Max Scherzer contract looks great for the Nationals

Max Scherzer’s $210M contract sounded huge in 2015. It sounds pretty great today.

Max Scherzer has been a player who has defied expectations his entire career, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that he’s made his seven-year, $210 contract look like a bargain so far.

Even though he was a first-round draftee in 2006 and quickly established himself as a strikeout force, the prevailing knock on Scherzer is that his wonky mechanics would catch up to him eventually.

Writing a prospect retrospective nearly a decade later, John Sickels quoted from his 2007 notes on Scherzer at Minor League Ball, “Some people think he’ll be a closer eventually, since his game relies more on power than finesse, plus there are concerns about his durability. … I think he’s more likely to remain healthy if used in relief. His ceiling is impressive, but there are still some questions about his command and durability.”

How wrong they turned out to be. Since his first full major league season in 2009, Scherzer has never failed to start fewer than 27 games.

In 2014, pitching in the last year of his contract with the Tigers, Scherzer again decided to defy expectations. The team reportedly offered him a six-year, $144 million contract to stay in Detroit. Scherzer rejected it and bet on himself instead, as noted by Ken Rosenthal. “I thought, ‘The way I’m pitching right now, the way I’m continuing to get better, I’m going to bet on myself. I believe I’m going to get better as a pitcher. I’m not afraid of failure at this point.’ ”

Scherzer knew numbers, as an early believer in sabermetrics while many players scoffed at it, and believed it would be worth the wait.

That bet earned Scherzer an extra $66 million when he came to an agreement with the Nationals that made him a $200 million man. At the time that made him the second highest paid pitcher, behind the $215 million contract of Dodgers’ ace Clayton Kershaw. (It also put Verlander $30 million ahead of former teammate Justin Verlander, something the hypercompetitive Scherzer was sure to enjoy.)

Max Scherzer’s Washington Nationals contract

The contract was a unique one, with the Nationals paying Scherzer for 14 years while only holding on-field rights for seven years. Per Cot’s Contracts, the breakdown looks like this:

• $50M signing bonus, with $5 million payable in 2015 and $15 million in 2019, 2020, 2021
• 2015: $10 million salary
• 2016-2018: $15 million salary annually
• 2019-21: $35 million salary annually, deferred interest free, totaling $105M
• 2022-28: $15 million payments on that deferment
• Bonuses possible for All-Star selection, Cy Young, postseason awards, and more

Looked at in a simpler way (and ignoring salary tax implications and awards), Scherzer’s contract broke down to $15 million paid annually from 2015 to 2028, further setting him up for the rest of his life.

Can you tell he was a business major at Missouri?

Max Scherzer’s value calculated

So what has he done to earn the money? Five straight All-Star rosters. Two National League Cy Young Awards (as well as being among the top five vote-getters each year in a Nationals jersey). A 20 strikeout game. Oh, and a World Series title.

His WAR has impressive. Per Fangraphs, Scherzer ranked:

• 2015: Third in the NL (6.5 WAR)
• 2016: Third in the NL (5.6 WAR)
• 2017: First in the NL (6.4 WAR)
• 2018: Second in the NL (7.5 WAR)
• 2019: Second in the NL (6.5 WAR)

That’s about 32.5 WAR through five seasons — an average of 6.5 wins per season. That is pretty incredible. Scherzer was not just the best pitcher in the NL during the entire five-year period, worth 4.5 WAR more than the Mets’ Jacob deGrom and 6.5 more than Kershaw. He was the best in MLB period, worth more than three wins better than Chris Sale.

Using offseason contract figures, FanGraphs is able to estimate just how much teams are willing to pay per unit of WAR. In the 2020 offseason, that amount was about $8 million.

That means through five years, in addition to all the fun things like a World Series title, Scherzer has created about $260 million in value, or about $50 million more than his total contract was worth.

We know 2021, when it begins, will be a shortened season. We hope that 2022 will return to normalcy. Everything Scherzer does from this point forward just makes Scherzer’s contract look better and better.

The Washington Nationals got one heck of a bargain.