Vazquez Lands With The Marlins

The Marlins, like the Dodgers, wasted no time filling out their pitching staff this offseason. They agreed to a one-year deal worth $7MM with Javier Vazquez yesterday, trading a full no-trade clause for a discount on the sticker price. Javy moves to a friendlier run environment and gets a crack at rebuilding his value before going back out onto the market next season, but more importantly for him, he’s nice and close to his family in Puerto Rico. A physical is all that stands in the way of the deal being a physical, but it’s not a given.

After a decade of 200+ IP seasons, the question right now is Vazquez’s health. He threw just 157.1 innings in 2010, his lowest total since 1999, mostly because he stunk rather than outright injury. Javy’s velocity was down at the start of the year, from 90-91 to about 88-89, and it progressively got worse as the season went on.

There were times in August and September that he’d come out of gate firing 83-84 mph fastballs in the first inning, but it would usually creep up to 88 or so after an inning or two of work. Just from watching the games though, and this is completely subjective, it was rather easy to see that his breaking pitches were lacking too. His curveball and slider were cement-mixers more than anything, just spinning without much action. Vazquez’s changeup was fine, but with his fastball compromised he didn’t have anything to change speeds off of. It became a batting practice fastball. It’s not ridiculous to think that the righty could have been hiding an injury, especially at age 34 and with all those miles on his arm.

But let’s assume for a second that he’s healthy and physically capable of 200 innings and throwing the ball hard enough to break a window in 2011. A straight 5-3-2 weighting system pegs Vazquez for a 4.35 FIP (8.1 K/9, 2.9 BB/9, 1.4 HR/9) next season, a far cry from the ≤3.86 FIP he posted every year from 2006 through 2009. He’s always been homer prone as an extreme fly ball guy (just 39% grounders in the FanGraphs era), so his new stadium should help a bit in that department. If he gets his innings in and regains some stuff, the wins will surely be there.

Vazquez had been a quality fantasy starter for years until his 2010 meltdown, though it’s reasonable to expect a rebound next year after the AL-NL switch, the ballpark switch, and an offseason of rest. There’s enough quality starters out there that you don’t have to count on him to be one of your top three, but as a roll of the dice later in the draft, a double-digit round, there’s some big upside potential here, as Hubie Brown would say.