For each player, I started with the current season’s ERA+. There are two things of special importance to consider: (1) In the regression analysis I based my analysis on, the r-squared was only .28, which means that a good deal of the variance of ERA+ is not explained by age alone. Of course this is the case, but what it means for the analysis below is that I am only showing the effect that we can expect age to have on the future performance of the pitchers. We are leaving out everything else (defense, injury, coaching, learning a new pitch, etc.). (2) We can not be sure, especially in the case of Buchholz, what each pitcher’s true ERA+ is. As such, I have included error bars. Halladay has error bars at 6%, which includes his variance of the last two seasons. Buchholz are much larger (10%), which means he ranges in talent from about as good as Lester was last year, to about as good as John Lackey was last year. Now, he may be much worse, he’s probably not much better, but it gives us a jumping-off point.

The graph above below suggests that Clay Buchholz will eventually become a better pitcher than Roy Halladay due to Buchholz’s growth and Halladay’s aging, but this won’t happen until 2018, when Roy Halladay is 41! It also says that, even if Buchholz is much better than we expect and Halladay is much worse than we think, chances are they won’t be comparable as pitchers until 2011, when their error bars cross. I’d go so far as to analyze this graph as saying that it is unlikely that there will be a time in the next 5 years where we’ll consider Buchholz a better pitcher than Halladay.

So, the relative ages of our pitchers in question does not make me any less likely to trade for Halladay. At this point, we can be fairly certain that Halladay will be a better pitcher than Buchholz for a long time. Knowing that the Sox will get the best player in the deal, and that he will remain so for a good duration, does not necessarilly mean they should pull the trigger. Obviously, how highly the Sox value the other prospects in play, who are much harder to project than Buchholz because they are younger and lack Major League experience, will make or break this deal.

Halladay v. Buchholz is a post from: Free Pedro

The graph below shows the career arcs of the average MLB batter and pitcher. It’s based on regression analyses (here and here) that isolated the effect of age on production. The vertical axis in my graph is the percentage better than the player was at age 21, so a positive percentage is how much better a player is at a certain age than he was when he was 21 and a negative percentage is how much worse. The average batter peaks at 29, and the average pitcher peaks at 28. For discussion of the current rumors, I have graphed the supposed trade targets and the potential Red Sox prospects in play.

So mark this down right now: The Sox, won’t trade for Halladay. OK, let me amend that a bit–the Sox won’t trade for Roy Halladay if they have to give up what the Jays are asking for. As we can see in the next graph, under Theo Epstein, the Sox have been very careful not to give long-term contracts to aging pitchers. They let Pedro and Lowe walk and showed little interest in the Santana trade or acquiring Sabathia. The length of the arrow is the length of the contract, and the number is the average yearly salary of the player.

Clearly, the Sox value a pitcher who they can sign when he’s still in his mid-twenties. As such, they value players like Lester, Buchholz, Bowden, and Kelly extremely highly. They wouldn’t give up Lester to get Santana. The reason they are so protective of their pitching prospects is not that they think they are all going to be stars, but because they know that if they do develop into talents, they will have the opportunity to lock them up in their mid-twenties and have them under contract for the primes of their careers. As we can see, the Red Sox have had great success in extending the contracts of their players at below-market rates. Ortiz, Youk, Pedroia (coming off an MVP!), and Beckett were all signed at good prices for shorter deals. The Sox have a clear strategy. Their MO is to sign a player who is still under contract to a cheap, short extension. Obviously, the Sox have had problems with shortstops, and the Drew contract is unforgivable.

To me, this means that the Sox are much more likely to give up their young talent for Adrian Gonzales than they are for Roy Halladay, who is quickly approaching the mid-thirties range where pitchers have historically fallen off a cliff. (Of course, these numbers are probably overly generous to older players because they were compiled in the PED Era. Don’t expect to see many productive 38-year-old pitchers in the next decade.)

Let’s consider the Mets.

Omar, like Theo, has done a fantastic job of signing his young talent to extensions. (That Wright contract may be one of the best ever.) It seems he has a soft spot for over-the-hill pitchers.  The Martinez and Wagner contracts were Cashman-esque. (Brian Cashman has a history of overpaying for past production. Oftentimes, this production was not even in the recent past.) While Santana was the best pitcher in the game when he was signed, very soon he will qualify as very overpaid. But Omar is getting better. The K-Rod deal is the type of short contract that works for a young pitcher. And though the Perez deal was a bit of a head scratcher because, let’s face it, his production wasn’t that great, even if it  was presumed to go up based on this analysis, at least it was short and for a young pitcher.

For laughs, let’s look at the Yankees next.

Brian Cashman may be worse at his job than anybody whose performance is so publicly observed. The A-Rod contract is so bad and so long that I had to extend the X-axis. No further discussion is necessary.

On Trading Prospects and Signing Long-Term Contracts is a post from: Free Pedro