Grading 15 of the biggest MLB contracts from the offseason’s spending spree
Justin Verlander, New York Mets
Mets owner Steve Cohen and general manager Billy Eppler coughed up a nifty $43.333 million to watch Verlander pitch for them this season. It was exactly one-half of a two-year, $86.666 million deal Verlander signed over the winter.
That deal was part of a larger spending binge that saw the Mets (operating on the fantasy that you can buy a pennant) blow their payroll to $330.6 million, up $74 million from last season and $135 million from 2021.
It’s not that Verlander was especially bad. He started 16 games, went 6-5 with a 3.15 ERA and averaged six innings per start, all reasonable for a 40-year-old. But it also was not the Cy Young caliber performance Verlander had delivered one season earlier.
By the August trade deadline, with the Mets below .500 and languishing in fourth place, there was really no point in keeping as expensive a trinket as Verlander. So the Mets shipped him back to Houston, where he played a supporting role in that team’s securing a postseason spot. So Verlander will pitch in October … just not for the team that signed him.
The numbers on him, a +2.2 WAR and 1.3 Win Probability Added, were OK but nothing special. A good comparable to Verlander’s Mets WAR was teammate Jeff McNeil, who nobody in their right mind would think of paying $43.3 million for one season. Transactional grade: C-
Aaron Judge, New York Yankees
Flowing from a month-long multi-team courtship, the Yankees preserved their connection to Judge by giving him a nine-year, $360 million deal that paid him exactly $40 million this season … plus a captaincy. Even in New York, $40 million is real money.
What they got in return was not enough to justify the only currency that matters in the Bronx — a World Series win or even a measly postseason berth. The Yanks finished fourth in the AL East and several games out of playoff contention.
When available, Judge performed well. But injuries cost him nearly 60 games, greatly hampering his ability to produce anything tantamount in value to his salary. He did hit 37 home runs and drove in 75 runs, both good for the number of plate appearances he got.
But his .267 average was off 44 percentage points from 2022 and his 1.019 OPS really testified to what might have been had he contributed for a full season.
Give Judge his credit. In the time allotted to him, he generated 4.5 WAR, a total exceeded by only two of the 15 players on this list. His 3.1 Win Probability Added was also third best among the 15.
It’s hard to be valuable when you miss more than one-third of the season. Penalizing a player because he got hurt may seem unfair, but until Judge gives 33 percent of that $40 million back it’s real world. Transactional grade: B+
Carlos Correa, Minnesota Twins
The Twins won, if that’s not too strong a term for it, a three-team winter bidding marathon that saw Correa pass successively through the Giants, Mets and them. The cost to Minnesota: $33.33 million, eventually rising to $200 million through 2028.
Given that Minnesota won the AL Central with Correa as their starting shortstop, it’s hard to come down too strongly on that deal. But given his personal production, it’s tempting.
In 135 games, Correa batted just .230. It was the worst season of his career, 61 percentage points below his 2022 average and 47 points below his career average.
The subsidiary numbers weren’t any better. Correa turned in a 94 OPS+, another personal full-season worst, with a .312 on base average that was also a personal worst.
His 2023 WAR works out to +1.4, which is sub-par for MLB regulars, and his -2.6 Win Probability Added was easily the worst among the 15 $20 million-plus deals signed in 2023.
It’s always dicey to knock paying big money to a star talent when the paying team actually qualified for postseason play. Maybe Correa, who has a reputation as a clubhouse presence, played some role in the team’s success that transcends the data. Maybe he’s the 2023 version of the 2016 Jason Heyward, whose sub-par on field play for the Cubs was offset by a locker room speech rallying the team to victory late in Game 7 of that year’s World Series.
Based only on what we can measure, though, the Correa signing was a major bust. Transactional grade: D
Shohei Ohtani, Los Angeles Angels
There’s no price the Angels could have paid Ohtani this season that would have failed to justify his on-field performance. They ended up working out a one-year, $30 million deal that is a preface to the injured two-way star hitting the open market this winter.
In return for that $30 million, Ohtani hit a league-leading 44 home runs with a league-leading .412 on base average and a league-leading .654 slugging average. Until those arm injuries kicked in, he was 10-5 in 23 mound starts and 132 innings of work with a 3.14 ERA.
Add it all up and you get a 10.0 WAR — far and away the best among the 15 players in question — with a 6.2 Win Probability Added. In November, when Ohtani receives his second Most Valuable Player trophy, those will be the reasons.
