Our thoughts on the Max Scherzer deal

A day later and it’s still hard for me to wrap my head around the fact that Max Scherzer is a Met. A bunch of you already weighed in on the comments section of yesterday’s articles. Here, every writer at the site was given the chance to give their thoughts. Here’s what they said:

Matt Netter – Damn, it feels good to spend like the Yankees. Identify the player who can make the biggest difference and write the biggest check. I also love that it set a new precedent that the Mets can shop in the prime meats aisle with Scott Boras. When you have the two best pitchers in baseball on your team you always have a chance. If that mediocre Diamondbacks team could ride two aces to the WS, maybe we can too. Thank you for the amazing Christmas cheer, Uncle Steve!

John Fox – I certainly hope Scherzer can pitch close to what he did this past season for the next three, but I have my doubts. He will turn 38 during the season next year, he has a lot of career innings under his belt, and time is not on his side. Scherzer has been a power pitcher throughout his career, and 2021 was no exception. He threw fastballs for nearly 50% of his pitches, averaging 94.4 mph. I hope I’m wrong, but he may have to transition to a finesse pitcher sooner rather than later.

Chris Dial – As mentioned last week, the Mets rotation was Jacob deGrom and the seven dwarves. The Mets “non-deGrom” starting pitching would project to be 1.5 wins below average. Scherzer is good for, on average, about 4.0 wins above average, so given the innings he replaces – the worst of the Mets starters, the signing means the Mets should pick up 5.0 wins above average (or 7.0 wins above replacement), which is critical beyond just what Scherzer will do – he replaces bad pitchers.

Rob Rogan – In my GM article I argued that Steve Cohen should just spend the money and act like the Dodgers East he seemed to want to model the team after. It’s great to see him doing that, though I will admit I didn’t anticipate the lean towards older players. I especially didn’t anticipate them going after Scherzer. The Mets signing a 37-year-old pitcher to a contract with the highest annual value ever? What could possibly go wrong? It’s a heck of a statement move, and if we accept that a combo of Scherzer/deGrom could either be historically great or an injury-prone disaster I think we’ll be prepared for a wild ride.

David Groveman – The acquisition of Scherzer is staggering, in a good way. The Mets starting rotation has a 1-2 punch that has two perennial Cy Young candidates in it. The payroll is equally staggering, in a much less good way. Especially when you consider some of the holes that the Mets will face in 2023 and beyond, while having no salary cap space to do anything about it. This salary inflexibility will put added strain on the farm system to produce viable cheap replacements for players the Mets won’t be able to afford to keep around. In the end, I’m happy to have Scherzer and feel that he and Starling Marte already make the Mets part of the World Series contender short list.

Chris Flanders – My first, and suppose most overwhelming, thought is total surprise. The clear sign is that unimaginable vast sums of money can change the destination for people already with unimaginably vast fortunes. Cohen has made one thing clear after Year 1 of ownership, namely, the milk-and-cookies club of kids having a good time and pretending to be good is over. We know deGrom is a serious competitor, but quiet, and perhaps not enough of a clubhouse force to show the way. Scherzer changes that completely. Francisco Lindor dressing down Jeff McNeil for playing out of position, losing an out, and possibly even injuring both of them on a play will not stand. The signing of Scherzer means that a new culture of extreme commitment and accountability is going to pervade the Mets. Either you give all plus accomplish at a high level, or you are gone.

Dalton Allison – The saying goes, “If you can’t beat him, sign him to a massive contract he can’t say no to.” While of course the excitement for Scherzer is well-warranted, it just begs the question of whether or not they could have spread that money out over more than one contract. For the price they paid for Scherzer, they probably could have retained Javier Baez and added a depth rotation piece. deGrom-Scherzer one-two is exciting though.

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One thing that we’ve yet to mention here at the site is that in one of the proposals that the owners made to the players in the ongoing labor negotiations was to have player salaries tied to fWAR. The players seemingly are not interested in this. But, in the particular case of Scherzer, last year he had a 5.4 fWAR, which translates to being worth $42.9 million on the free agent market.

