Post Sports
Jays’ Estrada proving trade brought good value.
It certainly didn’t start off looking like it was going to be a steal. Of course, no trade — not even the Jays’ masterstroke adding Josh Donaldson in exchange for Brett Lawrie, two uninspiring starters and a very impressive but very green shortstop prospect — should be judged in the first few months, or even years. But over the course of this season’s early months, there wasn’t a whole lot to like about the deal that brought Marco Estrada from Milwaukee for Adam Lind.
Estrada began the season in the bullpen. He was unable to beat out youngsters Aaron Sanchez and Daniel Norris for a spot in the rotation, and the club turned to others to take their most important innings in relief — though part of that was due to an ankle problem he picked up in Dunedin. Estrada’s debut for the Blue Jays came in the ninth inning of a 13-5 win over Baltimore. He pitched three innings of relief six days later, entered for some third-inning mop-up duty in his next appearance, finished out another blowout, then put in two multi-inning relief efforts beginning in the sixth and fifth innings, respectively.
Not exactly an integral part of the pitching staff.
Meanwhile, Lind stormed out of the gate. He posted a 165 weighted runs created plus (wRC+, average is 100) in April — a stat that measures offensive contribution, adjusted to account for league and park factors — which placed him 18th in the majors, just ahead of Bryce Harper and Giancarlo Stanton.
Calling it a nightmare would be a bit rich, but the Blue Jays are often wonder- ing where they might find left-handed power, so trading Lind didn’t exactly look good. Especially considering that the cash-strapped Jays had tendered a contract to Estrada, paying him $3.9-million to do a job that just as easily could have belonged to a guy making the league minimum, such as Todd Redmond.
My, as the saying goes, how things have changed.
Lind is still as good as ever, though he’s regressed some, as you’d expect, back to a 126 wRC+. That’s only a little lower than where he was in his last two seasons with the Jays, and good for 48th of the 164 MLB hitters who have enough at-bats to have qualify for the batting title. But the Jays’ offence certainly hasn’t missed a beat without him. And Estrada? Well, the status may be fleeting, but right now he’s the answer to the question, “If you had to pick one, which Blue Jays pitcher would you choose to start a must-win game?”
He was breathtaking against the Orioles last weekend, not giving up a hit until the first batter of the eighth inning, walking four and striking out six. On Wednesday afternoon in Tampa, he was even better. Estrada had a perfect game broken up with one out in the eighth, then kept going, pitching 8 2/3 innings of two-hit ball, with no walks and 10 strikeouts.
Over the past 30 days, a period encompassing his last six starts, he’s been a top-15 starting pitcher in the majors, according to FanGraphs’ version of WAR — as valuable as stars like Dallas Keuchel, Sonny Gray and Zack Greinke. More valuable than Clayton Kershaw, Cole Hamels and James Shields.
It’s just a month, granted, but that’s one hell of a month.
Estrada has lowered his season ERA to 3.45 thanks to this terrific stretch, meaning he’s crept into the top 50 among those with at least 70 innings pitched this season.
But before Jays fans get too elated about the gold their pitching-strapped team has found, it should be noted that Estrada doesn’t really seem to be doing a whole lot different to have produced these results. His pitch usage, velocities, the movements on his various pitches — all these things have been quite consistent — with one exception: He’s added a cutter to his repertoire.
Estrada has thrown 176 cutters over his seven seasons in the majors, and 83 of those have come in his last eight starts — 19 in the start against Baltimore alone. Since he debuted the pitch against Houston in mid-May, it has accounted for about 10 per cent of his total pitches. That’s not a whole lot, but it’s enough, maybe, to keep hitters off balance. Hitters’ exit velocity against Estrada’s cutter — the speed of the ball when it comes off the bat — is 84.1 miles per hour, according to the data at Brooks Baseball. That is noticeably slower than against his fastball (90.8) and curve (91.3). The sample is small, but so far the contact hitters have made with the pitch seems to have been weak.
Is that enough to have turned his career around in short order?
Actually, there may be a better explanation. With the exception of the first half of last season, when he was inexplicably bad, and especially homer-prone, Estrada has been a rather decent pitcher in the big leagues. His second half ERA in 2014, pitching out of the bullpen, was 2.81, and in the two seasons before that he was rather valuable — 1.7 WAR over 128 innings in 2013, and 3.2 WAR over 138.1 innings in 2012.
With numbers like that coming in, fans probably should not have been so down on him when he first arrived, though it’s hard to fault them given how good Adam Lind had been for the Jays and what a great balance he’d been for the club’s terrific right-handed power hitters. But this month has shown, at least as much as one month can, that the trade really wasn’t lamentable. With the state of the Jays’ rotation at the moment, fans should be quite glad they made it.