SCOTTSDALE, AZ -- The effects of having a veteran in the rotation isn't something that's easy to quantify, but plenty of teams make room for older players to take on the role of advisor and advocate. This poses the question that perhaps a pitcher can contribute in a way that transcends what he accomplishes on the mound. Aaron Harang has been around long enough that he thinks the answer to that question might be, "Yes."
Can Aaron Harang help the 2014 Indians?
Harang could be coming to the end of a long career, but he still thinks there’s something left to help Cleveland.
Joe Camporeale-USA TODAY Sports
The Indians owed last season's unexpected playoff berth to their rotation. As Mike Bates pointed out earlier this winter, one of the reasons they were so effective was that they increased their strikeout percentage by nearly 30 percent, which took them from 14th in the league in strikeouts to second. While it was a group effort, were it not for strong second-half performances from Scott Kazmir, a pitcher whose health and command problems kicked him out of the majors and into independent ball for a season, and Ubaldo Jimenez, an underperformer the Indians probably would have traded prior to the 2013 season given the chance, there's no way they would have made it to October.
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Kazmir and Jimenez, who are credited with roughly two-thirds of the strikeout improvement last season, are gone now though, and the Indians didn't delve into the free-agent market to replace them, hoping instead that internal candidates and veterans on minor-league contracts can fill that void. The Indians aren't rushing to make any final decisions just yet, but it seems that they have four of their rotation spots settled: Justin Masterson, Corey Kluber, Danny Salazar, and Zach McAllister.
Masterson is an established if occasionally inconsistent pitcher who managed three shutouts last season, the most in the majors, the best strikeout percentage (24.3 percent) of his career, and the highest ground-ball-to-fly-ball ratio in the major leagues. Kluber and McAllister are twins in service time and matching middle-finger sprains that cost them time last season, and while Francona has grown more confident in both of them, with less than 300 innings in the majors apiece, it’s difficult to be overly optimistic about their ability and health. Of the four pitchers, the one with the most promise and the most to prove is Salazar, who made his debut in the majors last July. In 52 innings pitched, he had a 3.12 ERA and struck out 30.8 percent of the batters he faced, relying on his 96 mph fastball.
Danny Salazar will need to replace the upside of Cleveland's departed arms. Photo credit: Gary A. Vasquez-USA TODAY Sports
As for the fifth spot, the Indians are hoping that one of five candidates -- Josh Tomlin, Trevor Bauer, Carlos Carrasco, Shaun Marcum, and Aaron Harang -- will emerge as the right one for the final spot. Tomlin and Carrasco both underwent Tommy John surgery (in 2012 and 2011) respectively, and have yet to establish themselves in a rotation post-op. The Indians will probably choose to wait on Bauer, who has a track record of doing well in the minors and imploding in major-league parks. Marcum was signed to a minor-league deal with the Indians this winter, but he's still recovering from surgery he had last year to address numbness in his pitching hand and won't be ready for opening day. Then there's Harang, a 12-year veteran who despite a good 2012 season with the Dodgers has been struggling to find his command and steady employment since.
While Carrasco and Tomlin may be the favorites for the fifth spot, Harang, 36 in May, is hopeful that the Indians might recognize he can fill a void in their lineup not just because of pitching ability, but also because of his age. The Indians rotation is young and inexperienced (Masterson is the oldest at 28, Salazar the youngest at 24) and so it’s at least worth exploring whether or not there might be value in having someone in the rotation that has been through the wars, even if his stuff is no longer equal to that of his prime seasons.
Harang's 2014 spring training photo, in which he dons the eighth hat of his career. Photo credit: Lance Iversen-USA TODAY Sports It's been a long road for Harang, who debuted in 2002 with the Athletics. He never became a household name, or even a top of the rotation pitcher, but he's worked hard, has an immaculate bill of health, and has pitched almost 1,950 major league innings over 12 seasons. He's never been an All-Star and he's never pitched in the postseason. The closest he's come to accolades was an honorable mention in the 2007 Cy Young voting, when he finished fourth. While there have been plenty of good nuggets throughout his career, his performance has been inconsistent at times, which makes it easy to forget his success. In 2006, he led the National League in wins, and in 2007 he ranked in the Cy Young voting, but the following season, he led the league in losses and that's what people seem to remember.
You can break down Harang's career into two halves. Through 2007, his pinnacle Cy Young-sorta year, he was 63-49 with a 107 ERA+. Since then, he's gone 47-67 with a 90 ERA+, and went from being a fixture in the Reds' rotation (his 213 starts ranks him 20th all-time for their organization) to a roaming pitcher that has been on seven different teams in four years, including the Padres, Dodgers, Rockies (for less than a week), Mariners, Mets, and now the Indians.
