No player, not even Bryce Harper, has personified the Phillies’ recent run of four straight trips to the postseason more than Kyle Schwarber. Faced with the prospect of losing their signature slugger to the division rival Mets, Philadelphia instead retained Schwarber on a five-year, $150 million deal, news of which enlivened the Winter Meetings here in Orlando on Tuesday.
Schwarber, who turns 33 on March 5, hit .240/.365/.563 and led the National League with 56 home runs and 132 RBI while playing in all 162 games in 2025. He set career highs in home runs, RBI, games played, slugging percentage, wRC+ (152), and WAR (4.9). The last of those marks owed plenty to manager Rob Thomson’s limiting him to eight games in left field, where he’s a major liability, having totaled -37 FRV and -34 DRS in 2022–23. Only Shohei Ohtani took more plate appearances as a designated hitter in 2025 than Schwarber’s 687.
Schwarber’s season — which propelled him to a second-place finish in the NL MVP voting behind Ohtani (who won unanimously) — may have been a career year, but it was no fluke. Thanks to his ongoing work with hitting coach Kevin Long, who joined the Phillies just a few months before Schwarber signed his four-year, $79 million deal with them in March 2022, he has evolved from a pushover against lefties into a top threat in those matchups. From 2015–21 with the Cubs, Nationals, and Red Sox, Schwarber hit just .214/.324/.361 (86 wRC+) in 584 plate appearances against lefties, making 100 PA against them just twice and topping a 100 wRC+ against them only in the last of those seasons, during which he bounced from Washington to Boston. He has topped 200 plate appearances against lefties in all four of his seasons with the Phillies, and he was an above-average hitter against them in each of the last three. Over the past two years, his 524 plate appearances against lefties led the majors, while his 157 wRC+ (.275/.385/.547) and slugging percentage both ranked second behind Yordan Alvarez (albeit in just 247 PA). By comparison, he hit .244/.365/.525 (143 wRC+) against righties in that span. Read the rest of this entry »
In the last competitive major league baseball game of 2025, the Dodgers used six pitchers, five of whom had spent most or all of their careers as starters. They used all four pitchers from their playoff rotation, most notably getting eight outs from Yoshinobu Yamamoto on zero days’ rest to close out the 11-inning contest. Manager Dave Roberts had run out of patience with his high-leverage bullpen, a group that had already been reinforced with starter Roki Sasaki late in the regular season.
The Dodgers, the best team in baseball, a force so immutable it got the American public to turn on capitalism, had a crappy bullpen.
On the second day of baseball’s Winter Meetings, the Dodgers signed Edwin Díaz to a three-year, $69 million contract.
The first day of the Winter Meetings turns out to have been the calm before the storm, but it did end with a modest bang. Late Monday night, Marc Topkin of the Tampa Bay Times reported that left-hander Steven Matz has agreed to a two-year deal with the Rays. Many details have yet to be reported. The dollar amount is unknown, and it’s not immediately clear whether Matz will slot into the bullpen or the rotation. What is known is that the 34-year-old is coming off an excellent 2025 season, his first as a full-time reliever after 11 years in the majors, and his first without spending a single day on the IL. Matz started the season with the Cardinals before getting dealt to Boston at the deadline. He ran a 3.05 ERA and 3.46 FIP over 53 appearances, including a hot stretch with a 2.08 ERA after the move.
Matz is a sinkerballing left-hander with a career 46% groundball rate. A second-round pick by the Mets in the 2009 draft, he suffered a series of injuries in the minors, including a UCL tear. He debuted in 2015, the last member to debut out of the fearsome youth movement that included Matt Harvey, Jacob deGrom, Zack Wheeler, and Noah Syndergaard. After all that waiting, Matz succeeded immediately, posting a 2.27 ERA over six starts and pitching well in the team’s World Series run. He followed that up in 2016 by going 13-8 with a 3.16 ERA and 3.44 FIP and picking up a Rookie of the Year vote. Unfortunately, the injuries kept coming: back spasm, elbow tightness, shoulder strain, bone spurs, flexor tendon strain, ulnar nerve transposition, finger strain, forearm strain, shoulder impingement. Amazingly, Matz still reached 30 starts twice in his six years with the Mets (and made a full complement of starts in the shortened 2020 season), but he combined for a 4.35 ERA and 4.49 FIP, putting up just 5.1 WAR.
