On Tuesday, David Price signed the largest contract for a pitcher in baseball history, getting $217 million over seven years to join the Red Sox. But the value of his deal isn’t just the $217 million dollars he’s now guaranteed; he also obtained an opt-out which gives him the right to hit the free agent market again in three years, if he believes he’ll be able to get a raise at that point. If he pitches well over the next few seasons and opt-outs, he may very well be able to replace the final $127 million of this deal with another $175 to $200 million commitment, pushing the total he’d collect between the two contracts close to $300 million.

Yesterday, Eno Sarris looked at the opt-out from a few different angles, estimating that it added something like $10 to $15 million in value to Price’s deal. Clearly, the opt-out is a perk to the player, as it allows them to reset their salaries if they play well and the market inflates, but doesn’t give the team the same option if they struggle or get injured. The team assumes the full risk of the guaranteed money, but does not get the same potential return if the investment goes well, as the opt-out reduces the upside for the team.

But could an opt-out clause also reduce a team’s risk? Over the last few days, both on Twitter and in (and after) my chat yesterday, a significant number of people have argued that including the opt-out increases the odds that the Red Sox avoid the riskiest years of this deal, and that the opt-out could help the team if they’re willing to let him leave after he opts out. After all, at that point, they’d have signed the best pitcher on the market for $90 million over three years, which is obviously a pretty great outcome for the team.

This assertion often conflates correlation and causation, though. While it’s true that getting three years of Price at $90 million without carrying the longer-term risk is a good outcome for the Red Sox, Price only opts out in situations where his market value is greater than the remaining $127 million left on his contract. In other words, at that point, the Red Sox wouldn’t be able to replace Price’s expected future performance by spending $127 million; they’d either have to pay more to keep him in Boston, or pay a lesser player (or players) that amount in order to fill the hole that the opt-out created. The opt-out occurs at a point when the original contract has turned out well for the Red Sox, but the opt-out is not the cause of the contract turning out well, and it does not improve the team’s situation at the point the opt-out is exercised.

From a purely accounting standpoint, the only way including an opt-out can be a positive for the team is if the player takes a larger discount in guaranteed money than the value of the opt-out is expected to provide. For instance, if Price would have demanded $250 million without the opt-out, then signing him for $217 million and including an opt-out is very likely a better decision for the Red Sox, since the math suggests the value of the opt-out is less than $33 million. For a team, whether to include an opt-out should mostly be a calculation based on the difference in guaranteed money the player is willing to leave on the table in order to have the opt-out included.

But while I’ll disagree with the sentiment that including the opt-out without getting a financial offset can ever be a net positive for a team, I do think a few interesting counterpoints were raised about the difference in expected long-term outcomes for a team when an opt-out is included. In particular, this comment from Josh yesterday explained a somewhat different perspective pretty well.

Certainly, if Price opts out, it’s because there’s a market for his services that may or may not include the Red Sox. In theory, if he had positive value, the Red Sox could trade him to one of those other teams interested in picking up the back end of his deal, no doubt.

The problem is that the market doesn’t work that perfectly. There are relatively few teams that can absorb a $32M pitcher and it’s possible that they are undesirable trade partners (division rivals, poor relationship between front offices, etc). If there is a trade partner, there’s no guarantee that the available return is greater than the value of a qualifying offer. There’s also a chance teams would be less than excited to acquire an asset at full price that’s only being dealt because of the risk he’s about to decline. If he opted out, it’s likely more teams would get involved at a sub-32M AAV in exchange for years. Perhaps he’d take 6/150 rather than 4/128.

I tend to think along the same lines as Dave on this — that the opt out is obviously player friendly — but the argument that there is no conceivable benefit to the team is a little too black and white for me. They definitely won’t be able to acquire a package of players from an interested trade partner this way(versus “might have been able, otherwise) but I’m sure the Red Sox would get over the grief of being out from under pricy decline years and their newfound payroll flexibility and draft pick quickly enough.

