Nathan Eovaldi Approaching Vesting Player Option Threshold

During the 2022-23 offseason, then-free-agent righty Nathan Eovaldi inked a two-year, $34MM contract with the Rangers. The contract contained a provision for a vesting player option that would give Eovaldi say over his fate for the 2025 season, provided he stayed largely healthy over the course of the contract’s first two seasons. With a combined 300 innings pitched between 2023-24, Eovaldi gains a player option valued at $20MM for the 2025 campaign. The veteran right-hander’s most recent start brought him to 296 innings between the two seasons combined. He’ll trigger the vesting player option if he completes at least four innings in his next start, which is slated to come tomorrow when the Rangers host the Blue Jays. All but two of Eovaldi’s 26 starts this year have lasted at least four innings.

There’s a strong likelihood that Eovaldi will unlock that option tomorrow versus Toronto. It should be emphasized that he’s not locking himself into that $20MM salary for the 2025 season, however, but rather gaining the choice to exercise that $20MM option or turn it down in favor of a return to the open market. There’s perhaps some extra incentive for Eovaldi to consider the player option, as a Texas native — he was born and raised in the Houston area — but he should also be able to top that $20MM guarantee in free agency.

Eovaldi, 35 in September, has been a clearly above-average starter in each of his two seasons in Texas. He’s started a combined 51 games and pitched to a 3.65 ERA across his 296 frames with the Rangers, fanning 23.7% of his opponents against a 7% walk rate. Both marks are better than the league average. He’s also upped his ground-ball rate considerably thanks to an uptick in his splitter usage. A hearty 49.8% of the batted balls against Eovaldi have been grounders; he posted a 43.9% grounder rate in his final two seasons with the Red Sox from 2021-22.

Barring a late injury that throws his 2025 outlook into question, there’s a good case to decline that $20MM player option. Recent examples of multi-year free-agent deals for pitchers beginning in their age-35 season aren’t exactly plentiful, as can be seen in MLBTR’s Contract Tracker, but there are a few such cases that underscore the earning power he’ll have.

Back in the 2018-19 offseason, for instance, both J.A. Happ ($34MM) and Charlie Morton ($30MM) inked two-year deal in free agency. Happ had nearly identical numbers in his two prior seasons to those of Eovaldi at present, and he was a year older at the time (to say nothing of the fact that the price of pitching has increased since 2018). Eovaldi also has a steadier track record than he had at the time. Morton, meanwhile, had only just broken out as a high-end starter in his prior two-year run with the Astros — doing so with numbers that resemble Eovaldi’s current Rangers run. Kenta Maeda signed for two years and $24MM with the Tigers just last offseason and did as a 36-year-old coming off a lesser platform showing. Eovaldi clearly has greater earning power than Maeda had.

Generally speaking, few pitchers remain this effective into their mid-30s and return to the market at this time. Many top-tier starters ink contracts of five, six or seven years in length when they reach free agency around age 30 or 31. “Second-tier” free agent starters, as Eovaldi arguably was in his past couple trips to the market, often suffer injuries or begin to lose effectiveness as Father Time chases them down. However, Eovaldi remains a clear playoff-caliber starter, averaging 95.5 mph on his heater and logging better-than-average strikeout, walk and grounder rates while averaging nearly six innings per start.

We’ve certainly seen pitchers in their age-35 seasons or older command contracts worth $20MM or more in terms of annual value, but they’re typically on one-year deals or the type of anomalous contracts reserved for the sport’s elite arms. Justin Verlander has signed extensions and free-agent deals north of this rate in the latter stages of his career, but he’s a future Hall of Famer and three-time Cy Young winner. Max Scherzer’s record-setting three-year, $130MM deal spanned his age-37 through age-39 seasons, but like Verlander he’s a Cooperstown-bound, multi-time Cy Young winner. Eovaldi’s teammate Jacob deGrom signed the most eye-opening of these deals when he landed five years and $185MM from the Rangers, but a healthy deGrom is arguably the best pitcher on the planet.

Eovaldi isn’t going to command that type of premium annual value, but he has a clear case for another multi-year deal and could take aim at a contract paying him an annual salary in the $20MM vicinity (give or take a couple million). He’s an unusual case when it comes to getting a third bite at the free-agent apple in his mid-30s at a time when he hasn’t lost much, if any, of his effectiveness. Recent mid-rotation starters who could return to the market in their own mid-30s (e.g. Jameson Taillon, Michael Wacha, Marcus Stroman, Jon Gray) will surely be watching closely to see how the market treats Eovaldi this offseason.