CLEARWATER, Fla. — On the day the Phillies signed pitcher Jesús Luzardo to a five-year, $135 million contract extension, here’s a question you might want to ask yourself:
Is it even possible that you love anything as much as Phillies president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski loves starting pitching?
Really. Think about it. Ice cream? Cool cars? That new 196-inch flat screen in your living room? Seriously. Anything?
Seems doubtful, even to the starting pitchers on Dombrowski’s roster.
“I know Dave,” his ace, Zack Wheeler, mused on Tuesday morning. “And Dave loves his starting pitching. I think he’s kind of proven that everywhere he’s been. And he’s proven it here.”
Well, this week, he proved it yet again, by extending Luzardo, a rising 28-year-old star who put up the sixth-best strikeout percentage (28.5 percent) of any qualifying starter in the major leagues last season. The average annual value of Luzardo’s deal ($27 million) puts him behind only five other left-handed starters in the sport.
PITCHERAAV
Framber Valdez
$38.33M
Blake Snell
$36.4M
Tarik Skubal
$32M
Garrett Crochet
$28.33M
Max Fried
$27.25M
Jesús Luzardo
$27M
Chris Sale
$27M
Carlos Rodón
$27M
(Source: Cot’s Baseball Contracts)
Luzardo could have pitched out this season and headed for the shelves of the free-agent superstore next winter. Had he done that, he could have been positioned as the top left-handed starter on the market not named Tarik Skubal. But as Dombrowski said Tuesday, “We didn’t really want to test that out ourselves.” And Luzardo shared that sentiment, once the dollars lined up, saying: “I don’t like to play the what-ifs (of free agency). I think this came at the perfect time for me.”
Sources briefed on the Phillies’ discussions said that it wasn’t merely the star-power upside of Luzardo that fueled their push to finalize this contract. It was an assessment of the potential replacement cost of losing Luzardo, in a market with few high-end alternatives other than Skubal and Mets ace Freddy Peralta.
So three weeks ago, those sources said, the Phillies picked up the pace of negotiations with Luzardo’s agents, Brodie Van Wagenen and Roger Tomas, and chiseled out this deal, which contains escalator clauses that could spike Luzardo’s 2032 club option from $32.5 million to as much as $42.5 million.
But the Phillies will worry about their 2032 payroll some other time. At the moment, they’re reminding the world that they’re as committed to winning — and building around high-end starting pitching — as any team in the big leagues. Take a look:
Luzardo — under team control through 2032
Cristopher Sánchez — under team control through 2030
Wheeler — under team control through 2027
Aaron Nola — under team control through 2030
Andrew Painter — under team control through 2030
At a time when their fan base is already getting edgy about how soon this team’s window to win could be closing, Dombrowski and the Phillies’ principal owner, John Middleton, clearly have other thoughts.
“The pitching window,” Middleton said, pointedly, “is absolutely not closing.”
In fact, the Phillies will now roll out one of the most expensive rotations in MLB. Luzardo, Wheeler, Nola, Sánchez and Taijuan Walker will earn more than $115 million this year. And even with Painter making the major-league minimum salary of $780,000, the Phillies will join only the Dodgers, Yankees and Red Sox on the list of teams with at least three starting pitchers earning $24 million a year or more.
What is also notable here is that the other teams in the National League East are not built this way. The Braves have Chris Sale and Spencer Strider, but their rotation is filled with pitchers with injury history. The Mets, under president of baseball operations David Stearns, are all about short-term commitments and young arms. And the Nationals and Marlins are floating in a whole different orbit.
But the Phillies? They haven’t just doubled down on expensive, long-term rotation contracts. They’ve quadrupled down — by handing out long-term deals to Wheeler, Nola, Sánchez and now Luzardo.
That isn’t a thing that just happened, of course. It’s a central tenet of Dombrowski’s longstanding team-building philosophies. And even if much of the rest of the industry is zigging in the other direction, Dombrowski has no second thoughts about zagging and collecting as many old-school, inning-devouring, swing-and-miss starters as he can round up.
“I can’t speak for other teams,” Dombrowski said Tuesday. “I don’t know what their mentality is. But basically, it’s worked. … It’s really worked throughout the years for me.”
In Detroit, he had Justin Verlander, Max Scherzer, David Price and Rick Porcello — all once or future Cy Young Award winners — in his rotation. In Boston, it was Sale, Nathan Eovaldi, Price and Porcello. In Miami, he won a World Series with Kevin Brown, Al Leiter, Livan Hernandez and Alex Fernandez. They were all vintage Dombrowski pitching productions.
