The Z Report
Lance Zierlein: Is Jadeveon Clowney worth $15M per year?
Lance Zierlein
Jun 20, 2018, 9:38 am
The Houston Texans are under the direction of a new GM for the first time since 2006, but we still aren’t sure how different the Texans will operate as it pertains to salary extensions and how they handle roster situations.
On one hand, Bernardrick McKinney was just given a 5-year, $50M deal with $21M guaranteed. Now keep in mind that McKinney is the clear-cut thumper in the middle who has accounted for 95 and 129 tackles over the last two seasons to go along with three and five sacks in both years. McKinney has been productive, durable and consistent. McKinney will be compensated like one of the best inside linebackers in the league starting in 2019, so should Jadeveon Clowney expect the same?
You have to pay Jadeveon Clowney. When Clowney has been healthy, he’s been a bonafide shop-wrecker and one of the more disruptive defensive ends in the game. Like homeruns in baseball, sacks are the sexy stat used by fans and media members to determine the worth and effectiveness of a player, but Clowney’s impact as a run defender is substantial and should not be undersold. Just google it.
Clowney is a plus pass rusher who has increased his sack total in each season and is coming off of a career high 9.5 sacks. This, despite the fact that J.J. Watt and Whitney Mercilus weren’t there to occupy blockers and take some of the offensive line’s attention away from Clowney.
J.J. Watt hasn’t been healthy for two full seasons and Clowney’s importance to this defensive front is now more critical than ever. He may not be an elite pass rusher, but he’s a damn good every down player with an ability to alter the course of a game and he’s only getting better. Clowney’s contract negotiations will likely have to start at $14M per year, but getting a deal done now could save the team millions over the life of the second contract.
Don’t be the desperate boyfriend looking to get married too soon, Texans. There is no reason to put an expensive ring on it until you are absolutely sure that Clowney is going to be the same guy we saw last year.
The version of Clowney that we saw last season played the full year, was great against the run and showed continued improvement as a pass rusher. That’s inarguable. But the question is whether that version of Clowney is what we are going to keep seeing. Let’s remember that this is a player who has missed two, three, and 12 games from 2016 thru 2014. He had to have microfracture surgery as a rookie. If you aren’t concerned about future durability then you might be a fool.
One could argue that Clowney approached 2017 like a contract season since it’s not unusual to get extended before your last season. So if that is the case, let’s see if he can maintain his health for consecutive seasons and let’s see if his growth as a pass rusher will continue to yield fruit. We can act like $14M is the starting point in negotiations, but in real life, the starting point is at least J.J. Watt’s average per year at about $16.6M. Can’t the Texans just wait one more season to find out if Clowney is worth this investment?
So I’ve shown you the two arguments that are out there for signing and not signing Clowney before the season starts. I have a hard time imagining a world where Clowney isn’t a Houston Texan next season, but it could very well be with a franchise tag attached to him.
You do have to wonder why the Texans haven’t extended him already, but if I were in charge, I think I might be approaching this the same way the Texans are. Nobody is saying he’s not a very good player who is emerging as a great player, but I think I need to see it for another year.
Bold decisions to change Major League Baseball’s longstanding rules quickened the pace of games and revived the popularity of stealing bases over the last few years.
A similarly creative move may be needed to help starting pitching regain the relevance it enjoyed as recently as a decade ago.
Only four pitchers (Seattle’s Logan Gilbert, Kansas City’s Seth Lugo, San Francisco’s Logan Webb and Philadelphia’s Zack Wheeler) threw as many as 200 innings last season, down from 34 in 2014.
During that same 2014 season, all 30 major league teams got over 900 innings from their starting pitchers and five had over 1,000. Last year, only four teams had their starters pitch at least 900 innings, led by Seattle with 942 2/3.
While this shift has been years in the making, the numbers themselves provide a cold slap of reality to longtime fans who remember seeing Bob Gibson throw three complete games in the 1967 World Series or Jack Morris pitching 10 shutout innings in Game 7 of the 1991 Fall Classic.
Going back to the days of Cy Young and Walter Johnson, part of the game's beauty was watching a pitcher work his way through a lineup three or four times.
With every team having multiple relievers who can come out of the bullpen and throw in the high 90s, what could prompt teams to let their starters work deeper into games?
Managers and players struggle to come up with a solution.
“Outside of just changing rules to incentivize managers to keep guys in games longer,” Los Angeles Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said.
Roberts’ Dodgers exemplified the bullpen emphasis during their run to the 2024 World Series title. Their starting pitchers worked as many as six innings in just two of their 16 postseason games.
