Granted, he was 35 when he signed, and should have been considered an injury risk for that reason alone, but "up and down?" He missed a month in 1995 with a dislocated finger, and missed some time in September of 1989 and 1990, but had been a veritable workhorse every year from 1991 to 1998, averaging well over 200 innings per 162 games.
The Dodgers got three very good (if non-consecutive) years and two injury-plagued ones from Brown, and then they traded him for two good years of Jeff Weaver (his last two good ones, it would turn out) plus two other pitchers. That's about as good as they could have hoped, given the fact that they were dumb enough to sign a 35-year-old pitcher through his 40th birthday.
Another one of Neyer's retrospective assessments:
"Zito was a disaster waiting to happen, his performance obviously slipping long before the Giants signed him."
Have to disagree there too, to some degree. There may have been some advanced metrics to suggest the impending drop in performance, but his slipping performance was hardly "obvious". At the time of the signing, Zito was a 28-year old lefty who had averaged 16 wins, 220 innings and a much better than average ERA for the previous six years. Those aren't the only important numbers, naturally, but you can hardly make a case for an obvious drop in skills.
Even if you just looked at the previous two to three years, he was still a durable, better than average lefty starter, which is a rare commodity. Of course, $18 million a year is too much to pay for that commodity, but there was little reason to think that Zito would turn out to be as bad as he's been the last two seasons.
"And Hampton was a very good pitcher who was thrown into an extreme environment."
Not sure about this one either. If anything, he was a so-so pitcher who had thrived in an extreme environment and was therefore highly overrated. Hampton had been helped significantly by the severe pitchers' parks in Houston and NY where he'd played.
His career ERA split after the 2000 season was 2.88/4.09, in over 1,200 innings of total work, meaning that away from those pitchers' havens, he was basically a little better than average.
Not only was he removed from that extreme environment, but he was forced to pitch half his games in an even more extreme environment, one with the exact opposite properties of those that had masked his mediocrity.
That revealed his weaknesses, and severely so. Colorado to their credit, unloaded him after two seasons, and got some value in return.
Sabathia is none of these things. Unlike Brown, he's not almost 35. Unlike Hampton, his success does not come from the parks he's called home. Unlike Zito, he doesn't have rising walk rates and dropping strikeout rates and his best season was last year, not five seasons ago.
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