Moore…things change.
It was a different kind of sports funk than the late-’90s October feedings to the Yankees, or the early-’80s pain of irrelevance, or being the last fan asked to please leave the seats on November 1, 2010.
But September 30, 2011 was a gut punch I won’t forget.
Texas, defending its first-ever American League pennant, had responded with a franchise-record 96 wins in the regular season, clearly targeting a second straight World Series berth.
In 2010, Texas had gone 8–9 down the stretch. But in 2011, no team in the American League pitched better in September than the Rangers — who won 14 of their final 16 in the regular season — and no team in baseball produced more September offense.
Until the final day of the month.
Like in 2010, Texas drew Tampa Bay to start the post-season, but unlike 2010, the Rangers opened the series at home.
Texas had its number one starter, C.J. Wilson (5–1, 1.21 over his final six starts, with a .194/.273/.248 slash) on the hill, coming off a two-inning start four days earlier designed to get him a little work and then get him off the mound.
The Rays were throwing a 22-year-old whose own previous six starts included five for the Durham Bulls. Matt Moore had made one career big league start — eight days before ALDS Game One — when he got the nationally televised daytime assignment in Arlington.
Josh Hamilton picked up two base hits off Moore that day.
But Ian Kinsler went hitless and Elvis Andrus went hitless and Michael Young went hitless and Adrian Beltre went hitless and Mike Napoli went hitless and Nelson Cruz went hitless and Yorvit Torrealba (DH’d!! and) went hitless and Craig Gentry went hitless and that’s an insanely talented lineup of hitters, with now 23 All-Star Games to their name, who failed to hit safely against the 22-year-old rookie southpaw.
Wilson allowed eight runs (six earned) in five innings and Texas was hammered at home, 9–0, and if you want to read a gut-punched recap of that game, be my guest. What that day was for me was a crushing blow to the idea that the Rangers would be able to get further in 2011 than they did the year before.
(They did get there, of course, starting out by winning the next three straight against the Rays, not allowing them to get Moore back out on the mound for a Game Five).
None of the above is to suggest Texas got Vidal Nuno’d by Moore. When the 2011 season ended, every single one of the major websites who do this sort of thing had Moore as baseball’s best pitching prospect — and Baseball America was the only to stick its neck out and suggest a different player, Washington’s Bryce Harper, actually ranked ahead of Moore. But BA agreed with MLB.com and Baseball Prospectus and FanGraphs that Moore was ahead of Angels outfielder Mike Trout.
Those publications all had Jurickson Profar between number 4 and number 7 in the game. If you think it borders on unimaginable that, six years later, Profar finds himself out of options and seemingly getting close to that as far as opportunities are concerned, consider the idea that Moore, baseball’s best pitching prospect (if not best prospect, in a heat with Harper and Trout) at age 22 and coming off a seven-inning, two-hit, scoreless effort to give Tampa Bay an ALDS lead on the road, would be traded at age 28 for as little as what he was traded for, and that the General Manager who acquired him would be asked for comments to essentially defend the move.
Imagine Noah Syndergaard being traded to your team once he turns 28. Or Lance McCullers. Or, for those of you who are into those prospect lists, Walker Buehler. Or, if he hadn’t just had Tommy John surgery, Alex Reyes.
Yeah, Tommy John. About that. Matt Moore had his own in April 2014. That was coming off a 17–4, 3.29 season in 2013, his second full year in the big leagues. He hasn’t been the same since. Not particularly close, in fact.
Which is why it not only took just a package of minor league righthanders Sam Wolff (who could have been drafted this week via Rule 5 but wasn’t) and Israel Cruz (who has two Dominican Summer League seasons and two Rookie League seasons in Surprise [5.12 ERA] to his credit) to get him — but also required the Giants (we’ll get to them in a bit) to throw in $750,000 in international bonus pool money to get the deal done.
Wolff (whom I had as the number 39 prospect in the Rangers system) is coming off August flexor tendon surgery on his elbow (two years after an Achilles tendon injury that cost him an entire season) and will start the 2018 season rehabbing. He’ll pitch in the big leagues, likely in relief — and probably would have this year had it not been for the August injury — but, again, slid through Thursday’s draft unselected, and is just one year and 10 months younger than Moore, whose more than 800 innings in the big leagues are more than 800 more than Wolff can claim.
