Nathan Eovaldi comes with only one guarantee for the Texas Rangers — his two-year, $34 million contract. Everything else is a risk.
Eovaldi is the last piece in a five-man rotation built entirely on the free-agent market. Jacob deGrom, Jon Gray, Martin Perez, Andrew Heaney and Eovaldi were acquired with $323.65 million in commitments from the ownership group that a year ago signed two shortstops (Corey Seager and Marcus Semien) for a combined $510 million.
This is how a franchise spends when it is motivated to give fans a winner, or at least a competitive team. The high-risk investment in pitching is what a team does when it does a miserable job of identifying, acquiring and developing pitching.
Consider that the last pitcher drafted or signed on the international market to deliver a season of 1.0 WAR for the Rangers is Chi Chi Rodriguez, a first-round pick in 2013. Think about that for a minute.
Jed Hoyer can certainly relate. He and his predecessor running the Chicago Cubs, Theo Epstein, have failed almost as badly as the Rangers in drafting and developing pitchers.
They once bragged about the team’s “pitching infrastructure,” with state-of-the-art pitching labs both in Chicago and Mesa, Ariz., and investments in coaches and staff to support young arms. But the Cubs have produced only four pitchers delivering 1.0 WAR seasons for them since Epstein replaced Jim Hendry as the top baseball man.
Those four (Justin Steele, Keegan Thompson, Brandon Hughes and Adbert Alzolay) should all play roles in 2023. But it will likely be guys from the free agent market (Jameson Taillon, Marcus Stroman and Drew Smyly) who determine if the Cubs can avoid a third straight losing season.
As much as the unwillingness of ownership to pay market prices to extend cornerstone players, it was the failure to draft and develop pitchers that led to the decision to rebuild a team that had gone to the postseason five times in six seasons.
The Cubs seemed to be always pushed to sign free agent pitchers at the end of every season. The results were poor, with Jon Lester and John Lackey as notable exceptions to the rule.
Under Epstein and Hoyer, the Cubs have acquired 14 pitchers on free-agent or waiver deals worth at least $9.5 million. That includes Taillon, who has yet to put on a Cubs’ uniform.
Led by Lester and Yu Darvish, the other 13 signed deals worth a combined $590.5 million over 38 seasons. Subtract six seasons because they traded Darvish halfway through a six-year deal and Smyly with one year left on the deal signed in 2018, and two years remain on Stroman’s three-year deal, and they’ve spent a combined $472 million for 32 seasons from their most expensive free-agent pitchers.
Those 32 seasons have yielded 29.7 rWAR, for an average of 0.9 WAR per year and an
expense of $15.9 million per every 1.0 WAR. This is inefficient spending, especially when compared to what the Cubs spent on their starting pitcher core of Carlos Zambrano, Kerry Wood and Mark Prior during the Hendry era.
The Cubs wouldn’t have won the 2016 World Series without Lester and Lackey, which makes their contributions priceless to the team’s fanbase. But even Lester delivered an average of only 2.1 WAR over the course of his six-year, $155 million deal.
None of the others averaged 2.0 WAR per season, with Lackey (1.95 average for two years), Darvish (1.9 average, three years) and Steve Cishek (1.8 average, two years) coming the closest. Stroman, worth 2.6 last season, has a shot to finish as the best investment.
Clunkers on the list include Edwin Jackson (-3.5 WAR over a four-year, $52 million contract), Tyler Chatwood (0.8 million, three years, $38 million), Wade Miley ( 0 WAR, one year, $10 million) and Kyuji Fujisawa (-0.2 WAR, two years, $9.5 million).
The point here is this: If you don’t draft and develop solid pitching, you will pay a high price. Just ask the Cubs and the Rangers.
