Robbie Ray agreed last week to a one-year contract in which the Blue Jays will pay him eight million dollars to pitch for them. Ray, 29 years old, has upwards of 800 MLB innings under his belt. Over those innings, he’s compiled a 4.26 ERA. Over the 2020 season, that ERA was an unsightly 6.62. Back in 2019, it was 4.34.
I say this to point out that Ray is relatively young, relatively good, and somewhere in between a trusted arm and a full-on reclamation project. FanGraphs has him pegged for 2.0 fWAR in 2021, but my guess, based on those 2020 numbers, is that his error bars are a bit wider than the median pitcher. Meaning, while the Blue Jays paid for $4M/WAR, one would guess that to be on the bottom end of the $/WAR range, were this the only data point (and at this point, it kind of is the only data point—everything else is team rejections of prices at the high end, beyond a few qualifying offers that ranged from $7.6M/WAR [Stroman and Gausman] to $4.7M/WAR [Springer and Realmuto] but aren’t hugely indicative of the market because those players are likely still hoping for solid long-term deals).
What to take away from this as a Cubs fan? Nothing we didn’t already know:
- Free agents are going to be cheaper than the $8M/WAR we saw last offseason.
- Because of that, there’s likely going to be some hesitation from players to agree to extensions and long-term contracts.
But while it doesn’t teach us much, it does give us some numbers on things, especially for one-year deals. The Cubs could plausibly get Jon Lester for under four million dollars. The Cubs could plausibly get someone like J.A. Happ for under ten million. Is it certain those will be the going rates for these pitchers? Of course not. But it’s an indicator.
More than that, it’s a reminder of how little we know about how arbitration will play out this year. We may get fairly routine salaries. We may get a lot of arbitration-avoiding one-year deals from players cutting their losses. It’s possible there’ll be players who swim against the tide and lock into longer-term arrangements, and it’s possible the Cubs will have some of those players. It’s also possible there’ll be teams who swim against the tide and get aggressive. It’s unlikely, from previous years, that the Cubs will be one of those teams. For now, the best assumption is probably that the Cubs will push for pretty big concessions from their arbitrating players, leaving it on the players to balk in the game of chicken. But we’ll see. There’s a lot we don’t know, and things like coronavirus-vaccine news aren’t meaningless in these evaluations.
The outlook remains murky. News could come any day or not ‘til arbitration. But the market is at least starting to start to take shape.
