At Last We Can Exhale

The Mets and Oliver Perez are on the verge of completing a three-year, $36 million contract, thus probably finalizing the initial 2009 starting rotation.

At last we can exhale. Which is a good thing, because if Ollie pitches in 2009 like he did in 2008, we will be holding our breath plenty this season.

There's a lot to like about this deal, though. The dollar value isn't outrageous, at least according to baseball economics. And now we have Perez sewn up for his age-27, -28, and -29 seasons, which are often the most productive years of a player's career. Ollie doesn't seem to be the faintest bit intimidated by toiling in New York, either--it remains to be seen if the same holds true for, say, Tim Redding, whose only start for the Yankees proved to be an unqualified disaster.

Some memorably wild flamethrowers have historically developed better control when they were around Ollie's present age, among them Randy Johnson, Nolan Ryan, and Sandy Koufax. Now, I'm definitely not saying Ollie is in that class. For one thing, he's never pitched as many as 200 innings in a season, and those other three were all notable workhorses. But if Oliver Perez can become a poor man's Koufax (like Rick Reed was a poor man's Greg Maddux), you know what? That's not too bad for twelve million per. Again, I'm not sayin' he's going to ... but no one has ever denied the raw talent is there.

Some bloggers have bemoaned the idea that our rotation is basically the same one as last year's second-place staff, but that's not totally true. The bottom end of the rotation looks noticeably stronger than last year's. If Freddy Garcia can make any kind of a significant comeback, there really isn't any bottom end. It's Johan Santana at the top, and then Mike Pelfrey, Oliver Perez, John Maine, Garcia, and Redding in any order you like, with the number six starter filling the long man's role in the bullpen or waiting behind the curtain in Buffalo.

So welcome home, Ollie. It's good to have you back. I just wish you hadn't kept us waiting so long.