I love Anthony Rizzo.
I want to see him stay with the Cubs forever.
I think he is completely justified in wanting more than five years at $70 million from the Cubs.
I simultaneously don’t think five years and $70 million is that insulting of an offer.
Let’s start with production, then get into the marketing/chemistry pieces.
A very basic predictor of how hitters age is that they lose about 0.5 WAR per year after the age of 30. With Rizzo producing 4.0 fWAR in 2019, at the age of 29, it would stand to reason that he’d produce 3.0 fWAR this year if we assumed the aging process to have begun at 30. That is…exactly what FanGraphs’s Depth Charts expect him to produce. If you factor in last season, when he produced just more than one fWAR over just more than one third of a season, an argument could be made that this is perhaps slightly optimistic.
3.0 fWAR is great. That’s a solid year. $24M/year good, by the traditional $8M/WAR market rate (which does appear to be changing). But over the 2022-2026 period I’d understand a five-year extension to last, it translates to just 2.5 fWAR in 2022, 2.0 in 2023, 1.5 in 2024, 1.0 in 2025, and 0.5 in 2026, which comes out to 7.5 fWAR over the length of the deal. For $70M, that’s just over $9M/WAR, and if you apply the same math to the reported first offer of $60M over four years, it comes out between $8M/WAR and $9M/WAR.
In other words, these offers aren’t out of line with what the market would probably pay Rizzo.
But there’s a difference between what Rizzo is worth to the market and what Rizzo is worth to the Cubs.
There are pieces of Rizzo’s value that do translate across franchises—the chemistry stuff, unquantified as of yet and debatably significant, but real nonetheless. Those would theoretically raise Rizzo’s price on the open market. But those, to an extent, are worth more on the Cubs, where his leadership’s already established, and then there’s the marketing aspect, where Rizzo is uniquely valuable playing half his games at Wrigley Field, given his reputation in Chicago, his relationship with fans, and everything he stands for as a connection to the magic of 2015-2016.
But how valuable is that?
I’d agree with the consensus that it’s enough to justify a larger investment than $70M over five years. And I share the hope of many that Rizzo will have a big year, perhaps back at the 4.0 WAR level, and age more gracefully than the rule-of-thumb would suggest (one interesting note that comes up in various places while researching this stuff is that we’d have better data on how power hitters age had the steroid era not happened). But the truth is, the Paul Goldschmidt comparison (Goldschmidt received a five year, $130M extension from the Cardinals prior to the 2019 season) is a poor one. Goldschmidt was projected, by this same rule of thumb, to be worth more than 15 WAR over the five years in question. That’s double Rizzo’s rule-of-thumb value from a pure wins-and-losses sense.
Hopefully, the Cubs offer Rizzo something better than five years at $70M. Hopefully, if negotiations really are dead until the offseason, Rizzo has a massive year and the Cubs throw something much better at him come November—something in Goldschmidt territory, even.
But there’s a limit to what’s reasonable, and paying for seven or eight years is probably past that limit, as is offering nine figures. As much as it stinks to say that.
Again, Anthony Rizzo is justified in wanting more money. It’s fair to bet on himself, and it’s fair to call in for the cashing of some checks he’s written over the years by being everything anyone with the Cubs could ask him to be as a member of a professional sports team. But there’s still a market he’s up against, just like there’s a market the Cubs are up against. So for as frustrating as the Ricketts’ approach to budgeting has been in recent years, and perhaps because of how frustrating the Ricketts’ approach to budgeting has been in recent years, there’s probably a bit of a public overreaction happening right now.
