Jamie Moyer and Cheating Death

I remember where I was when I learned that Jamie Moyer had been traded to the Phillies.  It was two in the afternoon, and I was sitting in my car waiting for someone to show up and let me look at a potential house for rent.  A lazy, stale August wind stirred sticky heat across pavement.  Unseen robins croaked monotone birdsongs.  The neighborhood was empty and the world felt bereft of promise.

I ended up spending a year in that house, which, like the 2007 Mariners, was surprisingly pleasant but not particularly memorable.  My anger at the Jamie Moyer trade, however, remained.  The next morning I went on a Rob Neyer chat to vent my frustrations, and he told me the same thing everyone else did: Moyer would be a free agent.  He’s 43 years old.  The Mariners should be happy they got anything for him at all.  This is not to criticize Neyer: the man is human, and no human could have foreseen the entirety that is the Jamie Moyer Experience.  But a quick look at the numbers reveals how awful this trade was.  Jamie Moyer, 2006-present:

As far as the returns: Andy Baldwin is 28 and still hasn’t reached the majors, languishing in Tacoma for three consecutive years.  He’s a Rochester Red Wing now, though this is perhaps not how he refers to himself at parties.  Andrew Barb underwent both elbow and knee surgery, and lasted one year in the Mariners organization; he spent 2010 in the independent Northern League.

Not even the argument of a salary dump can be made in Bavasi’s favor with this move: according to FanGraphs, Moyer’s 5.6 wins have been worth $24 million dollars over the last four and a half years.  His salary has been $27 million, a number that ignores ballpark effects (read: the spending habits of the Phillies).  To make matters even worse was the fact that Moyer’s departure created a hole in the rotation, one that Bavasi felt obligated to fill by one Horacio Ramirez.  It’s the trade that keeps on giving.

But let’s move backward from the facts to the speculation for a moment; it’s generally unfair to judge a GM using four years of hindsight.  At the time, everyone thought the trade was fine.  Bad team, moveable asset, flip for spare change, right?  It was a business move, a baseball move.  But this move is based on several assumptions, and these assumptions could have been challenged even at the time.  They were:

• Jamie Moyer was too old to succeed.  We have evidence now that this wasn’t true, but more importantly, we didn’t have evidence at the time to prove that it was.  At 43 years of age, there haven’t been a lot of pitchers like Jamie Moyer.  In his nine full seasons as a Mariner, Moyer started 32 games a season.  Pitchers aren’t like hitters.  They often don’t simply decline; they get hurt.  We’ve seen that now, with Moyer, at age 48; we weren’t seeing it at 43.
• Jamie Moyer was replaceable.  Mariners GM Bill Bavasi learned his mistake on this one in a hurry.  Often fans think they could be general managers, and this is because sometimes, general managers sound like fans.  Bavasi, returning from the winter meetings next year, sounded like a beaten man.  "This was one of the more miserable winter meetings I’ve ever been to," Bill admitted, in one of his humanizing asides. "Between the lack of activity and the volcanic (free agent) market, it was tough."  On a team that won 88 games, fourth and fifth starters for the Mariners threw 367.1 innings of 6.49 ERA baseball.
• Jamie Moyer was a free agent.  This is true, but Moyer never made threats about playing the market, never complained about salary.  He’d played here for ten years, his family lived here, his painful auto glass commercials were filmed here.  After being traded to the Phillies, he happily and quickly signed a fair contract with them.  Why wouldn’t he have done that here, with the team he had so many memories, where he salvaged his career?
• The Mariners were rebuilding.  Well, we hoped they were at the time, since 2006 didn’t offer much in the way of hope.  But then 2007 came around, and Bill Bavasi was absolutely certain he had a contending team.  This is a criticism targeted less at the trade itself and more about the general strategy with which this trade failed to align.  After handing away Moyer, Bavasi ended up signing Jeff Weaver and Jose Guillen, trading for Ramirez and Jose Vidro, and looking painfully like a guy drawing dead in a poker game.  Which, of course, he was.
• Then there’s the matter of legacy.  I know Seattle fans are often accused, rightly, of over-sentimentality.  We clutch onto our fading superstars like kids grab their mother’s leg on the first day of kindergarten.  And this is especially true for the Mariners… with hitters.  Here’s a list of starting pitchers who retired as a Mariner, among the top 50 leaders in games started for the team:

Moyer’s name would have made a fine addition to the top of that list.

In the end, Jamie Moyer represents the actuary’s dilemma: just because something is bound to happen, it doesn’t mean that it’s likely to happen at any given point.  A good comparison for Jamie Moyer’s career is death.  The average life expectancy for the American male in 2006 was around 75 years old. However, that doesn’t make it likely that someone will die at exactly age 75; in fact, the chance of dying between the ages of 75 and 76 are only 4.1%.  The age at which death becomes a fifty-fifty chance is a given year doesn’t happen until you turn 106. (Women still have the upper hand; they get to wait until 107.)

Moyer is the same way.  It’s very easy to say that pitchers, especially non-knuckleballers, don’t pitch until they’re 44.  And for any given prospect, that prediction is almost certainly correct.  But if that prospect lasts to the age of 43, those odds change.  And in light of this, I believe Moyer’s odds of being a good pitcher in a Mariners uniform, even in 2006, were far greater than the chances that either of the Andrews, Baldwin and Barb, had of being a good pitcher ever.