Danny Duffy and a contract extension that could help define the Royals’ next five years

The most predictable contract extension in the history of organized sports is official. Danny Duffy is five years closer to turning his “bury me a Royal” line of a few years ago from endearing to factually correct, and this deal was always going to happen for a number of reasons.

The Royals cannot afford talent like Duffy’s through free agency and realistically don’t have enough to trade for it, either. They have committed to building from within and haven’t been nearly as productive with starting pitching as they want. Retaining success stories like Duffy is imperative.

Everything the Royals do has at least a shred of public relations in it, too, and it would be hard to take their stated desire of competing beyond 2017 seriously if they bricked this layup of a contract extension.

So the Royals are fortunate to get out of this with a five-year, $65 million extension. Duffy had asked for $8 million in arbitration for 2017, a number the Royals internally viewed as fair, so they’re effectively buying his first four years of free agency for $57 million.

There are no sure things in baseball, other than Mike Trout, but given the value of starting pitchers and the direction of the sport’s economics it is hard to imagine this being a bad investment for the Royals. Duffy could lose a year to injury and still earn this money.

But the contract made sense for Duffy, too. He might’ve earned a $100 million contract with another strong season, but he’s a Tommy John surgery survivor and his 26 starts and 179  2/3 innings in 2016 are career highs.

In the 10 years since Dayton Moore took over what was then a forlorn baseball outpost, here are the players who’ve signed long-term extensions to stay in Kansas City: Zack Greinke, Salvador Perez, Billy Butler, Alex Gordon, Yordano Ventura, Alcides Escobar, Salvador Perez again and, now, Duffy.

Moore’s greatest accomplishment in Kansas City, other than the World Series victory parade, is turning the Royals from a franchise guys joined only if they had no other options to one they are regularly turning down more money to stay with.

This Duffy contract isn’t quite as club-friendly as the first Perez deal — it is possible that nothing again will be — but it had to be an easy sell to David Glass, even as he’s shortsightedly and counter-productively ordered the 2017 payroll to regress.

But Duffy wanted to sign this contract, with this team, and over the years has kept one of baseball’s worst poker faces. Over and over, he has openly and publicly talked about his desire to play in Kansas City forever. Recently, in an interview with KCSP’s The Drive, he said, “I was telling my mom a couple weeks ago, I can’t, I can’t even fathom having to wear another jersey.”

There is something to be said for being happy where you are, and when Duffy talks about wanting to repay the loyalty he’s felt from Royals fans over the years, it is going to push him toward the top of the best-liked athletes in modern Kansas City history.

These things have a way of going off-script, of course, but there is every opportunity here for a story that will help define the next wave of Royals baseball.

The Royals and Kansas City are a match of franchise and market that seem to value the intangible more than most, and this is a team in need of pitching and personalities giving stability to a fan base that operates in constant fear that it’s all about to end.

Duffy just had the best season of his career — 3.51 ERA, 188 strikeouts and 42 walks over 179  2/3 innings. He finished in the top 10 in American League pitchers in strikeouts, strikeout rate, walk rate, WHIP and adjusted ERA.

Maybe it’s unrealistic to expect him to replicate the best year of his career, but he only turned 28 last month and has been the Royals’ best starting pitcher in two of the past three seasons. It’s certainly not unrealistic to expect him to set a new career high in innings.

A fun exercise: duplicating his 2016 each year of his contract would push Duffy to seventh all-time in innings (ahead of Charlie Leibrandt), sixth in strikeouts (just ahead of Greinke), seventh in wins (ahead of Steve Busby) and fourth in WAR (ahead of everyone but Kevin Appier, Bret Saberhagen and Mark Gubicza) among the franchise’s all-time pitchers.

That’s a case for the Royals’ Hall of Fame.

The Royals just signed an emerging, could-be ace to an affordable long-term contract. They locked in one more high-level talent with a demonstrated commitment to the cause, a man with top-of-the-rotation stuff and a chamber-of-commerce view of Kansas City.

Baseball contracts like this don’t happen often. Good for Duffy. Very good for the Royals. Best of all for their fans.

This story was originally published January 16, 2017 at 4:43 PM with the headline "Danny Duffy and a contract extension that could help define the Royals’ next five years."