In the scenario where Price opts out, it is a given that there’s a market for his services that would result in a larger payday awaiting him in some other city. I’m not particularly convinced by the annual average value argument, as if a team was willing to pay him 6/$150M, they’d likely be willing to trade for Price at 4/$127M and then sign him to an extension that pushed some of the present money back into the new years of the deal; Price doesn’t have to be a free agent for an acquiring team to re-work his contract, after all, and plenty of trades are made contingent upon a player agreeing to a contract with their new team as part of the deal.

But I think Josh raises a point about the potential frictional costs of making a deal that are worth considering. In the scenario where Price has positive value in three years, he’s clearly pitched well to that point, and teams are often reluctant to trade star players who are performing at a high level, even if you could argue that there are signs that point to it being a rational decision in order to do so. The opt-out could force a rational decision upon the Red Sox where irrationality would prevail otherwise. While a team owning a positive-value contract without an opt-out always has the option of essentially forcing an a similar outcome if they so choose — MLB has the waiver system, and any player claimed on waivers could always be given away at any point, so a team is never really stuck with a long-term contract that has positive value relative to the market rate — often contracts at this valuation come with no-trade clauses, which complicates the ease of making a trade, even if a team decided they wanted to do so.

There are frictional costs to trying to trade highly paid star players, and regularly, teams end up hanging onto expensive aging players beyond their sell-by date because of the perception backlash that comes with trading a face-of-the-franchise type of talent. So, perhaps the theoretical upside of the potential trade value is overstated, if a team isn’t willing to act on that trade value. And the point about the qualifying offer is completely correct; even though a team doesn’t get to trade a player who opted out, in the current form, they are compensated with an asset valued at roughly $10 million in exchange for the player leaving for another organization.

We don’t know that the qualifying offer system will survive the next round of CBA negotiations, so a team signing a player to a deal with an opt-out this winter shouldn’t count on the fact that they will get draft pick compensation if the player outs out, but it is a potential benefit that could be realized by a team that has a star player opt-out in the future. The draft pick isn’t going to wholly compensate a team for the entirety of a player’s positive trade value in most cases, but we shouldn’t also assume that a team who has a player opt-out gets nothing in return; it’s the marginal gap between the potential crop of prospects and the draft pick that matters.

But beyond that, the increased likelihood of the team’s ability to walk away from an extension versus choosing to trade the final years of a deal also have to be factored in. And when we look at how irregularly teams choose to trade these types of players, it’s a fair point to suggest that the opt-out may force them into a good decision more frequently.

Overall, the opt-out is still always going to be a player-friendly perk, and one that benefits the player more than it benefits the team. But given the frictional costs involved with actualizing the trade value of a star player versus receiving compensation if the player forces the team into walking away from the risk of the longer-term commitment, the marginal cost of an opt-out to a team may be diminished somewhat. And if a team can get a player to leave $15 or $20 million in guaranteed money on the table — especially by taking a lower annual salary up front, and pushing more of their compensation to the end of the deal, after the opt-out decision has to be made — in order to obtain the opt-out, then it can be a perfectly rational decision to include one in a contract.

The Red Sox just paid an enormous amount of money for the baseball-throwing services of David Price. The deal makes sense, as Boston struggled last year in that department, and now they’ve basically ensured, barring injury or anomalous performance, that they’ll struggle less in that department next season. Price is a an exceptional pitcher. That was a well-established fact before he was handed $30 million a year — dating back to his breakout 2010 campaign with the Rays, in fact. However, this past season provided glimpses at a repertoire that might facilitate the next stage of David Price, Pitcher, and it was centered around the use of his cutter and the improvement of his changeup.

Jeff went over the changes in Price’s cutter usage in late September, but the main premise is this: Price started throwing more cutters, throwing them harder, and locating them further inside to right-handed hitters toward the end of last season. As we’ll see, that impacted how successful his changeup was in different parts of the zone.

Now, the changeup: we often hear about how difficult they’re to learn. They’re a “feel” pitch, and we’re told that, because of that, they need a lot of work — work that usually comes from experience. It takes confidence to throw any type of pitch well, and when confidence is lacking in a particular offering, the pitcher is reluctant to throw it very often. This is a little different for left-handed pitchers: as Eno pointed out in this piece, left-handed starters throw changeups 65% more often than right-handers do. Lefties inherently have a difficult job because the majority of hitters are right-handed; to combat this, they throw more changeups, the pitch with the best reverse platoon split.

