Ex-Twins pitchers watch

According to USA Today,
Johan Santana has baseball's
third-highest salary this year,
behind only Alex Rodriguez
and Cliff Lee.

Johan Santana had surgery Tuesday to repair his retorn shoulder capsule. The operation was termed "successful," which is surgical speak for "the patient didn't die on the table and we cut on the correct shoulder."

Santana is said to be intent on pitching again. Realistically, he's got a difficult road ahead to achieve that; he's certainly not going to pitch this year and probably not in 2014 either.

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Matt Capps, who was signed to a minor league deal by Cleveland just before spring training, didn't make the major league roster. What's more, the erstwhile closer was actually released from his contract and re-signed by the Indians in a move that negated Capps' $100,000 roster bonus.

Cleveland is, apparently, watching its budget carefully after a poor year at the gate in 2012 and a bit of a free-agent spending spree this winter. They did a similar roster manoeuvre with Daisuke Matsuzaka, the former Red Sox pitcher who was also a non-roster invitee.

Capps took almost a week before agreeing to the second minor-league deal, which suggests that he couldn't find a better offer elsewhere. Which in turn suggests that the other teams were not impressed with what he showed during spring training.

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Kevin Slowey, last seen spending most of the 2012 season on a Indians minor-league disabled list, made the Miami Marlins rotation. He's to start today against Washington.

The Twins have a pair of two-game series with the Marlins -- two game later this month at Target Field, two games in June in Miami (that's a bone-headed bit of scheduling) -- and I'm rather hopeful that he'll get to pitch against the Twins at least once.

If nothing else, it'll be interesting to hear Ron Gardenhire try to tap-dance again around the subject of the pitcher's falling-out with the Minnesota organization. We can be sure that Bert Blyleven will spend a few innings ripping Slowey.

I think both sides -- Slowey and Twins management -- mishandled things in 2010. Slowey's career crashed at that point; so did the Twins starting rotation. I'd like to see both back on sound footing.

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Kyle Lohse, who signed with Milwaukee about a week before spring training ended, got in one Cactus League start and now will start for the Brewers on Friday. This avoids matching him up next week against his old team, the St. Louis Cardinals.

Not that he can dodge that matchup for the full three years of his contract.

Kyle Lohse and free agent compensation

It's March, and Kyle Lohse — who went 16-3, 2.86 last season — still doesn't have a job. The head of the players union lays the blame on the new free-agent compensation system:

“While neither us nor the commissioner’s office have any legal obligation to bargain over that issue over the term of the basic agreement, I don’t think it was the intention of either side that you would have a player and you’d have clubs that would be interested in securing that player and be happy paying that player his salary, but would be stopped from doing it by compensation. That really wasn’t the intention.

“I can’t promise you that we’re going to be able to rectify it, but I know there will be discussions. It’s mostly good, but that part of it hasn’t worked out the way that we expected.”

Well, now. There's very little in the changes themselves that make it less appealing to a bidding team to pursue a free agent. What the changes did do was sharply reduce the numbers of free agents subject to compensation. Teams have to take a greater risk now to qualify a player for free agency; their payoff in draft picks is slightly less.  

If Michael Weiner's point is that any compensation system distorts the market, he's right; if he's arguing that this specific system is more distorting than the previous one, he's wrong. To be fair, I think he's leaning toward the former, as he points out that the number of free agents tied to draft picks fell from 30 to nine.

What has changed for free agents like Lohse, to be blunt, is that teams have gotten smarter about free agency over the past several years — not only about the value of draft picks, but about investing in older players (Lohse is 34). 

I detailed in December five factors inhibiting Lohse's market, and compensation is one of them, but most are variations on the premise that he really ain't that good. Lohse had ace-caliber results in 2012, but paying him on that level for the next several years is a bad bet. Those organizations stat-savvy enough to recognize the risk would avoid Lohse regardless of compensation.

Weiner hints that he'd like to revisit free-agent compensation before the basic agreement expires (2016), and since there's talk of revisiting the steroid-use penalties before then too, it might happen. I'm not convinced that there's really a system problem here, however. 

Lohse and his agent (Scott Boras) misjudged the pitcher's market. That's the problem.

Ex-Twins' (mis)adventures in free agency

Spring training is less than a month away, and an impressive number of former Twins are either still trying to find teams or have just landed jobs (or, in some cases, opportunities for jobs).