The Mets traded Matz to Toronto in 2021, and he had arguably the most productive season of his career, running a 3.82 ERA and 3.79 FIP over 29 starts and 150 2/3 innings. He parlayed that success into a four-year deal with the Cardinals. His performance was up and down in St. Louis; he continued to deal with injuries and posted ERAs over 5.00 in 2022 and 2024. He put up solid numbers in 2023, but things looked different in 2025. After filling a swingman role in previous seasons, Matz spent the nearly the entire 2025 campaign in the bullpen, where he flourished. (He made two spot starts for St. Louis.) He went more than an inning in 25 out of his 53 appearances, and he was one of just 39 pitchers to throw at least 75 innings and run both an ERA and FIP below 3.50. The Cardinals traded Matz to the Red Sox at the deadline, and he made two more scoreless appearances against the Yankees in the Wild Card Series. Read the rest of this entry »
Michael Soroka is getting another chance to start. Bright and early on Monday morning, Jesse Rogers and Jeff Passan of ESPN kicked off the Winter Meetings with news that the right-handed former sinkerballer has agreed to a one-year deal with the Diamondbacks. Nick Piecoro of the Arizona Republic reported that the deal is for one year and $7.5 million, along with up to $2 million in incentives. Soroka slots into a new team as a starter for the second year in a row after struggling in the rotation and then pitching better out of the bullpen. He’ll now do so for a Diamondbacks team in desperate need of starting pitching, as both Zac Gallen and Merrill Kelly have entered free agency. It’s a small gamble on a pitcher whose upside isn’t necessarily set in stone.
Still just 28, Soroka has already walked a long road. The Braves’ first-round pick out of high school in 2015, he debuted in 2018 at the age of 20. He dominated in 2019, going 13-4 with a 2.68 ERA and 3.45 FIP, and finishing second in the Rookie of the Year voting and sixth in the Cy Young voting. A sinkerballer by trade, he ran a 51% groundball rate and allowed just 0.72 homers per nine innings. He was one of the most promising young arms in the game. Then he tore his Achilles tendon in both 2020 and 2021 and followed those up with shoulder injuries. From 2020 to 2023, he made just 10 major league appearances, missing the 2021 and 2022 seasons entirely. Read the rest of this entry »
The Tampa Bay Rays have signed outfielder Cedric Mullins, late of the Mets and Orioles, to a one-year contract worth $7 million. This deal makes a lot of sense if you look at Mullins’ overall numbers from 2025: 17 home runs, a 10.0% walk rate, and a 94 wRC+ from a guy who can run well enough to play center.
That sounds like a pretty good player, and for just $7 million. Inflation’s so bad these days that $7 million is reliever money on the free agent market — not even good reliever money — and for that the Rays got themselves a fringe-average center fielder. Read the rest of this entry »
It’s been a busy December for free agent relievers. Ryan Helsley and Devin Williams, two of the most interesting names on the market, eachsigned with new clubs, and they each got multi-year guarantees despite shaky 2025 results. The next shoe to drop wasn’t quite as heralded of an option, but he too got multiple years and beat market consensus. The signing in question: Emilio Pagán and the Reds agreed to a two-year, $20 million deal, with an opt out after the first year.
Pagán was a far more effective reliever in 2025 than either of the two splashier names ahead of him. He had one of the best seasons of his career at age 34, in fact: 68 2/3 innings pitched, a 2.88 ERA and 3.72 FIP in hitter-friendly Cincinnati, and 32 saves in his first full-time closing job since 2019. He bounced back from an injury-interrupted 2024 with better fastball velocity and better pitch shape across the board, and got richly rewarded for it with a 30% strikeout rate. Is he homer-prone? You bet, thanks to a 0.51 GB/FB ratio. But a .200 BABIP and a solid HR/FB% (10.8%) meant that he actually allowed fewer homers per nine innings (1.31) than his career mark (1.51), and not by a small amount, despite pitching in a launching pad.
