Jake Odorizzi made a big bet on himself Thursday. The Twins already feel like winners.
Odorizzi accepted a one-year contract worth $17.8 million to remain in Minnesota in 2020, the team announced Thursday, abruptly ending his first foray into free agency. The move keeps the Twins' top two starting pitchers in place for next season as the team searches for ways to fill out its pitching rotation this winter.
"It's like signing one of the top pitchers on the market," said Derek Falvey, Twins president of baseball. "As we build off the season we just had, really, you want your No. 1 and 2 starters back from last year, and adding to that group at the upper end would continue to be our hope and goal."
The $17.8 million salary represents an 83 percent raise over the $9.5 million that Odorizzi earned last year and makes him the second-highest-paid player in Twins history, behind Joe Mauer and his $23 million annual pay. Yet it's also just a fraction of the millions that Odorizzi figured to guarantee himself in a multi-year contract as a free agent — some MLB analysts had forecast offers as high as $50-60 million for the 29-year-old righthander — had he turned down the qualifying offer and entertained contracts from other suitors.
But under baseball's collective bargaining agreement, doing so would have come with a catch: Any team signing him would forfeit one or more draft picks next June, potentially as high as the second round. (The Twins would also have received a draft pick as compensation for losing him.) That extra price tends to scare off some teams and lower the offers from others, and last winter even convinced pitchers Dallas Keuchel and Craig Kimbrel to sit out until after the draft, when the compensation was no longer required.
Odorizzi had 10 days to gauge teams' willingness to offer him long-term deals, and ultimately he chose to wait until next winter, when draft-pick compensation can no longer apply to him. In addition, the free-agent market won't include as many high-end starters looking for big contracts, as such pitchers as Gerrit Cole, Stephen Strasburg and Hyun-Jin Ryu are this year; the competition could be pitchers like Marcus Stroman and James Paxton.
Unless he reaches a long-term deal with the Twins before then, however, it means gambling that he'll stay healthy and effective. Odorizzi is coming off his first All-Star season, having posted a 15-7 record, 3.51 ERA and a career-high 178 strikeouts in 159 innings. He also lowered his home-run rate to a career-best 0.9 per nine innings and his wins above replacement (WAR) to 3.6, another big improvement over 2018, when he was acquired in a trade with Tampa Bay.