Brandon Morrow, Janssen Headed To Arbitration With Blue Jays
The deadline to complete agreements prior to salary arbitration came and went yesterday afternoon, and the Blue Jays reached agreements with three of their five players who were headed down that route: Kelly Johnson ($6.375M), Ben Francisco ($1.537) and Carlos Villanueva ($2.227M) all received slight raises one-year deals. Nothing out of the ordinary here.
That leaves just two pitchers, Brandon Morrow and Casey Janssen, who at least look as though they are headed towards the Blue Jays’ first arbitration cases since 1997. While contract negotiations clearly broke down in both cases, it’s still very unlikely that either player will actually have to make their case in front of an arbitrator when the meetings are set up about a month from now. The differences in the salary numbers by the player and the team are relatively small ($300K in Morrow’s case, $400K in Janssen’s), and is suggestive that the team is working on multi-year contracts with both players.
This was the same situation headed into last season with Jose Bautista before he signed a 5-year deal, and going to arbitration for the first time in 15 years over $300-400K differences doesn’t strike me as something the team or the player wants to do. The two sides will continue to work on a contract before an arbitration meeting is set, and since Alex Anthopoulos has set a team policy that they will only discuss multi-year deals once the arbitration process has begun, that’s what I think we can expect to see.
A two-year deal on Janssen, who was consistently one of the best relievers on the team in 2011, wouldn’t be such a bad thing. As for Morrow, a multi-year deal will likely be over two years, if only because it’d be pointless to buy out only his final arbitration years and not into his free-agency time, but also because of his upside. That’s a word that’s stuck to Morrow basically since he was drafted. A perennial breakout candidate, Morrow’s stuff is unquestioned, but the results have been mixed. Still, here are the facts: Morrow is headed into his age-27 season coming off two 3+ WAR seasons, with a K/9 of over 10 in both, and a xFIP that is significantly lower than his ERA.
In fact, just about all of Morrow’s statistics (WHIP, K/BB, OPP BA, LOB %) showed improvement in 2011, and his actual ERA suffered. Perhaps that says a little something about the predictive value of some of statistics alone, as anyone who watched Morrow’s starts will tell you he was both brilliant and terrible in stretches. For every start he had where Morrow would go 6IP, 1ER and strike out 7, there would be one where he’d give up 6+ runs in under 5 innings. In retrospect, it was a tale of extremes to watch Morrow; even though he’ll enter 2012 with the good memories of allowing just 2 ER in 21 innings over his final 3 starts (despite a 9.47 ERA over the 3 starts before that…see what I mean?), Morrow will have his work cut out for him in 2012 to find some consistency, and finally have that ace-like season that everyone (including me) predicts him to have every freaking year.
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If Morrow can give the Jays a big season then the Jays will contend.
It’ll certainly go a long way. For Farrell’s talk about Cecil and Rasmus needing a big year, I think a breakout season from Morrow is equally or more important in terms of both determining his role on the franchise, and what the team’s needs are to contend.