Welcome back to TA94, the series that applies a modern analytical sense to the major transactions of 30 years ago. After two whole weeks of waiting, the first domino of the winter finally falls, as Will Clark finds himself a new home. The owners had prohibited their general managers from attending the general manager meetings, worried about rising expenditures. But while many teams sat out the month, the Giants, Rangers, and Orioles, newly purchased by Peter Angelos, were looking to make a run at a trophy.
November 21
The San Francisco Giants sign RHP Mark Portugal to a three-year, $10 million contract.
If you own nine baseball cards, odds are good that five of them are Mark Portugals. The 15-year veteran was as ubiquitous in baseball as he was forgettable; he never made an All-Star roster, posted an exact league-average ERA over his career, and struck out fewer than 15% of the batters he faced. The only time that anyone even thought about Portugal’s existence, in fact, was after 1993, when the innings-eater put up his finest season, a 18-4, 2.77 ERA mark with a young budding Astros team that earned him some Cy Young down ballot support.
The Giants, fresh off a 103-win season, needed to replace the innings of no. 3 starter Trevor Wilson, who was out for 1994 with a torn tendon. With Will Clark’s salary coming off the books, the team bought high on Portugal, and quickly regretted it as the righty resumed his traditional levels of voting present. They received 38 extraordinarily average starts from him before, in the midst of their second-straight losing season, trading him at the deadline for a collection of future busts and a pretty decent two months of Deion Sanders.
This should end as yet another parable of teams overreacting to a career year, as the Giants had just done with Robby Thompson. But it would be unfair to banish Portugal from our memory together without noting two things: 1) that he hit .354/.360/.500 in 1994 and won the Silver Slugger, his only award; and 2) WARP considers him double the pitcher (28.6) that the other WAR metrics do. Some of that is park effects: During his peak, Portugal spent most of his time in pitcher’s parks, particularly the cavernous Astrodome, and DRA is less extreme about their effects than other metrics.
Otherwise, this blurb is already longer than Portugal’s wikipedia entry. It may not have worked out for the Giants, but it’s good that the veteran managed to pack just enough of his best work into one season to get one slice of the pie. This contract is about as much as fellow lifer Jim Eisenreich, below, would earn in his entire career.
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