After his final start of 2024, Boston Red Sox pitcher Nick Pivetta walked off the mound to an ovation from the Fenway Park crowd.
Pivetta has been a Red Sox since 2020 and he's thrown the most innings of any Boston pitcher in that time. He developed a reputation as a workhorse with solid results — he clocked a 4.29 ERA in 633 innings in his Red Sox career.
But when Boston chief baseball officer Craig Breslow extended a qualifying offer — a one-year, $21.05 million contract — to Pivetta on Nov. 4, many Sox fans were shocked. Breslow explained his choice at Monday's general manager meeting in San Antonio.
“I think we definitely saw stretches of him just being dominant and, certainly, we can dissect the performance to a greater degree. But he’s a guy that has performed well in this market — has 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," Breslow said. “As you think about what a Major League starting pitcher needs to be able to do to be successful, he has a lot of those ingredients.”
Craig Breslow explains why Red Sox extended a qualifying offer to Nick Pivetta
The Red Sox made a one-year, $21.05M qualifying offer to Nick Pivetta. How that impacts the rest of their offseason plans to add pitching: https://t.co/b5xmcQJw0M via @BostonGlobe
— Alex Speier (@alexspeier) November 5, 2024
Pivetta does throw strikes at a high clip. In 2024, he fanned 172 batters in 145.2 innings, good for an 88th-percentile strikeout percentage. According to Stuff+, Pivetta had the best stuff of any hurler who pitched over 100 innings last season.
Yet, his results are still solid, at best. Pivetta has never posted a sub-four ERA in his eight years of service time, and he's plagued by the home run ball. He allowed 1.7 home runs per nine innings in 2024 as just one of the few Sox pitchers with a tendency toward letting up homers.
Boston's front office has been vocal about its hopes to improve the pitching staff, and bringing Pivetta back for another season doesn't improve much. The Red Sox have enough funds to sign the top two aces on the market and enough resources to trade for one, and bringing Pivetta back doesn't inspire much optimism that sweeping change is coming this offseason.
But Pivetta is flexible. If the Red Sox do end up signing an ace and another back-of-the-rotation arm, they could use Pivetta in the bullpen as a long-relief option, a role in which he's thrived in the past.
Pivetta has until Nov. 19 to accept or decline the qualifying offer. The righty mentioned how much he loves Boston in an interview after his final start of 2024, but his durability and consistency could earn him a long-term deal elsewhere. Red Sox fans will have to wait and see how Pivetta's decision changes the direction of the team's pitching search this offseason.