The Pittsburgh Pirates will be glad to hear that the Cubs have signed Paul Maholm to a well-below market value deal of 1 year, $4.25MM. The deal includes a $6.5MM club option with a $500k buyout. The Pirates, of course, declined their contract option on Maholm for $9MM earlier this offseason, neglecting to get anything in return for him. Maholm has been worth 1.8 fWAR or more in each of the last 5 seasons, gets plenty of groundballs, suppresses homeruns, throws plenty of innings, and has routinely produced FIP's/xFIP's equal-ish or worse than his ERA, which suggests that he might be better than his ERA suggests. Naturally, there were no trade partners for the Pirates to find, and they didn't want to have a semi-useful pitcher on their staff, which is why they'll always be terrible, even in the NL Central.
The Cubs now have 6 people to occupy 5 spots in the starting rotation: Ryan Dempster, Maholm, Chris Volstad, Travis Wood, Randy Wells, and the suddenly still-certain to be traded Matt Garza. And for those out there who didn't think Garza was a trade candidate before this, shame on you.
Rumors have surfaced that the Tigers and Cubs are in advanced talks about Garza, and that highly-touted pitching prospect Jacob Turner could be among those sent to Wrigley. The last I heard, the Cubs were looking for a shitload of top prospects, but Stoeten at DJF seems to think that if Turner is involved, there won't be much else going with him in exchange for two years of expensive Garza control, which makes him (and me) wonder if the price for Garza has dropped a bit, which would allow the Jays to jump in if they were still interested. Given what we know about AA, I'm sure he's interested in Garza, assuming the price is right, and is probably constantly checking in periodically just to see if the price has dropped at all.
Stuff
We are 5 weeks away from the start of Spring Training. Prince Fielder has to sign somewhere, eventually, as does Edwin Jackson, Roy Oswalt, Kerry Wood, Dan Wheeler, Chris Snyder, Cody Ross, Magglio Ordonez, Brad Lidge, Hiroki Kuroda, Vlad Guerrero, Wilson Betemit, and more. Plus, the Yu Darvish stuff should finish soon. There's still some stuff left to go, but this is a boring time of the offseason, and I'm really quite ready for baseball to come back to me.
Former Jay Miguel Batista has re-signed with the Mets, and the Phillies are looking in to Jeremy Accardo for some reason.
Hiroyuki Nakajima has rejoined the Seibu Lions. He was posted earlier this offseason and was awarded to the Yankees after they won the bid. The two sides couldn't work out a deal, according to MLBTR, because of a discrepancy on how many years the two sides would agree to, and probably concerning Nakajima's role on the team as well.
Fangraphs' Bradley Woodrum has his take on the Maholm signing.
FIP is good, and probably better than whatever you're using to judge pitchers.
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