Rangers Paid Dearly for Veteran Pitching
The Texas Rangers' price tag for what they hope will be quality starting pitching in 2023 is set.
It’s $96 million, give or take.
The exact amount, per Spotrac.com and previous reporting, is $96.150 million, the result of one of the largest commitments the Rangers have made to their rotation in recent memory.
The Rangers believe they have a staff that can turn the club into contenders this season.
To understand how the Rangers got here, it’s important to understand where they were in early October.
The Rangers ended the season with Martín Pérez, Jon Gray, Glenn Otto, Dane Dunning and Cole Ragans as starters. The latter three are young and aren’t even arbitration eligible yet. The Rangers won 68 games, their sixth straight season with a losing record.
As early as August, when the Rangers fired manager Chris Woodward and president of baseball operations Jon Daniels in a 48-hour period, team owner Ray Davis made it clear he was ready to spend money on what the team needed. The top priority was starting pitching. Davis empowered general manager Chris Young to spend.
Entering the offseason, only one veteran pitcher was under contract — Gray. He was entering the second year of his four-year, $56 million deal. In 2023 that will pay him $15 million. The Rangers had plenty of young pitching stashed, but Davis and Young weren’t willing to wait.
So Young and his team got to work.
The first step came in early November when the Rangers traded pitcher Kolby Allard to the Atlanta Braves for veteran starter Jake Odorizzi. He was in the final year of his contract, one that came with a player option. He triggered it, giving him a $12.5 million salary. He told reporters that he knew once he triggered it, he was probably leaving Atlanta.
The Braves were so willing to part with Odorizzi that they picked up $10 million of his option, meaning the Rangers were only on the hook for just $2.5 million.
Right around then, the Rangers offered Pérez the qualifying offer of $19.625 million for a one-year deal. Doing so offered the Rangers some draft-pick compensation if Pérez left. Both sides wanted to work out a longer-term deal. Pérez reportedly only talked seriously to one other team — the Los Angeles Angels — before agreeing to the qualifying offer.
“I believe in myself, so I know what I have to do now,” Pérez said. “But I feel 100 percent that next year is going to be a better year because I know how to pitch now.”
Pérez is coming off the best season of his career, as he went 12-8 with a 2.89 ERA. He had a career-high 169 strikeouts. He also made the All-Star team for the first time.
Turns out that was just the beginning of the Rangers’ spending spree. In December, the Rangers did their own version of Christmas shopping, starting with Jacob deGrom.
deGrom’s five-year, $185 million deal was announced just before the MLB Winter Meetings. It’s the largest contract the Rangers have ever given to a pitcher. The fact that it was deGrom, a two-time Cy Young winner who was considered the No. 1 pitcher on the free-agent market, sent shock waves through the Rangers fan base and the MLB community. It was just the start of a $2 billion free-agent spending spree in December.
“I was really excited when I met with CY and (manager Bruce Bochy),” deGrom said. “Hearing the vision of what the Rangers wanted to do, meeting (Davis) and bringing a World Series here, that’s the goal. They all have the same vision and it lined up with what I wanted to do to.”
The money didn’t hurt either. deGrom will make $30 million in 2023. Only shortstop Corey Seager at $35 million will make more.
While in San Diego for the Winter Meetings, Young and the Rangers agreed to a two-year, $25 million deal with Angels starter Andrew Heaney, the second of three Top 50 free-agent pitchers (per rankings by the New York Post) the Rangers signed. Heaney, an oft-injured starter, will make $12 million in 2023. The deal also has an opt-out for 2024 that the Rangers can trigger for just $500,000, making it a team-friendly deal if Heaney’s health struggles again.
“(The Rangers) understood who I am, what I do what I do well, but also understood what I want to do better and how they can help me do that,” Heaney said. “So for me that was just that was a huge part of that.”
The third deal came after the Winter Meetings. The Rangers signed Nathan Eovaldi — who grew up in the same hometown as Rangers legend Nolan Ryan — to a two-year deal worth $34 million, which will pay him $17 million in 2023. There are incentives and vesting options that could turn it into a three-year deal with a $20 million salary in 2025.
“We have an abundance of starting pitching and that's not even reaching down into the minor leagues for the arms that are ready to come up,” Eovaldi said.
It’s a good problem to have — an abundance of starting pitching.
And it only cost the Rangers $96 million for 2023, give or take.
You can find Matthew Postins on Twitter @PostinsPostcard
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