In the past, whenever these FanGraphs Dollar Values were used to judge contracts here at Mets360, one of the criticisms was that no one paid $35 million or more for a player. Then we saw Gerrit Cole top this figure and now Scherzer. It’s unclear at this point if these are two outliers or the beginning of a trend. Perhaps it’s not a big deal on a one-year contract. But we’ve seen the New York teams give these out on a three-year deal with Scherzer and a nine-year deal with Cole.

Both of those deals are risky in their own way. The idea that Scherzer will be able to produce at 2021 levels for the next three seasons is far from a sure thing for a pitcher of his age. But, if you had to wager on which contract was “worse,” it’s not a slam dunk that Scherzer’s deal is riskier than Cole’s. To count on a pitcher to essentially bang out 5-win seasons for a decade isn’t exactly a layup. Cole reached that level in 2021. But how likely is he to do it in 2025, to say nothing of 2028?

Yesterday, faithful reader and commenter T.J. pointed out that perhaps some of the Scherzer contract had to be credited to brand-building value. And we’ve seen some of these types of contracts before, where perhaps a team “overpaid” to get a player to come but the only way to change the team’s image was to do just that. The Nationals were ridiculed when they gave Jayson Werth a 7/$126 deal. He returned $105 million according to FanGraphs’ valuation – and that’s with three of the seven seasons coming in at 88 or fewer games, including the second year of the contract.

It hasn’t worked out quite as nicely for the Padres with Eric Hosmer and his 8/$144 deal from an on-field value POV. In his first four years in San Diego, Hosmer has a combined 0.5 fWAR, with only the Covid year providing production above replacement level. Perhaps Manny Machado wouldn’t have signed with the Padres without the Hosmer deal happening first. But the Padres gave Machado 300 million reasons to come to San Diego.

It seems there are two distinct questions here. First, did the Mets overpay Scherzer? Second, did they have to in order to change the perception of the club? My belief is that the Mets are paying Scherzer on the expectation he’ll be able to perform at 2021 levels over the lifetime of the deal. It’s risky betting on any pitcher and it becomes even riskier when that pitcher is as old as Scherzer. But if you’re going to gamble on a guy pitching well at ages 37-39, it’s a good idea to pick the guy who has pitched great from ages 25-36.

As for the second question, maybe the Mets had to overpay to get a specific player; but in general, it doesn’t seem to me that the team needed to pay any heavy premium to get guys to come to Queens and change the perception of the club. You still have to have the top offer. But a 2/$20 deal for Eduardo Escobar, who has been a 3-WAR player in each of the last three full seasons, hardly seems like an overpay. Mark Canha produced $20.7 million in 2021 – and $32.2 in 2019 – so it’s hard to see 2/$26.5 as any type of premium. Maybe the Mets overpaid in years for Marte. But that’s what it took to get the deal done and it might be the most likely outcome that he’ll have produced enough in the first three years of the deal that the fourth season isn’t a back breaker.

Perhaps the craziest thing about the Scherzer deal is that he has an opt-out after the second season. We now have to imagine that a potential outcome is that Scherzer pitches so well in 2022-23 that he figures he can get more years – and more dollars – if he leaves $43 million on the table.

As many of you know, my college team is North Carolina State, a team that is similar to the Mets in a lot of ways. Bad things just seem to happen to them, to the point where the fanbase has created its own acronym – SSUPO. That stands for Scared Shitless Until Proven Otherwise. But those days might be coming to an end. They just defeated their arch-rival in football by scoring twice at the end of the game, the second one after they recovered an onside kick – by, of all people, the kicker. That’s the kind of thing that typically happens to them, not by them. The worm has turned.

And may we see the same thing with the Mets now. Signing an old guy to a record-breaking contract would have been a recipe for disaster for the Wilpon-era Mets. But it’s a new day for the Cohen-era Mets. Scherzer has already made one team happy for its decision to sign him to a mega deal. Now it’s time for him to do it for a second franchise.