BJs Extend Dickey

Reports are coming in hard and fast that RA Dickey has agreed to a two-year extension with the Blue Jays, the last hurdle of a heavily rumoured trade that would have Toronto acquire the 2012 National League Cy Young award winner in exchange for prospects. It’s an interesting trade that requires some hard analysis and careful handling, especially considering Toronto’s recent moves earlier this offseason in context, and how the Dickey extension may directly impact the possibility of Johnson being extended as well.

Obviously, there’s a lot more benefits to consider than just the obvious headline angles, but that doesn’t mean we should entirely discount them either. I’ve watched the magic of Randy “The Big Unit” Johnson from afar for so many years, it would be remiss of me to take for granted the similar magic we now have in our own laps.

That magic is of course, the quality of pitching talent that comes with having a NL Cy Young award winner. It’s rare for a team, especially for a team like Toronto in recent…decades…to be able to easily acquire a Cy Young level talent in the prime of their careers. This trade, when official, would actually mark only the fourth time in Major League Baseball history that a Cy Young award winner was immediately traded to another team in the offseason after winning it. An odd historical quirk is that Toronto’s already been involved in two of them – David Cone from the Royals in 1995, and Roger Clemens to the Yankees in 1999 (and the other trade also involved a Canadian team, with Montreal trading Pedro Martinez to Boston in ’98).

The most interesting part of the trade to consider in regards to Dickey is that, historically, it’s rare for 38 year-old professional athletes with a missing ulnar collateral ligament to be in their primes. Dickey has a few weird angles may creep you out at first, but then you realize maybe are exactly what’s required to hit the spot.

RA Dickey is a knuckleballer, the only active one still in the major leagues. After a back injury in 2005 reduced his fastball velocity to the mid 80’s and his career was seemingly in danger, he started tinkering with the knuckler. After a few years out in the wild, he finally found success with it in 2010 after signing a minor league contract with the New York Mets. And indeed, 2010 is the first year he committed to primarily throwing the knuckleball, using it 83.8% of the time, complimenting it with a fastball that only averages 83 MPH yet is still very effective since (a) batters expecting knuckleballs see it so infrequently and (b) he mainly only throws in it 2-0 or 3-0 counts when batters are usually watching all the way or unlikely to swing, thus it’s not challenged very often.

Dickey is also a relative flamethrower among knucklers, averaging 77.1 MPH on knuckleballs last year, whereas (like with recent successful knuckleballers like Tim Wakefield or Phil Niekro) the pitch usually only averages around the mid 60’s. And Dickey’s knuckleball velocity has actually been trending upward since he started seriously using it, as this chart from 2010 (the first year he started throwing it more than 80% of the time) notes…

Chart courtesy of Beyond The Boxscore.
Starting in 2010, you also can see that there’s two distinct peaks, indicating that Dickey comes with two knuckleballs. One’s slower, in the 72-75 MPH range and is used more in hitter’s counts, and he also uses a faster variant as an out-pitch, one that touches 77-80 MPH with the same movement. Both have the same type of unpredictable movement, and he’s able to locate both of them consistently, offering only 2.2 B/9 over the last three years.

The $25 million question then, will be how much age will factor into future performance. Dickey will be 41 in the last year of his contract with the Blue Jays, and it’s natural to distrust the elderly and openly and publicly question their competence. But as noted, Dickey is a knuckleballer, a breed that’s historically defied time and have pitched competently into their 40’s. Major league pitchers are generally volatile commodities, and years and years and thousands and thousands pitches worth of torturing your arm to distort in ways it was never meant to starts to take a toll on the human body. But Dickey, like the knucklers before him, aren’t exerting the same amounts of effort that other more typical pitchers usually are. While most pitchers burn out or are forced to change their approach after being unable to consistent smoke mid 90’s fastballs by hitters, knucklers are already regularly lofting mid 60’s, mid 70’s junk with relatively minimal effort as their primary way of pitching. Still, no knuckleballer has ever been this good before, and while Dickey’s future is likely not to follow the typical career arc of other 38 year-old pitchers, it’s no guarantee he can maintain his current, Cy Young award winning, level of production moving forward. Still, RA Dickey the knuckleballer, as the current pitcher he is now, has only existed since 2010. And since then he’s had one great season (138 ERA+ over 174.1 innings in 2010), one good one (112 ERA+ over 208.2 innings in 2011), and one amazing one (140 ERA+ over 233.2 innings in 2012) so even a regression to the pitcher he was before last year still makes him a very valuable innings eater.

Dickey was also born without a ulnar collateral ligament, or it was somehow destroyed or disintegrated during his youth…the same ligament that pitchers usually blowout and damage, needing Tommy John surgery to replace in order to keep pitching. Somehow he’s been able to succeed at the highest level in the world, as a man who professionally throws baseballs for a living, despite the fact that realistically shouldn’t be able to turn a doorknob without having some discomfort. Whether the fact that he doesn’t have a ligament to blow out makes him a more durable pitcher or whether this exposes other parts of his arm or shoulder for injury making him more prone to future injury than normal…I have no idea. Still, he’s averaged over 200 innings over the last three seasons and it was recently noted that he actually pitched with a torn abdominal muscle since April this past year…his most successful one yet. So whether or not his particular mechanics allow him to pitch through injury more or if he just happens to be the toughest motherfucker in the league, Dickey should still be a safe bet to log 200+ innings moving forward and provide strong, reliable, nightly performances without any chemical or herbal performance enhancers despite the fact that he’s closing in on 40.

