Last offseason, the Diamondbacks were in search of a marquee starter to pair with Zac Gallen atop their rotation. The market was thin at the top – Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Shohei Ohtani were probably never available to them, so their best options were Sonny Gray, Blake Snell, Eduardo Rodriguez, Shota Imanaga, and Jordan Montgomery. They signed two of those guys, and neither delivered the rotation-stabilizing performance they had expected. But instead of waving their hands in the air and raving at the injustice of variance, the Diamondbacks got right back on the horse:

BREAKING: Corbin Burnes to Diamondbacks, $210M, 6 years. opt out after 2 years

— Jon Heyman (@jonheyman.bsky.social) 2024-12-28T06:32:12.313Z

Corbin Burnes was the best free agent pitcher available. In each of the last five seasons, he’s been one of the top pitchers in the game, racking up a 2.88 ERA, 3.01 FIP, and 816 innings pitched. He’s second in WAR (21.7) over that time frame, second in RA9-WAR (23.2), second in strikeouts (946), and third in innings pitched. In other words, he’s been a capital-A Ace, a set-it-and-forget-it choice at the top of the starting rotation. He’ll receive $35 million a year for six seasons, with an opt-out after the second year of the deal, which also includes a $10 million signing bonus.

With Gallen also on their dance card, the Diamondbacks have one of the best one-two combinations in the majors. That doesn’t even include Merrill Kelly, a borderline All-Star when healthy, or Brandon Pfaadt, who looked like he was finally breaking out before a rough final two months of the season. Add in Montgomery and Rodriguez, and Arizona goes six deep with plausible playoff starters. That’s how you injury-proof a rotation – sheer depth.
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I hope that you spared a thought over the holidays for the poor Naylor brothers. In a premise tailor-made for a lesser Hallmark movie, their time as teammates came to an end just four days before Christmas, when the Guardians traded Josh Naylor to the Diamondbacks in exchange for right-handed pitcher Slade Cecconi and a Competitive Balance Round B draft pick. Just 21 minutes after Jeff Passan broke the news that broke up the family, he also reported that veteran first baseman Carlos Santana had agreed to a one-year, $12-million deal to fill the hole Naylor left in the Cleveland infield. He failed to report on what, if anything, would fill the hole left in Bo Naylor’s heart.

After five years away, Santana is coming home to Cleveland for the third time — another solid premise for a Hallmark movie. In fact, he still has a home in Cleveland. Or he did, anyway. He put it on the market a few weeks ago and closed on a sale two days before signing with the Guardians. Another fun side note to Santana’s signing: He very nearly busted the We Tried Tracker. Ken Rosenthal listed seven other teams that were in on Santana: “The Seattle Mariners, Santana’s team in 2022, sought to reunite with him virtually the entire offseason, and were pushing for a resolution. Santana said both New York teams, Detroit and Arizona also were in the mix, while San Diego and Texas had asked him to wait.” If you’re keeping score at home, that’s four teams that were in the mix, two in the brand-new category of asking the player to wait, and then the extraordinarily thirsty Mariners. As you may have noticed, Rosenthal is citing Santana himself as the source for this information. If more players spoke to reporters about the interest they received, the tracker would look a lot more robust.

After running a combined wRC+ of 94 from 2020 to 2023, Santana suddenly rediscovered his form with the Twins in 2024. In his age-38 season, Santana ran a 114 wRC+ with 23 home runs, and his 11 fielding runs earned him his first Gold Glove. He racked up 3.0 WAR, more than he totaled in all but two of his 15 years in the big leagues, and good for the fifth-most WAR among first basemen last season. His average contact quality didn’t stray far from his career norms, and his vaunted batting eye remained about as strong as ever. The big difference is that 23.8% of his batted balls came in the form of line drives or fly balls to the pull side. That’s his highest rate since 2014. Focusing on pull-side power has been a major organizational focus for the Twins, so much so that before the season, Trevor Larnach decided he’d gone too far in that direction and needed to develop a more balanced approach. Whether or not the Twins were responsible for it, this approach change certainly worked for Santana, and the Guardians are hoping that he can keep both the bat and the glove going for one more year.

