The World Series ended last Wednesday, which means that 5 PM today is the deadline for teams to make qualifying offers for their pending free-agents. The Pirates have two free agents that, erm, qualify for a qualifying offer: Russell Martin and Francisco Liriano.
Now, let’s do a quick refresher on the specifics of the qualifying offer before we get too far into the woods with Martin and Liriano. Basically, any player set to become a free agent that has spent at least one full season (that is, players traded in-season are not eligible) with his current club is eligible for a qualifying offer. The qualifying offer is a one-year deal based on some kind of evaluation of market value done by MLB and the MLBPA; this year, it’s $15.3 million. The player can either choose to accept the qualifying offer (which no player has ever done), or reject it and become an outright free agent. Once the player signs with a new team, his old receives a first round compensation pick in the sandwich round between the first and second rounds, while his new team loses their first round pick, unless it’s “protected” by them having one of the top ten picks in the next draft.
Making Russell Martin a qualifying offer is a slam dunk, and the Pirates have already more or less said they’ll do it (though I can’t find the link at the moment). Martin is far and away the only truly useful catcher available on the free agent market this year, and he’s going to get a big multi-year deal worth close to or more than that $15.3 million per year. There is, flatly, no way that Martin accepts a qualifying offer, and there’s no way that the draft pick price tag prevents him from signing with a new team, if and when he decides to sign with someone other than the Pirates.
Liriano is a much more complicated situation. On the one hand, the Pirates very much need starting pitching this winter (I’m going to sound like a broken record over this, but, again, their non-injured starting rotation for Opening Day at the moment is Cole/Worley/Locke/Cumpton/Sadler and this is just begging for a disaster) and they know that Liriano is a good fit for them. On the other, he’s not really a slam-dunk to be worth $15 million next year. He wasn’t really all that reliable in 2014, with his injuries and his general ineffectiveness through large stretches of the season. You could even argue that his unreliability was what torpedoed the Pirates for the Wild Card Game; given the Giants’ general struggles with lefties, he would have been an overwhelmingly obvious choice to start the game. Instead, the Pirates pretty carefully picked his starts and actually chose to start him in a relatively meaningless game against the Braves and not in the Wild Card Game, as opposed to giving him what could’ve been a huge start against the Brewers on the season’s next-to-last Sunday and the Wild Card start Using the off-day to move Liriano up would’ve kept him on normal rest done that and it was the most obvious way to use that last off-day to line things up for the Wild Card Game.
The whole thing gets a little more complicated because they knew at the same time that they had Gerrit Cole lined up for the season’s last day and could have skipped him in favor of putting him in the Wild Card Game instead. Still, I think the de facto interpretation of the way the Pirates handled the season’s last ten days is this: the Pirates didn’t think that Francisco Liriano was reliable enough as to be an obvious better option than Edinson Volquez in the Wild Card Game. A more charitable explanation would be this: they think that Liriano is so fragile that they preferred giving him an extra day of rest to lining him up for the Wild Card Game. We can sit here for hours and argue over whether thinking Volquez was a decent option was the correct interpretation of the talents of their pitchers at the time (it was not) or whether it mattered at all (it may not have), but the reality is that that’s the clearest interpretation we have of what the front office thinks of Liriano right now. They picked Volquez.
There is a bit of complicated calculus in making Liriano an offer. The reality is that I think bringing Liriano back on a one-year deal would be a good idea for the Pirates; I’m not sure how far into the future the Pirates will need him, but I’m not at all sure what sort of pitchers Jameson Taillon and Tyler Glasnow will be in the future for the Pirates. The problem is more or less this: if Liriano accepts the offer, and if the Pirates somehow resign Russell Martin, then that’s basically it for the off-season. They roll into 2015 with Brandon Cumpton (or 2015’s Vance Worley, I guess) in the rotation until Charlie Morton comes back from his hip surgery and without any sort of useful backup plan for if/when Liriano has his annual injury flare-up/control struggles, etc. or for Morton’s effectiveness post-surgery until Jameson Taillon’s arrival, which probably won’t be before the late sumer. Essentially, if Liriano accepts a qualifying offer, the result could be that the 2015 rotation will be much the same as the 2014 rotation, which was a disaster for the Pirates.
Liriano might accept, too. I think he’s probably ticketed for Ubaldo Jiminez Limbo if the Pirates make him an offer and he declines it; I can’t imagine anyone being super-excited to give up a draft pick or sign the notoriously unreliable Liriano to a multi-year deal, which could limit his destinations to teams with protected picks like the Cubs, the Rangers, or the Phillies. Those aren’t all bad choices, mind you, but it’s not quite an open market, either. If he puts together one more good year in PNC Park, though, he would have two strong years and a decent one in three, would have proved that he moved beyond 2014, and could maybe make a stronger argument for himself on the open market. On the flip side, well, he’s 31 now. He’ll be 32 next year. He’s worth more now than next year, no matter how well he pitches in 2015. Last year’s limbo players (Jiminez and Nelson Cruz, but especially Stephen Drew and Kendrys Morales) might change the approach of some players, but, well, there’s a reason no one’s ever accepted a qualifying offer in the past.
The Pirates probably aren’t going to re-sign Martin, though, and so the larger question about Liriano is this: is he the best way they can spend $15 million in 2015? There are a number of free agent pitchers that you would think fit the Pirates’ model relatively well (I’ve already mentioned Justin Masterson, Brandon McCarthy also seems like a ready-made Pirate, Brett Anderson is interesting, heck, even Edinson Volquez would be a cheaper mid-to-back-end rotation solution if necessary, though he’s a different conversation) and should make around that price point or less.
Looking at the whole picture, my gut feeling is that it’d be the right move for the Pirates to make Liriano an offer. Martin probably isn’t coming back and that give them a ton of money to play around with this winter, plus they need at least one starter and $15 million for one year of Liriano isn’t back-breaking without Martin’s salary. Looking at how they handled AJ Burnett , the way they handled the rotation down the stretch, and the free agent pitcher market, I just don’t think they’re going to do it, though. That wouldn’t be the end of the world, either, but it’d come with the same caveat that always does early in the off-season: if they don’t make Liriano a qualifying offer or do something to try and bring him back, then they have to do something else. The pitching staff as it stands is simply not good enough, and extending Liriano an offer is one way of working towards fixing it.
