.0 because his fly ball rate dropped from 46% to 40.7%. His biggest problem was the longball, and he gave up ten of them, but with his line drive and fly ball rates dropping, it wouldn’t be a wild guess to say that he hit a rough spell of luck in 2009. I know a lot of people will disagree with that, but the numbers are the numbers.
I kept checking. His fastball was actually faster last year than in 2008, 93.6 mph to 91.5 mph. He threw his slider a lot more (a full 25%, up from 14.8%) and by extension he threw his fastball less, which could help explain the raise in his walk rate, but let’s be honest here; 7.6 K/9 and 2.8 BB/9 isn’t a terrible ratio. Every last bit of this leads me to think that while he might not ever be 2007/2008 Matt Capps again (partially because he didn’t have the peripherals to match the ERA or WHIP he put up in those seasons), he should at least be able to be an effective reliever again.
So why do it? Is it to send some kind of message? A message about conditioning or off-season workouts or something along those lines? A message about relievers knowing their place in the world? Maybe something else is coming down the pipeline that involves a reliever coming back to the Pirates (remember, they were rumored to be interested in Toronto’s Jeremy Accardo during the winter meetings). Maybe they really just didn’t want to pay him $4 million + in 2010. To say this move is a headscratcher, though, would be an understatement. For the first time in more than two years, I honestly have no idea what the front office’s motivation is behind this move. Maybe we’ll learn more in the coming weeks.
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