Some would argue against Ohtani’s value on the premise that his team performed so poorly. To me, that’s silly reasoning. It asserts that Ohtani wasn’t valuable because Anthony Rendon, Matt Thaiss, Reid Detmers and Tyler Anderson stunk. Give the man credit. Transactional grade: A
Jacob deGrom, Texas Rangers
Remember when your parents warned you against doing something stupid and you went ahead and did it anyway and paid the consequences? That’s the line of thought to keep in mind when assessing the Rangers’ signing of deGrom.
The Rangers gave deGrom a five-year, $185 million deal that paid him $30 million in 2023. In exchange, they got six starts and the inevitable arm injury.
They were good starts, leading to two victories and a 2.67 ERA in 30 innings. But with deGrom, the question is never quality; it’s quantity. Opposing hitters batted just .171 against him with a .200 on base average. But he only faced 114 of those opposing hitters all season. In pitching, quantity counts.
By some statistical measures, Jose LeClerc ($6.2 million) had greater value to the 2023 Rangers than deGrom. deGrom’s WAR count stopped at +0.9; his Win Probability Added stopped at 0.6. LeClerc, just to pick one, had no starts and only four saves, but he contributed 57 innings and 1.4 WAR.
Since the Rangers are on the hook to deGrom for another $155 million through 2027, perhaps he’ll deliver enough innings down the road to justify the financial outlay. But who are we kidding? Transactional grade: F
Trea Turner, Philadelphia Phillies
The Phillies won the winter war for Turner with an 11-year, $300 million commitment that included $27.27 million payable in 2023. How they do on that?
Well, they’re in the postseason and Turner will start at shortstop, so it has to be judged a success at some level. Still, Turner’s production was ordinary enough that the biggest headline he got was when he took out a newspaper ad apologizing for his poor performance.
The bottom line sounds very much like an average ballplayer: a career low .266 average, a career low .320 on base average, a .459 slugging average that was 25 percentage points below his career average, and modestly negative defensive stats.
It added up to a decent but hardly overwhelming 3.6 WAR and 0.7 Win Probability Added.
Turner’s WAR was fifth best on the team, which sounds decent. The irony is that the Phillies’ No. 2 WAR producer — behind pitcher Zack Wheeler — was Bryson Stott, at 4.1. Do you mean the same Bryson Stott who lost his starting shortstop job when the Phils signed Turner this winter? Yes, that Bryson Stott.
Although Turner’s WAR is at least competent, his relatively modest 0.7 WPA suggests that he was at his best when the pressure was minimal. Transactional grade: C-
Xander Bogaerts, San Diego Padres
Bogaerts is one of five Padres winter signees on this list, and that fact alone ought to be an indictable offense for a team that barely played .500 ball. If A.J. Preller doesn’t survive this offseason, you just learned the reason why.
The Bogaerts deal was for 11 seasons at $280 million, paying him $25.45 million in 2023. It also forced the move of shortstop Fernando Tatis Jr. (already under a long-term contract) to right field. We can debate the implications of that on the Padres defense at another time.
Bogaerts justified that money by hitting .285 (his worst average since 2017) with 19 home runs and 58 RBI. He had a .789 OPS and a 119 OPS+, suggestive of a good but hardly exceptional season. In fact by OPS+ standards, it was only the sixth best season of his 11 MLB seasons.
There’s a word for that: average.
His 4.3 WAR looks pretty good, although Bogaerts produced five superior WAR seasons during his time with the Red Sox. The problem is his -1.0 Win Probability Added, his worst season by that standard since his 2014 rookie year. My hunch is that when the Padres agreed to pay Bogaerts that $25.45 million this season, they weren’t counting on his clutch moments costing them a full game in the standings. Transactional grade: C-
Yu Darvish, San Diego Padres
Darvish re-upped with San Diego over the winter for six more seasons at $108 million, $25 million of that coming to him in 2023. He got that on the premise that the Padres were locking down their team ace.
Turned out they were actually re-signing a 36-year-old No. 3 or 4 starter. Who knew?
Darvish, a once-good pitcher, went 8-10 with a 4.56 ERA in 24 starts covering 136 innings for the Padres. Stop me when I cite any Darvish number that impresses you. He won six fewer games than Michael Wacha ($7.5 million), and gave up more hits per inning than Nick Martinez ($10 million). He struck out one more hitter than Seth Lugo ($7.5 million).
He may have been the highest-paid pitcher on the staff, but he ranked 10th in ERA+, eighth in pitcher WAR, and third in workload.
