2021 Player Review: Dallas Keuchel
After a great first impression in 2020, Dallas Keuchel failed to meet expectations in 2021. A dismal second half of the season raises a few questions about Keuchel and his status with the 2022 Chicago White Sox roster.
BRef has Keuchel with a 20mil ’23 option that automatically vests with 160 IP in ’22. Is that accurate? Also with a 1.5mil buyout that would make ’22 more like 19.5mil
Yeah, but if he craters like he did in the second half of 2021, he wouldn’t last deep enough into games to get to 160 innings. He barely made it in 2021 even with a credible performance in the first half of the season. The buyout isn’t nearly as big of an issue in 2023 because Keuchel and Abreu are both off the books, which gives them a bit more breathing room. They could also technically decline Anderson’s option, but that’d be dumb.
The podcast didn’t cover this point. But seems this is important to add to the conversation. He is actually owed 19.5, not 18. Not entirely insignificant for the Sox. And if he does have a reasonable bounceback season like everyone wants to see. Not spectacular even, just useful. That 20 potentially owed is real money.
Yeah, it could be an issue, but that’s the way contracts generally work and it’s why it’s so important to make good on the first years of them. It’s why I never understood people saying 2020 was a building year, because that just wasted what were likely to be the most cost-effective years of Abreu, Keuchel, and Grandal.
Keuchel is owed just $18 million in 2022. That $1.5 million will be sorted out in 2023.
https://www.spotrac.com/mlb/chicago-white-sox/dallas-keuchel-11592/
“[John Danks] didn’t cost prospects to replace.”
Oh, if only.
At a $170m payroll, Keuchel is eating up 10.5% of your budget. Maybe having the worst qualified 5th starter in baseball works for a middling, mid-70 win team, but not a contender.
I strongly believe you have to use some of that money more efficiently, even if it means packaging some prospects and eating salary to move him out.
Some team that can have a payroll north of $188 million could probably find a way to use Keuchel as a 7th starter/low leverage bullpen option. But the Sox won’t have that kind of payroll.
Also I think there’s maybe a little too much automatic assumption that other teams in the Central won’t improve and the Sox can waltz to a division title with these sorts of inefficiencies. The Tigers look a few pieces away from challenging for the division.
Holding on to Keuchel and hoping for the best seems like a loser move to me, the sort of thing the Sox might do but doesn’t make it a good idea.
But again, it’s a question of whether or not he’s truly toast. After a poor start to the season, but the ASB Keuchel looked like at least an average-ish innings eater like we expected him to be. His second half was just utterly atrocious, though. Given he was one of two credible starters we had in 2020, not to mention the difficulty in finding starters who can at least take the ball reliably every fifth day, Keuchel might not be an efficient use of resources, but given how shallow the team is in the rotation, he is still a bulwark against far worse possibilities.