You couldn’t watch a Brewers game last year without seeing the Jeff Suppan recycling commercial. Play-by-play man Brian Anderson called the action while Soup pitched things like egg cartons and plastic bottles into a recycling bin. They were fairly long tosses, and though it looked pretty hard, Suppan proved up to the task.
But if you’re a Milwaukee Brewers fan, you should hope that’s the only place he pitches this year.
Yes, the Brewers owe Suppan $12.5 million dollars in 2010, the final season of his four-year, $42 million contract. But they should give it to him as part of a summerlong paid vacation. Let him sling wings at Soup’s Sports Grill instead of slinging gopher balls at Miller Park.
I know cutting Suppan is a waste of money. But keeping him is just as fruitless. So you can either waste that cash while he hurts your team on the mound, or you can waste it while he doesn’t. And the first rule of baseball, like medicine, is to do no harm.
It’s nothing personal against Suppan, mind you. He’s not a clubhouse troublemaker. He’s done plenty for the community with his charitable works, notably his Soup’s Troops initiative, which buys tickets for active military personnel and their families. He’s always been a pro.
But baseball is a bottom-line business. You either perform or you make room for somebody who will, especially on a team with serious and immediate playoff aspirations. And Suppan, quite simply, has not performed.
Too much is at stake this season to let one bad investment counteract the good ones. The Prince Fielder contract clock is close to striking midnight. With that in mind, Milwaukee gave big bucks to pitchers Randy Wolf, Doug Davis and LaTroy Hawkins. All three were brought here so the Brewers could win now. And Suppan is not a piece of that puzzle.
By any measurement, the guy is pretty much done as an effective major league pitcher. Not just because he’s allowed nearly a run per inning this spring – you don’t rate veteran pitchers solely on spring performances, even when that performance includes a 7.71 ERA and six homers allowed in just 16.1 innings. But the stack of evidence against Suppan has been growing for years.
He’s been in decline ever since joining the Brewers, posting a 4.62 ERA in his first season here, then slipping to 4.96 in 2008 and 5.29 last year. Moreover, that popular tag of “innings eater” no longer applies. Make a graph of his innings pitched – 206.2 in 2007, 177.2 in 2008, 161.2 in 2009 – and you get a ski slope. Toss in spring training, and it’s clear that the winter layoff didn’t help.
Basically, the only stat that qualifies Suppan as a major league pitcher is his salary. So if there’s little reason to expect you’ll win when Suppan is on the mound, why put your team at a clear disadvantage every fifth day?
If the Brewers had nobody else to fill Suppan’s role, then you’d have some semblance of an argument for keeping him. That may have been the case in past years, but not today. Suppan is, at most, only the seventh-best starter in the organization.
Milwaukee’s already named its first four starting pitchers – Yovani Gallardo, Randy Wolf, Doug Davis and Dave Bush. That leaves Suppan battling for the fifth spot with two others, Manny Parra and Chris Narveson. Parra’s recent results have been as bad as Suppan’s, but he’s still young and has lots of upside. Narveson’s performed the best of the bunch, closing the 2009 season strong and pitching just as well in the spring.
Stashing Parra or Narveson in the minors isn’t an option. Both would have to clear waivers, and some other team is certain to snap them up. So barring a trade (and why trade away pitchers that you believe in?), you must keep both in the bigs. There’s one open slot in the bullpen, so give Narveson the fifth starter’s role that he’s earned and let Parra work out his troubles in the bullpen, where he’s ready to become a starter should someone else get hurt.
Where does that leave Suppan? Frankly, in no-man’s land. Hard to imagine he’d accept a Triple-A assignment, so that’s not realistic. You could put him in the bullpen, but only at the expense of a more deserving pitcher (Carlos Villanueva) who’d have to go to Triple-A. And that, too, would only weaken a team that’s built to win now. Don’t you want your best team on the field from day one?
Which brings us back to the best option: cutting Suppan. As painful as eating his salary would be, it’s more painful to prolong the agony.
If you still can’t stomach the idea of blowing $12.5 million this year, play a trick on yourself. Instead of thinking it was a bad four-year contract, pretend it was just a bad three-year deal. OK, a really bad one. Three years, $42 million. Instead of a $10.5 million annual average, the Brewers paid Suppan $14 mil per year.
Put it in those terms, let both parties move on, and consider it the price of a better night’s sleep.
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