Gerrit Cole has signed a nine-year contract with the Yankees, at a cost of $324 million. What do we make of that?
Every time a player signs a massive, long-tern free agent contract, we get two ‘takes’ on the subject: opinion pieces speculating how good (or how terrible) the contract will be, and projection pieces calculating that player going forward, based on what they’ve done in the past.
I have no fundamental problem with either kind of article: each has merits as exercises in thinking through something complex. But as I’ve attempted, over the years, to unpack my thinking about big contracts awarded to players like
Bryce Harper,
Yoenis Cespedes,
Jason Heyward,
Giancarlo Stanton, and
Robinson Cano, I’ve come to view these kinds of articles as looking trees while avoidng a much more compelling forest.
So I'd like, with your tolerance, to work towards seeing that forest a little bit.
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Let’s start with a quick declarative: there are some very good long-term contracts. That is, there are some big dollar, long-term free agent contracts that seem, objectively, to be perfectly reasonable decisions.
And there are some very bad long-term contracts. There are contracts that seem, even at their signing, like significant mistakes.
When the Detroit Tigers extended Miguel Cabrera to an eight-year contract prior to the 2008 season, that seemed like a very reasonable decision. They were looking at a third baseman who hadn’t turned twenty-five years old, whose career slash-line was a robust .313/.388/.543. Miggy was healthy as a horse, having played at least 157 games each of the previous four seasons, and there was no hint that he was a problem in the clubhouse. He certainly seemed like a decent bet at the time, and he was.
On the other hand, the eight-year extension that the Tigers offered Cabrera prior to the 2014 season was very obviously not a great decision. Cabrera was coming off consecutive MVP seasons, but he was six years older, facing the declining years of his career, and his skill set was already narrowing. And the Tigers had two more years of control before he would hit free agency, making the extension feel illogically preemptive.
Or…spreading the field a little bit…I think most of us would say that Derek Jeter’s ten-year contract with the Yankees, signed prior to the 2001 season, was a very reasonable risk.
In Jeter, the Yankees had a shortstop entering his prime years who had finished in the top-ten in three straight MVP votes. Jeter possessed a wide array of skill sets: he could run, hit for power, get on base, and field his position ably. More significantly, Jeter seemed unfazed by the pressures of playing in pinstripes, and was a matinee idol in a game that frequently struggles to market their best players. The Yankees were a winning team that expected to go on winning, and Jeter was the kind of player who helps teams win. As for cost, the team could print its own money. Easy call.
Hard call: Albert Pujols.
The Angels decision to sign Pujols to a ten-year contract seemed like a bad deal before the ink had dried. Pujols was a thirty-two year old player coming off the worst season of his career (granting that ‘worst’ is a relative term). The Angels were looking at a player with a limited range of skills, all of which were showing signs of erosion. They were a team on the bubble of contention, certainly, but they weren’t shoo-ins for the AL West, and Pujols’ contract was very likely to hamstring them down the road (as it has). And unlike the Cardinals, who could use their history with Pujols as a justification for keeping him in St, Louis, the Angels had no emotional reason to offer Pujols a quarter of a billion dollars. The deal was very likely to disappoint at the outset.
We can think of Jeter and Pujols as ‘poles’ for big baseball contracts…one decision has nearly everything going for it, and the other has many, many causes for concern. From them…from thinking about them…we can draw out a list of variables to consider when we’re trying to assess a free agent deal.
Framing those variables as questions, we can ask:
- How old is the player?
- What role do they play, and what role can they move to if they decline?
- What is their health record?
- What is their physical makeup, and how does that fit with the role they are playing?
- What is their pedigree? Have they always been viewed as elite, or is it more surprising?
- What are the range of their skill sets?
- What are the trends of those skills?
- How easy/hard is it to replace their production?
- Is their production consistent, or is it varying?
- Who is like this player, and how have those comparable players performed going forward?
- What is their cost, and how does that cost fit with the team’s overall payroll?
- How well does this player align with the team’s long-term vision?
- Are they marketable?
- Do they have additional importance to the fan base or history of the franchise?
- Are they a leader on the team? Are they an asset in the clubhouse and with management?
- Do they like it here? Are they rooted, somehow, to the team/place?
This list isn’t exhaustive: there are many other questions that would be worth asking.
What this list does is give structure to something that we typically try to understand either through intuition or through a very narrow lens of statistical analysis. I think intuition and statistical analysis are both absolutely crucial in understanding a decision like this, and I don’t want to discount either one, or favor either one. What I am advocating is that we try to think about these kinds of contracts in a deliberate variety of ways, so that our conclusions take under consideration as many angles of inquiry as we are capable of imagining.
Using that list of questions as a guide, we can get into the practice of considering allbig deals through a multitude of lenses. In doing that, we will gradually develop an understanding not just of the poles of very good and very bad contracts, but which questions hold the most projective value. Over time, we will develop an intuition that isn’t a knee-jerk rejection of all long-term deals, and one that isn’t solely dependent on WAR-projections.
In seeing the trees, we will gradually become aware of the forest.
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Let’s consider Gerrit Cole.
Gerrit Cole is one of the ten best starting pitchers in baseball. He is coming off consecutive Cy Young-caliber seasons, and he paced the AL in strikeouts and ERA, falling a win short of the pitcher’s Triple Crown. He showed no signs of tiring in the postseason, and at twenty-nine years old, it is reasonable to project him as being one of the best pitchers in baseball over the next four or five seasons.