Price has always thrown a changeup, going back to his debut in the league. And, fitting the narrative that changeups are found with more experience, he’s thrown them with increased usage every season of his career. Take a look at his pitch usage every season since 2010:

In 2015, he cracked the 20% mark with his changeup usage, and he’s now transitioned firmly away from using his curveball as his main secondary pitch. In truth, he had already transitioned away from that approach beginning in 2013, but this year marked not only another increase in usage, but a few other adjustments that merit attention from us.

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On Tuesday night, the Red Sox made David Price the highest paid pitcher in baseball history. Dave Dombrowski is clearly a Price fan, having previously traded for him while running the Tigers, and made good on his stated desire to bring a #1 starter to Boston. Of course, at $217 million over seven years, Price certainly isn’t coming cheaply, and the Red Sox throwing money at free agents certainly didn’t solve their problems a year ago, so it’s fair to be somewhat skeptical of this kind of team-building approach. But, rather than simply paint with broad strokes, it’s instructive to look at how pitchers who have performed similarly to Price have fared during the same stretch of their careers as the Red Sox just signed Price for.

To identify a list of similar pitchers, I used the FanGraphs leaderboard to identify pitchers in the last 20 years who had compiled between +26 and +34 WAR in their age-24 through age-29 seasons; this gives us a group that approximates the +30 WAR that Price put up during his six years as a full-time starter. Nineteen pitchers have accomplished this feat, Price included, though a couple of them — Felix Hernandez and Clayton Kershaw — are present-day peers, and thus, don’t have anything to tell us about how pitchers like this perform in their early 30s. So, excluding those two, we’re left with 16 pitchers who were comparably dominant during their 24-to-29 seasons.

How’d they do from ages 30 through 36? Well, take a look.

David Price Comparisons

Pitcher	Innings	WAR	WAR/200 IP
Mike Mussina	1,444	36	5
Roy Halladay	1,413	35	5
Andy Pettitte	1,282	28	4
John Smoltz	813	24	6
Javier Vazquez	994	19	4
Roy Oswalt	832	16	4
CC Sabathia	861	15	3
Dan Haren	958	12	2
Kevin Appier	930	11	2
Justin Verlander	557	11	4
Zack Greinke	425	10	5
Johan Santana	482	8	3
Jack McDowell	327	5	3
Jose Rijo	86	2	3
Ben Sheets	168	1	1
Brandon Webb	4	0	0

At the top, we see four very obvious success stories, with Mussina, Halladay, Pettitte, and Smoltz all maintaining their dominance, putting up performances as good or better than they did early in their careers. This is the kind of performance the Red Sox are clearly hoping for, and if he pitches like any of these four, this will go down as maybe the most successful free agent pitcher contract in baseball history. These four represent the best case scenario, and show that yes, it is indeed possible for a pitcher to maintain greatness even after turning 30.

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David Price can opt out of his seven-year, $217 million contract in three years? That’s either terrible for the Red Sox or a boon for the Red Sox, depending on how you think about it.

It’s terrible for the Red Sox!

It’s power in the hands of the player, since it’s a player option. If Price plays well, and the market continues to grow, they’ll have paid $30 million a year for three years and will have to get right back into negotiating with their ace, along with every other team.

If he gets hurt or plays poorly or the market doesn’t perform the same way going forward, they suddenly have to pay yesterday’s going rate for an overpriced, possibly hurt, aging ace… for another four years.

And before you say that it’s great for the Sox to be able to walk away if they feel the market will overvalue their pitcher… they could trade him if the market valued their under-contract ace more than they did. They would have a way to react other than just walking away, and they’d presumably get some sort of return for their asset.

It’s great for the Red Sox!

The opt-out makes it more likely that they get three good years from their investment and move on. It has to make it more likely than it would if the team gave him a seven-year confirmed deal, at least. That might be a matter of semantics, but it’s a fact. And teams prefer fewer years and higher average annual salaries, since it allows them to avoid larger commitments and work with greater flexibility.

