Why the Red Sox Gave a Qualifying Offer to Nick Pivetta

On Monday, the Red Sox gave a qualifying offer to free-agent starter Nick Pivetta. After spending seven years in the majors and joining the Red Sox in 2020, the 31-year-old Pivetta will get to choose where he wants to work for the first time in his life. Pivetta will need to decide whether to accept the offer by November 19. If he does, he will return to Boston for one year, making $21.05 million, a huge jump from the $7.5 million he made in his final season of arbitration. If he declines it and signs elsewhere, the Red Sox will get a competitive balance pick in the draft. We can’t know exactly why Craig Breslow made this decision, but let’s break down the logic behind it as best we can.

First, the Red Sox might simply want that competitive balance pick. They might believe Pivetta will reject the deal and seek out a longer-term contract, or at least that it’s likely enough to make the QO worth the risk. FanGraphs published its Top 50 Free Agents list yesterday (Pivetta ranked 32nd), and one of the real takeaways was that starting pitching is going to be in even greater demand than usual this offseason. The Red Sox might believe that in this market, Pivetta is sure to land a multi-year deal, making the QO a slam dunk.

However, in writing up this story, Sean McAdam related something Breslow said to him earlier this year: “If you give a QO, you’d better be prepared for it to be accepted.” The Red Sox certainly aren’t afraid to bring Pivetta back. In terms of production, there’s no reason to believe that he would hurt the club. Since joining the Red Sox, Pivetta has a 4.29 ERA and a 4.19 FIP. That translates to an ERA- of 99 and an FIP- of 101, which is to say that he’s been almost exactly a league-average pitcher.

Despite a flexor strain early in the 2024 season, Pivetta has been extremely dependable, pitching at least 140 innings in each of the last four seasons. He’s thrown 633 innings, over 200 more than any other pitcher, and his 7.9 fWAR trails only Tanner Houck. While the Red Sox clearly need to upgrade the front of their rotation, there is no such thing as too much starting pitching depth. At the very least, keeping Pivetta around raises the team’s floor, and it gives them starting pitching depth to trade from as they build out the roster for 2025.

Pivetta is a stuff darling – pitch modeling system Stuff+ adores his four-seamer, his slider, and his cutter – but because he's homer-prone and he tends not to pitch deep into games, he has yet to translate all that nastiness into actual big-league success. If you’re a Red Sox fan who’s been watching Pivetta for the better part of five years, you might be understandably skeptical that he’ll figure it out, especially in Boston. However, Breslow has only been running the team for a year, and it’s reasonable for him to want one more crack at it. Remember how I said that Stuff+ loves Pivetta’s slider? Well, it’s a fairly new pitch. In 2024, he traded a more traditional slider for a sweeper with more horizontal movement. The results didn’t come, but among pitchers who threw at least 100 innings, Stuff+ rated it as the best slider in baseball. That’s got to be at least a little bit encouraging.

If things really don’t work out, Pivetta could end up pitching out of the bullpen. When he did so in 2023, he put up some of the best numbers of his career. That brings us to the strongest argument against making the QO: It would be an overpay. At FanGraphs, Ben Clemens projected that Pivetta would land a contract for three years and $45 million, while Tim Britton of The Athletic projected roughly the same thing: three years and $48 million. So yes, $21 million would be an overpay for 2025, but it would also be the best kind of overpay: a short-term one. Players and teams make this kind of trade-off all the time: players prefer to sign a larger average annual value in exchange for the security of a longer contract with a larger total dollar value, while teams prefer the flexibility offered by short-term deals. That calculus might have made sense to Breslow.

There’s a bigger reason that you shouldn’t worry about overpaying Pivetta by $6 million dollars: The Red Sox are supposed to be thinking bigger. If the Red Sox are trying to stay under the luxury tax for 2025, then this move doesn't make much sense at all. There's not enough room for them to pay more than market value for a back-end starter when there are other real needs on the roster. But if that's what's going on, then the game is already lost.

The Red Sox have run one of the highest payrolls in the game in very recent memory. There’s no way of knowing how much money they plan on spending this season or in the future, but they need real pitching upgrades and have been making noises about making a real effort to compete in 2025. They should be shopping in the Burnes-Fried section of the store, and they also need a catcher and a right-handed bat. There are a couple of advantages of being a big market team. It can help you sign big, expensive free agents, but it can also help you build out enviable depth. Think of the Dodgers. They’re packed with stars, but so were plenty of teams in the playoffs. The Dodgers paid more for quality depth, and it meant that even though they suffered some huge injuries, they always had an excellent arm ready in the bullpen and a solid bat coming off the bench. This kind of move, paying a little more for depth with upside, is what all that money is for. If paying $21 million to Pivetta is the extent of Boston's plan, or even enough to make them adjust the overall plan, then the team has bigger problems to worry about.