Adam Wainwright, Enormous Draft Risk

Nearly two years ago in this space, we wrote about how Adam Wainwright’s extension was a bargain, given the production he offered compared to the massive dollar figures other players across the sport were getting.

To miss a full season to Tommy John surgery and return without missing a beat while getting back up to speed — Wainwright’s 2012 featured baseball’s sixth-best FIP — is practically unheard of.

Wainwright did it, and then he kept doing it. His 2013 was the best season of his career and might have earned him his first Cy Young were it not for the historic performance of Clayton Kershaw.

In 2014, Wainwright did it again, putting up a career-best 2.38 ERA. He also leads all of baseball in innings pitched over the past two seasons, which doesn’t even take into account the 51 additional postseason frames he contributed. Some guys never make it back the same from elbow surgery, but the post-surgery version of Wainwright has continued to be among baseball’s best.

So when Insider recently put together a “Top 10 Starting Pitchers” list for a national television broadcast that didn’t include Wainwright, Cardinals fans were understandably displeased. When I explain right now why he shouldn’t be considered among the top 20 starting pitchers for 2015, I don’t imagine that reaction is going to improve. But there’s risk here. Lots of it.
On the surface, Wainwright’s 2014 looked like another great year in a string of great years. That career-best ERA came along with his second 20-win season. His 2.88 FIP was the third best of his career and was better than his career average; he made the All-Star team and finished third in Cy Young voting.

It didn’t, however, come without concern, particularly regarding the health of his elbow. In June, Wainwright complained of a sore elbow and skipped a start to rest what was termed as “tendonitis.” In August, he admitted that he’d been dealing with a “dead arm,” which was his explanation for a seven-game stretch in which he allowed three or more earned runs six times.

In October, he struggled badly in each of his first two playoff starts while insisting his issues were more mechanical than physical, to the point that Lance Lynn was on call to take the ball in Game 5 of the NLCS if Wainwright couldn’t. He started and pitched well, but then ended up undergoing elbow surgery anyway to “trim cartilage” just days after the start. The issue, apparently, was so bad that Wainwright could neither twist open a jar nor “support the weight of a Sprite can.”

While both Wainwright and the Cardinals insist the procedure was minor and that he’ll be fine in 2015, it’s understandable that you get worried when a pitcher with a recent major elbow injury on his resumé finds himself dealing with more elbow problems, especially a pitcher in his 30s who has thrown as many innings as Wainwright has. It’s that last part that’s a key point, because Wainwright has thrown 733.1 innings (regular season and playoffs) in three years since his Tommy John surgery. Research from The Hardball Times has shown that on average, pitchers last approximately 650 innings and 4.5 seasons after a Tommy John before breaking down again. Wainwright has rarely been average in anything during his time in the bigs, so that should hardly be taken as a guarantee. It is, however, a point against his continued dominance.

Nor is the fact that after four straight seasons of missing bats in the 22-23 percent range, Wainwright slipped to 19.9 percent last year. That’s worse than it looks, though, because the trend in baseball has been going the other way. That is, while Wainwright went down, baseball went up, so a more appropriate way to look at it would be to see how he’s trended against the rest of the National League. Since 2012, he’s pretty consistently struck out batters at a clip 2 to 4 percent better than your regular NL pitcher. Last year, for the first time, he was slightly (if only ever so slightly) below-average.

Year	% bats missed above NL avg
2009	3.6
2010	4.3
2011	(n/a)
2012	2.0
2013	3.2
2014	-0.6

Wainwright was pretty open as to why that was, saying that his sore elbow in the second half prevented him from throwing his two-seam and four-seam fastballs as much or as well as he would have liked, and the data backs this up. In April, Wainwright was throwing his cutter and curve 54 percent of the time; in September, that was 70 percent of the time, and the lack of sinkers likely also played into his decreasing ground ball rate.

Fortunately for Wainwright, even his third and fourth pitches are still pretty good, so he was able to get by with this new pitch mixture, though with a considerable amount of inconsistency, as we’ve seen. That said, if he’s going to put up another elite-level season, he’s going to need his full arsenal — he’s going to need to make sure that he can keep hitters off-balance with a fastball so that he can set them up to be devastated by a curveball.

It’s easy to say that “he’s healthy now, so he’ll be fine,” and maybe that’s true. But we can’t know that he is, and with plenty of reasons to worry — even the Cardinals are talking about limiting his innings early in the season — it’s not hard at all to see a Wainwright who is merely pretty good, not great.

That leads us into the other factor at play here, which is that starting pitching is just so, so deep around baseball right now that saying Wainwright shouldn’t be valued as one of baseball’s utmost elite shouldn’t be construed as an insult. On that Top 10 list I referenced earlier, I also couldn’t find room for established stars like Cole Hamels, Madison Bumgarner, Jordan Zimmermann, Yu Darvish and James Shields, or young stars attempting to overcome injury trouble of their own like Jose Fernandez, Matt Harvey, Garrett Richards and Masahiro Tanaka, to say nothing of breakout types I firmly believe in like Carlos Carrasco and Marcus Stroman.

That’s 11 more names past my initial top 10 right there, and while you can argue that not all of these guys are certain to outperform Wainwright in 2015, you get the idea. With offense down to lows so extreme that baseball people are constantly spitballing ways to add run-scoring, the sport is just swimming in pitchers who can make hitters look silly. The competition is so stacked at the top that when you realize you can’t have 18 pitchers in the top 10, you really have to start looking for reasons someone gets bumped. Maybe it’s age, health or ballpark. It’s difficult to say that Wainwright is less risky than many of his contemporaries.

Steamer, for example, sees 173 innings of 3.38 ERA ball from Wainwright, which is hardly a disaster. That’s a solidly above-average season. But that also stands out from the crowd a lot less than Wainwright’s typical great season would. In terms of WAR, that’s approximately the 30th best starting pitcher season in the projections, regardless of which flavor of WAR (FIP-based or RA9-based) you prefer.

That, really, is the takeaway here. Barring a serious injury event, it’s difficult to envision a pitcher as good as Wainwright falling apart. He’s still going to help St. Louis win, and may even be the team’s best starter again. But with some very serious concerns about his health, with his increasing age and heavy workload, and with so much other stiff competition from dozens of other very good starting pitchers, it may be time that we look at Wainwright differently. After all, you don’t have to try too hard to find reasons to.