The San Francisco Giants home-developed the starting rotation that pitched them to the World Series championship last year. The previous year the New York Yankees won the World Series with a primarily store-bought rotation. The Philadelphia Phillies hope to win it this year with a hybrid rotation, one that has been home grown, bought and traded for.
Then there is the Milwaukee Brewers’ idea. This winter they tried to do in their own way what the Yankees did with free agency two years earlier. The Yankees cornered the market by buying CC Sabathia and A.J. Burnett. This winter the Brewers cornered the trading market by acquiring Zack Greinke and Shaun Marcum.
But they weren’t finished with their winter’s work even then. When it became obvious that a cracked rib suffered in a pickup basketball game would delay the start of Greinke’s season. general manager Doug Melvin made another trade for yet another starter, obtaining Sergio Mitre, from the Yankees to take Greinke’s spot in the rotation until he was ready to assume his No. 1 position.
Thirty-four pitchers who have been starters in the major leagues and are still viewed as starters or possible starters changed teams during the off-season. Twenty-six moved as free agents. The remaining eight were traded. Three of those eight wear the uniform of the Brewers.
Mitre, of course, was an emergency replacement. Greinke and Marcum were the key elements of the Brewers’ winter strategy.
“No doubt about it, we set out to acquire starting pitching at the top end of the rotation,” Melvin said. “It was probably the goal of 28 of the 30 teams. Teams in our market always are looking for pitching. We have less chance to get involved in the free-agent market.”
Greinke and Marcum, he added, “became available and both have two years. We felt we had to take the risk. Pitchers are always a risk. If they’re injured, pitchers take longer than hitters to get back.”
More often teams look to trade players when they are one year away from free agency, but Greinke has two years left on his contract (at $13.5 million each), and Marcum, whose salary this year is $3.95 million, is two years from free agency.
The Brewers do not compete with the Yankees and the Red Sox for free agents. They didn’t enter the Cliff Lee competition, which the Phillies won at $120 million for five years, less than the Yankees offered but acceptable to Lee because he decided he preferred Philadelphia to New York.
Lee was easily the best pitcher in the free-agent market. Nobody else resembled a top-of-the-rotation candidate. Many teams that were in quest of pitching wound up signing pitchers who could best be described as reclamation projects. The Yankees, for example, signed Freddy Garcia and Bartolo Colon, the Mets Chris Capuano and Chris Young.
“When we acquired Greinke and Marcum,” Melvin said, “suddenly there aren’t any phone calls coming from agents. I’d love to have had Capuano, but it’s hard for me to convince him to come back here and start out in the bullpen.”
Capuano, a 32-year-old left-hander, has spent practically his entire career with the Brewers, but with their trade acquisitions they ran out of room in the rotation.
“If you were a starting pitcher,” Melvin asked, “would you want to start out in the bullpen? If you were a starting pitcher would you go to the Phillies? We weren’t so deep but deep enough for someone to not say if I go to camp I can win a spot in the rotation.”
The way Melvin designed it the Brewers’ rotation was supposed to have Greinke, Marcum, Yovani Gallardo, Randy Wolf and Chris Narveson. For a few minutes in spring training, it appeared that they might be without both Greinke and Marcum, who had a tight shoulder.
“I looked around baseball and saw other teams with injuries,” Melvin said. . “I told our guys keep your chins up; we still have to play the games. Our injuries aren’t season-ending or threatening.”
Melvin expected Marcum to be able to make his first start on schedule – he did Saturday night – and estimated that Greinke would miss two or three starts.
The health of the rotation is vital to the Brewers because they believe they have a chance to win the National League Central title, which appears to be up for the grabbing this season. The division has no clear favorite.
Last year the Brewers finished third, 14 games behind first-place Cincinnati but only a game in front of Houston and two games ahead of Chicago. The Brewers’ 77-85 record was no surprise because their pitching staff had the league’s third worst earned run average, 4.58.
“The division will be competitive,” Melvin said. “Cincinnati has good pitching but was sixth or seventh last year. They scored a lot of runs. Scott Rolen did a great job. They are the top defensive club in our division. I think defense is so important.”
For the Brewers, Greinke and Marcum will be so important and will go a long way in determining the wisdom of Melvin’s acquisition strategy.
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NO W.B.C., INJURIES UP AGAIN
Once again this year more players began the season on the disabled list than in either of the two seasons in which the World Baseball Classic was played.
W.B.C. critics have complained that the spring series in 2006 and 2009 were responsible for too many injuries to justify the classic’s existence. However, the numbers prove the critics wrong.
In 2006, the first year of the classic, 66 players were on the disabled list on opening day of the season. The number in 2009, the year of the second W.B.C., was 69.
This year 93 players opened the season on the disabled list, according to the commissioner’s office. In the previous eight non-W.B.C. years the disabled list number, beginning in 2001, ranged from 77 to 104.
Among the season-opening disabled players this year are Johan Santana (Mets), Jake Peavy (White Sox), Johnny Cueto and Homer Bailey (Reds), Zack Duke (Diamondbacks), Aaron Cook (Rockies), Jon Garland and Vicente Padilla (Dodgers), Zack Greinke (Brewers), Mat Latos (Padres), Adam Wainwright (Cardinals), Scott Feldman and Brandon Webb (Rangers), Brandon Morrow (Blue Jays) and Chien-Ming Wang and Stephen Strasburg (Nationals).
They are all starting pitchers. Among the non-pitchers, the most notable is Chase Utley (Phillies).
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RANGERS WIN PENNANT, LOSE SENSE
For a team that won its first American League pennant last season, the Texas Rangers haven’t exactly looked like a winner.
For one thing, they hadn’t finished celebrating the biggest moment in their history, their first World Series appearance, when they waged an ugly internal fight and forced out the chief executive officer and managing partner, Chuck Greenberg, who was responsible for the team’s rescue from a debt-run operation by Tom Hicks.
That was their most fractured development off the field. On the field it was their messing with Michael Young again.
Young was the Texas designated hitter in the first two games of the season, and he produced 1 hit in 10 times at bat. The Rangers can only hope they have not made a grievous mistake with their most consistent, most productive hitter over the last decade.
Once again, for the third time in his solid career, the Rangers moved Young. Only this time they moved him off the field.
First, they moved him from second base to shortstop when they traded Alex Rodriguez to the Yankees. Then they moved him from short to third base when they decided that Elvis Andrus was ready to play short. Now they have moved him to d.h. because they signed Adrian Beltre as a free agent.
Because Young had reacted so willingly and so graciously to the other moves, the Rangers assumed the third move would be no problem. Well, you know what happens when you assume.
Early in spring training Young asked to be traded, but the Rangers didn’t trade him. Teams rarely trade players under those circumstances.
During the next-to-last week of spring training, general manager Jon Daniels initiated a meeting with Young, and Young requested a second session.
Daniels did not return a telephone call seeking comment, but he told reporters at the Rangers’ camp, “They were productive conversations,” Daniels said. He provided no details.
But speaking of the situation the Rangers created, he added, “I regret it wasn’t good for anybody. It created a situation where our fans and the media were taking sides. That should never have been. We all want the same thing.”
Young said he told Daniels exactly what he thought and how he felt, but he was still the designated hitter on opening day – and the day after that.
Nowhere has it been said or written that Daniels offered Young more money to make the move more palatable or that Young asked for money. He probably wouldn’t consider additional payment an answer to his predicament.
Clubs complain about the absence of loyalty from the modern game, but loyalty went out the general manager’s window at least as quickly as the players lost it. If anyone doubts that, ask Michael Young.