Yankees meeting Strasburg this week
Mike Rizzo, the general manager of the Washington Nationals, doesn’t feel he has to schedule an in-person meeting with Stephen Strasburg. Rizzo figures that the Nationals drafted Strasburg in 2009, helped him blossom into a superstar and, together, won a World Series this fall. If there is a pitch to be made — and the Nationals will have to make one — it will be about money. The rest of what Washington offers has been sold for the last decade.
Does that mean the Nationals won’t meet with Strasburg at some point of his free agency? No. They very well could. The winter meetings are in Strasburg’s hometown of San Diego next week, he’s expected to be nearby, and it would be easy for Rizzo to sit down with Strasburg and gauge his temperature. Plus, other teams are starting to do so.
Strasburg has meetings set with multiple clubs, according to a person with knowledge of the situation, and will be accompanied by agent Scott Boras in Southern California. One of those meetings is this week with the New York Yankees, according to another person with knowledge of the plans. The scheduled meeting between Strasburg and the Yankees was first reported by The Athletic.
“We’ve talked to both of them. We’ve talked to the representatives of both of them,” Rizzo said Monday of Strasburg and free-agent third baseman Anthony Rendon. He was standing on the red carpet for the premiere of the Nationals’ World Series documentary. He was uninterested in discussing the future, aside from this short answer, and joked that there were “plenty of updates” before smiling and offering none. “We’ve been talking to them for 10 years, so there’s no need to have a personal meeting. They know where our heart lies, and we know where their heart lies.”
The hope for Washington, then, is that Strasburg’s heart lies where it always has. But it’s far from that simple. By winning World Series MVP, and leading the National League with 209 innings in the regular season, Strasburg’s value is higher than ever. His representation expects to use Max Scherzer’s seven-year, $210-million (U.S.) contract, signed in 2015, as a starting point. That would bump his previous average annual value of $25 million to around or more than $30 million. And, for the Nationals, that gets even more complicated if you start trying to squeeze Strasburg and Rendon, another star talent, onto the same payroll.
The starting pitching market has yet to pick up, and that’s because Strasburg and Gerrit Cole, and to a lesser extent Zack Wheeler, Madison Bumgarner and Hyun-jin Ryu, remain unsigned. The first to land will kick-start the rest and make teams more active in building a rotation. The question is which club will take the first leap.
The Yankees seem primed to, as they are also meeting with Cole in Southern California this week, according to reports. Cole, another Boras client, just finished second for the American League Cy Young Award and is the best available arm. He could be a contingency plan for Washington if Strasburg goes elsewhere, but the Nationals are fixed on retaining their homegrown righty.