If he has any sense of his place in baseball, Jaret Wright will go on his knees to Braves pitching coach Leo Mazzone, kiss his pinky ring, and sign over as tribute 10% of the $21 million contract the Yankees have given him. Wright is a long-time scrub, saved from the fate of being a million-dollar arm with a ten-cent head. Mazzone’s magic has set him up for life.

Before this season, Wright’s statistics never showed any reason to believe in the great promise that was often attributed to him when he was with the Cleveland Indians. Aside from a few good starts in the 1997 postseason, his record was flatly unimpressive, even taking into account his best season, 1998.

Wright was 22 that year, and threw 192 2/3 league-average innings, striking out 140, walking 87, and allowing 22 home runs. It was a decent season, but hardly one that matched his reputation as a young flamethrower of enormous promise. His strikeout rate was about the same as Jamie Moyer’s, with a strikeout-to-walk ratio only half as good; his groundball-to-fly ball ratio was 1.44, good but hardly enough to compensate for his lack of a strikeout pitch.

The best way to describe the Wright of that year would be that he was much like the Cubs’ Carlos Zambrano, but without the truly great sinker or the fierce, determined focus.

That’s still an arm worth spending some time on, and the Indians spent a lot. In 1999 Wright regressed and put up a 6.06 ERA; he spent the next three years nursing various injuries. None of these were career-threatening, but they prevented him from pitching enough to learn his craft. The Indians finally gave up after the 2002 season, when Wright allowed 34 runs in 18 1/3 major league innings. His career looked to be over when San Diego waived him late in the 2003 season after he’d posted an 8.37 ERA out of the bullpen.

When Atlanta picked him up that fall and immediately stuck him in their bullpen, the general consensus was that the great Mazzone had seen something in Wright that he figured he could fix. Indeed, Wright gave up only 2 runs in 11 appearances for the Braves, and was generally thought to be a good candidate for the 2004 bullpen.

In a move typical of their unrivalled daring, though, the Braves did what no one thought they would: They stuck the failed starter in their rotation. In retrospect, this should not have been controversial. Almost every scrub the Braves have put in their rotation the last few years, from Horacio Ramirez to Terry Mulholland to Damian Moss, has performed at a league-average level or better. Some of them, like John Burkett, have pitched at nearly Cy Young-worthy levels. This is what Wright did.

There’s no real mystery to why Wright finally lived up to his potential last year. Compared to1998,his last full year in the majors, his strikeouts were up by more than one per nine innings, his K:BB ratio was up well over 2:1, and his groundball-to-flyball ratio held steady.

Most important, his rate of home runs allowed dropped in half. That’s a profile that matches what I saw watching him this year, a power sinkerballer with good movement on his pitches and a commitment to throwing strike one. It’s the upside hinted at by his 1998 season, and it shows a damn good pitcher.

The question is, will that hold now that he’s left Atlanta?

There aren’t really any parallels to Wright among the many pitchers who have done better under Mazzone than they have anywhere else. Probably the best one is Kevin Millwood. Like Wright, Millwood is a young sinkerballer; unlike Wright, aside from two excellent seasons in Atlanta, Milwood also had three in which he was a durable, average starter, and that’s the level at which he’s pitched in Philadelphia.

An interesting study posted at www.sabernomics.com offers another way to look at the problem. John-Charles Bradbury, researching how pitchers did before and after Mazzone’s tutelage, found that the coach’s impact on a typical pitcher is worth .55 to .85 points of ERA. Go even further to account for the difference between the NL and the AL, and tack a full run onto Wright’s 2004 ERA – it comes in at 4.28.That would have been 16th best in the American League last year, just ahead of the 4.33 mark posted by Jon Lieber, whom Wright will replace in the Yankee rotation.

When I first read of this signing, I thought it was laughably ridiculous. Looking over the record, I’m not so sure it is. Compare Wright to Kris Benson, who signed a similar deal with the Mets, and Wright looks like a risk more worth taking. The new Yankee is a bit younger and has pitched at a higher level.

Benson offers reliable mediocrity with the promise of something more; Wright offers the promise of continued excellent performance. Had he spent 2000-02 putting up league-average ERAs instead of nursing minor injuries that haven’t, as it turns out, affected his health, this deal wouldn’t raise any eyebrows.

My best guess is that Wright will pitch 180-200 average innings. Given their issues elsewhere on the staff and in the field, that would rank among the least of the Yankees’ problems. Tony Womack, on the other hand…