At Long Last, the David Robertson Sweepstakes Has a Winner

We’ve finally done it, friends. Everybody take a bow. It took until July 20, but we’ve finally found a home for the last holdout on Ben Clemens’ 2025 edition of the Top 50 Free Agents. On Sunday, the Phillies took their shot on lucky no. 46, agreeing to sign veteran reliever David Robertson to a $16 million contract. Prorated for the late start date, the contract will actually pay the right-hander somewhere around $6 million. Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic broke the news, while MLB.com’s Mark Feinsand reported the contract details. According to Matt Gelb, also of The Athletic, Robertson will need a ramp-up period, which means he’ll need to agree to an assignment in the minors.

So why the hell did this take so long? Here’s my best answer: Uhh… ageism?

Let’s start with Robertson’s blurb from the top 50, which I don’t feel bad about plagiarizing here because I wrote it:

Over the past three seasons, Robertson has a 2.82 ERA and a 3.24 FIP. Over 188 appearances and 201 innings, he’s accrued 3.8 WAR, 12th most among all relievers. As he enters his age-40 season, Robertson is coming off his best FIP since 2017. His cutter averaged 93.3 mph in both 2023 and 2024, the fastest it’s been since Obama’s first term. According to Statcast’s run values, that cutter was worth 19 runs this season, making it the sixth-most valuable pitch in all of baseball. Knowing what it knows about aging curves and the volatility of relief arms, ZiPS projects Robertson for 0.5 WAR, but we humans should at the very least be open to the possibility that he’ll live forever. Until we see him fall apart with our own eyes, there’s no reason in particular to believe that he won’t just keep serving as an effective bullpen arm until sometime in the middle of the next decade. Robertson’s fourth straight one-year contract with a playoff hopeful would do quite nicely.

General managers across the league obviously disagreed with me, but you know who agreed with that last sentence? David Robertson. After striking out more than a third of the batters he faced last season, Robertson declined his end of a $7 million mutual option with the Rangers. USA Today’s Bob Nightengale reported in April that Robertson was looking for a one-year deal worth $10 million. That’s what he got from the Mets in 2023 and the Rangers in 2024 (with an additional $1.5 million buyout from the option). I won’t list all the teams that looked like a good fit for Robertson. A team that couldn’t use one of the best relievers in the game isn’t really a thing. But presumably because he was facing down his age-40 season, only the Cubs and Tigers were actually linked to him during the offseason. Both teams found other right-handers. Robertson spent the first half playing sudoku.

Presumably, he kept his arm warm too, because he threw in front of scouts on Saturday in Providence, Rhode Island (the Renaissance City, fittingly enough), and he impressed a bunch of them. In fact, he was so impressive, that his signing marks our first We Tried of the deadline season. After Robertson showed that he was still the guy he’d been in September, Rosenthal reported that the teams interested included the Mets and Yankees, and Jon Heyman of the New York Post mentioned the Red Sox, Tigers, and “many others.”

The Phillies certainly seem like a perfect fit. After their bullpen imploded to the tune of an 11.37 ERA and 6.96 FIP in the NLDS, they let Jeff Hoffman walk in free agency, and he ended up with the Blue Jays. In exchange, they signed Toronto’s former closer, Jordan Romano to a one-year, $8.5 million deal, betting on a rebound after a dismal 2024 season in which he put up a 6.59 ERA and 6.17 FIP. Romano’s FIP has bounced back to merely very bad, but his ERA is even higher and he’s blown three of his 11 save opportunities. In all, Philadelphia relievers rank 23rd with a 4.33 ERA, 22nd with a 4.19 FIP, and 19th with a 4.20 xFIP. If you look just at right-handed relievers, the numbers are even more stark: The Phillies rank in the bottom five in ERA, FIP, and xFIP, and their -0.2 WAR ranks 28th. To some extent, Robertson is there just to stop the bleeding.

More importantly, the team wants Robertson for October. In May, Feinsand reported that the team reached out to Robertson before José Alvarado’s 80-game suspension for failing a PED test became public. Since Alvarado’s suspension, the Phillies have seen roughly the same results, but the bullpen’s 4.55 FIP and 4.39 xFIP rank in the bottom five in the league. They’ll get Alvarado back in mid-August, but he won’t be eligible for the postseason, and as great as this Phillies team has been over the past four seasons, they’re arguably running out of chances to win the World Series that has so far eluded them. Robertson has 42 career postseason appearances, running a 3.04 ERA and 3.45 FIP.

That said, if you’re a Phillies fan, you don’t need me to tell you that this has looked like a perfect fit before. Robertson signed a two-year, incentive-laden, $23 million deal with the Phillies in 2019, with an option for a third year. He got into just seven games before undergoing Tommy John surgery. He didn’t play at all in 2020, and the Phillies didn’t pick up that 2021 option. That may sound ominous, but the Phillies also traded for Robertson at the deadline in 2022, and he ran a 2.70 ERA over 22 appearances down the stretch, then pitched even better in the playoffs. In all, Robertson has a combined 3.30 ERA over 29 appearances with the Phillies, and it drops to 2.87 if you include the postseason.

There’s no guarantee that Robertson will be effective. Maybe turning 40 really will cause him to turn into a pumpkin, or maybe he’ll throw his back out the first time he tries to bend down and field a comebacker. But regardless of what happened over the offseason, the competition for his services got fierce over the weekend for a good reason. About to enter the 17th season of his career, Robertson has a 2.91 career ERA, and that number drops to 2.82 if you look just at the past eight years. He’s now put together three excellent years in a row without a stint on the IL (aside from a COVID issue in 2022). Because all he costs is money, he’s a steal coming into the deadline. A full year at $10 million was clearly enough to scare off every team in baseball, but now that everybody’s a little more desperate after 60% of the season, 60% of $10 million looks like a steal.