For a 38 year-old, he’s also extremely athletic and a great fielder for his position, ranking third in DRS the last three years, with new teammates Mark Buehrle ranking first and Ricky Romero ranking fourth. Isn’t that nifty? And unlike what you’d expect for a knuckleballer, Dickey’s actually been amazing at holding runners, allowing only 4 successful attempts out of 7 over an astounding 233.2 innings last year. Also as knuckleballers have historically been believed to be more successful in environmentally neutral environments with no rain or wind, it should be noted that (in a tiny five game sample size) Dickey had a microscopic 1.22 ERA in indoor stadiums last year. Welcome to the perpetually domed Rogers Centre, Mr. Dickey.

The cost to acquire RA Dickey, currently rumoured to be Toronto’s (as per Baseball America) No. 1 and 3 prospects in Travis d’Arnaud and Noah Syndergaard is enormous. With six years of low cost team control each, moving them for the 39, 40, and 41 age seasons of a frontline pitcher is as clear of a win-now/all-in move there is. Indeed, considering the usual slow development curve for catchers, it’s possible that d’Arnaud might take a season or two to match what incumbent starter JP Arencibia provides now (though considering his .232/.278/.451 line last year it really wouldn’t be that difficult) and the earliest possible time of arrival for the 19 year-old Syndergaard would have been opening day of 2015. Considering the players acquired from the Jeff Mathis trade and the shelf life of a 32 year-old Jose Bautista, it’s clear that the Blue Jays see the next two or three years as their window of contention. And Dickey certainly fits snugly within that opening and provides them the length and girth necessary to reach for a playoff spot.

There’s also the principle of the marginal value of wins, where the idea is that improving your team from a losing one to an okay one is a lot easier to do than improving your team from a good one to a great one. The value of additional wins to a 82-win team is a lot less valuable to a 90-win team. With the addition of the second wild card spot, the inflection point for playoff probability comes in at 87 wins, or for a guaranteed ticket to the divisional series and avoiding a situation similar to Texas’ collapse last year, the peak marginal win value for a division title is 93. But we’re also dealing specifically with the Blue Jays, who belong to the toughest division in baseball, and AL East winners (mostly the Yankees) have averaged 97.8 wins over the last decade. Assuming the true talent level of a healthy Blue Jays team is closer to 85 wins than the 73 they actually finished with in 2012, and that the previous acquisitions from Florida and the signings of Cabrera and Izturis pushes them close to 90 wins…the importance and benefits of going all out for it and grabbing each additional win you can are multiplied. The value (and thus cost) of improving from a good team to a great one is big, and certainly adding Dickey is costly but there’s tremendous value in it as well. The trade also works very well as a depth move, plugging Dickey into one of the holes of the rotation bumps JA Happ into the role of the swingman/sixth starter and gives additional insurance in case of inevitable injury or if Ricky Romero still can’t get over his break up with the current Miss USA that was reportedly the cause of all his struggles last year (though who could blame him, she is crazy hot). Hopefully a personality like Dickey will take some pressure off Ricky’s perceived role as staff ace and anchor last year, and allow him to concentrate on baseball again. Or find an even hotter girlfriend which seems to be Derek Jeter’s modus operandi, whatever works.

Adding to Dickey’s value (and the high prospect cost to acquire him) is his financial affordability – he’s only owned $5 million in 2013, and was asking for an extension that seemed under market value, agreeing to a $25 million two year extension that was oddly less than the $26 million hometown discount he was reportedly asking from the Mets. Compared with the $80 million Anibal Sanchez got from the Tigers or the $147 million Zack Greinke got from the Dodgers in free agency, it certainly helps that the size of Dickey’s contract doesn’t push Toronto’s payroll into any uncomfortable areas, considering the sizable commitments already taken on from earlier this offseason. Dickey gives the Blue Jays great bang for their buck.

Considering the timing of their previous moves, the uncommon availability of elite talent, and the seemingly unusual openness of the AL East, grabbing a hold of Dickey makes a lot of sense even if the long term cost is high. But if the Blue Jays can ride Dickey to end a two decade long drought and into playoff bliss, it’ll all be worth it.

If nothing else, this will allow for amazing headline possibilities all year. I am so stoked for Dickey, who seems like a genuinely cool dude who named his bats after swords from The Hobbit and Beowulf, leading to one of the greatest corrections I’ve ever seen published in an actual newspaper.

An item in the Extra Bases baseball notebook last Sunday misidentified, in some editions, the origin of the name Orcrist the Goblin Cleaver, which Mets pitcher R. A. Dickey gave one of his bats. Orcrist was not, as Dickey had said, the name of the sword used by Bilbo Baggins in the Misty Mountains in “The Hobbit”; Orcrist was the sword used by the dwarf Thorin Oakenshield in the book. (Bilbo Baggins’s sword was called Sting.)