Last week, Major League Baseball set the qualifying offer for 2016-17 free agents at $17.2 million, up from $15.8 million last offseason and slightly above earlier estimates. To sum up the qualifying offer system: teams may offer any player who spent the full 2016 season with their squad a one-year contract at $17.2 million within five days of the end of the World Series. The player then has the next week—also the first week of free agency—to decide whether to accept or reject the qualifying offer. If the player rejects and signs with another team, the signing team loses its highest draft pick outside the top ten overall, and the originating team gains a compensatory draft pick after the first round.
The compensatory picks have generally fallen from the mid-20s to the mid-30s under the current system, so it’s a pretty good benefit for a team. It is possible this system gets tweaked a bit upon the signing of a new Collective Bargaining Agreement, which will likely happen sometime between the World Series and the old CBA’s expiration on December 1, but major changes are not currently expected.
The Mets have three plausible candidates for the qualifying offer. Yoenis Cespedes and Neil Walker are obvious candidates that we’ve been talking about all season. And then there’s Bartolo Colon.
Unlike last year, Yoenis Cespedes is eligible to be qualified by the Mets if he opts out of the two years and $47.5 million remaining on his contract. The Mets would obviously qualify Cespedes, and Cespedes would just as obviously turn the qualifying offer down. If he’s going to stay here on a shorter-term deal, it’ll likely be the one he already has, or a renegotiation.
The actual tough qualifying offer decision for the Mets is Neil Walker. I last dropped in on Walker two months ago and, at the time, not only was qualifying Walker an easy decision, but it seemed clear that it was in the Mets’ best interests to lock him up to a long-term deal. Literally right after that article was published, Walker’s season ended with a herniated disc in his back. Does it still make sense to qualify him?
Probably. Even if Walker’s offense falls back to 2014-15 standards, The Neil Walker Season, around 3.0 WARP, is worth having around on a one-year, $17.2 million contract. T.J. Rivera had a nice September, but you’d probably like to avoid having the plan at second be Rivera and Gavin Cecchini only. Beyond that, all the things I said in August about the possibility of Walker’s power breakout being real do still apply. They just have the health regression caveat now too. It is a hell of a caveat, given the seriousness of a disc herniation, but as the team shepherding Walker through his injury and rehab, the Mets should* have the best information possible to make that call.
[ * – Editor’s Note: Noting Jarrett’s faith in the Mets’ medical staff here for posterity.]
But there might be an even better way out here. The Mets can use the cudgel of the qualifying offer, and the quick decision that has to be made whether to accept it or not, to try and get Walker to sign a slightly-discounted two- or three-year deal. This minimizes Walker’s risk of becoming this year’s Kendrys Morales, Dexter Fowler, or Stephen Drew, unsigned into spring training or even the season itself and ultimately having to take a one-year deal for less than the originally rejected QO.
Based on his production over the last three years as a Met, not to mention the two years before that in Oakland, Bartolo Colon is probably in actuality worth the $17.2 million he would get under the qualifying offer. But entering his age-44 season, there’s simply no way Colon will be that expensive for the Mets to re-sign if they desire. (They should so desire.)
I’d expect Colon to sign another deal similar to his 2016 contract, probably with a slightly larger guarantee than the $7.25 million granted to him last year. And he’ll be a great bargain at that price given what other, worse starters like Ivan Nova and Jeremy Hellickson will go for. Hopefully it will be with the Mets for one more season.
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