Justin Verlander

Baseball's Winter Meetings are underway, and player movement has lifted off in earnest. In the biggest pitching moves so far, the Texas Rangers have signed ...

The Mets don’t take a hit qualititatively in 2023-24, have comparable or greater upside with much less risk in the short-term, and now can go after other high-end players with the ability to back-load deals into the 2025-27 time frame. The Rangers have some interesting kids on the way, but have a dicey risk/reward profile and might not have any big financial bullets left. I loved deGrom’s last contract, a five-year, $137.5M deal with an opt-out that he just utilized, because 1) he was the reigning best pitcher in baseball in his prime, and 2) he was healthy. To summarize, deGrom posted a cumulative K/BB ratio of 524/90 in 421 innings over those two seasons, while managing contact better than any pitcher in the league. deGrom was healthy in the 2020 pandemic season, and was as dominant as ever. He won back-to-back NL Contact Manager of the Year awards in 2018 and 2019 with matching 77 Adjusted Contact Scores. I simply add the Ks and BBs back to the equation after calculating Adjusted Contact Score, then spread the difference between the player’s “Tru” ERA and league average over their innings bulk to calculate “Tru” Pitching Runs Above Average (TPRAA). While deGrom’s quality has been as good as ever in 2021-22, his quantity has been way down. Both of these pitchers have been among the game’s best for an extended period; Verlander’s led his league in Ks five times, deGrom two, while the former has a 782/109 K/BB ratio and the latter a 876/127 mark since 2018. Going back to 2016 (the first season with 100% reliable granular batted ball data), Verlander has never won his league’s Contact Manager of the Year award, though he has greatly improved in this discipline. To qualify for such superlatives, one must excel at all of the central tenets of pitching - missing bats, minimizing walks and managing contact. That’s less apparent to the naked statistical eye, and requires peeling back a layer or two of the player’s record.