Mets are rolling $36M dice that Perez will finally fulfill potential

Oliver Perez has been a frustratingly inconsistent pitcher for most of his seven-year major league career.

In baseball, potential comes with a spotlight, and sometimes a noose, but it rarely comes with a easily determined price tag, at least not for players who have had ample time to test potential against performance.

Potential finally got a selling price this winter, however, when Oliver Perez agreed to a three-year, $36 million deal with the Mets on Monday. Perez is the 14th player to sign a contract of at least that length this offseason and the seventh to get at least as much money, but he is the first in either category whose signing is based almost entirely on the hope that he'll prove worthy of such an investment by finally harnessing the potential that has been at times the most intriguing and the most maddening aspect of his career.

Large contracts based on upside are a hallmark of other sports, but they are hard to come by in baseball. Each of the other free-agents who have signed similar big money deals this winter (Mark Teixeira, CC Sabathia, Francisco Rodriguez, Derek Lowe, Ryan Dempster and A.J. Burnett are the only ones to top Perez's dollars) have done so either as a reward for what they have done recently, or a projection of what it can be fairly well assumed they will do in the very near future. Perez, however, falls into neither category. Instead, in this winter of restraint, he is that rarest of commodities: a pricey gamble.

Indeed, this is a signing that, while not monetarily obscene by recent standards, is attention-grabbing in the current economic climate. While established pitchers from Jon Garland to Kerry Wood have settled for far shorter and cheaper deals than they could have gotten at another time, Perez got almost exactly what he was looking for. It's not that the 27-year-old Perez isn't good -- in fact, he is occasionally outstanding -- it's that too often hasn't yet been good enough, often enough to justify that contract in this marketplace. In fact, the only sure thing about each of his starts is that one can never be sure what type of performance they'll get. (For instance, of his 34 starts last year -- a total that led the National League -- he had exactly 17 quality starts and 17 non-quality starts, and while he had 11 starts of one or no earned runs allowed, he gave up at least five earned runs eight times.)

It has been that way for Perez since he first came to the majors in 2002. He's only topped 12 wins one time, and had more seasons with an ERA over 5.00 (three) than under four (two). He's never pitched 200 innings and is wilder than at any point in his career, having just completed a season in which he set career-highs in walks (an NL-worst 105), hit batsmen (11) and wild pitches (9). Baseball-reference.com compares his career at this point to Mark Langston, who at 27 was in the midst of a 19-win season and had just made his first All-Star team, benchmarks Perez has yet to reach.

Perez is still searching for a level of consistency to match his talent level that once made him one of the game's brightest prospects. He was alternately good enough to toss gems like a 7.2 IP, six-hit, one-run, 12-strikeout masterpiece against the eventual world champions Phillies in one start and a 3.1 IP, eight-hit, seven-run three-strikeout disaster against the lowly Nationals in another. The Mets are banking on the fact that the gems will become the rule, not the exception. If they do, the Mets will have a veritable bargain, a second ace to pair with Johan Santana in hopes of warding off the kinds of late season collapses that have doomed them each of the past two seasons. If he doesn't, they will have wasted a significant amount of money on baseball's most tantalizing tease: the young left-handed starter with the hard fastball and the wicked breaking ball.

It is a package that has tempted teams and their fans for decades, with varying degrees of success. What is remarkable about Perez, however, is that there is little evidence to suggest he is a temptation worth giving into. If he's ever going to round into anything resembling a reliable force there's been scant evidence of it so far. For his seven-year career, he is 55-60 with a 4.39 ERA, and a 1.425 WHIP. He has just three complete games and two shutouts in his career. He regressed from a 15-10, 3.56 mark in 2007 to a 10-7 ledger with a 4.22 ERA in 2008.

There is hope though. In a 2004 season that looks increasingly like an aberration but stands out as a bastion of possibility, Perez led the National League with 239 strikeouts and posted a 2.98 ERA. He was 23 years old and baseball-reference.com says he was most similar, at that age, to another pitcher who had a hard fastball, tremendous breaking ball and prone to fits of wildness who had not yet learned how to command his considerable talent: Sandy Koufax.

To be sure, Perez is not and never will be Sandy Koufax. But it is the possibility that such wandering talents will eventually find what they're looking for that keeps teams hoping the potential for greatness is worth gambling on the potential for disaster.