[ad_1]
CARLSBAD, Calif. — By now, Year 10 of baseball’s qualifying offer, you possess a good feel for who will accept it and who won’t. Noah Syndergaard, for instance, after missing nearly all of the past two seasons due to Tommy John surgery, appears a slam dunk to return to the Mets in 2022 for one year at $18.4 million and attempt to rebuild his brand and his market.
At first blush, you’d attribute the same logic to Justin Verlander, who underwent his TJ procedure more than six months after Syndergaard and is 9 ¹/₂ years older than Thor. But the 38-year-old Verlander, never one to adhere to others’ expectations, sent quite a message to the baseball industry on Monday morning, less than 24 hours after the Astros formally extended him a qualifying offer for next season:
He’s not thinking about rebuilding anything. For the first time in his storied career, he’s ready for the action of bona fide free agency. Which puts the New York clubs in play.
Verlander, whose reconstructive surgery took place on Oct. 1 of last year, threw for scouts for 15 to 20 teams on Monday, including two from the Mets and one from the Yankees, as The Post’s Joel Sherman reported. He threw about 30 pitches and his fastball clocked as high as 97 miles per hour.
That he held this showcase at the facility of Eric Cressey, the Yankees’ director of player health and performance, surely won’t hurt the Bombers’ chances of acquiring exactly the type of high-ceiling upgrade they could use for their deeper-than-usual starting rotation. Yes, it’s true that Cressey worked with a similar rebound candidate — and vouched for him to his employer — a year ago in Corey Kluber, and Kluber wound up pitching only half a season (16 starts, 80 innings pitched) due to a serious right shoulder injury after the Yankees guaranteed him $11 million. However, on a baseball actuarial scale that acquisition didn’t bust (Fangraphs valued his season at $11.8 million), and more to the point, Cressey scored major points by keeping Aaron Judge and Giancarlo Stanton sufficiently upright to post big-time campaigns.
As evidenced by the turnout, Verlander’s market hardly will be limited to the Big Apple. The Giants, with massive payroll flexibility and coming off a 107-win season, will dip their toes in all starting-pitching waters, to name just one suitor. Though we know that, when the Tigers resolved to trade Verlander in August 2017, he named the Yankees, Astros, Cubs and Dodgers as his top choices; the Yankees passed due to budgetary constraints (yeesh). The Yankees get another shot now.
If he’s four years older and one surgery worse now, let the record show that Verlander enjoyed a renaissance after joining the Astros (yup, go ahead and wonder about sticky stuff), winning the American League Cy Young Award (his second) in his last full season in 2019, prevailing in the voting by 12 points over his then-Astros teammate Gerrit Cole, who now plays for the Yankees. Furthermore, Tommy John surgery features a considerably higher recovery rate than the shoulder woes that plagued Kluber.
The Mets naturally can match and top whatever anyone else offers, courtesy of owner Steve Cohen, and the one field-staff position they have in place, pitching coach Jeremy Hefner, has quickly established himself as a respected force in the industry. That they face so many other questions about their personnel, though, could serve as a hurdle to recruiting Verlander.
Players must decide on the qualifying offer by Nov. 17, so it’s not impossible that Verlander could beat the lockout rush and render a decision by then. Yet Verlander’s appeal could be so strong, the draft compensation for signing him be damned, that he could reject the qualifying offer without having a deal in hand, which in turn would mean going into the likely owners’ lockout — slated to start Dec. 2 if there’s no deal on a new collective bargaining agreement — as a free agent still.
If he won’t be the priciest free agent, not by a long shot, he just might be the most intriguing. For sure, he posted the most intriguing first day after the qualifying offers established the winter’s parameters.
[ad_2]