In order to bolster their Grayson Rodriguez-less starting rotation, the Baltimore Orioles agreed to a one-year contract worth $5.25 million with free agent starting pitcher Kyle Gibson. The 37-year-old Gibson pitched for the St. Louis Cardinals in 2024, posting a 4.24 ERA and a 4.42 FIP in 30 starts over 169 2/3 innings, good for 1.5 WAR.

In 2023, the Orioles signed Gibson as a veteran arm who could eat innings, a useful purpose for a rebuilding team transitioning to contention and seeking to buttress a patchwork rotation. This was a task that Gibson accomplished successfully that season, scarfing down 192 innings for a 101-win team that lacked any other well-established starting pitchers. After the emergence of Kyle Bradish and Rodriguez’s relatively successful big league debut, the O’s saw less need for a caretaker starter in 2024. So Gibson moved on to St. Louis, a team that was stung in 2023 by the fact that nearly every starting pitcher except Miles Mikolas missed significant time due to injuries. While the 2024 Cardinals didn’t get back to to the playoffs, their failures could hardly be pinned on Gibson, who put up his typical workhorse season, finishing second in innings on the Cardinals, just behind Mikolas.

With the Cardinals in transition and seemingly determined to do nothing of substance during the offseason, they made little attempt to retain Gibson’s services for a second year. As one of the last remaining starting pitchers in free agency with a résumé to command a major league contract, it was likely only a matter of time until Gibson found a suitor to sign him. He joins a familiar club facing a familiar situation, as the Orioles are once again dealing with a thin starting rotation. Corbin Burnes is gone, Rodriguez is out with a triceps injury, and Bradish isn’t expected back for a while after undergoing Tommy John surgery last June. Over the winter, Baltimore added two-time All-Star Charlie Morton and NPB veteran Tomoyuki Sugano to make up for the loss of Burnes, but considering Morton is 41 and Sugano is a 35-year-old control pitcher who hasn’t yet played in the U.S., both of them come with plenty of risk attached.

The hope for the Orioles is that Gibson becomes unimportant to the roster sometime in the summer, as Rodriguez, Trevor Rogers, and prospect Chayce McDermott (no. 71 overall, 50 FV) return from injuries, with Bradish possibly due back in the second half, but this would represent a best-case scenario. Gibson’s contract reflects this uncertainty; based on innings and games started, he can earn just over another $1.5 million in incentives.

Gibson doesn’t have a fastball that flirts with 100 mph or one of those crazy 90-mph changeups that would have seemed like a tall tale 30 years ago. What he does do is make the most out of a six-pitch repertoire, resulting in a better pitcher than one might expect from his middling stuff. Star-level performances get teams to the playoffs, but so too do players with immaculate attendance. It may seem weird, but Gibson’s 112 wins is enough to rank him sixth among active pitchers, and he also ranks seventh in starts and eighth in innings. These three metrics aren’t indications of excellence, but competence, and that also has value.

Suffice it to say, ZiPS isn’t terribly excited about Gibson’s 2025, but then again, that’s beside the point. The O’s are no longer rebuilding or on the cusp of competing; they’re expected to contend for the AL East title. For a lot of teams, signing Gibson would be a bad idea, as they’d get a lot more out of signing a fourth starter with real upside rather than an innings-eater in his late 30s. But for the O’s, they’re getting the right pitcher at the right time, and basically for the right price. Despite my curmudgeonly inclinations, I can’t find a good reason to complain about that.

As spring training nears its conclusion, a few unsigned free agents have finally found homes. At best only one of these players will be ready for the majors in time to make the Opening Day roster, and all of them struggled to at least some extent last year, but at the very least, they’ll get another chance to extend their careers by providing depth to organizations hit by injuries. A double whammy of bad luck within their rotation has led the Rangers to sign lefty Patrick Corbin, while the Braves have triple dipped into the pool to sign catcher James McCann, outfielder Alex Verdugo, and reliever Craig Kimbrel.

