Nick Pivetta is a pitcher who invariably looks better under the hood than on the open road. That's not to say he's bad, because there's value in 150 innings of league-average ERA.
But it is to say that Pivetta's production alone did not justify the $21.05 million qualifying offer the Red Sox surprisingly extended to him Monday at the MLB GM Meetings in San Antonio. Pivetta is a sub-.500 pitcher with a 4.29 ERA over five years in Boston, and with his 32nd birthday looming in February, it's hard to imagine he's going to suddenly break out. He is what he is, which is OK.
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Pivetta has always struck out batters at an above-average clip -- over 10 Ks per nine innings in Boston -- and he has impressively worked to limit his walks, dropping to a career-low 6.1 percent last year.
That's a combination that teams target in today's analytics age, but it ignores Pivetta's glaring weakness, which is the home run ball. He has allowed between 23 and 28 home runs in each of his last four seasons, and only four pitchers have surrendered more bombs than Pivetta's 102 in that span.
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So why did the Red Sox extend a qualifying offer for him and not outfielder Tyler O'Neill, who just mashed 31 homers? Chief baseball officer Craig Breslow explained the rationale in San Antonio.
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"We definitely saw stretches of him just being dominant," Breslow told reporters, including Alex Speier of The Boston Globe. "He's a guy that has performed well in this market, has all of the underlying metrics. He gets a ton of swing-and-miss. He doesn't walk guys. He can get guys out pitching in the strike zone.
"So as you think about what a major league starting pitcher needs to be able to do to be successful, he has a lot of those ingredients."
While it's possible that Pivetta declines the qualifying and takes his chances in free agency, it's more likely that he signs it and perhaps even works out a longer-term deal. In any event, after coming up short in the starting depth department last year, Breslow seems intent on making sure the Red Sox are covered when injuries inevitably strike.
In addition to Pivetta, the Sox also return promising young starters Tanner Houck, Kutter Crawford, and Brayan Bello, while veteran Lucas Giolito remains on track to come back from elbow surgery.
"I am not going to be the guy who goes on record saying that you can have enough pitching, too much pitching," Breslow told the Globe. "[That doesn't] exist. ... The goal is to construct the strongest team we possibly can, and we need to be flexible, we need to be open to a number of paths in doing that.
"I don't think anything's off the table. I think we'll still continue to explore how we improve the rotation, how we improve the pitching staff."
