How Freddy Peralta’s Contract Demands Should Shift the Mets' Thinking

Freddy Peralta’s New York Mets tenure has been tenuous. Yes, he has been a steadying force atop their rotation, but he hasn’t been the “capital-A” ace fans hoped he’d be. He hasn’t been the problem in a season that has gone sideways, but he also hasn’t been the solution. The best way to describe his Mets’ exploits is excellently mediocre, but that’s clearly not how Peralta views things. 

Per Bob Nightengale, Freddy Peralta expects a contract “similar to Max Fried’s eight-year, $218 million deal,” when he reaches free agency this fall. As a point of reference, Fried’s contract is the largest ever handed out to a left-handed pitcher, although Tarik Skubal should blow by that, and is the fourth-largest ever for a pitcher. While it’s not really noteworthy when a report surfaces that a free agent-to-be would like a comically large sum of money, it could change the way the Mets view the trade deadline. 

Mets Are Teetering on the Edge of Buyer and Seller

As of the week of June 8, at 29-36, the Mets are five games back of the final wild card spot, and 15.5 games back of the Braves for the NL East divisional crown. According to FanGraphs' playoff odds, the Mets have a 22.7% chance of making the postseason, the ninth-best figure in the National League. Considering six teams from each league make the playoffs, the Mets’ playoff dreams aren’t dashed, but they’re certainly tenuous. 

If the Mets make a run and fortify their playoff positioning, Peralta will finish the season in Queens. Teams in the playoff picture always need more pitching, and Peralta, while a mild disappointment thus far, would be integral in any Mets playoff scenario. However, if the team falls out of the running before the trade deadline, Peralta’s name will become a hot topic of discussion, and his looming contract expectations will certainly be a factor for any team pursuing him and the Mets’ desire to retain him beyond 2026. 

As a quick note: The looming collective bargaining negotiations throw a tremendous amount of uncertainty over all of this. Since no one knows how those will play out, I’m going to assume that the status quo largely wins out. That is potentially naïve, but for the purposes of this analysis, it’s the only way to operate with any certainty. 

Why the Mets Would Trade Peralta

To land Peralta over the winter, the New York Mets traded Brandon Sproat and Jett Williams to the Milwaukee Brewers for Peralta and Tobias Myers. At the time, Williams was the 69th-ranked prospect, according to Fangraphs prospect rankings, while Sproat was 51st. The pair held 50 overall grades, which indicates average or better MLB players over their team control years. 

Sproat and Williams are very good prospects, and while the Mets probably won’t get commensurate value back, landing one top-100 prospect isn’t out of the question in a Peralta trade. They could also opt to cast a wider net and land a few players with tantalizing upside, but who are much farther from the majors. 

However, I doubt recouping prospects would be the primary reason the Mets would trade Peralta. They own the league’s second-highest payroll and have been aggressive every offseason to bolster their roster through free agency. Moving Peralta would likely be a means to clear as much future cash to pursue Tarik Skubal. 

If the Mets have no interest in keeping Peralta long term, then they have every reason to trade him before the deadline because extending him a qualifying offer doesn’t move the needle much. Due to the Mets paying the competitive balance tax, they’d receive their compensatory pick after the fourth round of the MLB draft, as opposed to after the first round. The disparity in bonus slot allotment and projected value between a player drafted after the first and fourth rounds is substantial enough that the overall player return for Peralta via trade would dwarf letting him walk after extending him a qualifying offer. 

On top of that, the qualifying offer will be for around $22 million, and if the Mets really do want to splash the type of money they’d need to land Skubal, then the potential of Peralta accepting the qualifying offer would be a serious risk because his salary expectations and reality don’t seem to align. 

Forecasting a Freddy Peralta Contract

Since the season is not over, any salary projection for Peralta has to make two assumptions. The first is that he will finish the season mostly healthy, and the second is that he’ll maintain his current level of production. 