On Tuesday, March 11 — the day I checked in on the Rangers in the wake of Jacob deGrom’s Cactus League debut — righty Tyler Mahle was scratched from his scheduled start due to forearm soreness, though he was able to take a start against minor leaguers on March 13 and returned to big league action on March 19. Texas wasn’t so lucky when it came to lefty Cody Bradford, who was scratched from his scheduled March 12 start due to left elbow soreness. He’s been shut down from throwing for four weeks and ticketed for the 15-day injured list to start the season; barring any further setbacks, a full buildup would bring him back in mid-May. Then on March 15, righty Jon Gray was hit by a line drive and suffered a fractured right wrist that knocked him onto the 60-day injured list. The break is clean enough that he won’t need surgery, but he’ll be out until at least June.

Given those injuries — and assuming no other ones occur — the Rangers are on track to start the season with an all-righty rotation consisting of Nathan Eovaldi, deGrom (who threw a mere 10 2/3 innings for the Rangers last September after returning from his second Tommy John surgery), Mahle (who threw just 12 2/3 innings between his return from Tommy John surgery and a season-ending bout of shoulder tightness), and former first-round picks Kumar Rocker and Jack Leiter, who each made their debuts last year. Rocker made three starts totaling 11 2/3 innings while pitching reasonably well, but Leiter was lit for an 8.83 ERA in six starts and three relief appearances totaling 35 2/3 innings. Read the rest of this entry »

This year’s Padres lineup may not be made entirely out of current and former shortstops, but on Wednesday, they added one to the fold. Jose Iglesias, who revived his career with the Mets last season in impressive fashion while also scoring an unlikely pop hit with “OMG,” has agreed to a minor league deal with the Padres, one with a non-roster invitation to their major league camp.

Iglesias headed last week’s roundup of prominent position players still on the free agent market. That’s a particularly funny sentence to write, not only since this spring hasn’t exactly offered the second coming of the Boras Four, but because Iglesias (who did hire Scott Boras to represent him this past offseason) wasn’t in the majors at all in 2023 after playing with six different teams over the previous six seasons. Nonetheless, I led my overview with the 35-year-old infielder because his 2.5 WAR — a career high, accumulated in just 85 games — was tops among the group and because the arc of his 2024 season was so compelling.

Coincidentally enough, during Iglesias’ absence from the majors in 2023 he spent about six weeks with the Padres’ Triple-A El Paso affiliate. This came after he’d signed a minor league contract with the Marlins and gone through spring training with them; he opted out a few weeks into April without ever playing a regular season game within their organization. From there, he signed that minor league deal with the Padres, hitting .317/.356/.537 in 28 games at El Paso. He opted out twice to test the free agent waters but didn’t catch on elsewhere, and played his last game of the season on June 7. Read the rest of this entry »

As I write this, the winter free agency period has essentially drawn to a close. Out of the top 50 free agents I highlighted before the offseason began, 48 have found homes — sorry, David Robertson and Kyle Gibson. Per RosterResource, only five free agents – including the two holdovers from the top 50 – accrued 1 WAR or more in 2024 and haven’t yet signed new deals. In other words, all the signing that is going to happen basically has, so it’s time to look back and see how you and I did at predicting the deals players would sign.

I like to evaluate my own predictions in service of making better ones in the future, dividing them up into a few categories. First, I break signings down by position, because the market for relievers and second basemen is different. Second, I look at both average annual value and total guarantee. There’s no set ratio for how to relate those two, so looking at each independently seems best to me. Finally, I look at both the individual predictions (how close to the actual contract that a player signed my predictions came), as well as the overall trend (how my aggregate predictions for each position group did compared to the total amount they received).

This year, I made all of that back-checking more rigorous. I put all of my predictions, as well as every crowdsourced one, into a giant spreadsheet. I noted all the contracts that were signed, made adjustments for deferrals, and ignored non-guaranteed money. I compared each actual contract to our predictions. I also gathered some of the best non-FanGraphs predictions I could find, looking to outlets like ESPN, The Athletic, and MLB Trade Rumors. Below, you’ll find how both the crowd (you) and I did, as well as the best non-FanGraphs entrant in each category. Read the rest of this entry »

In 2024, after an injury to Kodai Senga, Jose Quintana was the Mets’ Opening Day starter, facing the Brewers. Now, after a list of injuries that’s way too long for an introduction paragraph, Quintana will be joining the Brewers rotation. On Monday, the Brewers and the 36-year-old left-hander agreed to a one-year deal worth $4.25 million. Robert Murray of FanSided reported the deal, and MLB.com’s Mark Feinsand broke the contract terms. As the Mets signed former Brewer Frankie Montas in December, the two teams are effectively performing their own second-hand pitcher swap.