Texas’ Nathan Eovaldi went 5-0 with five postseason quality starts (defined as going at least six innings while allowing no more than three earned runs) a year earlier while helping the Rangers win their first World Series championship. Yet even he understands how much things have changed for starting pitchers since he made his big-league debut in 2011.
“Bullpens are a lot different now than they were back then,” Eovaldi said. “You’ve got a lot more guys who aren’t just eight- and ninth-inning guys. They can come in, in the sixth or seventh, go multiple innings. They all have multiple pitches now as well. I think that’s one of the fascinating things about the bullpen. You don’t have guys who are just a two-pitch mix anymore. They’ve got three or four pitches coming out, and two of them are really, really elite.”
And that’s why there seems only one way to get starters working more innings.
“Putting in rules that you have to,” San Francisco Giants manager Bob Melvin said. “We’ve created our own monster. It is what it is.”
MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred says it’s too early to explore rules changes.
“Our focus right now is training methods, particularly offseason training methods,” Manfred said. “It’s going to be somewhere between education and recommendations. It’s very hard to tell people you can’t do X, Y and Z, right? They’re grown men and there’s no way to monitor it during the offseason.”
One problem is the lack of a clear consensus on what rule changes could work best.
For instance, MLB had the Atlantic League experiment in 2021 and 2023 with a rule change that would force a team to lose its designated hitter if its starting pitcher didn’t finish at least five innings.
Instituting that kind of rule could be a tough sell in the majors, where some of the league’s most bankable stars such as Shohei Ohtani and Bryce Harper have received ample playing time at DH the last few years. Fans paying to see those stars likely wouldn’t be happy to see them get removed as collateral damage from an early pitching change.
MLB hasn’t announced any similar types of rules experimentations in the minors this season.
The maximum number of pitchers allowed on MLB rosters was lowered from 14 to 13 in 2022, though that limit rises to 14 when rosters expand from 26 to 28 on Sept. 1. A more extreme rule change would be to require starters to work at least five or six innings unless they get injured, throw a certain number of pitches or allow a particular number of runs.
Rangers manager Bruce Bochy said he wouldn’t mind seeing the minor leagues try out more rule changes designed at lengthening starting pitchers. He wants those pitching prospects to get accustomed to working deeper into games.
“That’s the way it used to be with starters,” Bochy said. “Now I think the mentality can be, ‘Hey, I’ve done my job. I’ve thrown four or five innings.’ “
Giants pitcher Robbie Ray says the history of the game shows that starters can adapt to longer outings.
“I think starting pitchers are capable of doing it,” said Ray, who won the 2021 AL Cy Young Award with Toronto. “It’s just a matter of kind of training our bodies to do that again because what’s been expected of us has changed over the years.”
A 62-page MLB study released in December showed how the focus on rising velocities and maximum effort on each pitch had resulted in more injuries among pitchers. That study also revealed that starts of five or more innings dropped from 84% to 70% in the majors from 2005-24 and from 68.9% to 36.8% in the minors.
“Because we’re trying to create this engine and this repetitive thought of just pure stuff each and every pitch, yeah, starters are going to fatigue sooner,” Cleveland Guardians pitching coach Carl Willis said. “And at the same time, we’re training them that way. We’re training them to do so.
“Everybody still talks about wanting to go out for the sixth, wanting to go out for the seventh and getting deep into games. I don’t know that we’re training them to do that, and I don’t know how we are kind of teaching nowadays can allow that to happen.”
A change in approach could allow those starters to get that endurance. Right now, it’s the older guys who seem more used to that workload.
The MLB leader in quality starts last season was the 34-year-old Wheeler, who had 26. Lugo, 35, had 22 quality starts to tie for second place.
Even so, the 2024 season did offer some encouraging signs for the future of starting pitching.
MLB pitchers threw 5.22 innings per start last season. That represented the most since 2018, though it was still far off the 2014 average of 5.97.
The 2024 season also featured an MLB average of 85.5 pitches per start, the highest since 2019. Starters haven’t thrown as many as 90 pitches per appearance since 2017.
Perhaps it’s inevitable that the pendulum swing at least a little more toward getting starters to work longer. The recent focus on relievers puts more pressure on them, causing bullpens to break down.
There’s one obvious method to change that.
“I don’t think necessarily the game is going to all of a sudden turn back the other way, but there’s a huge push to understand how you can keep a bullpen healthy,” Milwaukee Brewers manager Pat Murphy said. “And one of the biggest ways is those starters getting through that first bulk and getting you into the sixth or seventh.”
Now it’s just a matter of figuring out how those starters can pitch deeper into games more often.