Rusty's Player Projections: Barry Zito

7 years, 126$ million.

A contract Giants fans once applauded and accepted willingly. Now it's turned into a big heaping pile of regret and stupitity.

Barry Zito has been with the Giants for what seems like a decade. After his spectacular pitching in Oakland to start his career, Sabean and the Giants organization thought he would continue to dominate hitters for at least 7 years after his 2006 season.

Here's a quick comparison of what the Giants got out of Zito for 4 years compared to 7 with Oakland:

	With Oakland	With San Francisco
Wins-Losses	102-63	40-57
ERA	3.55	4.45
Hits per 9 innings	7.7	8.6
Walks per 9 innings	3.5	4.1
ERA+	125	97

Oh by the way, Zito also won a Cy Young Award with Oakland in 2002 and participated in 3 all-Star games with the A's. 

Now we can see how torturous Barry Zito has been to us Giants fans. He simply cannot pitch like he used to, but is there room for optimism?

I am one of the few people who believe so. 

Over the past two years, Zito has found himself pitching very effectively over a stretch of games toward the end of the season. Numbers indicate that he is a much better pitcher in the second half of the season

with a career 77-50 W-L record with a 3.52 ERA. Compare that to his career first half, a 65-70 W-L record and a 4.18 ERA, and you have a pretty definitive case that Zito gets better as the season goes on.

That statistic gives me hope. Maybe one of these years he can come out of spring training hot and continue his decent pitching well into the second half. So, that leads me to Zito's 2011 projection:

13-9 Record

203 Innings pitched

3.89 ERA

158 Strikeouts

5 more "Bar-ry!" chants at AT&T Park

You heard it here first, comment below if you completely disagree, I wont blame you.