When things are going well for him, Pagán makes everyone think they can hit a home run, then pulls the rug out. He runs his four-seamer high and spots a heavy splitter off of it, a classic fly ball pitcher mix. It’s one of those strategies that looks awful when it isn’t working, and yet seems to come through most of the time anyway. More specifically, Pagán went through a three-year stretch of terrible form from 2020-2022, posting a 4.61 ERA and 4.71 FIP. Then he broke out in 2023 and has been solid since. The weirdest part of it all? His stuff and command metrics barely budged between those two wildly different stretches.
Reversals like that go a long way toward explaining why reliever performance is so difficult to predict. When Pagán has it, he’s a worthy late-inning reliever. His ERA- was 40th among relievers last year, and it’s 60th over the past three years, even with his ineffective 2024 in the mix. He’s pitched like you’d expect a closer or setup man to, in other words. His FIP tells a broadly similar story, and I’m willing to believe that pitchers with his extreme tendencies outperform their FIP in the long run. If you get good Pagán, he’s a very useful bullpen piece, the kind any team would love to have in the bullpen and many fringe contenders would love to have as a closer.
That’s the calculus from the Reds’ perspective. They’ve managed their payroll tightly in the early years of Elly De La Cruz’s team control window, hovering around the $100 million mark with wiggle room in either direction. With that budget constraint in mind, the top five or so relievers in this free agency class were presumably off the board. The next tier down is a mixture of interesting pop-up arms, aging closers, and reclamation projects. Would you rather have Kenley Jansen or Pagán? Seranthony Domínguez? Kyle Finnegan? Phil Maton? Maybe Drew Pomeranz? I think I’d take Pagán or Jansen over the field – I ranked them that way in my Top 50 Free Agents list – and as an added bonus, he’s already familiar with Cincinnati. I’d take Raisel Iglesias over him – rankings, again – but he signed for one year and $16 million, probably outside of this team’s price range. The Reds probably could’ve gotten some solid lefty specialists for the $10 million or so annual salary that they gave Pagán, but that’s not what they were in the market for this winter. They needed a bankable closer, and in the aisle they were shopping in, there weren’t that many options.
This team really does need relief arms. The Reds didn’t have to cover many bullpen innings in 2025, but even then they struggled to piece it all together. Pagán, Tony Santillan, and Graham Ashcraft formed an effective three-headed monster at the top, but the rest of the pen was ineffective even in limited time. With a bandbox for a home stadium, it’s hard to expect a similarly limited need for relief pitching in 2026. This was the path of least resistance for a team that really does need to do something to challenge for the NL Central title in 2026 and build on its surprising 2025 Wild Card berth.
Now, the risks? They’re real. It was only a year ago, after his down 2024 performance, that Cincinnati fans were lamenting Pagán’s decision to pick up his player option for 2025. More innings and a .200 BABIP turned that frown upside down, but it’s not like it’s impossible to imagine an ineffective Pagán. Would you be shocked if he had an uneven, homer-prone 55 innings in 2026 and then picked up his option? I certainly wouldn’t be. We just saw that!
That leaves me in the situation of liking this deal more for Pagán than for the Reds, and yet I’d make this offer if I were in their shoes anyway. Figuring out which relievers will be good in a year’s time is incredibly difficult. If it were easy to solve, the Dodgers wouldn’t have signed Tanner Scott and Blake Treinen last winter and then spent this entire October hiding them. Despite that difficulty, relievers are integral to a contending club. If you aren’t winning the close games, it’s hard to make the playoffs. The Reds likely wouldn’t have done that last year if not for Pagán.
With that backdrop, what were the Reds supposed to do? Sign a different, similar guy for slightly less? Sign two reclamation projects on one-year, $5 million deals? It’s not even like the second year is that much of a disaster; in a year’s time, they’re going to be contending with a core built around De La Cruz and looking for relievers, and I don’t think the market rate is likely to plummet in the meantime or anything. Sure, you might get bad Pagán in 2026 and then have him opt in, but the inherent volatility of relievers means that even that isn’t a tragedy. It worked out last time!
