The Red Sox made a surprise decision Monday, extending a one-year, $21.05 million qualifying offer to free agent starting pitcher Nick Pivetta.
Pivetta has until 4 p.m. on Nov. 19 to accept or decline it.
He seems like a strong candidate to accept it and return. If he does accept it, the Red Sox will have five returning starters in Pivetta, Tanner Houck, Kutter Crawford, Brayan Bello and Lucas Giolito who exercised his $19 million player option after missing 2023 because of elbow surgery.
But that doesn’t mean the rotation will be set.
“I don’t think anything is off the table,” chief baseball officer Craig Breslow said Monday at the GM Meetings. “I think we’ll still continue to explore how we’ll improve the rotation, how we’ll improve the pitching staff.”
Pivetta experienced his ups and downs with Boston but he pitched 142 ⅔ innings or more each of the past four years (including 179 ⅔ innings in 2023) and had a respectable 4.09 ERA and 4.02 FIP in 2023-24 combined. The Red Sox will need to replace that durability if he doesn’t accept the offer.
“We’ve been pretty outspoken about our need for pitching,” chief baseball officer Craig Breslow said as the GM Meetings opened in San Antonio. “Obviously we know Nick really well. This is ultimately where we landed. We’ll see how it plays out from here.”
Pivetta ranked in the 88th percentile among major league pitchers in strikeout percentage (28.9%) in 2024. He was in the 80th percentile in walk percentage (6.1%).
“We definitely saw stretches of him just being dominant,” Breslow said. “We can dissect the performance to a greater degree. But he’s a guy who has performed well in this market. Has kind of like all of the underlying metrics. He gets a ton of swing and miss. He doesn’t walk guys. He can get guys out pitching in the strike zone. So as you think about what a major league starting pitcher needs to do to be able to be successful, he has a lot of those ingredients.”
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