That’s coming off a year where he posted a 5.83 ERA for the Angels and Yankees — and pitched so poorly for New York after being traded there that they essentially stopped putting him on the mound at all, throwing just 7 2/3 mop-up innings in September.
Heaney is left-handed where Ureña is not, but otherwise, the backs of the baseball cards look pretty similar, right down to the fact that they both entered pro ball with the Marlins in 2009 and shared some team top prospect lists together.
2) The second free agent pitcher to agree with a new team, Eduardo Rodriguez, reportedly will receive $77 million over five years from the Tigers, with the added ability for him to opt out after two years.
Meanwhile: Rodriguez wasn’t the only lefty Red Sox starter with a 4.74 ERA, because Martín Pérez did exactly the same thing.
They care about what they think you will do for them in the future, especially if they think they have the coaching, tools or skills to make you a better player.
Among the 129 pitchers to throw 100 innings, that’s just outside the top 30; it was better than Walker Buehler, Logan Webb or Julio Urías.
Heaney walks fewer than average as well, so if you were to sort those 129 pitchers by the largest differences between their strikeout rate and walk rate, Heaney would be 31st, just behind Buehler, on a list where the top 30 could credibly be a list of the 30 best starters in the game.
Looking deeper, Heaney has 90th percentile fastball spin, with Ureña merely 26th percentile, and while “high spin” does not automatically mean “good pitcher,” it provides a lot more raw material to work with if you know how to use it, which a team like the Dodgers generally does, especially if they can teach him the sweeping slider they’ve used so effectively to try to limit some of those loud homers.
Heaney, at least, starts from the baseline of being above average at getting strikeouts and above average at limiting walks and with an interesting starting point in that high spin fastball.
It was just a year ago that another similarly-aged lefty coming off a rotten season signed a nearly identical one-year, $8 million deal.
This is different, in that it’s not about a way to make Rodriguez better as it is with Heaney.
Considering that Rodriguez had a better strikeout rate and a lower walk rate and a lower home run rate and a much better hard-hit rate, it’s exceptionally clear that these two did not perform the same way.
Maybe that’s bad luck or bad defense or both, but it’s not something you’d expect to repeat itself in 2022.
This shift — we’ll try to find players who will be good, or who we think we can make good, rather than worry just about players who have been good — has been ramping up for years, of course.
You can definitely overthink this, because someone like Garrett Richards will get chances endlessly due to incredible spin rates, despite the fact that the on-field performance rarely seems to match up.
But he somehow managed it despite a regularly declining strikeout rate and a decline in velocity, and no one believed he could go a full season without allowing a homer, as he did in ‘20.
We saw it before 2018, when the Phillies signed Jake Arrieta to a three-year deal weeks after Spring Training had begun, after he’d been waiting months for more based on how fantastic he’d been with the Cubs before a somewhat shakier final season in Chicago.
Or, perhaps most notably, think about two winters ago, when many were surprised to find that Zack Wheeler signed for more , despite Bumgarner’s far longer track record of health and success for the Giants.
None of this means there’s not some human self-interest here at the team level, because surely Blue Jays executives and coaches are riding high having turned a one-year investment on Ray into a fantastic season, like the Giants with Kevin Gausman prior to 2020.
So: Who is next? Longtime aces still performing at a high level, like Max Scherzer, have little to worry about, because they will be valued highly.
It goes both ways — good for players like Heaney and Rodriguez who are much more valued now than they ever would have been, and less so for players hoping to recoup pre-free agency success before they were on the market — but it’s clear evidence of a changing sport.