His 0.8 WAR was barely above replacement level, and his 0.1 WPA registered precisely one tick above me as a clutch contributor in San Diego. As measured by WPA, 2023 was Darvish’s worst season since 2018 in Chicago.
Then there were the injuries, which culminated in Darvish being given the rest of the season off in early September. Transactional grade: D
Juan Soto, San Diego Padres
As many big-money deals as the Padres made, they had to get one of them right. Soto happened to be the one.
To avoid arbitration he signed a one-year, $23 million contract, resulting in a lot of trade rumors when the Padres fell out of contention. The rumors turned out to be baseless (at least to date), but Soto actually had a good season.
He batted .275 with 35 homers and 109 RBI, all of that adding up to a .929 OPS and a glossy 158 OPS+.
That the Padres failed to live up to expectations was not Soto’s fault.
His 5.4 WAR ranks behind only Ohtani among the 15 high-contract players on this list. He coupled that with a +3.6 Win Probability Added, again ranking second behind Ohtani. In other words, he had a statistically superior season to Aaron Judge, which is saying something.
Granted, Soto was in the lineup for 161 games, Judge for only 106. But showing up counts, too.
His league-leading 131 bases on balls testifies to what opposing pitchers thought of him, and fueled his .409 on base average.
With negative Defensive Runs Saved numbers, he wasn’t much of an outfield factor … but the Padres didn’t pay him that $23 million to catch; they paid him to hit. Transactional grade: A
Carlos Rodon, New York Yankees
The Yankees demonstrated all the risks involved in signing a pitcher long-term when they put Rodon under contract for six seasons at $162 million, $22.833 million of that to be paid in 2023.
Thanks to a preseason injury, Rodon didn’t even make an appearance until July and, when he did, he was nothing special. He finished the season with a 3-8 record and 6.85 ERA in 14 starts covering a painful 64 innings.
That’s what $22.833 million will get you in the Bronx these days.
It all worked out to a WAR of -0.9. The Yankees used 32 pitchers in 2023 (among them Isiah Kiner-Falefa and Josh Donaldson) but only Luis Severino had a worse WAR than Rodon. Of his 14 starts, he failed to last five innings in six of them, including September 29 against the Royals when he faced eight batters, every one of whom scored.
The Yankees will hope that, braced by a healthy offseason and a normal spring, Rodon will bounce back to something approaching his old self in 2024. He might; he was a combined 27-13 in 2021-22 for the White Sox and Giants.
Anyway the Yanks have 140 million reasons to hope so. That’s the amount they still owe him through 2028. Transactional grade: F
Miles Mikolas, St. Louis Cardinals
In preparation for what everybody assumed would be another division championship and postseason run, the Cardinals gave Mikolas a three-year, $55.75 million deal that paid him $21.667 million in 2023.
Nominally, Mikolas fulfilled his end of the bargain. As the staff’s highest-paid pitcher and the team’s third highest-paid player (behind Goldschmidt and Arenado), he made a team-high 34 starts, and worked a team-high 194 innings. That’s all you can ask, right?
Well, you could ask for performance. Mikolas was 8-13 in those 34 starts with a 4.82 ERA. He led the team with 219 hits and 107 runs allowed; the runners-up allowed 121 and 89 respectively. His 90 ERA+ was the worst of his career.
It all worked out to just 1.8 WAR (that’s replacement level) and -0.5 Win Probability Added. For $21.667 million, you’d think you could buy a pitcher who could actually help, not hurt, the team.
Mikolas still tied Steven Matz for second on the staff in WAR, behind only Jordan Montgomery (who was traded away in mid-season). But that says more about Cardinal pitching than it does about Mikolas. The entire 28-man staff only combined for 6.7 WAR.
Let those numbers soak in a while and you begin to understand why the preseason favorite Cardinals sank to the NL Central basement. It wasn’t all on Mikolas. But some of it was. Transactional grade: D
Manny Machado, San Diego Padres
Considering all the money he was giving everybody else, it was almost obligatory for A.J. Preller to find a few million lying around for Manny Machado.
Just kidding. Preller tore up Machado’s existing 10 year, $300 million deal (which ran through 2028) and gave him a new 11-year, $350 million one through 2033. Preller now has three players (Machado, Bogaerts and Tatis) under contract through 2033. He hopes he lives long enough to see those deals play out.
