Kyle Freeland Signs Up for Five More Years (Ish) in Denver

Kyle Freeland and the Rockies were set for a tense arbitration session. He had asked for $7.8 million; they countered with $6.425 million. That was the fourth-largest gap between team and player across all of baseball. But good news for people who don’t like contentious negotiations: That’s all in the past, because both parties agreed to a five-year extension that supersedes the arbitration dispute and should keep Freeland in Denver for the foreseeable future.

The deal, which buys out three seasons of free agency, has all kinds of bells and whistles. At its core, it’s a five-year, $64.5 million contract, which will pay him $7 million, $10.5 million, $15 million, $16 million, and $16 million for the next five years. If Freeland pitches 170 innings in ‘26, he’ll trigger a player option for the 2027 season, which would pay him $17 million. But wait, there’s more! If Freeland finishes in the top five in Cy Young voting in either 2022 or ’23, he can opt out after ’24; if he’s showing Cy Young form, he’d presumably do so.

This deal is somehow the largest contract the Rockies have given to a pitcher since Darryl Kile and simultaneously not one of the top five deals signed by starting pitchers since the end of last season. As befits a deal that is simultaneously large and small, I’m of two minds about it.

On one hand, I love seeing teams spend money to keep players. The Rockies were racking up a terrible track record on this exact issue as recently as last year. They confused Trevor Story by keeping him at last year’s trade deadline but without any intention of keeping him long-term; they gave him a qualifying offer and let him leave after the year. Colorado didn’t even do that with Jon Gray, thinking it was going to keep him and reportedly not trading him at the deadline for that exact reason — then following up by offering him a three-year deal worth less than $40 million, which he declined. The Rockies also inexplicably didn’t give him a qualifying offer, then watched him sign for four years and $56 million in Texas.

Add the Nolan Arenado saga to that list, and it’s fair to say that the Rockies haven’t done well when it comes to retaining homegrown talent in recent years. Seeing Freeland leave would be doubly painful there; he’s not only a product of the Rockies farm system, but also a Denver native. It would be particularly unpleasant to see him flourish elsewhere given the team’s recent issues retaining talent.

On the other hand: ZiPS maestro Dan Szymborski is on vacation, but the three-year projections for Freeland are hardly inspiring, with 1.6, 1.4, and 1.2 projected WAR for each season. That’s largely a volume issue; Freeland last topped 125 innings in 2018, though he threw a full season in 2020. His injuries have been multifarious; in 2021 alone, he strained his shoulder, dealt with blisters, bruised his foot, and suffered a hip contusion. The strained shoulder was the big blow, but the other injuries certainly didn’t help.

ZiPS thinks that when Freeland is available, he’ll be an effective starter, and that’s largely been the case in his career so far. His 4.27 career ERA might sound pedestrian, but that’s 12% better than average in Colorado. Even his 4.53 FIP is basically average, and an average pitcher is something worth holding onto, particularly in Denver. The Rockies need innings in bulk, and while the bulk part is certainly in question, an ERA in the mid-4.00s definitely plays.

But even when he’s available, warning signs are flashing. Freeland’s best season, 2018, was undeniably excellent, but also benefited from a ton of batted ball luck. Opposing hitters turned only 8.5% of their fly balls into home runs — a nice mark for any pitcher but an inconceivable one in homer-happy Coors. Since that excellent year, 18% of fly balls against him have turned into home runs, resulting in a 5.29 ERA, 5.08 FIP, and 2.7 WAR over 309 innings.

What’s to blame? The home runs played a huge part, but Freeland’s stuff has declined at the same time. He’s striking out only 17.6% of opposing batters — a bottom-five strikeout rate for pitchers with 300 or more innings over that time frame — which simply isn’t enough. Even with an average walk rate, that’s just too many batted balls, particularly at altitude. And even at his peak, Freeland wasn’t a strikeout pitcher, checking in at 20.5% in 2018. His fastball doesn’t miss bats; he throws a sinker and a four-seamer, but neither boasts plus movement or velocity. His slider is his best pitch, but it’s best deployed in two-strike counts. He hasn’t been getting there often enough, plain and simple. That’s not to say he won’t figure out some tweak to bulk up his strikeouts, but it’s tough to succeed as a low-strikeout, middling-walk pitcher when you’re pitching on the moon. Freeland has a 6.31 ERA (5.48 FIP) over 159.2 innings at Coors since the start of 2019. Oof.

From a dollars-per-WAR standpoint, this deal is paying Freeland a bit over $10 million per win if you extrapolate ZiPS over the five years of his deal. From a pure dollars-and-cents perspective, that’s an overpay, particularly when you take his two arbitration years into account. If the team paid him $17.5 million dollars in arbitration — basically the midpoint of this year’s numbers plus a reasonable raise, and what the yearly dollars in the contract come out to — then Colorado is paying him nearly $16 million per win in the three free agency years it’s bought out.

I liked the Kris Bryant signing for the Rockies, but I can’t muster up quite the same enthusiasm for this one. The Rockies probably paid quite a bit more for Bryant than anyone else would have offered, but Bryant gives them something they simply wouldn’t have otherwise: a premium offensive player (depending on how you feel about C.J. Cron). I like paying up for stars in general, and I think Bryant fit the bill enough for it to make sense for the Rockies.

It’s hard to get too worked up about this one given the smaller overall contract size, but I think it’s categorically different. I’m not certain that Freeland will be one of the Rockies’ five best starters in three years. They’re paying him a higher average annual value (for his free agency years) than Gray got on the open market, and I’m a bigger fan of Gray than Freeland. This feels like a reaction to losing out on Story and Gray rather than a move they’d been planning all along. Unlike the Ryan McMahon deal, which was questionable from a roster-building standpoint but offered solid monetary value to the team, I’m struggling to wrap my head around why the team had to offer this deal right now. If I were Freeland, I would have accepted it in a heartbeat.

I don’t think this contract will be an albatross, or anything close to it. Freeland is a hometown star, undeniably popular among fans. He’s certainly one of the Rockies’ five best starters right now, and if he kicks the injury bug, I could see years of average production in his future. It’s not like they have a strong track record of running out rotations so deep that they couldn’t use a Freeland-type arm, even in his decline years. What else were they going to do with that money, sign two relievers?

The bigger issue, for me, is how this deal stacks up with Gray’s departure. If I had to rank Colorado’s options when it came to pitching retention, I’d have signing both Freeland and Gray first, signing only Gray second, and signing only Freeland third. I’m happy that Freeland got a big deal after his excellent 2018 season looked like it might be a flash in the pan, and I’m sure Rockies fans will appreciate having a local as one of the faces of the team for the next five years. I just wonder about what could have been.