The stove was already hot the week before Thanksgiving. But on Wednesday evening, the Toronto Blue Jays threw some logs on the fire and aimed a leaf blower at the damn thing, and now the proverbial stove is hot enough to melt soda cans into aluminum ingots.

Dylan Cease has signed with the reigning AL champions, and for what they offered him — $210 million over seven years — you’d be packing your bags for Canada, too. Looks like someone can shell out for the fancy cranberry sauce this Thanksgiving. Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t want to overstate the value of raw financial power in baseball. The Mets spent more than $320 million on player salaries, not counting luxury tax penalties, and they finished four games over .500. Money can’t buy happiness, or even a spot in the playoffs.

It can, however, buy you a closer and a major upgrade to your bench. So the Braves demonstrated Wednesday, when they re-signed closer Raisel Iglesias for one year at $16 million, and swapped utility infielders with the Astros, sending Nick Allen west in a 1-for-1 trade for Mauricio Dubón.

The Braves went into last season as one of the favorites to win the NL pennant only to tumble to fourth place behind the Marlins (the Marlins!) after befalling a series of farces and calamities that recall A Serious Man. Jurickson Profar got popped for PEDs, Spencer Strider and Ozzie Albies lost their juice, half the roster got hurt, it was a huge mess. Read the rest of this entry »

After Josh Naylor signed the first major free agent deal of the offseason over the weekend, four more big names came off the board Tuesday afternoon. Of the 13 free agents who were presented with qualifying offers, four accepted: Brandon Woodruff, Trent Grisham, Gleyber Torres, and Shota Imanaga will all return to their previous teams on one-year contracts worth $22.025 million.

Bo Bichette, Dylan Cease, Edwin Díaz, Framber Valdez, Kyle Schwarber, Kyle Tucker, Michael King, Ranger Suárez, and Zac Gallen all declined their qualifying offers and will hit the open market, carrying draft pick penalties to be determined by MLB’s inscrutable compensation system.

If you’re thinking this is a bumper crop of QO acceptance, you’d be right. In the first 14 years of the qualifying offer system, 144 offers were extended to pending free agents, and only 14 accepted. This year, nearly one in four qualified free agents decided to bank the offer and walk away, rather than face one more multiple-choice question from Regis Philbin. Read the rest of this entry »

Technically, the starting gun for the 2025-26 offseason already fired. Back on November 5, Leody Taveras signed a one-year, $2.1 million contract with the Orioles, though you’d be forgiven for missing that news, seeing as it came just days after a transcendent World Series and didn’t even merit a writeup on this august website. So let us consider November 16 the official first day of the offseason. On Sunday evening, Jeff Passan reported that first baseman Josh Naylor and the Seattle Mariners were “finalizing” a five-year deal. (On Monday evening, Ken Rosenthal reported the terms: five years, $92.5 million.) In estimating Naylor’s contract for our annual Top 50 Free Agent ranking (he checked in at no. 11), Ben Clemens anticipated a four-year, $100 million deal, while the median crowdsource projection was four years and $80 million.

The first real move of the offseason, fittingly, is perhaps its most predictable. From the day their season ended, the Mariners’ front office shared its desire to bring Naylor back to the Pacific Northwest.

“It was a great fit and it’s definitely a priority for us this offseason — if not one, I don’t know what else would be, he’s no. 1 right now,” Mariners general manager Justin Hollander told MLB Network Radio on the first day that free agents were allowed to sign with other teams. “I don’t really see a reason, there’s no advantage to hiding the ball, to telling people, ‘It was just fine.’ It wasn’t just fine. It was awesome. It was a great fit for the two months, and we’d like to make it last a lot longer.” Read the rest of this entry »

The Boston Red Sox addressed their hole at first base over the weekend, coming to terms with free agent Nathaniel Lowe, formerly of the Washington Nationals. Lowe has struggled in 2025, hitting .216/.292/.373 for an 86 wRC+ and -0.8 WAR, his worst showing as a professional.

I don’t think that anyone — not even a member of Lowe’s family — would object too strongly to the declaration that Lowe has had an abysmal season. Lowe has never actually been a star, but with a .274/.359/.432 four-year run from 2021 to 2024, averaging 2.7 WAR per season, he had at least established himself in that Serviceable B+ First Baseman category. The end of Lowe’s time in Texas came quickly, and after a Silver Slugger in 2022, a Gold Glove and a World Series ring in 2023, and another solid offensive campaign in 2024, he found himself tradable for pitching help (lefty Robert Garcia) after the team acquired Jake Burger for reasons that still confound me. The Nats were making noise about being competitive in 2025, and there was a reasonable expectation that Lowe would improve the position without requiring a major long-term commitment. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Rich Hill has a chance. On Tuesday, the Royals announced they had agreed to a minor league deal with the 45-year-old left-handed starter. He began his professional career in 2002 with the Boise Hawks, who are no longer part of affiliated baseball. Hill’s journey from the majors to independent ball, then back to a career renaissance in his late 30s is one of the game’s true feel-good stories, and it’s not over yet. If he makes it to Kansas City, he’ll tie Edwin Jackson as the most useful player on Immaculate Grid, with appearances for 14 different major league teams. However, that’s by no means a sure thing.

Hill started the 2015 season – yes, this historical overview section is skipping over the first 13 years of Hill’s professional career – with the Long Island Ducks of the Atlantic League. The Red Sox signed him that August, and from 2015 to 2020, he went 43-22 with a 2.92 ERA and 3.48 FIP. Over that stretch, relying (sometimes exclusively) on a four-seamer that averaged under 90 mph and a loopy curveball, Hill put up 10.7 WAR, struck out nearly 29% of the batters he faced, and pitched in two World Series to a 1.80 ERA.

The 2021 season, when Hill was 41, marks a dividing line. Over the past four seasons, he owns a 4.51 ERA with a 4.42 FIP and a 4.52 xFIP. His strikeout rate has fallen to 21.1%. In 2023, Hill posted a 4.76 ERA with the Pirates, then imploded after being traded to the Padres at the deadline, running an 8.23 ERA and 6.77 FIP over 10 appearances. He sat out the beginning of the 2024 season to spend time with his family, then joined the Red Sox in August, putting up a 4.91 ERA with ugly peripherals over four appearances and 3 2/3 innings. For the first time, his fastball didn’t reach 90 mph even once. The team released him in early September. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »