Blue Jays president Mark Shapiro says that righty Drew Hutchison has attracted trade interest from numerous teams, Ben Nicholson-Smith of Sportnet tweets. The Blue Jays expect Hutchison to rebound from a tough 2015 campaign. In a full article on the topic, however, Nicholson-Smith notes that the Blue Jays aren’t necessarily looking to deal Hutchison, who remains relatively cheap and should provide valuable depth next season.
Nicholson-Smith does explore the reasons there’s a market for Hutchison, who pitched 150 1/3 innings in 2015 and posted an ugly 5.57 ERA. Jeff Samardzija just got a $90MM contract after a 4.96 ERA season, demonstrating clearly that teams increasingly rely on scouting reports and advanced stats more heavily than traditional stats. Hutchison’s 2015 peripherals (7.7 K/9, 2.6 BB/9, 39.6% ground ball rate) weren’t outstanding, but they were much better than his ERA was, so teams might see him as a buy-low candidate. Hutchison is also young, at 25, and has made 60 starts in the past two seasons.
Further down, Nicholson-Smith notes that, in addition to potentially keeping Hutchison, the Blue Jays are looking for mid-range options to improve their pitching staff. They could attempt to improve their rotation depth by adding pitchers who could also pitch out of their bullpen, and along those lines, they’ve been in touch with representatives of Joe Blanton and Craig Stammen recently. They were also in discussions with Yusmeiro Petit, although Petit now has a deal in place with the Nationals. They’ll also look to fill out their rotation at Triple-A Buffalo via trades or non-roster invites or by optioning pitchers from the Majors.
Hutchison is a lot better pitcher than he showed us last year. It’s not beyond reason to suggest he might win a rotation job out of Spring Training next year.
no….Hutchinson WAS that bad last year and he hasn’t shown us he is a good pitcher. He had a 13-5 record last year but in only five of the 30 games he started did Toronto fail to score more than three runs. His career era is nearly 5. Maybe he has the talent to be a better pitcher but right now, he’s not exactly a guy to count on.
George is referring to his peripheral numbers. His FIP shows that his ERA should have been much better than it was. Drew ran into some tough luck last year. That said, I obviously agree that he didn’t pitch well last year. He needs to prove himself in 2016 or his career could soon be over.
So many teams trying to find cheap rotation options.
Which isn’t odd but the value of SPs have risen so much after the
Price / Greinke / Miller that I don’t think any trades for SPs will happen with ease.
Its the same every year for the blue jays. Have an absolutely amazing offence, but cheap out on starting pitching. We spent 30m on estrada, happ and chavez (via trade), we could have gotten zimmerman, chavez and a pen arm for that amount of cash. Absolutely ridiculous. Is Stroman, Dickey, Estrada,Happ and Chavez/Hutchison good enough to win the east again? Do they not see the effect an ace had on our team?