Aaron Nola Sensibly Stays in Philly

Admit it: you had a feeling it might go this way. Aaron Nola is headed back to Philadelphia. After a short trip to free agency, he re-signed with the Phillies for seven years and $172 million, as USA TODAY’s Bob Nightengale first reported. He’s the first domino to fall this offseason, but this was hardly a shocking outcome. The move makes a lot of sense for both team and player, which helps explain why it came to pass so swiftly.

Let’s start with the team side of things. The Phillies are bona fide World Series contenders, and they’re built to win right this minute. Bryce Harper, Trea Turner, and J.T. Realmuto are all at or near the peak of their careers. Kyle Schwarber and Nick Castellanos are in the same boat. The Philly offense is so good right now that it would be borderline criminal not to contend, and that’s clearly been the team’s plan. They made the World Series in 2022, then went out and added Turner in the offseason to bolster their squad.

If they didn’t act this offseason, they’d be moving in the wrong direction. The Phillies’ recent regular seasons may have been built around an excellent offense, but their playoff plan has been all about pitching. Nola and Zack Wheeler have each been October workhorses; taking advantage of off days, they’ve started 19 of the team’s 30 playoff games in the last two years. Giving the ball to elite starters that frequently takes pressure off both the rest of the rotation and the bullpen, the team’s two great weaknesses.

Without Nola or a pitcher of a similar caliber, that plan wouldn’t really work. Ranger Suárez is great, but he doesn’t handle the same type of workload. Taijuan Walker didn’t appear in the postseason, which says a lot about how the Phillies see his role. It’s usually true that teams don’t need a player at any one spot, because a run scored counts the same no matter how you produce it and a run prevented works similarly. But that’s just a generality, not an immutable rule.

In this particular instance, I don’t think that’s true. The Phillies couldn’t execute their playoff plans without two aces. Not only do those two give the team a great chance to win when they start, but they also let manager Rob Thomson manage the bullpen more aggressively in the rest of the games, hunting matchups freely with the knowledge that everyone will get a rest when the top guys are back on the mound. It’s not exactly managing on easy mode, but it’s a lot more fun to work out your plans when you can just say “use the good pitchers and see what happens” in two-thirds of your games.

Could the Phillies have replaced Nola with another starter with a similar resume? Sure, in theory. Jordan Montgomery and Blake Snell are likely going to get similar deals, and there’s a tier or arms just below that includes Sonny Gray, Eduardo Rodriguez, Marcus Stroman, and Shota Imanaga. You could even go a tier above Nola, to Yoshinobu Yamamoto. If there’s one thing this thin free-agent market isn’t short on, it’s top-line starters.

None of those plans make much sense to me from Philly’s perspective, though. Only one team is going to sign Yamamoto, and it’s hard for me to believe that anyone has a strong conviction on where he’ll end up. For a team like the Phillies that had to come out of this winter with a top pitcher, he’s a risky top target. Snell and Montgomery would probably fit with what the team is looking for, but they carry some risks. There’s no certainty that they’d sign with the Phillies. Snell hasn’t been as durable or eaten as many innings as Nola. Montgomery’s track record as a top option is only 1.5 years long. The group below that is even dicier when it comes to expecting and needing a playoff star; that’s certainly in the range of outcomes for those guys, but it doesn’t feel like the average case, and Philly needs it to be the average case.

That made Nola a snug fit. He already knows the team. He seems to love playing in Philadelphia. I certainly got the sense that he’d come back to the team if they were in line with the best offers, and it seems like I might have undersold his preferences; Jon Heyman reported that Nola turned down more money to take their offer. The Phillies absolutely had to have a top pitcher to fit the way they built their roster, and making Nola their first call makes perfect sense given that context and their familiarity.

From Nola’s perspective, I completely understand his decision. Some players want to maximize the size of their contract in free agency, and more power to them. There are plenty of reasons to do it: you might care about setting new precedents for player salary, or the prestige associated with a big contract, or just truly be undecided about where to play, at which point money is a great tiebreaker. But if I were a multi-millionaire, I’d put a lot of value on continuing to live in the same place. I like that I know where the nearest dry cleaners is, where to find the best bagel within a 10-minute walk of my apartment, and what the best dog walk routes are. I’d need a compelling argument to move away from that setup. That’s me, someone with a finite amount of money. If I had more than I could ever spend, no one could ever convince me to change my routine.

Both team and player seem to have come to an easy decision with this signing. Everyone wants more of the same: more contending seasons, more pitching-heavy Octobers, more raucous crowds at Citizens Bank Park. That brings up a thorny question: will they get it?

Nola is coming off of a rough season, arguably his worst in the majors. He allowed too many home runs, didn’t strike out enough batters, and lost some of the pinpoint command he began displaying a few years ago. He righted the ship somewhat in the second half of the season, but even then he got hit hard and posted a 4.58 ERA. He looked sharp in the playoffs, but that’s only four games. The 2023 season was incontrovertibly a step backwards across the board.

ZiPS takes that step backwards to heart in its forecast of Nola’s future:

Hey, you might say: What’s with that big gap between Nola’s FIP and ERA? But that’s roughly where he’s been for his career, over enough innings that surely some of it is signal. The bigger takeaway for me is that ZiPS expects his strikeout rate to decline quickly over the next four years as he continues to surrender his fair share of home runs. It’s an extension of what happened this year, more or less.

These projected futures are hardly set in stone. I’m optimistic that Nola will be able to squeeze a little more juice out of his pitch mix, particularly his new-ish cutter, to stave off normal age-related decline in his inning-for-inning results. And I’m optimistic about his innings totals; he’s been one of the most durable pitchers in the game since debuting, making at least 30 starts (or its 2020 equivalent) every year since 2017, when he still made 27. There’s no predicting catastrophic injuries, and the ZiPS forecast is a median that accounts for the possibility that he misses a huge chunk of time. But if I were the Phillies, I’d pencil Nola in for 30 starts for at least the next three seasons and then build contingency plans around injury rather than expecting him to throw less frequently.

I won’t quibble with the back end of the projections. For every Zack Greinke, there’s an Aníbal Sánchez. In fact, there are multiple pitchers like that for every Greinke, guys whose best years were in their late 20s and early 30s. Maybe Nola will beat the odds and continue to excel seven years from now, but I wouldn’t bet on it; the odds are against him.

To be clear, that’s fine. The Phillies know that. The teams whose bigger offers he turned down know that, too. That’s how these deals work. You get a great player right now and for the next few years at a reasonable rate. For teams like the Phillies, that’s what you care about: right now and the next few years. That’s when his talents will do the most good, when the rest of their core will also be at its best. Free-agent contracts don’t work out or fail to work out based on what happens in year seven, at least not usually. Their outcome is determined by what happens in the first few years, when the player is closest to looking exactly like he did when the team signed him. Similarly, that’s presumably when the team needs that production the most; I doubt any teams who aren’t interested in contending in 2024 were pitching Nola on coming to their city.

When you put it that way, I think that this is a win-win deal. This contract is right in line with both my and the crowd’s predictions. It’s not some egregious hometown low-ball, but it’s also not a case of a team paying an outrageous sum to a hometown hero for his past contributions. Nola got a huge chunk of money, one that befits a pitcher of his talents. The Phillies gained a ton of certainty and will now get to spend the rest of the offseason upgrading around the margins with their sights set on a third straight deep playoff run in 2024. This won’t be the most exciting deal of the offseason, or the biggest shock. But it makes a ton of sense for both sides, which is how you end up with one of the top free agents on the market signing mere weeks after free agency opens.