Time to rise, shine as free agency nears
Chicago Cubs ace Arrieta: ‘I like my chances’
For the first time in their baseball lives, they will have control.
They can choose where they’ll live, where they will work. And sign contracts guaranteeing financial security for generations.
Freedom is three months away.
It’s called baseball free agency, and with the regular season nearly complete, more than 100 players have the final chance to showcase their skills, polish their résumés and let future employers know they could be coming their way.
For some, this season has been spent simply validating their greatness. For others, it has been a nightmare, as untimely poor performances cultivate fear that struggles are costing themselves millions.
For every Max Scherzer who earned a $210 million windfall from the Washington Nationals in 2015 after rejecting $144 million from the Detroit Tigers, there’s a Carlos Gonzalez. He was offered a lucrative four-year deal from the Colorado Rockies this spring and wonders if he’ll ever recoup it, as he is batting .228 with a .641 on-base plus slugging percentage (OPS) — his worst season since his 2008 rookie year.
For every Jake Arrieta, whose early-season struggles with the Chicago Cubs gave way to five weeks of greatness, there’s Rockies catcher Jonathan Lucroy. The two-time All-Star is having the
worst season of his career, batting .245 with four homers and a .645 OPS — 210 points lower than a year ago, when he led all catchers.
It’s a unique time of year, with teams watching and players realizing how critical these final weeks could be to their futures.
“I haven’t had the year I would like, but it’s not over yet,” Arrieta, the 2015 Cy Young Award winner, tells USA TODAY Sports. “How many people can do what I do, anyways? A handful of guys?
“But one season shouldn’t diminish what the whole package is and what a guy can do. You can struggle for a little while. It’s going to happen. If a guy hits .200 for a while, it doesn’t mean he’s a .200 hitter.
“Everyone wants to have a career year, but if I stick to what I’m doing, I like my chances. I’ll be fine.”
Arrieta and Yu Darvish of the Los Angeles Dodgers are the premier starting pitchers in this year’s free agent market, and they realize their performance over the rest of the regular season, and particularly in the postseason, will be heavily weighed by prospective teams.
If Arrieta, 10-8 with a 3.88 ERA, keeps performing like he has since the start of July — yielding a 2.08 ERA while permitting six or fewer hits in 14 consecutive starts — he might indeed get that six-year, or even seven-year, deal, that he covets. Certainly, Johnny Cueto’s six-year, $130 million contract and Jeff Samardzija’s $90 million deal with the San Francisco Giants provide nice baselines that will help establish his value, even if the Cubs don’t seem inclined to jump into those waters, last making a formal multiyear offer two years ago.
“It’s completely business, so I get it,” says Arrieta, who starts Monday at AT&T Park against the Giants. “They haven’t offered me anything, because they know if they do, it’s probably not something I would accept, so why make the offer? I get it.
“If you let that stuff bother you, you don’t completely understand the sport, because that’s part of it. They have to do what’s in the best interest of the organization in the long term. Is that spending money on me or getting a guy like (Jose) Quintana? They’re going to try to establish a rotation without spending $30 million-plus a season and maybe sign another bat. Who knows what they do?
“I understand. No hard feelings at all.”
J.D. Martinez, 29, the best position player on the market, thinks he could benefit after being traded from the Detroit Tigers to the Arizona Diamondbacks. He goes from a pitcher’s park in Detroit to a pitcher’s nightmare in Phoenix. Most of all, he’s going to a contender, where he can focus on the playoff pursuit rather than his own performance.
“There’s always that little bit of added pressure or stress that goes into it, because everybody’s always talking about it,” says Martinez, who is hitting .226 with six homers and 20 strikeouts in 53 at-bats since the trade. “Everybody reinforces it on you. I’m just trying not to think about it and just play the game.
“But I think it definitely helps going to a contender.”
