Give Dave Dombrowski a round of applause. Jesús Luzardo’s contract extension is a super smart deal

A transaction to consider with regard to Jesús Luzardo …

Three years ago, a 30-year-old free agent lefty named Carlos Rodon signed a six-year, $162 million contract with the Yankees. Two years before that, Rodon wasn’t all that different from Luzardo.

At 28 years old, he entered his walk year with all the stuff in the world but plenty of durability questions to go with a middling career 4.14 ERA in about 500 career innings. He finished fifth in Cy Young voting that season, but logged only 132⅔ innings and settled for a short-term deal in an effort to rebuild his value. The strategy paid off. Rodon started 31 games for the Giants and posted a 2.88 ERA with best-in-class strikeout and walk rates in 178 innings.

» READ MORE: Jesús Luzardo finds the stability he craved with his Phillies extension as part of a change atop the rotation

On Monday, the Phillies agreed to a contract extension with Luzardo that will pay him $135 million guaranteed over five years, a source confirmed to The Inquirer. At $27 million per year in average annual value, it is similar to the contract Rodon signed, with a couple of important exceptions.

One, the Phillies are only paying Luzardo through his 33-year-old season, while Rodon is under contract through his 35-year-old season. Two, the cost of pitching has tracked the cost of everything else over the last few years. A better comp for Luzardo’s deal is the five-year, $130 million contract that Ranger Suárez signed with the Red Sox this offseason, which runs through his 34-year-old season.

This was strong work by the Phillies. Suárez has never reached 160 innings in a season. Luzardo went 178⅔ in 2023 and 183⅔ last season, when he finished seventh in Cy Young voting and posted a peripheral line that was much closer to Rodon’s than Suárez’s.

It is a fair deal, and that’s a lot more than most teams can expect in the current environment. Luzardo could have struck it bigger as a free agent next offseason if he replicated last year’s 3.92 ERA, 10.6 K/9, 2.8 BB/9 and 0.8 HR/9 in 32 starts. He could have struck it much bigger if his ERA ended up closer to his Fielding Independent Percentage, which pegged him at a 2.90 ERA-level pitcher last season. But $130 million is an awful lot of money to walk away from, especially for a streaky pitcher who battled injury in 2024.

There is plenty of risk here for the Phillies. There always is with pitchers. With Luzardo, the risk comes coupled with an equivalent amount of upside. The Phillies saw all they needed to see in the NLDS, when Luzardo looked every bit the ace Zack Wheeler and Aaron Nola had been in previous postseasons. In Game 2, he held the Dodgers to two runs on four base runners with five strikeouts in six innings. Three days later, he gladly came out of the bullpen to retire five of the seven batters he faced, three via strikeout, in the Phillies’ excruciating extra-innings loss in Game 4.

» READ MORE: How Max Scherzer has mentored Jesús Luzardo, from NL East ‘pop quizzes’ to offseason training advice

We haven’t spoken much about Luzardo’s NLDS performance since it went down. That’s a shame. Had the Phillies won that series, he would have joined the cast of local folk heroes spawned by the Phillies’ runs to the World Series and NLCS in 2022 and 2023. That they did not win was no fault of Luzardo’s. He showed us a heck of a lot last October. You can bet that his bosses felt sold.

Luzardo at his best is about as good as any pitcher there is. He showed it in his first 11 starts last season, when he posted a 2.15 ERA and struck out 77 while walking 19 and allowing just three home runs. He showed it in his last 11 starts: 69⅔ innings, 80 strikeouts, 14 walks, six home runs, a 2.84 ERA. The 10 starts in between were a bit of a mess: 20 runs allowed in back-to-back starts, four more outings of four-plus runs in five or fewer innings.

The upside for the Phillies is Luzardo eliminating the volatility that plagued him during the middle of last season. The guts he showed in the postseason suggest he is a pitcher who is capable of rising to the challenge. If he does, the Phillies will have themselves an immense bargain. They will have Rodon in 2023, with a much longer track record, and they will have him signed to a contract that could run the length of his physical prime.