Quintana’s deal, such as it is, makes it the big-money transaction of the offseason for the Brewers. It’s definitely not enough to make fans forget about owner Mark Attanasio’s recent comments: “Is my job to win a World Series,” he said, “or is my job to provide a summer of entertainment and passion and a way for families to come together?” (Not that it’s the purview of this particular article, but the answer to both questions, of course, is yes.) Until yesterday, Milwaukee’s priciest addition was a $1 million deal for reliever Tyler Alexander, but the team’s biggest move of the offseason is still the one that sent closer Devin Williams to the Yankees in exchange for one year of lefty starter Nestor Cortes and infield prospect Caleb Durbin. Christmas only comes once a year in Milwaukee. Read the rest of this entry »

The 2024 season was a big one for Kyle Finnegan, or at least it started that way. On the strength of a 2.45 ERA and 25 saves, the Nationals’ closer made his first All-Star team (he finished the year with 38 saves, good for second in the National League). Yet he struggled in the second half, and in November, the Nationals non-tendered him rather than risk a trip through arbitration. On Tuesday — the same day I highlighted his continued free agency within this roundup — he returned to the fold nonetheless on a one-year, $6 million contract.

The deal, which is pending a physical and a 40-man roster move at this writing, is not yet official. Given that Finnegan made $5.1 million last year, the new contract constitutes about an 18% raise for the 33-year-old righty. However, in his annual projections for arbitration-eligible players at MLB Trade Rumors, Matt Swartz estimated that Finnegan would land a salary of $8.6 million, just shy of a 69% raise, because saves play well in arbitration. The view that Finnegan got something of a raw deal by this process is offset by the fact that he did get to test free agency a year ahead of schedule, only to find the market for his services limited enough to make a return his best option. Among the other 29 teams, the Cubs appeared to show the most interest.

Earlier this month, Nationals general manager Mike Rizzo told reporters that the team had kept in touch with Finnegan “throughout the offseason.” He likely lingered on the market because his profile and his performance both have some notable dings. Conceptually, Finnegan is basically a two-pitch pitcher, with a four-seam fastball that averaged 97.2 mph in 2024, and a splitter that has replaced his slider as his main secondary pitch over the past couple of seasons. By the pitch models, the fastball is about average, while the splitter is above-average but short of being a true plus pitch. He doesn’t miss a ton of bats, and while he generates a healthy share of groundballs, he gives up a lot of hard contact. Read the rest of this entry »

The great Irish writer Seamus Heaney often spoke of the good that poetry could do, both for individuals and the world at large. To that point, he once lamented in jest that “poetry can’t be administered like an injection.” Admittedly, I stumbled upon that quotation by accident, deep within an internet rabbit hole I tumbled down while researching the American baseball pitcher Andrew Heaney. (Sometimes I forget to search for more than just a last name.) Nevertheless, I was so taken with Seamus Heaney’s message that I felt inspired to inject his words into my writing and analysis today.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.
-From “Digging” (1966)

On Thursday, the Pirates and Heaney – Andrew, to be clear – agreed to a one-year, $5.25 million contract for 2025. After two years with the Rangers, the veteran left-hander will slot into Pittsburgh’s rotation for his age-34 season.

A first-round pick by the Marlins in 2012, Heaney spent three seasons in their organization. He climbed to the summit of Miami’s top prospect list in 2013 and made his big league debut the subsequent summer. Following the 2014 season, he was the headlining prospect in a fascinating trade with the Dodgers that brought Dan Haren, Dee Strange-Gordon, and Miguel Rojas to the Marlins in exchange for Heaney, as well as future Dodgers stalwarts Enrique Hernández and Austin Barnes, and catcher-to-pitcher convert Chris Hatcher. Hours later, the Dodgers flipped Heaney to the Angels for Howie Kendrick. At the time, Kendrick was coming off a 4.6-WAR season for the reigning AL West champions, just to offer some sense of how highly the Angels must have valued Heaney. Read the rest of this entry »

For the third consecutive offseason, Justin Turner has signed to play for a new team. This time, he is heading to the north side of Chicago, after he and the Cubs agreed to a one-year deal worth $6 million earlier this week. Turner, who turned 40 in November, will likely split time at DH and 1B. The reason to add Turner at this stage in his career is straight forward: He can still hit at an above league average clip.

