Jose Quintana is good at baseball.
That much can be agreed upon by nearly everybody in the baseball world.
But just how good?
His career record is 50-54 and has never reached 200 strikeouts. He has finished in the Top 10 in Cy Young voting just one time and making only one All-Star Game (both coming in 2016).
That being said, Quintana is the seventh most valuable pitcher in baseball since the start of the 2013 season, has rattled off four straight 200-inning seasons with ERAs under 4.00 and has a 2.70 ERA over his last seven starts after a rough beginning to the 2017 campaign.
Quintana's worst enemy is the perception that surrounds him. His run support has been a punchline in Chicago for years, dragging down his overall numbers. He's never pitching in the playoffs or on the game's biggest stage.
Jon Lester, meanwhile, is unquestionably heralded as one of the top pitchers in the game. A huge reason for that is his longevity (12-year career) while pitching in two huge markets (Chicago and Boston) and tossing 133.2 postseason innings.
MLB
But Quintana and Lester are basically the exact same pitcher.
Over the last four seasons, the two have the same WAR (21.1). Here's the year-by-year WAR breakdown:
Lester
2017: 1.7
2016: 4.3
2015: 5.0
2014: 5.6
2013: 3.5
Quintana
2017: 2.0
2016: 4.8
2015: 4.8
2014: 5.1
2013: 3.5
Delving even further into peripheral stats, Quintana and Lester are mirror images of each other. They're so similar it's scary:
So for anybody worried about what the Cubs gave up in the deal, think of it from this prism: Theo Epstein and Co. essentially acquired a 28-year-old Jon Lester who is only owed about $32 million over the next 3.5 seasons. Lester will make roughly $85 million in that same span.
Not bad, eh?