7:14pm: Heyman tweets that Gonzales agreed to drop his grievance, which could have increased his service time and, consequently, his earnings, in exchange for a current salary greater than that of a typical player with his service time.
6:13pm: According to Heyman, part of the explanation for the abnormally high value of Gonzales’ deal is the existence of a previous grievance from his time with the Cardinals, which is still pending (Twitter link). The grievance reportedly concerns the timing of a demotion. The outcome of this dispute may alter Gonzales’ service time and therefore his earning power, which would explain the $1.9MM figure.
4:40pm: The Mariners have agreed to a highly unusual two-year contract with lefty Marco Gonzales, reports Fancred’s Jon Heyman (Twitter link). The contract promises Gonzales a total of $1.9MM despite the fact that Gonzales is still two full years from reaching arbitration. Joel Sherman of the New York Post tweets that Gonzales will earn $900K in 2019 and $1MM in 2020.
Presumably, then, there’s some type of club option associated with the deal that will give the Seattle organization the right to control at least one of Gonzales’ arbitration seasons at a predetermined rate. Beyond that, it’s not entirely clear why the Mariners would bump Gonzales’ pay to this extent; he earned just north of the league minimum in 2018 and could’ve been given only minimal raises over that sum in both of the next two seasons. While it’s only a minor difference, the Mariners are effectively promising as much as an additional $700-800K with this deal.
Gonzales, 27 in February, emerged in 2018 as a quality rotation piece for a Seattle team that was in desperate need of arms. While some raised an eyebrow when Seattle traded slugging outfield prospect Tyler O’Neill to St. Louis in order to acquire Gonzales, the lefty delivered plenty of value to the Mariners in his first full season with the organization. Through 166 2/3 innings (29 starts), Gonzales pitched to an even 4.00 ERA with 7.8 K/9, 1.7 BB/9, 0.92 HR/9 and a 44.9 percent ground-ball rate.
There’s also yet some reason to believe that Gonzales has more in the tank. His pristine control helped to offset his average strikeout tendencies, prompting metrics like FIP (3.43), xFIP (3.49) and SIERA (3.81) to view his 2018 results even more favorably. Meanwhile, he induced swings on pitches out of the strike zone at a whopping 35.9 percent clip — a mark that ranked fifth in the Majors and trailed only Patrick Corbin, Jacob deGrom, Carlos Carrasco and Miles Mikolas. That speaks to the deception that Gonzales brings to the table and suggests that there could eventually be more strikeouts — or at least more weak contact — in the future for the southpaw.
Another move by DiPoto who seems to lead the league in head scratching moves.
Another online comment; another odd mistyping of Jerry Dipoto’s last name. Folks around here bat around .600 on its proper capitalization (1.309 OPS).
Haha, I’ve noticed that too.
I remember someone claiming that their iphone auto-corrected his name with the capitol ‘P’. I have no idea if that’s true, but they would still be guilty of not correcting the auto-correction.
I apologize for the mistyping of the GM’s last name.
I always thought it was DipOto.
My friend thought it was Nomargar Ciaparra.
Well it’s a good move, for sure. I love watching this guy pitch!! Hits spots and is aggressive, hides ball extremely well, does very well without plus velocity.
This season Seattle lefthander Marco Gonzales ranked 23rd among all starters in fWAR, just ahead of Clayton Kershaw and Zack Greinke:
link to fangraphs.com
Where did Andrew Cashner rank last year?
Not unusual if you play MLB The Show or worship at the altar of Cost Certainty!
It’s still unusual even factoring in cost certainty. The Mariners could’ve controlled Gonzales for something like $1.2MM over the next two seasons if they wanted. They had total say over his salary.
The existence of a pending grievance makes more sense though.
Why is $700k by your own estimation an issue? It’s a gesture of good faith for a guy that just took a monster step in the right direction after a TJ surgery. He gets a pay bump, and it’s still less than $1M AAV over the course of two years. Hardly detrimental.
His future arb salaries are based on what he makes now. He’ll get a raise on 1.9 Instead of 1.2. Then he’ll get another raise the next year on his salary ARB 1 salary and so on. When the club has team control they usually don’t cost themselves extra millions of dollars doing this sort of thing because the raise is NOT just 750K. It’s an added expense that wasn’t required nor did the team benefit from doing so. The presence of whatever grievance Gonzales filed seems like it influenced this move.
I never called it an issue. I said it’s unusual that the Mariners are paying Marco Gonzales at the same level the Red Sox and Cubs chose to pay Mookie Betts and Kris Bryant during their pre-arb years. That, unequivocally, is unusual.
Lots of pre-arb players took huge steps forward in 2018. Most of them will get a raise south of $50K. Not sure why you took offense to that being pointed out in fairly innocuous fashion.
Wade LeBlanc possible 31 mill over the next 4 years. LeBlanc and Gonzales are getting their due. They both had a nice year and deserved more than what they were paid. You’ve known Jerry in Cali and you have known Jerry under prior Mariner ownership. He’s getting free reign now. He’s not the norm, he never will be!!
So 800k over two years is considered abnormally high compared to mlbtr prediction of Harper getting $31 mil and up?
Go figure.
Considering his future arb salaries are based upon that salary yes, yes it is. The multiplier on this raise for arb is much much higher.
It’s not enough money to significantly influence his arbitration dollars.
The numbers that will blow up his arbitration number are the 3.43 FIP and 1.22 WHIP.
On what planet can pre-arbitration salaries be compared with free-agent salaries? No one ever said Marco Gonzales is being overpaid or anything. I said it’s strange to see any player receive $1.9MM for two pre-arbitration years when most would be paid $800K less than that. It’s a factual statement that has no bearing on Marco Gonzales’ open-market value. If we were a free agent right now, he might make $10MM+ per season on a multi-year deal. That’s beside the point, which was that this type of arrangement, on a multi-year, guaranteed deal, has virtually no precedent.
That there’s a former grievance tied to it makes it more understandable, but I still can’t think of a single other contract of this nature.
Pay the man he deserves it, carried the team till his arm was done. If he can build on this season he’ll be worth it
What do the Mariners care if he drops his grievance, the Cardinals were the ones accused… I don’t get it.
Because it could affect his arb pay outs which they will be paying
In the end, his service clock will remain the same instead of potentially moving up, affecting the number of years of control the M’s have. They get that in exchange for paying him some salary