Examining Sean Manaea’s deal last year for clues how to operate in the future

Nearly everyone wants the Mets to bring back Sean Manaea, who they signed last year to a one-year deal with a player option, one which he’ll officially decline as soon as he’s able. Much like with Pete Alonso, it’s fine to want a guy back. But there has to be a point, either in years or dollars, where it doesn’t make any sense to extend the offer that high. And where is that place with Manaea?

Recently, Tim Britton and Will Sammon had a piece over at The Athletic where they broached the subject of re-signing Manaea. Here’s what they said about his projected salary:

Manaea’s age limits the length of his next deal when compared with a younger pitcher like Flaherty, who is 29. Something between the three-year, $63 million deal signed by former Met Chris Bassitt with Toronto two winters ago and the four-year, $80 million deal signed by Eduardo Rodriguez with Arizona last winter should work.

And the thing is – that’s what seems reasonable now before the free agent market has spoken. It’s entirely possible that the price for starting pitching becomes heated and those numbers become tame. The majority of people felt that Yoshinobu Yamamoto – who had never thrown a pitch in the majors – would sign for a deal that paid him less than $200 million. Instead, he inked a $325 million contract.

All you need are two teams willing to spend money and the price goes way beyond what was considered reasonable. With Yamamoto, there were at least the Mets and Dodgers willing to go beyond $200 million and likely other clubs, as well. And it’s difficult to believe there won’t be multiple suitors for a guy who tossed 181.2 IP during the regular season and who finished with a 2.8 fWAR.

Another thing to consider is that last year’s free agent market was affected by a dozen teams with unsure TV deals, thrown into chaos with the declared bankruptcy and voided contracts by Diamond Sports. Most of those teams have sorted out their TV deals, meaning that roughly one-third of the clubs who were not major players in free agency a year ago are likely to be more competitive in that area this offseason.

Manaea is going to get whatever the free agent market dictates, which is how it should be. At least in general. Yet this is a blog about the Mets and my thoughts are less about what Manaea will get and more about how predictable was the 2024 season and did the Mets blow it by not getting more future years of control with the player they signed a year ago.

Everyone knows that the focus for the Mets last offseason was to get players on short-term deals, especially once Yamamoto signed elsewhere. It’s great to have a plan and it’s great to execute that plan and not to get distracted by every shiny object or potential deal that comes your way.

Still, it’s necessary to view things with the benefit of hindsight and view how things could have been. If you know how things did work out, you can realize what you could have done differently. That may not help retroactively, yet it could benefit you with how you approach things in the future.

In the specific case of Manaea – was there enough information available at the time which would have made sense to offer him a more-expensive deal but one which gave the Mets more control beyond 2024? My opinion is that there was. Here’s what was written by me about Manaea in his projection piece, written on February 16:

There’s no guarantee that the sweeper will be that effective for Manaea in 2024. But if it’s remotely close, that will give him three above-average pitches. It’s my opinion that guys with three above-average pitches at their disposal don’t wind up with a mid-4s ERA. Here’s my totally biased forecast for Manaea this season:

160 IP, 3.44 ERA, 1.125 WHIP, 9.5 K/9, 0.8 HR/9

In more innings, Manaea finished with a 3.47 ERA last year. The sweeper held up over a SP workload over an entire season. And he’d been good with other pitches previously. And the thing is that it worked out that Manaea was good with four pitches in 2024, not three. MLB had a .310 wOBA in 2024. Here’s how Manaea did with his four-best pitches in that metric:

.276 – Cutter
.275 – Sinker
.258 – 4-seamer
.250 – Sweeper

Was there enough evidence from his 2023 season that the Sweeper would be an effective pitch? Perhaps reasonable people can disagree but it seemed to me that there was.

If the Mets were convinced that there was, too, should they have deviated from their plan of only offering short-term deals in this case? That’s not necessarily an “easy” case to make. Yet it seems worthwhile to discuss it.

First, we have to address why the Mets were so focused on short-term deals and why the interest in Yamamoto. The club was obviously willing to make an exception for the Japanese star because they felt he was young enough to still be an elite pitcher whenever the Mets made it back to serious World Series contention. Of course, the irony is that Yamamoto made just 18 starts in 2024 and the Mets made it to the NLCS without him.

Yamamoto aside, the Mets were focused on short-term deals to have as little as possible on the balance sheet for 2025 and beyond. But why was that important? Was it because they wanted to get under various Luxury Tax thresholds? Or was it so that they could have the room to sign multiple impact free agents in the 2024-25 offseason?

Regardless of why you believed the Mets chose that strategy last offseason – wouldn’t having Manaea available at 2023-24 prices have been better than having him at 2024-25 prices? Instead of offering him the contract that they did, with a player option – wouldn’t it have been better to sign him with team option(s) instead?

Essentially, Manaea was betting on himself with the player option. If he was good, he could enter free agency coming off a strong season. And if he wasn’t good, he had the security of the player option. But what if the Mets gave him more money so that they would have that control? It would be a case of the Mets betting on Manaea.

Manaea’s actual deal paid him $14.5 million in 2024, with a player option of $13.5 million in 2025. What if the Mets signed him to an $18 million deal in 2024, with a team option of an equal amount for 2025? And it’s not unheard of to have a deal with multiple option years, potentially extending their team control for future years, too.

The important thing to remember here is that the Mets weren’t making decisions last offseason with the main point of reducing payroll. They were doing it for future flexibility. Giving Manaea $3.5 million more last year would not have been a deal-breaker from the Mets’ POV, even given the self-imposed constraints under which they were operating.

By making it a player option, rather than a team option, the Mets were essentially being penny-wise and pound-foolish.

It’s easy to say that this is nothing more than revisionist history and that there’s no way to tell if Manaea would have been willing to trade which side got the option for $3.5 million. Still, the idea is to look at what could have been done differently and see if there are ways to incorporate than knowledge into future negotiations.

Perhaps with oodles of cash available to spend this offseason, the specific case of trying to gain team control, rather than player control, over options won’t come into play. Yet the big-picture case of being penny-wise/pound foolish can certainly come into play. Especially if the plan is to chase the most-expensive players available while having the sport’s richest owner.