There’s some chance that Cincinnati could have waited longer, negotiated more stingily, and reached a slightly more team-friendly deal with him. So far, Pagán is the early signing whose market has most outstripped my projections. But who cares? What were the Reds going to do, save a million dollars or two? From their perspective, the risks were greater, because if they dragged their feet in negotiating with Pagán and he signed elsewhere, they’d suddenly be sifting through a variety of relievers they’re presumably less interested in with a strong need to find a deal. I’d prefer to overpay slightly for a guy I’m comfortable with than hunt for unknown bargains to fill an essential role, and it seems the Cincinnati front office thinks similarly.
I’m not convinced that this is a great long-term way to run a team. It certainly wouldn’t be my preference in a vacuum; I’m a Rays/Dodgers/Brewers-style bullpen guy at heart. I love reclamation projects and throwing a lot of relievers at the wall to see what sticks. I love betting on guys with elite stuff and seeing if they can figure out how to throw strikes, or betting on guys with elite command and seeing if they can figure out how to throw harder.
I’m also not running the Reds, staring at two superstars in De La Cruz and Hunter Greene and trying to make the playoffs again after a miracle run. Sure, it would be great to build an incredible pitching development system from the ground up. But it’s December, and the season starts in four months, and that’s not enough time to overhaul an entire organization, not even close. The Reds needed a reliever. They got a guy they’re comfortable with at a rate that won’t force them to cut back elsewhere. Maybe it’s a slight overpay, and maybe he’s more volatile than his 2025 results would suggest, but for the Reds? He’s just what they needed.
The Chicago White Sox got on the board in free agency on Wednesday morning, inking left-handed pitcher Anthony Kay to a two-year, $12 million contract with a $10 million mutual option for 2028. Kay will make $5 million in each of the next two seasons, with a $2 million buyout due if the mutual option isn’t exercised.
It’s been a huge week for the trans-Pacific starting pitching exchange, with Matt Manninggoing over to the KBO and Cody Poncecoming back in the other direction. Kay spent the past two seasons pitching for the Yokohama DeNA BayStars of NPB — and pitching quite well, it bears mentioning: In 24 starts and 155 innings this past season, Kay posted a 1.74 ERA and a 2.55 FIP. That ERA is a couple tenths better than what Tatsuya Imai, this offseason’s hot Japanese pitching import, posted this season. Read the rest of this entry »
While 29 American teams sit around twiddling their thumbs, the Toronto Blue Jays continue to run up their bill on the free agent market. After spending $210 million (with deferrals) to bring Dylan Cease in on Thanksgiving Eve, Toronto has now landed one of the top international free agents: right-handed pitcher Cody Ponce, late of the Hanwha Eagles of the KBO.
Even those of you who vaguely remember Ponce from his first stint in the majors might have trouble distinguishing him from any other of the dozens of big, replacement-level relievers the Pirates have thrown out there over the past decade. On some level, Ponce’s stint in Asia is just a chapter in a Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants-type deal he’s stuck in with John Holdzkom, Nick Kingham, and Colin Holderman.
Devin Williams, the lights-out reliever with the M. Night Shyamalan changeup, has agreed to a three-year deal with the Mets. A two-time All-Star, Williams earned NL Rookie of the Year honors in 2020 and scored a down-ballot MVP vote as recently as 2023. Even after a disastrous 2025 season kicked his career ERA all the way up from 1.83 to 2.45, he still has a career ERA of – you guessed it – 2.45. Here’s my first piece of analysis: That’s so good, you guys! Assuming he won’t keep running a 55% strand rate from here on out, the Mets just signed up for three years of one of the best relievers in baseball; meanwhile, Williams just signed up for a quick ride from the Bronx to Flushing, but it’s important to note that the ride is always going to be longer than Google Maps predicts, because the odds of actually catching an express 7 train rather than the local are vanishingly small.
Let’s start with the terms of the deal and the credit for who reported which parts of those terms, and then we’ll take a nap and perform some more light analysis. Cool? Cool. Read the rest of this entry »