The market is slim for players who had a big role in turning the Twins from a 90-plus win team to a 90-plus loss team, it would appear.

A quick rundown:

Delmon Young is only 27, but the promise has tarnished.

Delmon Young, last seen bopping postseason homers for Detroit, was nevertheless quickly cut loose by the Tigers. He signed Tuesday with Philadelphia for a piddling (in baseball terms) $750,000 plus more than $2 million in bonus clauses, some of which are apparently tied to making weight at six different weigh-ins over the course of the season.

It always amazes me when a major-league athlete in any sport has weight problems. It was one thing back in the day when players worked offseason jobs to make ends meet; today, when being a jock is a full-time, year-round job, getting out of shape to the extent that Young appeared to be last season signals a significant lack of self-discipline and/or interest in his job.

And he's paying for it. The guaranteed money is a mere $50,000 more than Drew Butera signed for. That speaks volumes to how little interest there was in Young.

The Phillies intend him to be their regular right fielder, but the contract structure suggests that he'd do well to avoid his usual lousy start. The Phils don't have a whole lot committed to him.

Kevin Slowey is
on the player union's
pension committee, but
he isn't on anybody's
40-man roster.

Kevin Slowey, last seen going on a minor league disabled list in the Indians organization and never returning, signed a minor-league deal Wednesday with Miami. The Marlins have lots of openings, but Slowey hasn't pitched much, or effectively, the past two years.

The bridges between the Twins and Slowey were well and truly burned in 2011, but I'd still rather have him than Kevin Correia — which speaks less to my diminishing faith in Slowey's ability to pitch than to my conviction that the Correia signing will be a disaster.

Francisco Liriano's deal with Pittsburgh finally became official this week, long after it was reported. The lefthander apparently fractured his right arm in a bathroom fall, and the two sides had to rework the deal to give the Pirates some protection should that injury for some reason be an issue. It shouldn't. The issue, as always with Liriano, will be throwing strikes.

Matt Capps remains unsigned. So does Jon Rauch, whose departure from the Twins predates their collapse. And, of course, Kyle Lohse is still out there for any team willing to pay the penalty, with agent Scott Boras supplying this awkward metaphor to excuse the length of time his client has been dangling:

It doesn't matter what time dinner is when you're the steak.

Well done, Mr. Boras.

Free agents and draft picks

A bit more than a week ago I pondered the whys of the apparent lack of a market for former Twins pitcher Kyle Lohse. Since then a St. Louis newspaper has reported that the free agent hasn't had an offer other than the "qualifying offer" made by the Cardinals to insure a draft pick in compensation for Lohse's departure.

Lohse isn't the only free agent to find his market dried up by the new rule. Others in the same sinking boat are relief pitcher Rafael Soriano, first baseman Adam LaRoche and center fielder Michael Bourn. Nick Swisher somehow managed to avoid their trapped-in-limbo state.

Nine free agents got the one-year, $13.3 million qualifying offer, which saddled their free agency prospect with the draft pick (and, perhaps more important, bonus pool) penalty. All of them turned it down, figuring that they would get more money and more years in free agency. Two of them -- David Ortiz and Hiroki Kuroda -- re-upped with their old teams. Three others -- Josh Hamilton, B.J. Upton and Swisher -- landed deals with new teams despite the penalties.

Upton signed with the Braves, who doubtless figured they would replace what they lost in the penalty with the payback for losing Bourn. Hamilton's talent was seen as worth the penalty. Swisher -- I don't know, in this context, what the Indians were thinking, although they "only" lose a second-round pick.

This is the first offseason with the new free-agency rules. Previously the standard for getting draft pick compensation was lower -- it merely required the old team to offer salary arbitration, not offer the average of the top 100 salaries -- and there was no loss of draft pick bonus pool money. And the old, analytically inept classification system, which chronically overstated the value of middle relievers, was wiped away.

The old system was bad for a certain group of lower tier free agents -- the Juan Cruzes of the world who were categorized as Class A free agents because of the flaws in the ranking system. That type of player is free and clear now; teams might be willing to offer a middle reliever arbitration, but not $13.3 million.

This system is squeezing a higher level of player. This was to be expected -- any compensation system, no matter how defined, is bound to find some free agent on the margin.

It did succeed in cutting the number of players who are tagged with compensation picks, which is something the players union is doubtless pleased with.

