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Zack Greinke calculates his current WAR depending on which PythagenPat exponent he uses.

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There isn't much left to say regarding Zack Greinke's start to the 2009 season. It is indeed beyond description. More interesting is the question of where he will go from here. I can't imagine that any reasonable person thinks he will maintain his current pace, finishing the season with his current ERA of 0.51 and a FIP of 1.46, along with 16 or 17 complete games. Brilliant analysis and historical comparisons can be found all over the place.

However, given that Greinke signed a 4-year, $38 Million extension this past off-season, the question that came to me is this: What are the chances the contract will pay off by the end of this season?

To answer the question of how good Greinke would have to be for the contract to pay off in full this season, the first thing we have to ascertain is what the contract is worth. That might seem obvious: $38 million. However, the first two seasons of the contract correspond with what would have been Greinke's second and third abritration years. The "real value" (on the free agent market) is typically figured on the basis of the player being paid 40, 60, and 80 percent in each of the arbitration years, respectively. Greinke's contract is "backloaded," but to take it as a whole (as should be done), we divide it into fourths: $9.5 per year.

First year at  $9.5M/0.60 + second year at $9.5M/0.80 + $9.5Mx2 for the third and fouth years =  about $46.7 million in value.

How do we figure out what that's "worth" in terms of player value? By calculating how many Wins Above Replacement (WAR) the Royals are buying, that is, how many wins they are buying over what a freely available pitcher would provide (more on pitcher WAR). The current market price of a marginal win is more difficult to determine. Prior to the 2008-2009 offseason beginning, most people had the dollars per WAR predicted to keep inflating to around $5M given the rate of inflation in free agents salaries in previous years... and then the economy and the free agent market crashed. Long story short, we'll keep things at about the previous season's level, and say that the cost of a marginal win in the 2008-2009 offseason stuck at around $4.5M, as Colin Wyers calculates.

The simple way to figure out how good Greinke needs to be, then, is to say that once you take out the replacement salary from his contract (~$400,000/year), he needs to be worth $45M this season, or about 10 WAR. Fangraphs player value has Greinke at 2.9 WAR already, my own calculations have him at 3.4. Over a full season, that comes out to 14.4 WAR. Done deal, greatest season ever.

Um, no. I mean, I guess it could happen, but let's not go nuts. Indeed, even reaching "only" 10 WAR in one season is tough for a pitcher. Using the same methods I use to evaluate other pitchers' seasons, here is a list of 10+ WAR seasons by starting pitchers post-1991:

While there are few other Randy Johnson seasons, another Pedro Season, and one by Kevin Brown that round up to 10, you get the idea -- this doesn't happen very often -- and no one has done in the past 5 years or so. Moreover, other than Pedro's 1999, all of those other seasons involve innings pitched numbers that the Royals would be crazy to let Greinke rack up -- almost no one does that any more other than Roy Halladay and CC Sabathia. So it seems pretty unlikely.

But that's also an overly simplistic approach to contract evaluation. The Royals aren't paying Greinke $38M/$45M for one year, but $38M (or $46.7 in "real" value) over four years.  In the free agent market, one has to take account of both a player's attrition rate as well as the salary inflation. Here is a salary chart I did early in the offseason before the crash. To figure out how many WAR a team is paying for, find the number of years across the top, then looks for the closest dollar amount in that column, then look all the way left to get the WAR. As I said, that chart is almost certainly too high.

Without redoing it, I will simply tell you that on a $4.5/WAR basis, and adjusting for the arbitration years, the Royals are paying for 8 WAR over the next four seasons. That's still a big season, but it's much more attainable. At least 24 pitchers have done that since 1992, and Roy Halladay and Tim Lincecum both came very close (around 7.7) in 2008, on my calculations.

We don't know what Greinke will do of course. People knew that the deal was a good one, and that he was very talented, but anyone would be nuts to predict a start like he's had. But he's obviously outstripping pre-season projections. Enter Dan Szymborki's updated ZiPS projections, which project what the pitcher will do the rest of the season. I calculate pitcher WAR a bit differently than FanGraphs, but entering Zack's current data and the projected ZiPS projection for the rest of the season form his FanGraphs player page, I get the following numbers (as of this writing, the league RA is 5.06).

That total is 7.2. Of course, we don't know how the league run environement will end up, either -- if I take the ZiPS projection for the whole season as listed wit the current run environment, I get 7.0. At this point, that might seem disappointing. It shouldn't. It's not only very good in its own right (remember the sort of superlative performance we're discussing), but definitely puts Greinke in the 8 range.

To even be discussing this is testimony to what a great season Greinke is having. Again, we have no idea what will happen. He could pull a class Pedro-Martinez type performance, or he could get hurt next week. But just for fun, let's conclude by looking at some seasons to which Greinke's start has been compared, and see how they ended up, WAR-wise.

Not much to say here, other than the ZiPS projection has him outpitching Valenzuela's famous 1981 and Cliff Lee's out-of-nowhere Cy Young campaign from last season, while the other three comparisons are with monster seasons. Whether Greinke's contract is payed off in WAR this year or he has to wait until two starts into next season, his starts seem likely to be "can't miss" for the foreseeable future.