Those were very different times in this sport than these times. But in many ways, it’s the same Dombrowski. When his starting pitcher is better than your starting pitcher, he still likes his chances as much as ever.
“I’ve always felt that you go out there daily, and you look at who’s on the mound,” he said. “It doesn’t always work this way, but do you have the edge or not? I really like having the edge myself.”
So, as Dombrowski succinctly put it, has it “worked?” It’s hard to argue that it hasn’t.
Last year, on the way to a 96-win season, Phillies starters led the major leagues in Wins Above Replacement (FanGraphs), strikeout percentage, innings pitched and quality starts. And that occurred in a season in which the two veteran stabilizers in that rotation, Wheeler and Nola, dealt with significant injuries for the first time in their Phillies careers.
But into that breach stepped Sánchez and Luzardo, to finish second and seventh, respectively, in NL Cy Young Award voting. Now, the Phillies have both locked up on deals that clearly stamp them as the future leaders of this rotation. Sánchez has grown into a Cy Young waiting to happen, assuming Paul Skenes ever lets anyone else win one. And Luzardo had the largest jump in strikeout rate last year (7.3 percentage points) of any qualifying pitcher in the majors.
“So if you told me he was going to win a Cy Young some day, I wouldn’t be shocked,” said his catcher, J.T. Realmuto. “He’s got that type of stuff and that type of work ethic.”
Happy for our guy ❤️ pic.twitter.com/TECbiEK6HF
— Philadelphia Phillies (@Phillies) March 10, 2026
The question, with Luzardo, has always been health. The Marlins traded him to the Phillies before the 2024 season because they were worried about injury risk. And just before the Phillies traded for him, the Cubs reportedly backed out of a deal because of concerns over his medicals.
But the Phillies didn’t share those concerns. And even as executives from other teams were still questioning the “risk” the Phillies took in crafting this deal, Luzardo’s team was still shrugging off the idea that he couldn’t stay healthy.
“It’s tough to know all the intricacies of where he’s been and the routines there,” Phillies pitching coach Caleb Cotham said. “But all I know is, in the past year, I haven’t seen a guy that’s more dedicated to the recovery aspect, taking advantage of everything that (the Phillies’ athletic training staff) can offer. …
“You know, injuries, in some ways, they just happen. But I think there’s also a piece where it’s just him understanding himself better, opening up a playbook in his game — like throwing all his pitches a little bit more, and not just doing one thing and trying to throw 100 (mph) all the time. It’s actually afforded him a little more freedom to just pitch a little bit, even though he still throws 99.”
The Phillies added a lethal sweeper to Luzardo’s repertoire last year. It became one of the best swing-and-miss pitches in baseball. But his agent, Tomas, said that isn’t the only reason he has thrived in Philadelphia.
“What the Phillies were able to do with Jesús made things click for him,” Tomas said. “Everyone talks about the sweeper, and yes, no doubt, that has been a huge difference working off his electric fastball. But what most don’t realize is that the Phillies were so proactive with his health from the minute they traded for him.
“They were so good at getting him to understand his body, how it works, how they can keep him healthy for a season. Jesús realized a lot of his little injuries could have been prevented. He’s told me, ‘I never listened to my body the way I was supposed to and didn’t have the type of plan that I did last year with Phillies from a preventive-care standpoint.’”
“So if you told me he was going to win a Cy Young some day, I wouldn’t be shocked,” J.T. Realmuto said of Jesús Luzardo. “He’s got that type of stuff and that type of work ethic.” (Emilee Chinn / Getty Images)
No one can ever be sure, of course, that one pitch at the wrong time won’t land any pitcher on the injured list. And the Phillies enter this season with more rotation questions than at any time in the last five years:
• What will Wheeler look like on the other side of thoracic outlet syndrome surgery?
• How much will they miss Ranger Suárez, the one key member of this rotation they didn’t keep?
• Is Nola going to regain his place as one of the most dependable, inning-devouring starters in baseball?
• Is Painter going to be the guy who once ranked as the No. 1 pitching prospect in the sport or the guy who had a 5.40 ERA in Triple A last year in his first season back after Tommy John surgery?
• And is there enough depth in the system to ride to the rescue if any of these things go wrong?
But the Phillies have made their bet on the upside of this group. And on Tuesday, Middleton even went so far as to compare this rotation to the fabled 2011 all-aces Phillies rotation.
“In 2011,” the owner said, “I expected to win every single game.” And if the best-case scenario for all these starters happens, he said, “I’ll have the same feeling I had in ’11. Why should we ever lose a game?”
Well, the lesson of history is, they’ll lose a lot more than one. But even if they do, there’s one thing the architect of this team can’t ever be accused of:
Skimping on his starting rotation.