It will be interesting to see if, in future years, some of the players who get a qualifying offer accept. (Such a move would apparently have gummed up the Yankees plans; they didn't Soriano or Swisher back, and have apparently told Soriano in recent days that they aren't interested in resigning him.) When 44 percent of the qualifying offer pool are teamless a week into the new year, it suggests that the players underestimated the value attached to the picks and the bonus pool. Perhaps next winter it will be some teams who get stung.

Kyle Lohse's free-agency misadventures

We're on the cusp of a new year, and Kyle Lohse -- former Twins pitcher coming off the two best seasons of his career -- remains without a team.

Kyle Lohse went 30-11, 3.11
over the past two seasons for St. Louis.

He has multiple factors working against him. I'll list them in the order that I consider them significant, but any of them would logically discourage teams from pursuing him:

• Stat-savvy organizations will be particularly wary of his below-average strikeout rate (6.1 K/9 last season, 5.6 for his career) and his far-better-than-sustainable batting average on balls in play (.272 and .267 the past two seasons). Those stats mean he's a bad bet to continue pitching well.
• Because the St. Louis Cardinals made him a qualifying offer, the team that signs Lohse will lose a draft pick. More than that, it will lose the bonus budget allotted to that pick, which figures to limit its flexibility in signing draftees next summer.
• He's 34.
• Lohse's success is a creation of the Tony LaRussa-Dave Duncan patch-a-veteran pitching assembly line, and such pitchers have not generally fared well out of that environment.
• He is represented by Scott Boras. No bargains are available there.

The Twins probably weren't going to go after Lohse simply off their past history with him, but point two in the above listing is the real killer for them. In the Twins specific case, it would be the second-round pick that they'd lose -- and they're not at a point in the success cycle where it makes sense to surrender a high pick. Even contenders might think that regarding somebody with as many warning lights as Lohse.

The problem of draft-pick compensation dampening demand for specific free agents was supposed to have been fixed by the new labor agreement. The old system of free agent classification -- which resulted far too often in decent middle relievers being absurdly overvalued -- was abolished and replaced with the qualifying offer system.

Lohse is among a group of free agents to whom qualifying offers were made who might wish they'd accepted. They're good enough for their old team to have offered a $13 million one-year deal but not good enough to find real demand in the open market, at least not with the draft-pick penalty attached. Michael Bourn and Adam LaRoche also remain unsigned; Nick Swisher landed with Cleveland, a move I expect to look at in more detail in the next week or so. Suffice it to say for now that the Indians were hardly Swisher's desired destination.

The myth of Game Seven

The National League Championship Series comes down to a Game Seven tonight. St. Louis will start Kyle Lohse, former Twin; San Francisco will start Matt Cain, author this year of a perfect game.

I am probably incapable of accurately assessing this matchup. Both men had fine seasons this year. Lohse is doubtless a better pitcher today than he was six to 10 years ago, but his failure to develop while with Minnesota colors my perception of him. He will, in my estimation, always be the punk who damaged Ron Gardenhire's office.

Lohse: Bad. Cain: Good. Now that I've said that, Lohse will probably throw 20 ground balls tonight and shut the Giants out. He's better than I want to admit.

Meanwhile, I offer this piece of goodness combining two of my favorite things: Baseball and Mythbusters. Cain earlier this summer filmed a segment with the Discovery show that has yet to air (exactly what myths they're exploring/exploding I'm not sure), and this weekend Tory Belleci and Kari Byron each tweeted links to this video.

Ex-Twins watch: Kyle Lohse

Kyle Lohse is at one of those injury-induced career crossroads pitchers so often come to.

But in his case, it's an odd one — something called "exertional compartment syndrome," in which the sheath of a forearm muscle won't expand. There is said to be no precedent for a pitcher with this condition, which may simply mean it's never been diagnosed in a pitcher. (I figure there's no such thing as a new pitching injury, just more specific diagnoses and surgeries.)

So ... surgery today (Friday) and nobody knows when he'll be back, if ever.

If this is it, I'm afraid I'll remember Lohse more for what he wasn't than for what he was. In 2003 I figured he was about to take off — he had a strong stretch at the end of the season, and I thought that in 2004 he and Johan Santana would both move ahead of Brad Radke. Santana did, Lohse didn't.

He's had just one winning season since 2003 — 2008, when he hooked up with the LaRussa-Duncan school for failing veterans — and he sports a career record of 85-94 with a 4.71 ERA.

He could/should have been better than that.