The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Zack Wheeler’s Phillies contract displays the new cost of frontline starters
CLEARWATER, Fla. — The shockwaves being felt ‘round spring training the past week were the result of the Phillies upping the ante on the already exorbitant cost of frontline starting pitching by extending Zack Wheeler a year before he was to reach free agency with a three-year, $126 million contract that will take him to age 37. “Say what?” “Why?” ”How could they?” were the exclamations being heard everywhere, as the industry high $43.3 million AAV (average annual value) Max Scherzer was able to extract from Mets owner Steve Cohen back in November 2021 can no longer be considered an outlier but actually the benchmark for a No. 1 starting pitcher.
But Phillies owner John Middleton, who is acting every bit the financial heavyweight as Cohen, clearly doesn’t care what his fellow lodge members might be saying about the Wheeler extension. He knows what the cost of No. 1 starters has become — last month he publicly revealed that he had offered more than the Dodgers’ 12-year, $325 million winning bid for Japanese right-hander Yoshinobu Yamamoto — and he’s going to do what he has to do to keep the Phillies competitive with the Braves in the NL East.
“It all came down to Zack’s desire to pitch here and knowing what it was going to cost in the free agent market to keep him,” Phillies president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski told me the other day. “By doing this now instead of waiting until the end of the year we were able to limit the number of years. Once a player gets into the market you don’t know what might happen.”
Once the Wheeler deal was announced, it was thought it might have immediate repercussions for the Yankees with Gerrit Cole, who has an opt-out in his nine-year, $324 million contract after this year. But the Yankees very cleverly inserted an “opt-out blocker” in their deal with Cole in which, if he does decide to opt out after this year, they can counter it by adding a 10th year at $36 million to his contract. Had they not done that, they would have suddenly found themselves doubly at the mercy of Scott Boras next offseason, who would have most certainly been seeking to up Cole’s AAV to that of Wheeler (who’s never won a Cy Young) while at the same time negotiating with Boras on what he anticipates being a record free agent contract for Juan Soto. But instead of having to negotiate a whole new contract for Cole if he decides to opt out, the most it will cost the Yankees is another $36 million at the end of the deal.
Meanwhile, the day after the Phillies’ Wheeler extension
was announced, the cost of frontline starting pitching took equal billing on two other fronts when the Red Sox announced that Lucas Giolito, by far their biggest free agent signing of the offseason with a two-year, $38.5 million contract was going to be lost for the season with a
partial tear of his UCL, and in Cardinals camp it was revealed that Sonny Gray, to whom they gave a threeyear, $75 million deal to be their No. 1, was going to be sidelined indefinitely with what was termed a mild hamstring pull and most likely will not be ready for opening day.