by Justin Verlander became Met the minute Rangers signed Jacob de Grom. It took three days to become official. A winning team needed a front starter and the next best option was to strike a long-term deal with Carlos Rodón.
Spending $86.8 million over two years on a pitcher who turns 40 in February is a cost that Dishes need to pay. Rodón involved more years at risk and with a lower cap. The Mets made sure to keep Verlander just below new and old teammate Max Scherzer as the most expensive pitcher in history — by about $30,000 a year.
Coming out of Tommy John surgery at 39, Verlander went 18-4 with a 1.75 ERA last season and won his third career Cy Young award.
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Scherzer turns 39 in July. The Mets will pay $86 million next year for pitchers ages 38 and 40, up from five full-team paydays last season. No team since 2013 Yankees, along with Hiroki Kuroda and Andy Pettitte, had two qualified starters aged 38 or older. The Mets have already tried this, in 2004, with Tom Glavine and Al Leiter. The Yankees won a pennant in 2003 with Roger Clemens and David Wells.
Keep this in mind, though: Verlander and Scherzer are outliers. They haven’t lost any of their stuff. Where the Mets have to be careful is building rotational depth to give them more days off and not pushing them deep into games to make sure they maintain that stuff. The Astros did that with Verlander last season, giving him five days off in a six-man rotation. The Dodgers learned to treat Clayton Kershaw that way. Scherzer is still reliable but no longer the same workhorse. He has thrown 110 pitches in one start once in the past two years.
The Mets’ mission will be to manage their co-aces’ innings to ensure they reach October healthy.
Verlander and Scherzer are very competitive athletes who are friendly rivals. A source familiar with their time together at Detroit compared their competitiveness to Randy Johnson and Curt Schilling with the Diamondbacks. They pushed each other but they also got angry sometimes. A source familiar with the teammates said Schilling, for example, would ask Johnson how much money he would get at autograph signing shows. Schilling would then say he would get $10,000 more to anything Johnson said, just to polish it.
Verlander still has a lot of elite baseball in him. His idol was Nolan Ryan, and for years Verlander said he would love to reach his forties like Ryan did. The similarities don’t end there.
In 1988, Ryan was 41 when the Astros thought he wasn’t worth the money he was making. They offered him a year and $1.3 million. Rangers had no room in their budget, but owner Eddie Chiles told general manager Tom Grieve that if Ryan was available, the budget didn’t matter. Rangers signed Ryan to a one-year contract for $1.8 million. He struck out 301 batters. A year turned into five years at Texas in which Ryan was 51-39 (.567) – his best winning percentage among his four teams – and struck out 10.1 over nine innings – his best scoring rate. strikeouts among his saves.
There is only one Ryan. But Verlander is a close composition because of his star power and his ability to continue as a power pitcher. The Mets replaced deGrom with Verlander, who posted a 1.75 ERA last season. It was a move they had to make.
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• Jacob deGrom worth the risk for Rangers
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