Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Should the Yankees Sign Derek Lowe?
The Yankees are reportedly considering a bid on Derek Lowe to help shore up their starting rotation. Lowe had a very good season for the LA Dodgers this year, but would he be a good move for the Yankees? Let’s see what CAIRO thinks.
First off, here’s Lowe’s range of CAIRO projections as an LA Dodger for 2009.
RSAR: Runs saved above a replacement level pitcher (20% worse than league average).
The next step is to adjust Lowe’s projection to account for the league, park and defense. Here’s what Lowe’s projection would like in my projected neutral league and park with a league average defense. I have the AL as 4% better than the NL right now. In other words, an AL player would be 4% more valuable in the NL and vice versa. so the neutral league is 2% better than the NL and 2% worse than the AL.
The final step is to take that neutral projection and adjust it to the American League and then the Yankees.
I’m assuming the new Yankee Stadium’s park factors will be the same as the old Stadium since the dimensions are the same, but there are other factors that could change that.
I haven’t done my defensive projections yet and we still don’t know who all will be part of the Yankee defense in 2009, so I’m using 2008 performance regressed towards the mean for now. Here’s an explanation of how I look at the impact of the defense on Lowe’s projection.
Lowe projects to allow 674 balls in play. The breakdown looks like this:
Fly balls: 116
Ground balls: 436
Line drives: 101
Pop ups: 21
I then use a normal distribution of balls in play to estimate the number of chances at each position in Lowe’s starts. This is not exactly right because of handedness of both Lowe and opposing hitters, but it’s close enough for me. Then I use zone rating to look at the difference in plays converted to outs at each position and convert that to a run value. That ends up looking like this:
Chances: Fieldable chances at position
LAzr:: 2008 LA zone rating regressed towards the mean
NYYzr:: 2008 NYY zone rating regressed towards the mean
Diff: Difference in plays made by LAzr vs. NYYzr
RV: Run value of plays not made
So we see a 6 run hit if we move Lowe from LA’s projected 2009 defense to the Yankees’ projected 2009 defense. Signing Mark Teixeira would conceivably recoup two of those runs but that’s a story for another post. That’s a hit of .25 on Lowe’s ERA over 210 innings, with the rest of the difference based on the difference in league talent and not facing pitchers.
Lowe doesn’t project to be great, but he projects to be pretty good. Here’s a rough 3 year forecast and the estimated value of it.
Lowe’s going to be 36 next season and could conceivably drop off the cliff, but that’s a risk with any pitcher, young or old. His projected worth on a 3 year deal is around $42 million using a marginal win value of $4.5M in 2009, $4.75M in 2010, and $5M in 2011, which is probably low. He wouldn’t be a bad signing for anything in the 3 year, $45M range. However, there’s one last projection worth considering.
That player can very probably be signed for only one year and likely for less than Lowe and projects to be just a few runs less valuable.
I’d rather re-sign Andy Pettitte for one season than Lowe for three. If Pettitte decides to retire, then I’d probably prefer Lowe to A.J. Burnett since he’ll be cheaper (in years and dollars) and more durable. Burnett projects to be better on a rate basis, but he’s also more likely to miss time given his past history.
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