As for the Diamondbacks, they’re in for their first taste of life without a cornerstone at the cold corner since 2010. Naylor may not be peak Paul Goldschmidt or Christian Walker, but he’s been a top-10 first baseman over the past three years. As slugging first basemen who play bigger than the numbers suggest, Naylor and Santana have a lot in common. Both players are under six feet tall and both depend on the home run ball despite lacking jaw-dropping exit velocities. Naylor hits the ball on the ground more often and lacks Santana’s gift for staying within the strike zone, but he hits the ball harder. Despite comparable average exit velocities and hard-hit rates, Naylor’s 90th percentile exit velocity was 106 mph, significantly higher than Santana’s 103.7-mph mark. In 2024, despite running a bottom-quartile groundball rate, Naylor put up the first 30-homer season of his career, to go along with a 118 wRC+. He’s now reached that mark or higher in each of the last three seasons. His 2.3 WAR ranked 11th among first basemen in 2024, and his 7.0 WAR over the past three seasons ranked eighth.

Santana’s deal is for exactly the same amount as MLB Trade Rumors predicted that Naylor would get in his final year of arbitration, and that’s what makes this such a Cleveland move. The Guardians are taking on more risk due to Santana’s age and giving up Naylor’s higher upside, but essentially, they swapped out two similar players for identical prices and wound up with a draft pick and an interesting arm in Cecconi. Steamer projects Naylor to put up 2.0 WAR next season, compared to 1.2 for Santana. You can understand why, on the “Five and Dive” podcast, Jeffrey Paternostro called the move, “so Guardians (derogatory).” It took a whole lot of work for Cleveland to make its first base situation a bit dicier in exchange for a couple longshots.

Cecconi announced his arrival in Arizona with a bang in 2023, and I mean that very literally. He made four starts and three relief appearances, running a 4.33 ERA and 4.37 FIP. Cecconi entered the 2024 season as the D-backs’ no. 5 overall prospect and their system’s top-ranked pitcher, but he struggled mightily, running a 6.66 ERA and 5.02 FIP. He bounced between the minors and majors, and he was sent to the bullpen in late July, but his 4.49 xERA and 4.70 xFIP — while still nothing to write home about — were much less worrisome. Cecconi doesn’t rack up many whiffs or strikeouts, he doesn’t run a great groundball rate, and he doesn’t avoid hard contact. But what he does have is solid control, a fastball that can reach 98 mph, three other pitches that grade out as above average according to Pitching Bot, Stuff+, and StuffPro, and 0.155 years of service time.

The Rays were rumored to be interested in him at the trade deadline, and it’s entirely possible that the Guardians turn him into a serviceable pitcher. Although the fastball can reach 98, it averages closer to 94 and got rocked last season. Somehow, the Diamondbacks let Cecconi throw it 55% of the time anyway. Maybe the Guardians will get him in the pitching lab and help him figure out a fastball that works. Maybe they’ll make him a full-time reliever to bump his velocity back up to the top of its range. They’ll definitely have him throw his heater less often. Then again, maybe they just wanted that draft pick.

The Astros’ facelift continues. One week after trading star outfielder Kyle Tucker to Chicago, Houston has dived into the free agent market and come up with a replacement: first baseman Christian Walker, now the beneficiary of a brand spanking new three-year, $60 million contract.

Walker didn’t establish himself as a major league starter until he was almost 30; he spent the mid-2010s stuck behind Chris Davis, Freddie Freeman, Joey Votto, and Paul Goldschmidt, in that order. But since claiming the Diamondbacks’ first base job after Goldschmidt got traded, Walker has established himself as one of the most consistent players at the position. Over the past three seasons, he’s had wRC+ marks of 122, 119, and 119, and posted WAR totals of 3.9, 3.9, and 3.0. That downturn in 2024 was informed by an oblique strain that cost Walker the month of August. If he’d played 162 games, he would’ve been right back up around 3.9 WAR again.

