9:50 am: Moore’s business comes with a base salary of $ 3 million and additional incentives, tweets Ken Rosenthal of Atlético.
9:39: The Phillies agreed to a Major League contract with the left-handed agent Matt Moore, reports Jim Salisbury of NBC Sports Philadelphia (via Twitter) The Apex Baseball client spent the 2020 season launching in Japan, where he did very well. His agreement with the Phillies is pending a physical examination.
Moore’s career did not go the way anyone expected when he was ranked alongside Bryce Harper and Mike Trout between the three main perspectives of the game. Both MLB.com and Baseball Prospectus, in fact, have already rated Moore as the number one farmer in the game.
Certainly, Moore seemed to be on track to meet the bill. The lefty made his major league debut at age 22 with the Rays in 2011 and hit 15 hitters in 9 1/3 innings of work in the home stretch, as part of Tampa Bay’s post-season effort. He made two appearances (a match) at ALDS that year, playing 10 entries and yielding only one race against Rangers.
From 2011-13, Moore threw 337 entries and delivered 3.53 ERA / 4.11 SIERA while hitting 23.1% of opponents with a slightly more problematic walking rate of 11.1%. Still, for a 20-somethings pitcher and announced as an ace future, Moore seemed to be on the rise. He was on the All-Star team in 2013, finished ninth in the AL Cy Young vote and was ready to lead the Tampa Bay rotation in the foreseeable future – health permitting.
Unfortunately, this injury warning showed its ugly face; Moore lasted only 10 entries in 2014 before suffering a rupture of the ulnar collateral ligament. The resulting Tommy John surgery destroyed the rest of Moore’s 2014 season and much of his 2015 campaign. And while it is common today for people to assume that every pitcher recovers from Tommy John’s surgery, Moore is proof that this it is certainly not the case.
After returning from surgery, Moore fought for a bad 2015 season that culminated in 5.43 ERA in 63 frames. He recovered enough in 2016 that the Rays could trade him with the Giants, but Moore’s struggles started again in 2017. He jumped from San Francisco to Texas for the next two seasons, throwing badly on both charts before settling for a one-year deal with the Tigers in 2019. That match got off to a great start – 10 goalless entries – when Moore suffered a meniscus tear when launching a grounder. Subsequent surgery to repair his knee ended his 2019 season.
After an ugly three-year 2017-19 season, Moore could have been relegated to secondary league territory if he had stayed on the ball in North America, but secured $ 3.5 million to launch Nippon Professional’s SoftBank Hawks Baseball in Japan. The deal worked out very well, as Moore not only got a bigger paycheck, he did brilliantly in his audition, while having a bigger workload than most MLB pitchers in the shortened season. last year’s pandemic.
With the Hawks, Moore pitched to an ERA of 2.65 in 13 games and 78 work entries. He lost two months due to a calf strain, as NPB scribe Jim Allen noted at the time of his return, but that was earlier in the year and Moore ended up very well. The leftist defeated 28 percent of his opponents and walked only 7.4 percent of them, both of which would be marks of quality in the Majors.
Add the pair of rehab he did with the Hawks’ secondary league club, and Moore’s total of 85 frames last year would have led the Majors. Only three pitchers exceeded 80 entries in 2020, and only 17 passed the 70-entry mark. It’s not a big discrepancy, but the Phillies certainly see this slightly increased workload as a benefit. Team Leaders Aaron Nola and Zack Wheeler both released 71 entries last year, but before agreeing to sign with Moore, Zach Eflin (59 innings) was the only other pitcher on the current Phils list that exceeded 35 frames.
Moore probably fits the rotation behind Nola, Wheeler and Eflin. He will give Vince Velasquez and the best customer Spencer Howard some experienced competition for the two end points of rotation, although it is likely that all three will start a significant number of games for the Phillies in 2021, as the club appears to be judicious about the workload of its pitchers. Philadelphia also hired veterans Ivan Nova and Bryan Mitchell about minor league deals recently, and in-depth additions seem quite possible based on recent comments from new baseball operations president Dave Dombrowski.