Carlos Rodón closed the book on his White Sox career by signing a two-year, $44 million deal with the Giants on Friday. He also settled the book on another case of going year to year, rather than signing the kind of extension that so many teams try to engineer for young players of his caliber.
That two-year contract allows us to complete the picture on what he earned over the course of standard extension, as teams usually sought for one or two club options to delay a player's free agency. We can neatly compare him to José Quintana, a fellow career-long starter who attained Super Two status. The Sox signed him to an extension in March 2014 after Quintana notched the first of five consecutive 200-inning seasons.
Rodón doesn't have a 200-inning season. Hell, he's only qualified for the ERA title once, and by a slim margin (165 innings in 2016). Nevertheless, despite all of the false starts due to injuries and surgeries and a non-tender toward the end, he's still going to come out way ahead by betting on himself.
| Year | Quintana | Ródon | Difference |
| Arb 1 | $3.4M | $2.3M | -$1.3M |
| Arb 2 | $5.4M | $4.2M | -$2.5M |
| Arb 3 | $7M | $4.45M | -$5.05M |
| Arb 4 | $8.85M | $3M | -$10.905M |
| FA1 | $10.5M | $21.5M | $95K |
| FA2 | $11.5M | $22.5M | $11.095M |
| Total | $46.65M | $57.95M | $11.3M |
Imagine if Quintana hit the market in after 2018, coming off a decent year with the Cubs and five consecutive above-average seasons before that. He's getting way more than two years and $22 million. Instead, the Cubs exercised those options just in time for Quintana's decline, and now he's only been able to land a couple of one-year deals worth $10 million total since.
Putting it another way:
| First 7 years | GS | IP | ERA | ERA+ | bWAR | fWAR |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Quintana | 215 | 1314 | 3.60 | 114 | 24.3 | 24.7 |
| Rodón | 121 | 669.1 | 3.79 | 110 | 11.5 | 11.9 |
Rodón will make twice as much as Quintana over the following two seasons despite pitching half as much over the same stretch of career.
This doesn't mean that Rodón didn't earn what the Giants gave him, or Quintana was foolish to sell his services that cheaply. At the time Quintana signed the deal, there was a growing sense that such extensions were no-brainers for teams, but the guaranteed money still remained tempting.
Rodón just shows why those deals have lost their allure. He was almost a poster boy for securing money early thanks to shoulder and elbow surgeries. Instead, e shows how quickly somebody with his talent can make up any deficit.
That's why I said that Dylan Cease should be paying attention to what Rodón commands on the open market, even before he switched to Boras over the winter. By fully harnessing the power of his stuff over the course of a full season, Cease is already ahead of where Rodón stood two-plus years into his career. If Cease can stay healthy, he'll be in line for a steeper set of arbitration raises, and if he can time another 200-strikeout season closer to free agency, he'll have his own sizable deal awaiting him.
What Rodón shows is a scenario where Cease doesn't stay all that healthy, and it's still not that bad. Rodón plugged the most direct route to free agency into Google Maps, and while it led him into potholes, twists, turns and missing guard rails, he still found the shortcut worth taking.
It's not worth sweating about because Cease is under team control for four more seasons, and he and the White Sox have so much important work in front of them during that time. It just explains why the bargain extensions of yore are so much harder to strike. When it comes to somebody with riding any kind of prospect stock, if he's already made the majors, it might be too late.
