The Mets made Jacob deGrom an offer: take it or take it.
The right-hander will earn $607,000 this season because that’s what the team offered to pay him. DeGrom, who is entering his third season in the majors, has yet to amass enough time in the big leagues to be eligible for arbitration.
DeGrom is unable to negotiate his pay, per the collective bargaining agreement (CBA) that governs the terms and conditions of employment for major league players. To be eligible to bargain over pay, a player must either qualify as a free agent (defined as at least six years of Major League service and no contract for the coming season) or have between three and six years of service.
DeGrom can claim neither, which led the Mets to offer him a raise of $50,125 for the coming season. DeGrom, who had 14 wins last year and helped pitch the team to the World Series, responded by declining to sign his contract, as is his prerogative.
“Like the Mets, he is simply exercising his rights under the [collective bargaining agreement],” Brodie van Wagenen, deGrom’s agent, told ESPN. “But given Jacob’s standing as one of the top pitchers in Major League Baseball and his 2015 performance, his worth cannot be properly valued by a formula.”
deGrom doesn't realize that once you hit free agency, you earn 2x as much as you are worth. Sit back and wait. https://t.co/eJazdsvhDE
— Tangotiger 🍁 (@tangotiger) March 5, 2016
The drama, which unfolded in Port St. Lucie four days before deGrom faced the Yankees in his first outing of training camp, reveals as much about the uniqueness of deGrom’s career as it does about the vagaries of the CBA.
DeGrom, whose birthday falls on June 19, will pitch most of his third season at age 28, or a year older than Matt Harvey, and five years senior to Noah Syndergaard.
In short, deGrom happens to be older for a third-year pitcher, if by older you mean between one and five years older than the other main members of the Mets’ starting rotation. Harvey will be eligible for free agency in 2019. deGrom won’t be a free agent until 2021.
Thus, the Mets have deGrom pitching for them, relatively inexpensively, in the prime of his career. Sandy Alderson, the Mets’ general manager, defended the offer as the product of the team’s “straightforward approach to determining salaries.”
“Yes, it is based on a formula, predicated on performance,” Alderson told reporters.
That sounded to some like the Mets might be letting the exercise of their rights under the CBA cloud their judgment, especially when the player in question happened to be among the best in the big leagues and one whom the Mets are counting on to pitch them back to the postseason.
Given deGrom’s “unusual circumstances — an outlier on the developmental scale but an instant and charismatic star — would a few extra hundred-thousand dollars have bankrupted the Wilpon family,” asked Harvey Araton in the Times, referring to the Mets’ owners.
Still, you needn’t worry about deGrom, who is poised to earn more money that most people will in their lifetimes. After this season he likely will qualify as a so-called Super Two, which affords arbitration to players with at least two but less than three years of service if the player has accumulated at least 86 days of service during the immediately preceding season and he ranks in the top 22% of service in the group of players who have between two and three years of service, all as agreed to in the CBA.
Provided deGrom stays healthy and continues to win, the Mets likely will offer him a series of million-dollar seasons in the hope of coming to terms before an arbitrator imposes an award. And that’s just for arbitration. Free agency holds the prospect of millions more.
During the latest offseason, the Diamondbacks signed Zach Greinke to a deal that reportedly will pay the pitcher $206.5 million over six years. Greinke will turn 33 this October.