A second MLB free agency domino fell today, with Marcus Stroman announcing his acceptance of a qualifying offer from the Mets.
Qualifying offers, if you’re struggling to keep all the offseason terms straight (What are Rules 3 and 6 and why do they not get their own drafts?), are one-year deals at the average amount paid the 125 highest-paid players in baseball. When players reject them and sign with another team, the team that offered receives a compensatory draft pick, and the team that eventually signs loses a draft pick. There are more complexities to it, but know this and you know enough to understand the impact on this particular free agency. Marcus Stroman was offered $18.9M over one year by the Mets. He accepted the offer.
In the past, qualifying offer acceptances have been rare. This year, in that respect, is no different. The players that receive them are proven veterans looking for long-term stability. Often, they’re looking for more lucrative deals than those set at the average of the top 125 players. And the teams that offer would not offer if they believed such a deal constituted overpaying for the player. Teams make qualifying offers for the draft pick bonus attached. The draft pick is their incentive.
So, it’s always interesting when a player accepts the offer, because it means there’s either a statistical oddity happening where the offer sits at the intersection of good for the player and good-enough for the team to risk it for draft pick upside, or there’s a disconnect between the player, the team, and the market at large.
Stroman’s situation is probably in the midst of the two categories. It hasn’t been a weird year for qualifying offers. Six were offered—a low number, but not dramatically lower than that of the last few years. Four have been rejected. One has now been accepted. (Update: Two. Kevin Gausman just accepted his.) None of this is unusual. Last year, ten were offered and two were accepted.
But it’s still interesting. Stroman has been dominant at times in his career. He’s fairly young (30 years old). He opted out of the 2020 season. FanGraphs has him projected for 2.5 fWAR next year, presumably with wide error bars (there isn’t exactly a ton of data on how careers turn out when paused for a year due to a pandemic), meaning $18.9M isn’t far below last year’s $8M/WAR market rate. The Mets have a new owner, Steve Cohen, who’s been at worst a great marketer of himself and at best a rare owner who seems to aspire to collaborate with players rather than oppose them with the fervency of a Facebook commenter discussing draft dodgers. Is Stroman banking on a big free agency haul next winter? Is Stroman excited about a possibly aggressive Mets front office and what it could mean for 2021? Did Stroman’s lack of a 2020 dissuade teams from extending competitive offers as he gauged the market? Did 2021 uncertainty hold teams back from extending competitive offers as Stroman gauged the market?
More likely than not, Stroman’s case (and Gausman’s) just fell pretty squarely into that intersection of good for the player and good-enough for the team, with the broad uncertainty around the market probably at least playing something of a role in Stroman accepting. In short, nothing to learn here, besides the fact this doesn’t change our expectation of a low $/WAR price and more potential tolerance from players for one-year deals. Onward we go.