To properly gauge Peralta’s market, we need to first properly analyze the actual market. Over the past three offseasons, there have been 11 free agent pitchers around the age of 30 (28-32) who entered free agency coming off a 3.0 fWAR season or better. Since Peralta has only just turned 30 and has averaged about 3.0 fWAR over the past three seasons, these pitchers can reasonably be called his peers.  

On average, these pitchers signed contracts for 4.6 years, for a total of $127.95 million, and at an average annual value (AAV) of $27.54 million. It should be noted that longer deals for larger total money will generally have lower AAVs, while shorter deals usually get a slight AAV bump. 

To quickly and rudimentarily get an idea of what Peralta should expect in free agency, I found the correlation between contract length, contract size, and AAV and six-season bWAR total, ERA, FIP, strikeout to walk ratio, innings per 162 games, and available start percentage. 

[As a note, the pandemic 2020 season makes all of this a little trickier.]

Unsurprisingly, the bWAR over the six seasons prior to free agency had the strongest correlation to contract size and length, while ERA over that same span was the best at predicting AAV. From there, I threw Peralta’s figures into a linear forecast model, with a little boost to his on-pace bWAR total from this season, to give us a rough estimation of what he should expect to see in free agency. 

Based on this, Peralta should expect a contract of 4.8 years, for a total of $132.1 million, and at an AAV of $28.5 million. These numbers don’t all add up, but the general outline is that Peralta’s market should be for around five years at $28 million a year. For every additional year, you’d expect the AAV to decline and vice versa. Obviously, that’s not particularly close to Max Fried’s eight-year, $218 million deal, but perhaps Fried simply beat his projection. 

Well, about that. Fried’s projected contract length was for 6.56 years, for a total of $192.38 million, with an AAV of $30.9 million, which aligns pretty well with what he got. However, there was one little thing bugging me from that data set: Blake Snell. 

Snell features twice in this exercise, and his whole presence kind of ruins everything. The linear correlation between six-season bWAR and salary craters from 0.86 without him to 0.71 with him. The reason for this is that Snell basically has two elite seasons where he won Cy Youngs and a bunch of mediocre to poor seasons in between. And since I used six seasons as my cutoff, his first free-agent foray, where he only got two years and $62 million, he had 19.6 bWAR, but his second trip through free agency lopped off his 7.1 bWAR season, and he then landed a five-year, $182 million contract on only a bWAR of 14.7.

It’s not the most rigorous exercise, but I wanted to see what Peralta and Fried’s contract forecasts would be if I simply removed Snell from the equation. Yes, it shrinks the sample, but I’d rather kill two outliers with one Snell. 

In the Snell-less projections, Peralta would expect a contract of 5.2 years, for a total of $144.5 million, and an AAV of $28.8 million, while Fried landed a 7.35-year deal, for a total of $215.04 million, and an AAV of $31.37 million. Fried projecting so accurately makes sense because his figures are part of the sample, but they continuously reinforce the notion that if Peralta starts with Fried’s contract in negotiations, it’s only going to go down from there. 

What Peralta’s Demands Mean for the Mets

Personally, if I were running a team, Peralta’s expectations wouldn’t scare me off from trading for him, or keeping him if I’m the Mets. Unless he rips off a truly transcendent final 20 starts, Peralta looks in line to land a six-year deal worth a total of $160 million, which is right in line with what Ranger Suarez got this offseason. 

Now, whether or not the Mets want to hang onto him long term at $160 million is another thing, but his seeking Max Fried money shouldn’t be a hang-up. At the end of the day, it’s highly unlikely any team will go anywhere near $200 million for him on a contract. The difference between his perceived value and true market value does make it more likely that he’ll accept a qualifying offer or seek a short-term deal with opt-outs, but most teams have had few qualms about handing out those types of deals. 

At the end of the day, Peralta’s contract expectations should change the Mets' line of thinking. Either they need him for a playoff push, or they decide they’d rather commit long-term money to a higher-end pitcher and trade him. Outside of a CC Sabathia-like run to close the season, Peralta is going to land a contract that pays him like the number two starter that he is.