Economist JC Bradbury on the Kyle Lohse deal:

Well, it turns out that Boras was right. If Lohse had signed the deal three-year $20 million deal, he would have missed out on this deal. I have Lohse valued at $47 million over the next four seasons, and I’m sure Boras was well aware of his client’s value. The opportunity cost of signing a bad deal now is not signing a better one later; it’s a good lesson to remember.

If you go by JC's numbers, the Cards are getting a discount on their newly signed pitcher, a goal every team strives to achieve. The problem is his valuation model on Lohse is probably a declining pattern (i.e. Lohse is worth $12m next year, $10m the next, and so on), while the Cardinals are paying him on an increasing scale, with the brunt of the money coming in the third and fourth years of the contract. That limits our flexibility at the end of the contract because it's more money we have to absorb to keep him or get rid of him.

Beyond the Box Score has a more pessimistic take on the Lohse deal:

The issues with this signing are as follows:
A. Lohse has been a consistently below average pitcher (tRAs since 2004: 93, 93, 81, 112, 98, 87, 94.) You know who else has a tRA between 93 and 95? Guys like Livan Hernandez, Kevin Milwood, Garrett Olson, and Dave Bush.

B. Lohse had one of the worst strike swinging percentages of his career, tying 2005 at 6%. Greg Maddux gets 6.2%, Jarrod Washburn gets 6%, only pitchers like Jeff Suppan, Paul Byrd, Mark Hendrickson, Jeremy Sowers, Joe Blanton, the potentially non-tendered Daniel Cabrera, Scott Feldman, and Aaron Cook get between 5-6%. That is not very good company.

C. The Cardinals are paying him 41 million over four years.

D. Let me repeat that: the Cardinals are paying him 41 million over four years.

E. See points C and D.

While what the writer says has some merit, I think this is a case of cherry-picking stats to fit a certain cause. You can say that Lohse had one of the worst strike swinging percentages of his career, but what about the fact that he posted the second-best K/BB rate of his career (2.43) and the best GB% and GB/FB rate of his career (45.8% and 1.43, respectively)? Those are numbers that define how a pitcher will fare over the course of a season, not just strike swinging percentage.

A definition of tRA can be found here. Quite frankly, there are plenty of metrics to judge a pitcher's performance. I tend to like FIP, which Lohse did very well in this year. The stat tRA isn't so kind to Kyle, and there are several others that may or may not be in his favor. Arguing that his season wasn't that good this year is a pretty outlandish opinion to take, as is arguing that his season was one of the best in the league. He had a good season - not great but not as bad as BTBS is making it seem to be. You can argue that this season was a fluke or career year for Kyle, and that doesn't merit making over $10m a year for four years - that's fair. I just don't see enough evidence coming from his argument to justify bashing the deal so harshly.

That's my take.