Fire Gardy

Remember all that talk a while back about Cuddyer’s contract? I talked about it back in March; while Tim Dierkes rated his deal as one of the worst current contracts in baseball, I pointed out that “it’s not out of the question that he returns to his 2007 form this year in 400-450 PA or so.” And that basically, while 2008 was a throwaway year,* if 2009 and 2010 are reasonably good years the contract won’t have been that bad.

* If you want an easy way to look at disastrous contracts, look for everyone who gets injured and then make fun of the GM. You can try to price in some injury risk, but if you demand a “30% catastrophic injury discount,” any agent worth being an agent will laugh in your face and walk out of the room. This risk is part of doing business, and I think it’s cheap to retroactively decide that the GM made a bad move based on injuries that sap a player’s ability for a year.

So … how’s that contract looking at the moment, with Cuddyer hitting .277/.358/.523 with 14 HR, 18 2B, 46 R, and 46 RBI? So far this season, Cuddyer has been worth $7M, which means if he just stopped playing today, he’d be worth more than he’s getting paid this season.

Of course, Fangraphs is less than optimistic about his ability to keep this pace up, but have adjusted their projections upwards, and have him finishing just 1 run below his value from 2006 (and 10 runs better than his 2007, which is what I was hoping for this year). And if he keeps up his current pace, he’ll be worth considerably more than he was in 2006.

I know I was pretty hard on Cuddyer early in the year, but at this point it’s really looking like his offseason eye surgery did in fact kick in, right around the beginning of May* — his OPS jumped above .700 on May 2, and has been going steadily upwards ever since.

* Perhaps you recall when I wrote about Denard’s eye surgery a while back, and pointed out that he didn’t really start hitting until May of last year. See a pattern here?

So Cuddyer’s contract is looking considerably better than it did four months ago, and I imagine that next year when Dierkes looks at this again next year he might not be so quick to shit on Cuddyer.

And I really don’t mean to go back to talking about eye surgery again, but it is a little bit striking,* isn’t it?

* In April, Cuddyer hit .224/.318/.316, with 15 K and 1 HR in 88 PA. Since then, he’s hit .297/.373/.598 with 44 K and 13 HR in 236 PA. Talk about turning a corner!

At the end of the day, though, it’s good to see Cuddyer hitting — and well — for an extended period of time. Let’s hope he can keep it up and make everyone remember why we’re paying him like we are.

(Naturally, now that I’ve said this, he’ll either get injured or start sucking, probably starting tonight. The universe has a funny way of doing that. Sorry about that everybody.)