To this point, the Machado re-signing isn’t looking all that great. He hit .258 with 30 home runs and 91 RBI, which sounds OK. But there were those incessant rumblings about Machado’s clubhouse chemistry, or lack of same.
His average fell 40 points from last season, his OPS took a 116 point tumble, and he piled up 56 fewer total bases in 601 plate appearances.
He was not, in short, the sort of franchise figure you envision when you sign a player long-term.
The discrepancy between Machado’s WAR and his WPA was striking. The 2.9 WAR wasn’t anything to write home about (in fact, it was well off his 6.8 WAR of 2022) but it was survivable. But his WPA took a pratfall from 4.5 one season ago to -0.5 in 2023.
His line drive and hard hit percentages both declined to levels not seen in several seasons. Transactional grade: D
Charlie Morton, Atlanta Braves
With all the young pitching in Atlanta, the Braves front office decided to reward their senior citizen. So they gave the 39-year-old Morton a one-year, $20 million deal, perhaps as a farewell present.
Since every move the Atlanta front office turns to gold these days, it’s no surprise that Morton turned in a solid season. He was 14-12 with a 3.64 ERA in 30 starts, covering 163 innings. Only Spencer Strider and Bryce Elder pitched more.
Among starters, only Max Fried had a lower ERA or a better ERA+. With his 3.1 WAR, Morton trailed only Strider in that category. His +1.0 WPA was solid.
Morton’s career development is an object lesson in growth. Ten years ago, the best sentence a batter could hear was, “You’re facing Charlie Morton.” Into his 30s, he was a sub-.500 pitcher with ERAs often in the fours.
The transformation began with his arrival in Houston at age 33 in 2017. Since then, he’s 42 games above .500 and routinely delivering 30 starts per season, as he did for Atlanta this year. He’ll be a postseason starter in part because he has the credentials: a 7-5 record with a 3.60 ERA in 17 postseason starts. Transactional grade: A-
Clayton Kershaw, Los Angeles Dodgers
The only surprise here is that the Dodgers needed to re-sign Kershaw. You mean they didn’t already have him on a lifetime deal?
In fact he signed for one year at $20 million, making him a free agent again this winter and almost certainly leading to another one-year, $20 million contract with the Dodgers.
What L.A. got for that $20 million was nothing short of a lifeline. It would have been difficult to imagine all the pitching problems that beset the Dodgers. Walker Buehler went down with a season-ending injury, Tony Gonsolin and Dustin May fell out, Julio Urias was sidelined while a domestic violence allegation is sorted out.
Through it all, there stood Kershaw as he always has. Granted, at age 35 the workload got a little shorter. He produced 131 innings in 24 starts, well off his Cy Young peaks of 33 and 233. But the ERA was still there (2.46) and he could be counted on, witness the 13-5 record.
In fact even at his comparatively advanced age he still led the depleted staff in wins, ERA, innings and strikeouts. No wonder the Dodgers held on to first place from mid-July through season’s end.
Kershaw’s 3.7 WAR trailed only Mookie Betts, Freddie Freeman and Will Smith on the whole team. His 2.1 WPA was down from 2.7 one season earlier, but still fourth best among the 15 $20 million signees.
The only question going in to this winter is whether Kershaw can do it again in 2024. Do not bet against him. Transactional grade: A
Joe Musgrove, San Diego Padres
Musgrove got a five-year, $100 million deal over the winter that pays him $20 million annually to pitch for San Diego through 2027. But for a mid-August shoulder inflammation, he had an outside chance to join teammate Blake Snell in Cy Young discussions right about now.
Musgrove was 10-3 with a 3.05 ERA in 17 starts when the injury sent him to the sidelines and adjusted his sights forward to 2024. The hope is that he’ll be able to avoid surgery. He’s coming off three solid seasons for the Padres since being acquired from Pittsburgh.
Musgrove’s 2.0 WAR was on pace to compare with his 3.7 and 3.3 WAR performances of 2021 and 2022 when he season ended early. That translated to a good but not great 1.2 WPA.
The real question regarding Musgrove now (as is often the case with injured pitchers) is whether he returns to form following a recuperation period consisting of rest alone. If he does, at age 31, there’s no reason to believe he won’t justify the remaining four seasons of his contract.
At the same time, plenty of pitchers do not return to form following a winter’s rest for shoulder soreness. Some of them even rest and then decide to go under the knife. If that happens, you can write off Musgrove’s 2024 and the $20 million the Padres will pay him again.
Such are the risks associated with giving pitchers long-term deals. Transactional grade: C
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