Zack Greinke, Agentless

I’ve long held a great appreciation for Zack Greinke. He’s one of the most interesting guys in baseball and isn’t afraid to speak honestly when asked a question. It also doesn’t hurt that he’s really good at pitching baseballs. Adding to the myth of Greinke, it now appears that he’ll be without an agent to represent him for the time being, and one year away from free agency, he may even tackle some of his own extension talks with the Milwaukee Brewers. If it seems strange that the guy with well documented struggles against anxiety, and who once said after winning the AL Cy Young Award, “I hope it doesn’t get that way, where everyone is like, `Oh, hey, Zack, hi,” is entertaining the idea of negotiating his own potential multi-year and multi-million dollar deal, it kind of is. That’s just how Greinke rolls, you guys.

As the story goes, Greinke somewhat mysteriously left his long-time agency last Winter. He became involved with a different company, but when it came time to designate specific representation before 2011, he sort of just didn’t fill out the paperwork, leaving himself without an agent. Not much has changed up to now. A very knowledgeable player, Greinke has got a bit of press here and there in regards to his study and understanding of more advanced statistics and methods of player evaluation. His relationship with former teammate and well-known stat-head Brian Bannister probably contributed a bit to that. I can’t speak to Zack’s ability to handle other facets of player representation like dealing with endorsement deals and such (it sounds like a total nightmare), but from a numbers perspective, it’s easy to imagine that the ever-confident Greinke could hold his own at the bargaining table. While it’s likely he’ll retain an agent, or at the very least counsel before signing anything substantial, Greinke did address the story recently, saying, “It’d be me in charge as of right now … So, we’ll see how long that lasts.”

So what kind of salary extension or free agent contract might Zack Greinke hope to attain for his client Zack Greinke? A long ways off from any real definitive study, I took a quick look at how Greinke has compared to other pitchers over the last three-years of his soon-to-expire deal. You’re probably aware that Greinke took home the Cy Young Award in 2009, striking out 9.5 batters per nine innings, and posting an ERA of 2.13 and FIP of 2.33, good for a sort of ridiculous fWAR of 9.3. The last two seasons have been a bit less exceptional for Greinke, but with his peripheral stats suggesting better performance than his ERA would indicate, he was still worth 5.1 and 3.9 fWAR the last two seasons. His strikeout rate also raised drastically to 10.5/9 in 2011 after joining the National League. These kind of numbers place Greinke in pretty elite company, sandwiched between the likes of CC Sabathia, Felix Hernandez, Tim Lincecum, Dan Haren and Jared Weaver. All of these players have signed lucrative deals at various stages in their careers for a number of different contract lengths, but if you’d allow me a bit of somewhat-educated speculation, I’d imagine a contract slightly below the Weaver deal might be a good place for Greinke to shoot for when selling his own status. We’ll knock Greinke down a bit due to a few durability issues and an ERA that’s less shiny than Weaver’s, but other than that, their ages, numbers, and awards hardware matches up very well. While a five-year $85 million contract probably won’t fly, I could easily envision a comparable four-year $68 million deal being more than fair for Greinke’s future services. At this point, I guess we’ll have to see if Greinke himself will reach a similar conclusion. Although it would be really weird if he did, handled everything alone, and got himself signed to this exact, roughly envisioned deal, because what is he doing, reading my mind?

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Kyle writes baseball nonsense at The Trance of Waiting. You can follow him on Twitter @AgainstKyle.