When the Boston Red Sox traded Yoenis Cespedes for Rick Porcello last December, they signaled that they were willing to roll the dice on the hurler’s big 2014 breakout.
Now they’re really rolling the dice on that breakout, suddenly putting an $82.5 million wager on it.
Not long after the club opened its season with an 8-0 drubbing of the Philadelphia Phillies, Porcello and the Red Sox basically made a joint announcement of the new deal. The Red Sox announced on Twitter that they had signed Porcello to a four-year extension that starts in 2016, and the 26-year-old right-hander shared his half of the story at The Players’ Tribune:
Alex Speier of The Boston Globe reported the agreement was for $82.5 million. Porcello gets a $500,000 signing bonus and will earn $20 million in 2016 and 2017, and $21 million in 2018 and 2019.
Now that we’re all clear on the details, we can get this out of the way: HOLY SMOKES IS THAT A LOT OF MONEY FOR RICK PORCELLO.
Porcello may be coming off a 2014 season that saw him post career bests in ERA (3.43) and innings pitched (204.2), but in six seasons he owns a modest 4.30 ERA and, if you’re into metrics, just a 4.03 FIP (Fielding Independent Pitching). According to FanGraphs, park- and league-adjusted versions of ERA and FIP rate Porcello as about a league-average pitcher for his career.
Yes, the cost of good pitching is awfully high these days. But the cost of league-average pitching? It hadn’t risen to around $20 million per year. Not until now, anyway.
On that note, first things first: Hats off to Porcello for securing such a deal.
He’s going to be getting a heck of a raise on the $12.5 million he’ll make this year. And though he signed away a chance to hit free agency after this season, in doing so he avoided sharing a market with high-profile aces like Jordan Zimmermann, Johnny Cueto, David Price and Doug Fister. And when he hits the market after 2019, he’ll only be coming off his age-30 season. He’ll still be young by free-agent standards.
If you ask the man himself, there’s also the reality that Boston is the right place for him. He said in his column that people around him “really sold” him on the Red Sox organization, which he feels “offers every opportunity” for players to succeed.
But now for the hard part: It may make loads of sense for Porcello, but why does this extension make sense for the Red Sox?
Not surprisingly, general manager Ben Cherington gave a straightforward answer.
“Aside from the pitcher that he is, which obviously we really like, getting to know Rick more over the course of the winter and spring, he has a lot of qualities we really admire,” he said, per Speier. “We felt like he was the type of person we want here, one of the type of guys we want here, and we see him as a really important part of our team the next several years.”
If there’s an important phrase here, it’s “the next several years.” That’s not the same as “a long time,” and that hints as the main attraction for the Red Sox.
As Mike Petriello of FanGraphs and Matthew Pouliot of Hardball Talk noted, Porcello’s youth and respectable track record stood a good chance of earning him a nine-figure contract in free agency. Something comparable to Homer Bailey’s deal might have been in the cards, meaning something in the neighborhood of six years and $100-120 million.
Had the Red Sox done a deal like that with Porcello, they might have secured his services for longer and for a smaller average annual value. But due to pitchers’ inherent frailty, longer deals aren’t necessarily a good idea when it comes to them. To that end, the Red Sox’s paying a premium so they could limit their commitment to Porcello to four years makes a certain amount of sense.
Especially given that these four years should all be prime years. Neither Porcello’s health nor his production are likely to completely break down over the life of his four-year contract. As Steve Adams of MLB Trade Rumors suggested, that actually makes Porcello’s four-year deal a safer bet than that of James Shields, even though the latter has a much stronger track record.
This, however, only means that Porcello’s new deal shouldn’t turn into a complete disaster. His actually living up to it won’t be so easy.
Throughout Porcello’s career, there’s really only one season in which he’s resembled anything even remotely close to a $20 million-per-year pitcher. This, of course, was last year.
And to an extent, it was a long time coming. Porcello had a reputation of being a guy who was better than his surface stats indicated. His real crime wasn’t that he was a bad pitcher, but that he was a ground-ball-oriented pitcher on Detroit Tigers teams that never had good defenses.
In light of that, it looks good on Porcello that, as Speier noted in his column, his performance finally improved when Detroit’s defense finally improved for the 2014 season. And now that he’s on a Red Sox team that has the goods to be one of baseball’s best defensive clubs, it looks like he’s in a perfect spot for his hard-fought improvement to carry over.
But it’s not actually going to be that simple.
Though it looks like Porcello may have benefited from a defensive improvement in 2014, he might actually have simply benefited from good luck. The two best ways for a pitcher to make his own luck are to collect strikeouts and ground balls, and these figures show he took a step back in both departments:
In Porcello’s defense, this was partially by design.
His strikeout and ground-ball rates may have paid the price, but one thing he did in 2014 was become less predictable. Brooks Baseball shows that he trusted his four-seamer and a cutter almost as much as he trusted his sinker, and Baseball Savant shows that he was more willing to try to change hitters’ eye levels with four-seamers up in the zone.
But while these changes may have resulted in positive results despite a lesser strikeout rate and a lesser ground-ball rate, that’s a hard performance to sustain. The script on him has been flipped. Whereas he was once a guy who always underperformed, now he’s a guy coming off a season in which he seemingly overperformed.
That’s another way of saying the Red Sox were already betting against Porcello returning to earth in 2015. Now they’re betting on him staving off a return to earth for the next five years. What was an intriguing gamble has turned into something more like a reckless gamble.
The Red Sox aren’t going to go up in flames if the deal doesn’t work out, mind you. They’re loaded with cash, and, again, the relative brevity of Porcello’s contract is a good thing. They’re not signing up for a long-term headache, a la the Carl Crawford or Adrian Gonzalez contracts of yesteryear.
There is, however, a very real chance that they won’t get the pitcher they’re paying for. They may be hoping for the new Rick Porcello, but what they may get is the old Rick Porcello.
Note: Stats courtesy of Baseball-Reference unless otherwise noted/linked.
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