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So David Price and the Red Sox have agreed to a seven-year deal worth $217 million, pending a physical that Price will presumably clear with some ease. As part of the terms, Price can opt out after year three, and sometimes pitchers do that, and sometimes they don’t. We’re in a weird place, where this was entirely predictable, for any number of reasons, and at the same time, we’re talking about the biggest pitcher contract in the history of the sport. That shouldn’t be something you just calmly nod at, but though this wasn’t a foregone conclusion, it was at least a popular guess. Price reunited with Dave Dombrowski on a team in need of an ace. Word is Boston blew the competition out of the water, which is what they figured to do.

Writing about these giant free-agent contracts is always a challenge. People want to know, “is it worth it?” and the bigger the contract, and the longer the contract, the more assumptions there are being made. You have to guess a player’s skill, and decline. You have to guess what a win is worth, now, and many years down the road. You have to guess at inflation, and around everything, you have to guess at a team’s success or failure. In the end, you’re left guessing. The teams themselves are left guessing. It’s not like they know the future much better than we do. It’s not like they understand injury risk much better than we do. Numbers are put on paper, and players sign on lines, and, subsequently, life happens. Each contract might turn out to be good, bad, or anywhere in between.

People want answers. There aren’t answers. Not that we know. Years down the road, we’ll all have opinions of the David Price contract with the Red Sox, but we can’t know what those opinions will be. I’m sorry to have to put it like that, but let’s leave this uncertainty behind, shall we? Let’s just focus on what we do know. That’s as much as can be done.

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The Red Sox signed one of the Chris Youngs — the one who can hit. Terms haven’t yet been announced, or at least, terms hadn’t yet been announced when I first heard about this, and I haven’t bothered to check again since. It doesn’t really matter. He’ll get some millions over some years, and it will be neither great nor terrible, and whether Young is a success will probably come down to about five or ten swings per season. If they’re doubles or homers, terrific. If they’re outs, bad investment. So it goes with the role players. So it goes with everybody.

It’s fun that there are multiple Chris Youngs. It’s all the more fun they’re both weird and exceptional, extreme representations of ordinary profiles. The pitcher is unusually tall, and he throws unusually slow, and he generates an unusual amount of fly balls. The outfielder is also strange, and here’s a plot of part of his career profile:

Young hits a ton of balls in the air. A relative ton of those remain close to the infield. Young pulls the majority of his balls in play. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Young is sitting on a pretty low career BABIP, despite having a good amount of footspeed. Young isn’t the most difficult hitter to defend. You tend to know where the ball’s going, and then it’s a matter of covering as much of that limited ground as possible.

So, yeah, both Chris Youngs are fly-ball machines. They both get pop-ups and run low BABIPs. These are neat and coincidental fun facts. But let’s focus on that pull rate. Also, on the inversely-related opposite-field rate. Young does his damage hitting to left and left-center. He’s the worst opposite-field hitter we have on record.

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There’s a difference between saying a pitcher has a changeup, and saying a pitcher throws a changeup. Pretty much every pitcher has a changeup — all it takes is once or twice having messed around with the grip and the delivery. If a guy has thrown a changeup, and remembers what he did, it could be said the same guy has a changeup. But to say a guy throws a changeup — that’s something active. That says, not only does the pitcher possess a changeup in his arsenal, but he could throw it at any point. It’s a part of his approach. The pitcher has a fastball, a changeup, and a curve, say.

I don’t know where the point is where one becomes the other. I don’t know how many times a pitcher has to use a pitch before it can be said the pitch is a part of the pitcher’s attack. Here’s what I can tell you about Craig Kimbrel: for years, he’s had a changeup. Now he’s closer than ever to regularly throwing one.

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When Dave Cameron wrote up the Athletics’ signing of Rich Hill yesterday, he titled it “A’s Sign Rich Hill, Because Of Course They Do.” He focused more on the fact that Hill was a resurgent pitcher that represented a low-risk, high-reward, low-money signing — a bit like Scott Kazmir before the 2014 season. That makes a lot of sense, given Oakland’s budget constraints and past practices.

There’s another way Hill is the perfect major league acquisition for the Athletics, though. He’s a fastball/curve guy with an iffy changeup. He’ll fit right in.

