You can't sugarcoat it; that's among the very worst contracts out there. He's a replacement value pitcher. There are worse things you can do than keeping him around to eat low-leverage innings when he's cheap. There is no roster on which I'd pay him first year arb money; the minute he gets over $400K you replace him in Rule 5. $63M over 5 seasons? Ouch.
As for how he got the contract-- he was released by his previous owner at age 26, probably because he was arb-eligible for the first time and that owner didn't want to pay him $1.4M or whatever he was asking, preferring to replace him in Rule 5. Because his OVR is inflated by very high DUR/ST, and because FA demands are based on OVR, he must have asked for something like $5M a year for 4 years in FA.
At that point, either:
- A very new owner who was just missing the fundamentals of the game offered him an essentially random contract right off the bat, or
- Even scarier to think about, there was a bidding war over him to push him to that contract.
1/21/2019 3:30 PM (edited)