By Louis Addeo-Weiss
In the final hours of the 2019 calendar year, the Minnesota Twins, a team that missed on big-name free-agent starters in Madison Bumgarner and Hyun-Jin Ryu, made an effort to silence the displeasure of the crowd when they announced the signings of Homer Bailey and Rich Hill to one-year deals.
The oft-injured Hill, who will enter his age 40-season, will receive $3 million in guaranteed salary.
And while Hill may be one of the game’s true elder statesmen, the funky left-hander has thrown just 937.1 innings since debuting in 2005, which leaves the possibility of him pitching into his early 40’s. Injuries and inconsistencies at the big league level have held back the former 4th round pick.
While coming to Minnesota with an extensive injury history, Hill has been quite good when healthy in recent years. Since the start of 2015, Hill’s 2.91 ERA ranks fourth among pitchers with at least 450 innings pitched, though his 10.7 WAR ranks 41st due to the aforementioned string of injuries.
In 2019, Hill was limited to just 58.2 innings pitched spread across 13 starts, though he did manage to muster a 2.45 ERA and stealthy 169 ERA+.
Moving to Target Field, a ballpark that generally plays well for pitchers (99 multi-year park factor), Hill should continue to pitch well, so long as he can remain healthy.
Hill is expected to make his season debut sometime around June following an estimated six-month recovery from primary repair surgery, a semi-pseudo type of Tommy John Surgery.
Should he pitch well in his return, Hill’s presence in the rotation will help the team in moving on from the likes of Kyle Gibson. Gibson, who posted a 4.84 ERA over 34 games pitched, 29 of those starts, and 160 innings, signed a 3-year/$28 million deal with the Texas Rangers on December 6th.
Baseball-reference projects the left-hander to post a 3.79 ERA over 102 innings while striking out 112. The Twins’ brass will be thrilled to get 120-130 innings out of Hill, only furthering the narrative that there’s no such thing as a bad one year contract.
