McAdam: Five thoughts on the Gerrit Cole signing and what it means for both the Yankees and Red Sox

The New York Yankees got their man, Gerrit Cole, late Tuesday night, signing the free-agent starting pitcher to a record-setting $324-million deal over nine seasons.

Here are some thoughts as to how that signing impacts the Red Sox.

1. A very good Yankee team just got a lot better.

That much is obvious. The Yankees won 103 games in 2019, and did so without their best starter, Luis Severino, for most of the season. Now, the Yankees will have both a healthy Severino and Cole to anchor their rotation. For the last few seasons, the lack of a bonafide No. 1 starter was the Yanks' one obvious weakness. That's been addressed with the addition of Cole, who at 29, is in the prime of his career.

Will the Yankees live to regret this contract in, say, five or six seasons? Likely, yes. Rare is the pitcher who performs as a front-of-the-rotation starter in his mid-30s, with Houston's Justin Verlander one of the rare exceptions to the rule.

But the Yankees can worry about that later. When you've gone more than a decade in between titles, as they have, there's a certain urgency of now that takes over. The last time the Yankees went big



in the free-agent market — going all in for CC Sabathia, Mark Teixeira and A.J. Burnett — it resulted in a championship the very next season. It would hardly be a shock if history repeated itself in 2020.

2. The road back to contention for the Red Sox just got tougher.

As they determine their roster for next season and contemplate some significant payroll reduction, the Red Sox were — at best — a wild card contender. Cole's signing doesn't change that, as the Yankees were already the more talented team within the division.

But ceding the division title for certain is a reminder of how much tougher October is when you gain entry as a wild card game and have to survive a win-or-go-home game.

True, the Washington Nationals just pulled it off, coming from behind in the eighth inning against the Milwaukee Brewers in the N.L. wild card game to travel all the way to a World Series victory. And the Kansas City Royals nearly pulled off the same improbable journey in 2014 when they survived a Wild Card game with Oakland and went all the way to Game 7 of the World Series before coming up a run short of the San Francisco Giants.

But it's not easy. And there's little that's more demoralizing than winning 90 or more games, only to see your season end in nine innings.

3. Cole's record-setting contract will help other free agents, but maybe not the Red Sox' efforts to trade a starting pitcher.

Stephen Strasburg's reign as the highest-paid pitcher in the game lasted less than 48 hours before Cole's contract blew it out of the water. As recently as Monday, David Price's $217 million deal was the largest ever given to a pitcher. But Cole just eclipsed that by a staggering $107 million — albeit for two more seasons in length. That will likely boost the likes of Madison Bumgarner and Hyun-Jin Ryu, the two best free-agent starters remaining on the open market.

But as the Red Sox intensify their efforts to trade Price, a comparison with Cole isn't apt. Cole is 29, healthy and coming off a season in which he narrowly missed out on winning the Cy Young award. Price is five years older and is coming off a season in which injuries limited him to just 107.1 innings.

The two can't be compared.

Now, if Bumgarner or Ryu receive deals with an AAV of $30 million — unlikely, at this point — then the Red Sox could benefit in marketing Price. Ryu is 32, and like Price, profiles more as a lefty No. 2 starter. That's a more appropriate comp.

Until then, the Red Sox face the prospect of having to make Price's deal more palatable by either including a younger (cheap) player or, more likely, taking back a considerable amount of his remaining $96 million over the next three seasons.

4. Eventually, the Yankees are going to have their own financial reckoning.

The difficult choices facing the Red Sox this offseason will eventually visit the Yankees. For the next seven seasons, they'll have two players (Cole and Giancarlo Stanton) earning a minimum of $60 million (in 2020), and, starting in 2023, as much as $68 million. Those two contracts alone will eat up somewhere between one-third to one-quarter of their payroll and at some point, will limit what the Yanks can add in the coming seasons.

That's a lot of money to be tied up with two players, especially considering how little they've gotten out of Stanton in his first two seasons in pinstripes. He's unlikely to get healthier or more durable as he ages.

Still, that's a worry for the future. In the here-and-now, the Yankees have made themselves the odds-on favorite to win their first A.L. pennant since 2009.

5. As if they needed to be reminded, the Cole deal shows the Sox how important it is to develop your own starting pitching.

Over the last three seasons, the Red Sox, Astros, and Yankees have been the three best teams in the American League. Know how many top starters are homegrown between those three clubs? One — Severino.

The Sox have, for the time being, four starters in their rotation. One (Price) came via free agency. The other three (Chris Sale, Nathan Eovaldi, and Eduardo Rodriguez) came via trades, with Sale and Eovaldi subsequently given big extensions.

Beyond Cole and Severino the Yankees have J.A. Happ (trade, then extension), James Paxton (trade) and Masahiro Tanaka (Japanese free agent).

And the Astros, having lost Cole for whom they traded, have a rotation headed by Verlander (trade, then extension) and Zack Greinke (trade).

If the Red Sox could execute a turnaround with their minor league system and develop some top starters internally (Jay Groome? Bryan Mata?), they would give themselves a huge advantage over their biggest rivals.

As it stands, the Sox haven't developed a homegrown starter of merit since (gulp) Clay Buchholz.