Doug Fister Is a WAR/$ Tyrannosaurus Rex (Padres 1 ...)
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=== Doug Fister's FX ===
If you're a right hand hitter, the dotted circles on this chart are there to indicate what the break on a normal ML pitch looks like to you. (A pitch with no spin, no air resistance, thrown in a vacuum, or whatever, would hit exactly at the intersection of the X and Y axes.)
The colored starbursts indicate where Doug Fister's pitches were breaking, on Saturday.
The F/X system was probably mis-reading the "four-seam" fastballs, but forget about that. The point is the "marginal" break that Fister gets on his FB and changeup. The RH batter reads two-seamer, swings at the aqua circle, and the ball bores in wayyyyy towards his back foot. If you watched the game, you saw a bunch of weak chops into the San Diego camera well.
Fister's curve was "spiking" into the dirt, breaking so much that he couldn't throw it for a strike. Long live weight training, I guess.
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=== Release Point ===
In the chart below, the sky-blue starburst indicates a normal RHP's release point. Fister's is somewhat higher ... and much to the side, toward third base.
VALUE Tyrannosaurus Rex.
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Doug Fister, in the first half, earned $11.7M in value for the Mariners, and he was paid $218,250.
Whoever trades for Fister will get two-three months' of free TOR performance this year, and four more years of club-controls performance out of him.
Even if Fister dropped back to the $12M yearly performance that he brought in 2010, a team is looking at a full $50-70M worth of performance for a total of about $15-20M in salary.
(If Fister pitches like he is in 2011, his new team is going to receive $100,000,000 worth of performance from him. And it will be well aware of this fact. Everybody has a Tom Tango or Voros McCracken on staff these days.)
What happened to this kind of argument? In terms of net value, Doug Fister is worth much, much more than (say) Josh Hamilton, Carlos Quentin, Matt Kemp, or Andre Ethier, all free agents after 2012.
The topical argument for trading Michael Pineda ... that is a separate discussion. But if you're going to convert pitching value into hitting value, why not cash in $40-$70M of net value on Doug Fister to do it?
And keep Felix and Pineda together.
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BABVA,
Dr D