Surely Cruz — 20 years old with only 65 (fairly ineffective) stateside innings at the lowest level — wouldn’t have netted that $750,000 pool space himself, which if true at least suggests that San Francisco had to give Texas more than just Moore for Wolff.
Sounds crazy.
Especially coming off two straight fully healthy seasons in which Moore averaged 186.1 innings, made 32 Quality Starts, and fanned about eight batters per nine innings, walking under 3.5 per nine. There was also this, on October 11, 2016, five years and 11 days after he blanked Texas on two hits over seven in his first playoff appearance:
Chicago Cubs catcher David Ross hit a solo homer in the third.
Anthony Rizzo singled in the fourth.
But, over Moore’s eight innings, Dexter Fowler went hitless and Kris Bryant went hitless and Ben Zobrist went hitless and Addison Russell went hitless and Jason Heyward went hitless and Javier Baez went hitless and John Lackey and a series of pinch-hitters went hitless and, man, I know that 2011 Rangers lineup was stacked, but come on.
Moore (8.0–2–2–1–2–10) straight dominated Chicago and his own former manager, Joe Maddon, poised to send the NLDS to a decisive Game Five, before five Giants relievers yielded four ninth-inning Cubs runs and went home for the winter.
That was just a year ago.
That summer, minutes before the trade deadline, San Francisco had picked Moore up from the Rays for third baseman Matt Duffy and two prospects. The trade happened hours after the Dodgers, who were two games behind the Giants in the division, had traded for Oakland lefthander Rich Hill (we’ll get to him in a bit).
Moore went 6–5, 4.08 for the Giants down the stretch that summer, posting the best strikeout rate (9.1 per nine) and lowest home run rate (0.7 per nine) of his career, and throwing that Game Four masterpiece that his bullpen couldn’t preserve. Then came 2017, a terrible year by any measure (6–15 record, 5.52 ERA, a league-leading 107 earned runs allowed, a career-worst 27 home runs surrendered).
The poor run support Moore got (third-lowest in the big leagues) likely had something to do with those league-high 15 losses. But it doesn’t explain the runs scored by the other team when he was pitching, and that has to change for this pickup — which will cost Texas $9 million in 2018, and another $10 million in 2019 that the club can buy out for $750,000 — to work.
If he’s good again in 2018, Texas has a reasonably priced starter it can bring back for 2019.
Or, depending on circumstances, trade to a contender, either this July or next winter.
And if Moore turns out not to be what Texas is hoping for, it will cost less than $1 million to cut ties a year from now.
But the Rangers, while not divulging the analytics that give them confidence, think there are reasons to believe Moore can refind some of the form that made him a formidable big league starter, if not the top-of-the-rotation type everyone believed he was on his way to becoming before he got hurt. “Last year clearly was not his best year,” Jon Daniels conceded, “but we believe there are really some reasons he’s primed for a bounceback.”
So, Rich Hill.
While not the Baseball America cover kid early in his career, he did emerge as a solid young starter in the mid-2000s (with the Cubs), before a shoulder injury and then elbow surgery led to a nomad’s journey that took him from Greenville to Salem to Pawtucket to Boston to the Gulf Coast League to Portland to Pawtucket to Boston to Cleveland to Pawtucket to Los Angeles (AL) to Scranton/Wilkes-Barre to New York (AL) to Syracuse to independent Long Island to Pawtucket to Boston to Oakland to Stockton to Oakland, and finally to the Dodgers — all from 2012 to 2016.
It wasn’t all health with Hill, once he got past his 2011 surgery. He (and his pitching coaches) had to figure some things out. The three-year, $48 million deal he signed with Los Angeles at age 36 last winter is just one means of proof that they did.
That’s not to suggest that Moore is about to enter the best years of career, starting with a couple in Texas. Would be nice, of course, but what the Rangers are counting on, and trading for, is the idea that a healthy Matt Moore, with possibly a different approach based on what some of the numbers under the surface reveal, gives the club a veteran pitcher who can take the ball every fifth — or every sixth — day, and might even dominate on some of those.
Like he did at Globe Life Field on a tremendously sports-bleak day for me six years ago, when he became the first rookie in Major League history to pitch at least seven scoreless playoff innings and allow two or fewer hits, and delivered a huge dose of the promise that he was on his way to becoming one of baseball’s top young pitchers, a guy who by age 28 would certainly be a guy you couldn’t even dream of prying free by trade.