Considering Turner is entering his 17th major league season, you likely already know a lot about his game. His whiff and strikeout rates have stayed in the upper quartile even as he has aged, he doesn’t chase much, and has a great feel for spraying the ball to all fields. It’s the exact group of traits that a hitter without much explosiveness needs to survive this many years. Here is a quick reminder of his performance over the last handful of years to put into perspective where he is at right now:

There is no doubt his contact quality has dipped. That’s likely a function of his bottom decile bat speed. But along with that has come improved whiff rates. This compensation represents a new version of how Turner has been successful with his current physical attributes. It’s a benefit to any team to plug in this type of hitter, especially because he is productive and essentially platoon neutral.

To be frank, though, I don’t think a full on, comprehensive analysis of Turner’s offensive game is completely needed at this point. We’ve seen what he can do and have a good idea what type of hitter he is now. Instead, I want to use this time to highlight what I think is the most impressive part of Turner’s game, the part that makes me enthusiastic to watch him in the twilight of his career: His ability to hit sinkers. Read the rest of this entry »

In his prime — and it was not a long prime — nobody hit a majestic home run like Joey Gallo. It was something about the violence of the swing, the loopy lefty uppercut, the two-handed follow-through, and the way he’d stand up straight right after contact, a confirmation that the baseball was indeed crushed.

Those high arcing blasts powered one of the more bizarre careers of his generation. In the heart of the Three True Outcomes era, he was its emperor, threatening to lead the league in either walk rate, strikeout rate, or home runs in any given year.

Sadly, time passes. Those with prominent residences on Gallo Island now fear foreclosure proceedings. The big slugger has fallen on hard times; last week, he signed a minor league contract with the Chicago White Sox. A non-guaranteed deal with the team that just set the major league record for losses carries some pretty clear subtext. Gallo is hanging off the cliffside of his career, one finger latched to a jagged rock.

It all feels too soon. He’s just 31 years old, a normal and cool age that is in no way old. As Tom Tango’s research shows, bat speed generally starts to decline right at this point, not years before. But even at his best, Gallo lived at the extremes. In his magical 2019 half-season, which unfortunately was cut short by a broken hamate bone, he posted a .635 xwOBA on contact. Across 2,865 player seasons in the Statcast era, only 2017 Aaron Judge topped that figure.

At his apex, nobody — save for one of the greatest hitters of all-time — crushed the baseball like Joey Gallo. He paired that supreme power with some of the lowest chase rates in the league, giving him enough on-base juice to offset the batting averages that made boomers want to gauge out their eyes. That excellent plate discipline allowed him to hunt mistakes in the middle of the plate, mostly fastballs and hanging sliders. His swing was geared for these middle-middle meatballs, and his 70-grade batting eye allowed him to lay off most pitches on the black. Yes, when he got into a two-strike count and was compelled to swing, he most likely was going to come up empty. But he forced pitchers to battle.

Over the last handful of years, though, the other extreme in Gallo’s game eclipsed his prodigious power. Remember those 2,865 player seasons? Two of Gallo’s seasons rank first and second across the decade in the percentage of all swings resulting in whiffs. That decade-leading 44.3% whiff rate came in the 2023 season, when he still managed, I must note, to run an above-average wRC+.

In retrospect, it all started to go downhill after that infamous July 2021 trade to the Yankees. Gallo was coming off perhaps his finest month as a big leaguer, striking out “just” 25.3% of the time, walking nearly as frequently as he struck out, and mashing 10 homers. Painfully, he hit just .160 following the trade, and despite his 16.2% walk rate and usual home run pace, his anemic batting average turned him into a villain with the Yankees. After another dismal half-season, the Yankees shipped him off to the Dodgers; things didn’t get much better in Los Angeles, where he ran strikeout rates that dipped into the 40s for the first time.

