Today marks the fifth anniversary of the James Shields-Fernando Tatis Jr. trade, which I only know because Baseball Twitter folks enjoy blowing the dust off that photo and marveling at it anew at various points throughout the baseball season.
Sending away Tatis in any trade was never going to age well, but Shields' "contributions" are what truly make June 4 a day to live in infamy. It'd be one thing if Shields pitched as well as, say, Edwin Jackson. Jackson cost his own high price in Daniel Hudson and David Holmberg, and the White Sox didn't get over the hump with him, but that was independent of Jackson's own contributions. He pitched the equivalent of one full season with the Sox over two years, and went 11-9 with a 3.66 ERA over 30 starts and 196⅔ innings. The Sox can say they got the highest concentration of the good version of Jackson among the 14 teams that have employed him. Other people were the problem.
Shields immediately, spectacularly, violently faceplanted, giving up 22 runs over his first three starts, including an inaugural shelling against Washington that sent the Sox below .500 for the first time all season. By the time he recovered for a decent July, it didn't matter, and even if it could, he flopped against in August.
The immediacy of the White Sox's scouting failure -- which was foretold by FanGraphs before the trade -- paired poorly with the Jeff Samardzija trade that went nowhere the year before. Samardzija gave the White Sox lots of innings, but the forced emphasis on his Northwest Indiana roots carried a certain sadness before he threw his first pitch, and he made no real impact on the White Sox when the games started. Zack Burdi, drafted with the compensatory pick the Sox received when the Giants landed Shark, is the only thing the White Sox have to show for the experience.
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By those measures, the first two months of Lance Lynn are a huge relief, even if the Sox plan on there being at least five months left. Regardless of where he goes from here, he's at least resembled the guy they thought they were getting. He's 7-1 with a 1.23 ERA through 10 starts. He's heaving varieties of fastballs 95 percent of the time, he's sweating, he's screaming, he's thoroughly Lance Lynn. The White Sox finally got what they thought they were getting.
Sounds like the Captain of Attitude they always wanted.
If there's one area where he's not quite meeting the marketing, he's only on pace for 170 innings. A steady flow of factors have conspired to cause him to fall off a workhorse's workload -- terrible defense early, a brief IL stint due to a back issue, a planned short-rest start that ended up getting rained out, and, on Thursday, another bout with general tightness, which he said was no big deal.
"They were sitting there talking to me like, 'What do you think?'" Lynn explained. "And I was like, 'Well, I want to go back out.' They're like, 'Do you need to?' And I was like, 'Well, I want to.'
"But our bullpen was in a good spot with the day off (Wednesday). It's good to give them a clean inning. And we won the game. ... We've got an off day coming up on Monday, so hopefully nine outs isn't too much for them to cover."
Assuming this caution is really with October in mind, and not just a positively framed way of keeping him from revisiting the IL, he's a great fit for this team. And if he's a great fit for this team, he might be equally suited for future White Sox teams, especially since he's one of two impending free-agent starters in the rotation.
Carlos Rodón is the other, and he seems like somebody who's going to reach free agency. It's hard to imagine a Scott Boras client bypassing an opportunity to hit free agency at the height of his powers, especially since Rodón's track record is scarred enough that it might be hard to get a cost-conscious team like the White Sox to bid against themselves.
The analogue to me is Kevin Gausman, somebody who made good on a make-good deal during his sixth year of service time in 2020. The San Francisco Giants gave him the $18.9 million qualifying offer, which he accepted, and while there were some rumors that an extension was around the corner, he has not yet signed one. He's driven up his price since then, riding two devastating pitches to a 6-0 start, with a 1.40 ERA supporting it.
If Rodón makes it through the rest of the year intact and has his best-ever season to show for it, a qualifying offer seems like a natural move -- at least if there's a qualifying offer to be made with the expiration of the Collective Bargaining Agreement looming.
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With Lynn, it's easier to see an extension.
Maybe.
He's 34, and he's already signed a couple of non-negligible contracts -- a three-year, $22 million extension that covered his arb years in St. Louis, and now he's in the final year of a three-year, $30 million deal originally signed with the Rangers. You could say that Lynn has shown that he doesn't need to capitalize on his situation with a capital-C (which stands for "capital).
Then again, both of these deals preceded Lynn's evolution into a pitcher worthy of annual Cy Young support, and he doesn't have many peers as somebody who turned into A Guy in his early 30's. Pitchers as good as Lynn is now were usually that good in their late-20's, and signed a lucrative extension that covered them through age 35 and beyond. Justin Verlander is one example, signing a two-year, $66 million extension at age 36 as his first big deal approached its conclusion. But it's fair to say Lynn isn't Verlander.
There's Charlie Morton, who has spun his renaissance into two contracts covering three years for $45 million, but he's also somebody with a regulated workload and specific geographic requirements. Rich Hill's idiosyncratic profile resulted in a three-year, $48 million contract at age 36, even though he's not a great bet for even 100 innings in a given year. Jake Arrieta was a late bloomer who signed a three-year, $75 million deal with the Phillies at 32, but he was three years younger in his first season and had a Cy Young to his name.
Perhaps the recent free-agent pitcher with the most similar situation was ...
... wait for it ...
... James Shields, who carried a streak of eight consecutive 200-inning seasons into his first crack at free agency as a 33-year-old. He eventually signed with San Diego for four years and $75 million after an awkward amount of time on the market. By the time Shields' age-35 season, he was on the White Sox's books for two more long years, although the Padres were paying some of it.
What do you do with that information? You probably wait. I like Lynn's chances of pitching toward 40, because with his ability to manipulate a fastball, he reminds me of Bartolo Colón, who succeeded at all sorts of velocities, ages and weights. But with a couple of bouts of tightness two months into the season, there are already a couple of events one could point to if Lynn suddenly started looking older and pitching less.
But there's no reason to dwell on that yet, so let's project a positive outcome where Lynn makes it three strong years in a row. A contract figure that comes to mind is three years, $55 million. That's the deal Dallas Keuchel signed at 32, so it seems high. But Lynn would be coming off a string of healthier, fuller seasons, and he would also be free of a qualifying offer, so he could generate his own bidding war if his profile appeals to the analytics departments of teams with deeper pockets.
Then again, if Lynn hits free agency at full stride, that probably means the White Sox fared well as a whole themselves, which would generate the combination of goodwill and greater resources to make a postseason extension palatable for everybody. That's when you can stop thinking about Shields, and instead picture a Jake Peavy situation where both sides met their objectives.
(Photo by Kamil Krzaczynski/USA TODAY Sports)
