Daily Archives: December 2, 2010

So Long, Russell Martin

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It came down to the wire, but the Dodgers have decided not to tender Russell Martin a contract for 2011 and risk paying him an increase on his $5.05m 2010 salary. While I thought they may have been attempting to negotiate a more palatable contract, SI’s Jon Heyman reported that the club also spent time trying to trade him.

This doesn’t necessarily spell the end of Martin in Dodger blue, of course. They can still attempt to sign him, and my guess is that that they will try (Ned Colletti confirmed this after the decision was made), particularly since the already poor catching market has largely dried up now that John Buck‘s in Florida, Yorvit Torrealba‘s in Texas and A.J. Pierzynski stayed in Chicago. (Fine, fine, and Jason Varitek returned to Boston.) But there’s sure to be interest in Martin’s services, so there’s a real risk that he’s playing elsewhere next year.

Really, I wasn’t going to be able to argue this decision either way. If they’ve decided that risking $6m to a declining catcher coming off a serious hip injury isn’t a wise choice, that makes total sense. On the other hand, the catching market is so poor – really, is anyone excited about Rod Barajas and Miguel Olivo? – that locking up a young catcher with above-average on-base skills is a more than defensible decision as well. Earlier this offseason, I’d been leaning towards letting him go, though as the market proved to be more expensive than we’d thought and as low-OBP Juan Uribe was signed, I’d been waffling on that in recent days. If Martin is replaced by someone like Olivo or Barajas, this could be a team with a serious OBP problem. On the other hand, maybe there’s a happy ending and they can re-sign him at a lower price later this winter. Either way, it’ll be an interesting story that’s far from over. (Update: Dylan Hernandez reports the team is “close”  to re-signing Barajas. You could do worse for a backup, so okay – but you couldn’t do much worse for a starter. That still doesn’t preclude Martin’s return.)

As expected, Chad Billingsley, Hong-Chih Kuo, and James Loney were tendered contracts, and George Sherrill (and Trent Oeltjen, who I completely forgot was involved in this) was not.

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But wait! There’s more! There’s unconfirmed reports saying that Vicente Padilla signed tonight to return for 2011. I’ll have more to say on that if it ends up being official in the morning, but Ken Gurnick explains how it’d work, since the club already has five starters:

Padilla could serve multiple purposes for the Dodgers. Colletti has talked about adding a veteran swingman capable of pitching multiple innings of relief with the durability to slide into the starting rotation if needed.

Padilla could do that, and his stuff is still nasty enough (especially against left-handed hitters) to close games. The Dodgers have All-Star Jonathan Broxton for that role, but there is concern over his late-season fade. There’s Hong-Chih Kuo, but his injury history is well documented. Kenley Jansen made a spectacular debut, but he remains unproven as a pitcher.

So the 33-year-old Padilla could be a staff utility man.

On the surface, that sounds great. How could you ever have too much pitching? There’s no question that Padilla has talent, and if pitching in shorter bursts helps preserve his health, that could be very useful. The two questions here are, #1) is he really okay with doing that, and #2) how much can you spend on pitching before you realize that the lousy offense is what sunk you last year?

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Not that I really expected that Loney was ever in danger of being non-tendered, but any thought of that probably went away when Adam Dunn agreed to a $56m contract with the White Sox today. I was actually pretty happy to see that, because he both waived his “no-DH” stance and was offered far more money than anyone expected. The Dodgers weren’t going to offer him $60m, nor would I have expected them to, so it’s not like watching him sign for $33m with an NL team while the Dodgers spent money on Juan Uribe.

Place Your Non-Tender Votes Now

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The Dodgers have until 12am EST / 9pm PST tonight to decide whether to tender a 2011 contract to their five arbitration-eligible players – Chad Billingsley, Hong-Chih Kuo, James Loney, Russell Martin, and George Sherrill. For those not familiar, if the player is tendered a contract, then they may not talk to any other team about a contract, and are on the path to an arbitration hearing early next year. The player and the club are free to discuss a contract agreement before that happens, and that’s usually the case – Jonathan Broxton, Andre Ethier, and Matt Kemp are among the notables to agree to contracts before the arbitration hearing arrived in recent years. The level of difficulty here is that the team may not offer a contract that represents more than a 20% cut from the previous season, so you can’t, for example, try to give Sherrill a $500k deal.

If the player is non-tendered, he then becomes a free agent, and able to negotiate with any team. The Dodgers could still talk to any of the players they non-tender and would no longer be bound by the 20% rule, though of course they would no longer have exclusivity in discussions and would be competing with other teams.

With Ryan Theriot mercifully out of the way now that he’s St. Louis’ problem, let’s quickly look at the five remaining cases. You can cast your vote at the bottom.

Chad Billingsley. He’s 26. He bounced back from a rough end to 2009 to have one of the better seasons of his career. Uh, yeah, you better believe he’s getting an offer. I’d rather see him agree to a long-term deal before arbitration, though I have to say he’s second in the pecking order to Clayton Kershaw in my book. He’s likely to make about $5.5m in arbitration if he gets that far.

Hong-Chih Kuo. Only had one of the most dominating seasons in history by a reliever last year, so I’d say he’s getting an offer as well. I’m more hesitant to sign him long-term because of his injury history; the $2.5m or so he’d likely pick up in arbitration seems fair to me.

Russell Martin. Where do you start? We’ve talked about this ad nauseum. He’s not nearly what he was, yet that’s still better than most catchers. He’s coming off a serious injury and stands to get about $6m in arbitration, yet the options to replace him are terrible. I don’t know if there’s a right answer here; I’d probably try to sign him to a two-year deal at less per year than he’d get in arbitration, but there’s probably not enough time left to do that today.

James Loney. He’s sub-par among his first base peers, and as he gets older and his salary increases the promise of his potential gets dimmer, especially when there’s a decent crop of veterans who could be had for one year and offer similar production. I said months ago that I’d like to trade him for pitching and get a better option at 1B; still, I don’t think you’ll see him non-tendered.

George Sherrill. Well, he made $4.5m last year, and I can’t imagine they’ll risk paying him anything like that. Still, he was effective vs. LHP and with his record, he’s got a better chance of a bounce-back year than anyone else, so I’d be interested in bringing him back cheaply.

At the time of this writing, the Dodgers have just about 13 hours to make their choices. Check out the poll below, and let me know – which guys are getting contract offers? You can vote for as many as you like.

(Update: the percentages here are kind of misleading, since it’s trying to make all of the figures add up to 100% on the whole, rather than individually. I tried to turn off the percentages and show hard votes only, but it doesn’t appear to be an option. So ignore the percentages and focus on total votes.)

[polldaddy poll=4184630]

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Unrelated, but fun: we’ve started up the hot stove talk at the Baseball Prospectus Fantasy outlet. My first article of the winter about relief pitchers went up today.