"The adjustment from Cincinnati to San Diego was good," Harang said on Sunday after his spring training start against the Giants in Scottsdale, in which he pitched four innings and allowed just one run. His adjustment to the Dodgers went fine in 2012 (3.61 ERA in 179.2 innings), but last year he was the odd man out of the rotation when they added Zack Greinke and Hyun-jin Ryu. The switch set off a chain of events that made 2013 the worst of his career.
“In Los Angeles, they were building me up as a starter, then they tell me I have to go to the bullpen. There was a lot of choppiness and movement last year that really threw things off.”
Harang never made it into a game with the Dodgers in 2013 and was traded just six days into the season. After that, he was traded two more times and released once, and even though he looked a little better in the final month of the season after the Mets picked him up (posting a 3.52 ERA despite allowing five home runs in just 23 innings), it wasn’t enough to convince a team to offer him even a major-league deal this winter. All told, Harang pitched 143.1 innings with a 5.40 ERA last season and gave up 26 home runs.
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Harang thinks the biggest culprit was that all of the bouncing around didn’t allow him to find his rhythm. “There was a lot of time off between appearances. In the spring, I had about five days off before the season started and then six days off before I got traded and another five days off before I even got into a game. So it ended up being about two or two-and-a-half weeks before I got into a game at the end of the spring for my first outing. You lose a little bit of what you’ve built up and so I was playing catch up to try to get back up to where I could be. Ultimately, I can’t use the trades as a definitive excuse. I was just being really inconsistent.”
Harang reiterated, however, that even though last season was difficult, he feels ready to pitch and so far this spring, he’s allowed just two earned runs (none of them homers) in nine innings. There’s a chance that last season was just one that’s better forgotten and that Harang will bounce back this year, but he also feels he can give something to an Indians team that is short on veteran pitching by just being himself.
“The biggest thing I bring is just having experience ...and being able to watch guys and talk to them about situations I’ve been in if I see them in similar situations on the field. If they are out there and the game starts to speed up a little bit, maybe I can help them step back and slow the game down a little bit and stay under control and focus.”
One thing that jumps out about Harang when you look at his career, is that even though he should hit the 2,000 innings pitched mark this season, he’s never suffered a significant injury, being sidelined only for minor ailments and an appendectomy. “You can’t explain it, “Harang said. “You look at some of the guys who have phenomenal mechanics or supposed phenomenal mechanics and they end up blowing out. The biggest thing is learning myself and trying to maintain every season as it goes on while knowing my limitations when I do get out there.”
"If they are out there and the game starts to speed up a little bit, maybe I can help them step back and slow the game down a little bit and stay under control and focus."
While he acknowledged that injuries are somewhat of a crapshoot, there’s still things that young pitchers need to learn. “You have to know when to push through something and when to back off. You do have aches and pains throughout the season, but knowing what the pains are and knowing what the aches are and knowing what you can go through and what you shouldn’t go through.”
It's nearly impossible to measure how beneficial having a veteran in a lineup can be on a win-loss record, but it's something that plenty of teams experiment with and manager Terry Francona has never shied away from experienced players. Even when it seemed that Curt Schilling and Tim Wakefield may no longer have utility, he managed to use them in the rotation and in the bullpen to keep them around. Francona has done the same with middle-aged relievers who brought experience and clubhouse presence, particularly Julian Tavarez, Paul Byrd, and Scott Atchison, who spent two seasons in Boston under Francona and is now part of the Indians organization.
There's also Jason Giambi, who despite being 43, having a broken rib, and hitting just .183/.282/.371 as the Indians' designated hitter in 2012, will make this year's team because Francona likes having him around. There's obviously a limit to how much a veteran player can hurt a team before the idea of keeping him for his wisdom seems ludicrous, and to be fair, Giambi is pushing that limit. Yet, there is nothing wrong with giving Harang priority if he can in fact help mentor and develop the pitching staff as a supplement to pitching coach Mickey Callaway. While the Indians won't (and shouldn't) rearrange their entire rotation and consider bouncing a guy like Salazar back to the minors just to get a greybeard onto the team, there may be enough room to consider using Marcum, Carrasco, Tomlin, and Harang in such a way that you get a good mix of experience and skills, and since they are all right-handed, that's easier to do.
If the Indians are lucky again, they might catch lightning in a bottle with Harang the way they did last year with Kazmir, who also came to the organization on a minor-league deal when no one else wanted him. As for the importance of aging players on a young roster, the simple answer seems to be that as long as a player has a positive impact on a team’s output, then he should at least be considered for a roster spot. The obvious danger is that blindly coveting a player just for their age would be a lot like giving a player’s salary and a valuable roster spot to a mascot or a coach, but that seems to be the fine line that Francona is walking with Giambi, if not Harang. Of course, it’s easier to hide a part-time DH/pinch-hitter than it is a starting pitcher, but for an Indians team that was strangely inert this offseason, failing to react when their two best starting pitchers left town, they can use any edge they can get, even if it’s just the wisdom of age.
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