There was a time, not all that long ago, when the best team in baseball wouldn’t commit anything more than a three-year contract to a starting pitcher. The Toronto Blue Jays lost some pitchers in the early 1990s, but they won back-to-back World Series.
Imagine trying to do that now.
This winter, even average big league starters have routinely signed three-year deals, and anyone slightly better than average qualifies for five years or more. The Blue Jays watched ace left-hander David Price walk away to the Boston Red Sox for seven years and $217 million, and it cost them $36 million over three years to sign J.A. Happ as a sort of replacement.
Pitchers may be more brittle than ever, but they’re also more expensive than ever. Just this winter, 16 free-agent starting pitchers have signed multiyear deals, with 10 of them signing for five years or more. Almost all those deals were for huge money.
“Crazy stuff!” one National League general manager said by text message Wednesday.
It may be crazy, but it also seems unavoidable. Unless you’re not trying to win or are blessed with five great young (and therefore still cheap) starters, try assembling a competitive rotation without joining the spending spree.
And even if you have that great young rotation, as the New York Mets do, try keeping it together without eventually committing too many years and too many dollars to pitchers who could easily break down.
Paul Beeston, the former Blue Jays president who once had the three-year limit for pitchers and later limited all his free-agent contracts to five years, may well have been prudent. But after those back-to-back championships in 1992-93, the Jays went 22 years without making the playoffs.
Beeston told Canada’s Prime Time Sports last month that he wouldn’t have gone longer than five years, even for Price. But the Red Sox, looking at an ace-less rotation and three last-place finishes in the last four years, willingly did.
Still, it’s not the Price contract that makes this winter different.
Pitchers signed seven-year contracts each of the previous two winters, with Masahiro Tanaka going to the New York Yankees in January 2014 and Max Scherzer signing with the Washington Nationals a year after that. Justin Verlander and Clayton Kershaw, who weren’t free agents, also signed for seven years each.
But in the last two winters combined, just three free-agent pitchers (Tanaka, Scherzer and Jon Lester) signed for more than four years. This winter, those long deals went to aces like Price and Zack Greinke, but also to guys like Ian Kennedy, Mike Leake, Jeff Samardzija and Wei-Yin Chen.
The Los Angeles Dodgers even gave out an eight-year deal to Japanese right-hander Kenta Maeda, although it was so loaded with incentives that Maeda is guaranteed just $25 million over the length of the deal. According to Dylan Hernandez of the Los Angeles Times, the Dodgers were concerned about Maeda’s elbow and his ability to stay healthy.
Johnny Cueto’s elbow was also supposed to be a concern, but the San Francisco Giants still gave him $130 million over six years—all guaranteed.
The Giants have plenty of experience with big, long contracts, having once given Barry Zito a seven-year, $126 million deal in December 2006 that, at the time, was the biggest ever given to a pitcher. When the Zito deal didn’t work out, it seemed to scare the Giants and some other teams away for a while. But eventually the Giants gave six years and $127.5 million to Matt Cain, only to watch him miss large parts of both the 2014 and 2015 seasons because of injury.
Cain, at least for now, hasn’t needed Tommy John surgery, which puts a pitcher on the shelf for more than a year. But two pitchers who had signed six-year contracts—Yu Darvish of the Texas Rangers and Homer Bailey of the Cincinnati Reds—were among the 25 pitchers on major league rosters who needed Tommy John surgery in 2015.
There’s risk with any contract, of course. Position players can get injured and can also see big performance declines that turn their long-term deals into albatrosses. But the long-held belief in baseball, one that has proven out over time, is that pitchers are at bigger risk of both.
But executives who don’t win are at even bigger risk of losing their jobs, and owners who don’t win are at risk of ordering flashy new signings, regardless of the potential cost.
As Detroit Tigers owner Mike Ilitch said after his team committed five years and $110 million to Jordan Zimmermann, via Drew Sharp of the Detroit Free Press, “It might sound silly, but I don’t care about spending money.”
It might sound silly to risk so much money on something so fragile as a pitcher’s arm, but in today’s baseball world, it can sound even sillier to spend money elsewhere and neglect the starting rotation.
As Fox Sports’ Ken Rosenthal wrote, after the Baltimore Orioles committed more than $200 million to keep Chris Davis, Matt Wieters and Darren O’Day and add Mark Trumbo, it won’t be worth a thing if they don’t top it off by adding a starting pitcher.
“Otherwise,” Rosenthal wrote, “Davis will be nothing more than an ornate showpiece, a freak-show, home-run hitting attraction at Camden Yards.”
The Orioles, who have made the playoffs just twice in the last 18 years, have been searching for an ace for years. They’ve tried without success to develop one, haven’t been able to trade for one and haven’t been willing to pay for one.
So yes, there’s a risk your big-money starter gets hurt or fails to perform. You can take that risk or you can take the other one—the risk of going without that starter.
They spend their money, and they cross their fingers. And the pitchers get rich.
Danny Knobler covers Major League Baseball as a national columnist for Bleacher Report.
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