Revisiting Zito's Contract

When decisions are made during times of desperation, the results are rarely pretty.

In the 2006 offseason, the Giants were determined to sign a big-time free agent bat. They offered deals upwards of $100 million to two players, but couldn’t coax either Carlos Lee or Alfonso Soriano to head to San Francisco. In hindsight, this ended up being a very good thing, in that neither Lee nor Soriano are particularly useful any longer, if at all; except that, having failed in their endeavor to sign them, the Giants pulled the trigger on another ill-advised deal: they signed Barry Zito.

There wasn’t really anything wrong with Zito as a Major League starter at the time, nor really is there now. The problem was this: they gave him the richest contract for a pitcher in baseball history, i.e. 7 years for a total of $126 million, and an option for an eighth season for another $18 million (or otherwise a $7 million buyout).

Zito was never an elite pitcher, despite wining the AL Cy Young award in 2002. His best season actually came in his first full campaign, when he finished with 5.0 Wins Above Replacement (WAR) in 2001. But that season he struck out 8.61 batters per nine innings. and he would never again approach that. He was always more of a finesse lefty, and one who walked his fair share of batters. As his fastball velocity slowly eroded, so did his value. After his 2002 Cy Young season, he never again posted a FIP (fielding independent pitching) beneath 4.00 (it was 3.87 in ’02). His WAR went from that 5.0 in 2001, to 4.4, to 4.3, to 3.2, to 3.0, and to 2.1 in 2006, his last season with the Athletics.

And then the Giants made him the richest pitcher in history, despite these obvious signs of his steady decline.