Barry Zito Won’t Be the Next Scott Kazmir

There has been a mixed reaction to the return of Barry Zito to the green and gold this week. Despite his signing to a minor league deal with no guarantee of making the big league roster, some fans think Beane has made an unnecessary acquisition that will, ultimately, be a flop. Others, myself included, are fairly indifferent about the grab.

Acquiring Zito for a low-wage minor league deal with an invite to spring training is a pretty smart gamble. If his stuff looks great in spring, we’ve got a solid veteran in the rotation and a bit more depth at an already stacked position. If his stuff looks terrible, we took a calculated, low impact, risk on someone who will now be one of our best minor league pitchers. There really isn’t a downside for the Athletics in this deal.

Then there are folks that will point to Beane’s penchant for resurrecting pitchers every year. Last year we saw Scott Kazmir make a dramatic return to form and, to a lesser extent, saw Jesse Chavez transform into a formidable starter. Is it possible that Zito is simply this year’s Kazmir and that we have a future all star fighting for a roster spot?

Probably not.

The likelihood of Zito’s return mirroring that of Kazmir is doubtful when you look at the numbers. Zito is five years older than Kazmir and got his Cy Young two seasons before Kazmir made his big league debut. That’s not to say that Zito can’t succeed at his age, just look at Bartolo Colon for proof that it can happen, but it will be much more difficult than Kazmir’s return to form.

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ERA wise, both Kazmir and Zito have similar low points with Kazmir peaking at 5.94 and Zito peaking at 5.87. The difference, if there really is one, is that 12% of Kazmir’s full seasons had ERAs over 5 where 21% of Zito’s seasons had 5+ ERAs.

What is worrisome to me is that Kazmir, since 2013, has thrown 215 more innings than Zito with 190 of those innings coming from 2014 when Zito didn’t pitch at all. This is where the potential comeback parallels take a dramatic turn for me.

When the A’s acquired Kazmir, he had already begun his comeback with the Indians, having pitched in 29 games in 2013  with a .526 win record and a 4.04 ERA. In 2014 he was a good story but he was hardly the gamble that Zito will be. Zito has gone an entire season without facing a big league hitter and the last season he did pitch saw him with a .313 win record and a 5.74 ERA in 30 games.

If we’re just looking at 2013, which is the last year either man pitched for a team before joining the A’s, we’ll see a noticeable split between the two players. Zito had 2.5 more hits per nine innings than Kazmir, .9 BB per 9 innings, 3.4 fewer strike outs per 9 innings. The fact of the matter is, Kazmir’s last season before coming to Oakland was not as bad as Zito’s last season and there wasn’t a year of inactivity prior to signing.

Kazmir was a gamble, for sure, and nobody expected him to go on to be an all star pitcher with a .625 win record (a number that was a little disappointing considering the struggles he had late in the year) but he had shown more promise and more potential, at least on paper, than Zito. To draw a comparison that this is going to be another Kazmir-like makeover is quite a stretch of the imagination. It could happen but it’s probably not going to. I can’t wait to see what he brings in spring training but I’m not terribly optimistic.