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Last week, MLB saw two of their first big trades of the winter, as both the Red Sox and Angels gave up significant pieces of their farm system to acquire upgrades to their big league roster; Boston acquired closer Craig Kimbrel, while Anaheim landed shortstop Andrelton Simmons. In both cases, the acquisitions are not rentals, as Kimbrel is signed for two more years with a team option for a third, while Simmons is under contract through the 2020 season. To get high-quality players with multiple years of team control, both teams had to give up significant prospects from their farm system.

For the Red Sox, that meant parting with a pair of consensus Top 100 prospects in outfielder Manny Margot and shortstop Javier Guerra, along with a couple of lower tier add-ons. For the Angels, the cost was left-handed pitcher Sean Newcomb, the team’s first round pick in the 2014 draft and the most coveted player they had in the minor leagues; they also sent along with a second pitching prospect and shortstop Erick Aybar, who had been their everyday player at the position for the last seven years.

Both teams surrendered talent they would rather have kept, but felt strongly enough about the players they were receiving to make the trades anyway. And both teams did get very good players, among the best at their respective positions. But in terms of what these deals did to the remains of their respective farm systems, the situations could not be more different.

In making the Kimbrel deal, Dombrowski referenced the Red Sox loaded farm system, which has regularly been seen as one of the best in baseball.

“You don’t ever like to give up young talent,” Dombrowski said. “We think they’re very talented individuals. But I do think that (because of) the good job that the people at player development, scouting, international operations have done, we do have some depth at those positions. And we do have some other quality young players that we were asked about repeatedly.”

Those quality young players Dombrowski is referring to? They are almost certainly Mookie Betts and Xander Bogaerts, the team’s pair of 23-year-old big league cornerstones, who happen to play center field and shortstop, respectively, the same positions that Margot and Guerra are playing in the minor leagues. With those positions locked down at the Major League level for the foreseeable future, Margot and Guerra were seen as somewhat extraneous to the team’s long-term plans, and were likely going to be traded at some point. The primary justification for paying a very high price for Kimbrel is that the team’s depth of prospects allowed them to make a trade like this, because even after surrendering good young talent, they have other good young talent to help them keep their future looking bright.

The Angels are in a very different situation; Newcomb was essentially their only prospect of significance, now that Andrew Heaney has too much time in the majors to qualify as a prospect. Roberto Baldoquin, the team’s top-rated prospect after Heaney and Newcomb heading into the 2015 season, just hit a meager .235/.266/.294 in A-ball, to give you some idea of the organization’s current crop of hitting prospect. With Newcomb, the team’s farm system would have been rated as one of the worst in baseball; without him, it unquestionably is so.

So, relative to their stock of future utility to the organization, the Angels probably gave up a greater percentage of their inventory than the Red Sox did, even though it’s pretty clear the package San Diego got for Kimbrel is a better one than the Braves got for Simmons. But even though Newcomb had more utility to his own organization than Margot or Guerra did, I can’t agree with the notion that highly talented prospects should be viewed as having significantly diminished value to an organization simply because of the presence of other highly talented players, even other talented players at the same position.

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Anyone who’s ever tried to analyze baseball has had the occasions of coming away fairly humbled by the experience. I’ve been made to look stupid at least dozens of times, but one that really sticks out is a blog entry from May 2007, when I figured a mid-30s Raul Ibanez was about out of bat speed and power. From the date of that entry through the end of his career, Ibanez batted more than 4,000 times, drilling 166 home runs while posting a 112 wRC+ and making something like $50 million. Ibanez remained with the Mariners, left them, came back more than a half-decade later, and that year was the best hitter on the team. He was never toast until he was. It’s hard to look into the toaster.

Next season is going to be David Ortiz’s last. The official announcement is apparently coming Wednesday, but the word is out now, and it’s unlikely Ortiz is suddenly going to reverse course next November. So 2016 will bring another farewell tour for another franchise icon, and at every stop, people are going to share their memories. We all have our own, and if we’re being honest, we all have several. Among mine is that, time and time again, it’s been speculated that Ortiz was about at the end of the road. It’s a perfectly reasonable position to take with a player getting up there in years, but to Ortiz’s credit, there have been slumps, but he still hasn’t actually declined. He turns 40 tomorrow.

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