He is healthy, as far as starting pitchers go: he hasn’t undergone Tommy John surgery, and he hasn’t missed significant time with injuries. He has always been regarded as a preeminent talent: he was drafted in the first round out of high school and was later selected as the first overall pick by the Pirates. While his career hasn’t had the smoothest trajectory, he has always been an excellent pitcher. His recent success is attributable to an improved spin rate and less reliance on a sinker.
Cole has ample playoff experience and has not blinked at the spotlight. For a team like the Yankees, which anticipates being a strong contender in the coming years, having a playoff-tested starting pitcher is a useful asset. His salary, while significant, is not going to break the Yankees in the late years. And he wants to play for New York: Cole grew up a Yankees fan, and was drafted by the Yankees out of high school (first round, 28th overall).
He has the chance to be one of the keystone player for the newest Yankee dynasty, though I don’t think he’ll be as marketable a figure as, say, Aaron Judge. As far as team structure goes, the Yankees need an anchor for their rotation, and Cole fits the bill better than any other pitcher. He has played for winning teams, and there is no reason to suspect that he is a clubhouse problem.
His similar pitchers are all excellent: Oswalt, Peavy, Hudson, Verlander, Hamels, Price, Santana, Strasburg. He should be effective going forward, at least for a little while. Given the lack of good starting pitching, it is possible that the Yankees can find another team willing to gamble on rehabilitating him if it all goes to hell, and it won’t hurt the team significantly regardless.
The Yankees will likely have to tangle with the Astros once or twice in the coming playoff seasons…it might help to have some insider information about a rival organization.
So what do I make of the Cole deal?
If the Reds were making this offer, I’d be wary. But the Yankees have the money to swallow the cost, and they are a team that is peaking right now. They play in a division loaded with strong teams, and they have a need for an anchor in the rotation. They signed a player that is pressure-tested and motivated to perform in the Bronx, and they have the resources and talent to endure if Cole turns bad three years down the road. The right team got the right guy.
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How about Anthony Rendon?
As I was writing this, the news broke that the Angels grabbed Anthony Rendon, signing him to a seven-year deal worth $245 million. We might as well throw him onto the pile.
Anthony Rendon is coming off the best season of his career, pacing the NL in doubles and RBI and capping off 2019 with some dramatic homeruns in the Nationals World Series triumph over Houston. Rendon is a strong hitter and a capable defensive third baseman, though his defensive metrics have declined from his peak years. He is slower than he used to be, but he has compensated by walking more frequently.
Rendon will turn thirty years old in June, and his decision to play college ball means that his career started later than other players. His similarity scores on Baseball Reference have Ken Boyer, Fred Lynn, Bernie Williams, Hunter Pence, Joe Gordon, and…improbably…Pablo Sandoval. There are not many players on that list who were effective through their thirties, but I don’t find it a compelling list.
A better list of comparable players would start with third baseman who tallied similar WAR between ages 27-29…Rendon’s 19.9 fWAR and broad skill set is comparable to Ron Santo (21.5), Al Rosen (19.6), and Tony Perez (19.5). He’s also close in fWAR to Miguel Cabrera, Buddy Bell, and Brooks Robinson, but their skill sets don’t parallel Rendon’s as closely.
Rendon is not likely to do better going forward: the question is how much longer he can be expected to maintain his current level of performance, and whether he is still going to be effective in the late years of the contract. His athleticism suggests that he could shift to 1B or a corner-OF position if his defense at third declines (or if the Angels acquire a younger player better suited for the position). He is a good contact hitter, which suggests that he has some capacities to adjust and remain effective as he enters his decline years.
Rendon seems like a positive presence in the clubhouse, though he isn’t a ‘marque’ player who draws the spotlight: he has remined one of the more anonymous great players in baseball.
For the Angels, there are two divergent pressures. On the one hand, they have so far squandered the best years of the best player of this generation, struggling to put a team together to help Mike Trout. Having paid a lot to make sure Trout is a lifetime Angel, and having lucked into winning the Ohtani lottery, their next task is to make sure the teams has a few runs at contention while he is in his prime. Rendon helps fill a gap on their offense and defense and should improve the team in a few dimensions.
That said, throwing big-dollar contracts to hitters on the wrong side of 30 (Pujols, Hamilton, Justin Upton) hasn’t worked out for the Angels in recent years, and while Rendon looks like a better investment than those three, it is the kind of move that rarely returns extra value. At best, the Rendon contract breaks even. Even that is unlikely.
The Angels won 72 games last year….Houston won 107 and Oakland won 97. Are the Angels really close enough to contention that Rendon will tip the balance? Are third baseman so rare that the Angels had to shell out a seven-year contract for one of the best? I don’t know.
What do I make of the Rendon deal?
I am less optimistic about it than I am about the Cole deal. While I think there is a good chance that Rendon is productive for most of the contract, I doubt there will be much surplus value in the contract: the Angels might get what they pay for, but they aren’t getting anything more. And I don’t like the timing: Rendon’s best seasons will be 2020-2022, and I’m not sure the Angels are going to be a winning team for those years. The allocation of a lot of resources into one player hasn’t worked yet for the Angels, and I don’t think it will work out with Rendon.
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So how’s that?
Is that a better way to interpret these kinds of big-salary, long-term moves, or am I just recycling more of the same, in a different format? Did you think about these contracts in a more complex way, or is it too much forest? What questions did I forgot to ask? What questions are important?
Let me know.
David Fleming is a writer living in western Virginia. He welcomes comments, questions and suggestions here and at dfleming1986@yahoo.com.