USATSI_9273021_168381442_lowres

What’s the Precedent for Releasing John Danks?

In light of his gophertastic start on Thursday, there was a general consensus among White Sox fans on Twitter (and on this site) that John Danks’ left shoulder has finally run out of useful bullets, and so its owner needs to go. Given that Danks is due a prorated $15.75 million for the rest of this year, it’s hard to envision a scenario in which another team takes on his salary without additional compensation. With the deal up at the end of the year and thus not affecting any future spending, it would be pretty severe malpractice to part with any other players just to be rid of Danks.

All this leaves the White Sox in the odd position of likely releasing their longest-tenured player (nobody else on the roster was even in the organization when he made his debut) and only remaining link to the last White Sox team to make the playoffs. It wouldn’t mark the end of an era as conspicuously as the departures of Mark Buerhle and Paul Konerko, but a midseason release for a guy with that much history with a club struck me as a bit unusual. So, what’s the precedent for a player like this getting the boot during the season?

To answer this, we can use Retrosheet’s transaction database to identify releases and waiver claims, then looked at all midseason releases since 1980 (roughly the free agency era).

One important caveat: this doesn’t cover all players who were designated for assignment, only those that were released or claimed off waivers as opposed to being outrighted to the minors.

As a measure of tenure, I used the number of games played for the franchise during that stint with the team; to make position players and pitchers comparable, I treated each start as five games played and each relief appearance as 2.5.

If he were to be released, Danks would certainly be an outlier based on this metric, as you can see in the chart below. Danks is the red line, and he doesn’t have too much company:

Firke Danks graph

He’s not unique, though, and here are the players that got released despite comparable track records with their teams (Danks’ 1,230 number doesn’t include his promised start on Wednesday):

Name Team Date Age Adjusted Games
Jim Palmer BAL 5/17/1984 38 2455
Steve Carlton PHI 6/24/1986 41 2224
Hal McRae KCA 7/21/1987 41 1837
Steve Rogers MON 5/21/1985 35 1823.5
Scott McGregor BAL 5/2/1988 34 1582
Carlton Fisk CHA 6/28/1993 45 1421
Brandon Inge DET 4/26/2012 35 1408
Kirk Rueter SFN 8/14/2005 34 1375
Dan Quisenberry KCA 7/4/1988 35 1312.5
Bob Knepper HOU 7/28/1989 35 1311
Greg Minton SFN 5/28/1987 35 1302.5
Larry Gura KCA 5/18/1985 37 1263
Mario Soto CIN 6/20/1988 31 1262.5
John Danks CHA ??/??/2016 31 1230
Randy Bush MIN 6/27/1993 34 1219
Danny Graves CIN 6/2/2005 31 1180
Randy Moffitt SFN 8/4/1981 32 1137
Jerry Reuss LAN 4/10/1987 38 1098.5
Rick Langford OAK 7/18/1986 34 1091.5
Craig Swan NYN 5/9/1984 33 1019.5

Looking at the list, a few things jump out that enhance Danks’s outlier status:

  • He’s young. Only Mario Soto was the same baseball age, and Danks is actually 9 months younger for accounting purposes (April birthday, instead of July).
  • He’s pitching in this decade. Only three of the other nineteen happened since the 1994 strike. (I’m not sure what it was, but presumably there was a structural change such that releasing veterans became much less common in the last 20–25 years.)
  • He’s taking up a lot of payroll. Contracts from before a few years ago are very hard to compare to today’s numbers, but none of the other recent players made up as large a share of his team’s opening day payroll as Danks’s 16% (Graves, Rueter, and Inge were at 9%, 8%, and 5%, respectively).
  • Another aside: for someone like me who doesn’t remember 1993, it’s a bit surprising that Fisk is on the list, given the reputation the White Sox have under Jerry Reinsdorf’s regime for being loyal to a fault. Fisk was 45 and been fighting about money and playing time with Ron Schueler in the middle of a pennant race, so it’s not too surprising he’s the rare vet the White Sox pushed out.

Overall, then, there isn’t really a precedent for Danks’s situation once we take era, age, and salary into account, and even without those exacerbating factors there aren’t many comparables. This has no bearing on the merits of the decision—just because nobody’s done something quite like this before doesn’t mean it’s not the right thing for the White Sox to do. What this list does bring out, though, is how many abnormal, largely unfortunate occurrences have to pile up for a team to consider releasing a guy who could’ve been the face of the franchise under other circumstances.

Transaction data via from Retrosheet, salary information via Baseball-Reference, games played and age data via the Lahman database, opening day payroll information via here, Code for analysis and figures can be found here.

 

Lead Image Credit: Tommy Gilligan // USA Today Sports Images

Related Articles

6 comments on “What’s the Precedent for Releasing John Danks?”

robmccraw

The Angels-Rangers “trade” of Josh Hamilton last season is perhaps an interesting comparison.

DavidHNix

But they can set off the cost of eating Danks’ contract against the money Adam LaRoche left on the table.

Jerry Hansen
Jerry Hansen

Cut your losses and release him lol!. He costs us when he starts. Maybe bullpen, long relief role. Too much dead $$ to cut him outright. This year could be special for Sox

Frank

Trade him for a couple AA’s or a batboy!

Frank

Danks was actually washed up when they signed him to the big contract!

Leave a comment

Use your Baseball Prospectus username