Many of the best free agents in this year’s class are playing for contenders, from Arrieta, closer Wade Davis, starter John Lackey and outfielder Jon Jay with the Cubs, to Eric Hosmer, Lorenzo Cain and Mike Moustakas with the Kansas City Royals, to Gonzalez and Lucroy with the Rockies. There are those such as outfielders Jay Bruce and Curtis Granderson who play for the New York Mets, who are hopelessly out of the National League East race, but could wind up with contenders by the Aug. 31 trade deadline once they pass through waivers.
“If you’re not in a playoff hunt, I imagine it would be really hard,” says Cubs outfielder Jason Heyward, who received an eight-year, $184 million contract after the 2015 season. “I personally didn’t have to think about it too much. I was on a good team (the St. Louis Cardinals). We were in the playoff hunt, and that’s what drove me every day, not free agency.”
Says Lackey, who will hit free agency for the third time this winter: “Honestly, it’s never been that big of a thing for me, but I can imagine it could be hard for a guy like J.D. Martinez, who’s trying to prove something to his new team and is a free agent at the same time.”
Really, the recruiting process is going on already. Players talk before and after games. They ask whether or not they have interest in coming their way, just as the potential free agents have their own set of questions.
“You get those conversations when you’re standing at first base, like, ‘Hey, you want to play here?’ ” says Nationals catcher Matt Wieters, who signed a twoyear, $21 million free agent deal in February, with an opt-out clause after this season. “But you got to block it out. You have to have focus. The hard part is whether you have a good or bad game, not allowing that to (make you) wonder how that will affect you in free agency.”
Indeed, even when the Tigers divulged that Scherzer had rejected their offer before his walk year, Scherzer turned that pressure into motivation. His dominant season — 18-5 with a 3.15 ERA — helped yield the $210 million windfall with the Nationals.
“Every player understands the business side of this, and everybody knows free agency is coming,” Scherzer says. “But it’s just part of the game. It doesn’t change the game.
“You’ve had to deal with playing for contracts for so much of your professional career, whether it’s coming out of college for the draft or whether it’s Year 3 and eyeing arbitration.
“Really, free agency is better, because it’s a better representation of how you are as a player vs. the salary arbitration we currently have in play.”
And for every general manager or owner who gets skittish bidding on players who struggle in their walk year, fearing the beginning of a decline, there are others who look at it as opportunity.
“Anomalies happen, whether it’s a great year or a bad year,” says Nationals GM Mike Rizzo, who has signed three players to contracts exceeding $100 million. “Oftentimes, there’s reasons and rationales that may not be clear. A player may be nicked up and grinding through a little discomfort or an injury because he was good enough to play but not hurt enough to be on the DL. So many things go into it.
“That’s why you’ve really got to know the man more than the player. You’ve got to find out why they had that kind of season in their walk year.”
When prospective teams sit down with Arrieta, they’ll ask about his early-season struggles and decrease in velocity. And they’ll be reminded that he’s more of a complete pitcher now than at any other time in his career, commanding the strike zone with four pitches instead of simply trying to blow away hitters with a 96-mph fastball.
Sure, he’s not likely to get a David Price, Scherzer or Zack Greinke contract topping $200 million, not when he’ll be 32 at the start of next season, but he’ll still become one of the game’s highest-paid pitchers. A team such as the Houston Astros will be lurking, knowing what he could mean to a young, star-studded team, offering him a place to play near his Austin home.
That might be pressure to some, but not for a man who was dumped four years ago by the Baltimore Orioles after going 2025 with a 5.46 ERA, only to emerge in Chicago as one of the game’s top pitchers. He has a 6429 record and 2.75 ERA since joining the Cubs, winning one Cy Young Award and finishing in the top 10 two other years.
“With what I’ve gone through in my career and having all of that failure in Baltimore, there’s no more pressure,” Arrieta says. “I feel like I’ve already proven everything I needed to prove. I don’t have to prove anybody wrong. I’ve already done that. The Cubs know what I can do. Everyone does.
“It’s going to be interesting to see where I end up, man. But if we can walk out of here with two rings, everybody is going to be happy.”