Gallo hit free agency for the first time after that 2022 season, and since then teams have made increasingly small bets on his ability to return to his prime form. It started with the Twins in 2023, who paid him $11 million for a single year’s services. Next up were the Nationals, who handed out a $5 million deal, and he turned in his worst season yet. So now here we are, with Gallo at the bleakest end of the baseball universe.

It isn’t hard to see how things ended up like this. Gallo is a big guy who swings hard, and the bills have come due for his high-impact style of play. Over the last two seasons, he battled a sprained shoulder, a strained oblique, a foot contusion, and two separate hamstring strains, the second of which forced him out of action for nearly two months. He even came down with a case of pink eye. His body appears to be breaking down rapidly, and you can almost see the effects of this as he sets up in the box, constantly shifting and readjusting like he’s in the middle seat on a Spirit flight.

Perhaps as a result of all this discomfort, Gallo’s carrying tool is showing signs of erosion. In the second half of 2023, his average bat speed of 73.9 mph ranked in the 84th percentile of hitters. That 2023 mark is the first bat speed data available to the public, and one can imagine that at his peak, Gallo could swing a few miles per hour harder than that, ranking among the likes of Giancarlo Stanton and Kyle Schwarber as one of the fastest swingers in the league.

Gallo’s bat slowed even further in 2024. His average bat speed dipped 1.5 mph, dropping him into the fat part of the bell curve, only a tick above the major league average of 71.3 mph. His once-excellent plate discipline now looks more like passiveness. White Sox manager Will Venable says Gallo will primarily play first base. He is definitively an aging slugger, and his career depends on whether he can revive his famous power skills.

It’s possible that some of Gallo’s bat speed decrease was intentional; in 2023, only Trey Cabbage squared up fewer balls, and that mark improved slightly in 2024. But it’s Joey Gallo. If you have him on your team, you don’t want him trading off power for contact because he’s never going to make enough contact for that to matter. You want him swinging out of his shoes, walloping tanks into the stratosphere.

As my editor Matt Martell pointed out, the White Sox have an institutional history of old slugger resuscitation attempts. There were the ill-fated midseason acquisitions of Manny Ramirez and Ken Griffey Jr., a deal for post-peak Andruw Jones, even the four-year deal they handed out to Gallo’s evolutionary predecessor, Adam Dunn. All these guys landed on the South Side hoping to recapture the magic one last time.

Unlike those other players, though, there are no guarantees that Gallo makes the team, especially because Miguel Vargas is out of minor league options. But let’s just dream for a minute that Gallo took up yoga or any of the other offseason workout routines that prompt players to boast that they’re in the best shape of their lives. Picture this: a .190 average, a 35% strikeout rate, 30 home runs, a permanent spot in the middle of the order against right-handed pitchers. Gallo is one of the strangest and most spectacular players I’ve ever seen. I’m crossing my fingers he gets one last go.

After four season’s worth of high-profile trades, extensions, and free agent signings, the Padres have had a very quiet winter save for the headlines that their ownership battle has generated. On Wednesday, the day that their pitchers and catchers reported to their spring training facility in Peoria, Arizona, the team made by far its biggest move of the offseason, signing free agent Nick Pivetta to a four-year, $55 million deal. They followed that up on Thursday by inking lefty Kyle Hart to a one-year deal with an option.

Taken together, the additions appear to set up a trade of Dylan Cease, the top starter on last year’s 93-win Wild Card team and a pending free agent this winter. However, general manager A.J. Preller indicated that’s not the plan right now, telling reporters on Thursday, “He’s a very big part of our club. The additions the last couple days supplement what’s a really good rotation. That’s our focus here going forward — having that strong rotation.”

Of course, any decision to keep Cease could be revisited if the Padres receive an offer they can’t refuse, or if they fall out of contention this summer. It should also be pointed out that Michael King, the team’s second-best starter in 2024, is a trade candidate as well; he can also become a free agent after this season if he declines his end of a mutual option for 2026. Read the rest of this entry »