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The Phillies Have An Ace for Half the Price

In 2019, Zack Wheeler and Gerrit Cole were signed within weeks of each other off the free agent market. Now after two seasons with their respective clubs, one is clearly outperforming the other.

Author:
Ben Silver
Feb 23, 2022 4:15 PM EST

Zack Wheeler wasn’t brought to the Philadelphia Phillies to be the best pitcher in the National League, but that's exactly what he's become.

In Dec. 2019, when the 31-year-old ace signed a five-year, $118 million contract, Matt Klentak believed he was signing a high-upside player to be second fiddle to Aaron Nola in the Phillies one-two punch.

Later that week, the New York Yankees plucked the biggest prize off the 2020 free agent board, Gerrit Cole, for nine-years, $324 million. Cole’s contract is almost triple Wheeler’s, but the pitcher on the southern side of I-95 has outperformed Cole in almost every metric.

In 2020, both players showed they were worthy of the contracts they’d signed. Wheeler and Cole made 11 starts for 71.0 innings pitched and 12 starts for 73.0 innings pitched respectively. Both posted ERA’s barely lower than 3.00 and featured in Cy Young voting.

But in 2021, Wheeler revealed himself as a top-class National League pitcher. He made all 32 starts last year, avoiding injuries and throwing an MLB leading 213.1 innings pitched. In those innings, he struck out 247 batters, posted a 2.78 ERA, 2.59 FIP, and 5.37 K/BB ratio.

Advanced stats reinforce Wheeler’s dominance. He held hitters to MLB’s lowest average exit velocity (84.6 mph) and highest flyball/line drive rate (89.7%), all with an absurd xERA of 2.79.

Wheeler credits much of his dominance in 2021 to a revamped slider, “It’s become a really good swing and miss pitch for me, before it was going to be a ball every time,” Wheeler said. “I’d kinda hoped someone would swing at it, but now I can throw it for strikes and still have the movement that I want.”

That slider saw a huge uptick in usage from 2020 to 2021, from 16% to 25%. Not only does Wheeler throw his slider more, he also throws it harder, up from 89.8 mph in 2020 to 91.5 mph in 2021.

Meanwhile, it seems Cole took a step back in 2021. His ERA rose from 2.84 to 3.23, he missed a few starts due to injury and was therefore almost 40 innings short of Wheeler’s monstrous total.

Cole’s stagnation in 2021 doesn’t mean he’s a bad pitcher, in fact he’s one of the best pitchers in the American League, but his value per dollar at the present is far lower than Wheeler’s. According to AAV, per inning pitched the Phillies paid Wheeler $110,627, while the Yankees paid Cole $198,533 for an inferior product.

Though Cole is 101 days younger than his counterpart in Philadelphia, the Phillies will certainly be glad to be freed from the burden of Wheeler’s contract after his age 34 season before he begins to decline with age. In New York, the Yankees will be paying Cole until he’s 38-years-old, an unenviable position given how much Cole relies on the velocity of his fastball.