Here’s a nice little bit of unexpected lunchtime good news for you: Jeff Passan reported right around noon that the Pirates have extended Francisco Cervelli for three years and $31 million and the Pirates quickly confirmed the move with a statement from the front office.
I will admit that Cervelli’s impending departure after this season was something that I’ve been silently dreading since no extension was announced this off-season. Elias Diaz is a solid enough catching prospect, but the Pirates have gotten tremendous value from their catchers these past four seasons, starting with Russell Martin and moving seamlessly to Cervelli, and it seemed to me that going with someone like Diaz while waiting for Reese McGuire would be one of those unnecessary small-market rolls of the dice. If you read Travis Sawchik’s Big Data Baseball last year, you know that the Pirates built that surprise 2013 Wild Card club from Russell Martin on outwards. Having a good catcher that expands the strike zone allows the Pirates to take risks on pitchers like Francisco Liriano, and Cervelli is every bit as strong as Martin behind the plate and nearly as good with his bat.
I was previously working on the assumption that a free agent Cervelli was going to command somewhere in the $15 million per year range, if not quite a Russell Martin salary, and that that would be pretty well out of the Pirates’ price range. This deal is a very nice one for the Pirates, because Cervelli is almost certain to be worth the money (he was worth arguably twice it last year, without really going too deep into the value of framing), but it’s also really good to see from a fan’s perspective, because it proves that the Pirates won’t always automatically choose a young, internal replacement over a proven option, even if that proven option isn’t outwardly cheap. This is, after all, a nice deal for the Pirates but not a riskless one; $10 million is not nothing, Cervelli is already 30, and he’s had health problems in the past.
Anyway, it’s hard to see this as anything but great news for the Pirates. It gives the Pirates some certainty behind the plate from now until Reese McGuire is ready, and it puts another important Pirate in place for several years beyond this one. When we sat back in 2013 and wondered if the Pirates would be willing to do what was necessary to keep their good teams together, I was much more curious about their willingness to make deals like this one than than ones like the Polanco and Marte extensions. Those sorts of contracts are important, of course, but they deal with signing really high upside players to relatively low-cost contracts through their primes with the downside pretty obviously balanced by the high upside. Cervelli is thirty and he is what he is, but what he is is an important part of the Pirates. He’ll stay that way now until 2019.
Photo by Justin Berl/Getty Images
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