The former South Carolina star is 33, a bit old for a big free agent signing, especially a first baseman, and even more especially a right-handed first baseman. But he’ll be a tremendous asset to the Astros, and sorely missed by the Diamondbacks. Read the rest of this entry »

Hi, I’m Ben Clemens. You might know me from such articles as “C’mon, Orioles, Do Something”, “Why Are the Orioles’ Playoff Odds So Low?”, and “Wait, FanGraphs Is Too Low on the Orioles Again?!”. In my spare time, I also write about the rest of the league, but today I’m focusing on Baltimore yet again given their latest signing: The O’s and right-hander Tomoyuki Sugano have agreed to a one-year, $13 million contract.

Sugano has been one of the best pitchers in NPB for more than a decade. The 35-year-old won the Central League MVP in 2014, and he’s added two more MVP awards since then. He also won two Sawamura Awards – think the Cy Young, only for the entire league and with minimum criteria – neither in any of his three MVP seasons. In other words, he’s been racking up hardware like no one else for his entire career.

Reading a scouting report on Sugano is like chicken soup for my command-obsessed soul. If pitching was entirely about hitting a tiny target, Sugano might be the best pitcher in the world. Saying that he has the ball on a string would be offensive to Sugano; I can’t control a yo-yo as well as he can spot his five-pitch arsenal. He walked 16 of the 608 batters he faced last year, a 2.6% rate that would make George Kirby jealous.

It’s not just walk avoidance that sets Sugano apart from the crowd, though. He works the corners and tunnels his pitches off of each other to great effect. He can add or subtract from everything he throws, so his five-pitch mix can feel even deeper when a hitter is trying to figure out what’s coming next. He might not inspire the physical discomfort batters experience when facing triple-digit heat that could come right at their ribcage if the pitcher misses his location, but facing Sugano is like solving a Saturday crossword puzzle, if crossword puzzles threw splitters. Read the rest of this entry »

Proposition No. 1: Identifying the smartest front office in baseball would be a difficult task even if it weren’t such a loaded question to start. How do you weight scouting versus development? How do you factor the influence of ownership, for good or ill? Or injuries, or luck, or other elements of force majeure?

So I’ll state my premise this way: The Braves seem to be a competently run organization. They’ve made the playoffs seven years running — six of those by winning the NL East — and are set up well to continue contending in the future. They’ve had internal developmental successes, savvy trade wins, and the occasional opportunistic buy-low move for a veteran free agent. Are they the best-run team in the league? I don’t know, but I’d hear out an argument to that effect.

Surely they wouldn’t go out of their way to acquire a player coming off a historically bad season. Read the rest of this entry »

It looks like Nathan Eovaldi made the right decision. So far this offseason, the pitching market has been much hotter than projected, and as the Winter Meetings kicked into high gear in Dallas on Tuesday, that trend continued. The 34-year-old right-hander will not regret for a moment declining his $20 million player option with the Rangers. After signing a two-year, $34 million contract (plus that option) before the 2023 season, Eovaldi will remain in Texas on a brand new three-year, $75 million deal. That $25 million average annual value far outstrips the projections of $16 million by Ben Clemens, $20 million from our readers, and $22 million from MLB Trade Rumors. As Nick Deeds noted for MLBTR, Eovaldi is only the third pitcher in the past 15 years to sign a deal for more than two years that starts in his age-35 season or later.

Speaking of pitchers who are old enough to remember the band the Wallflowers, the Texas rotation features an awful lot of them. Eovaldi rejoins Jon Gray, Tyler Mahle, and Cody Bradford, along with whatever presumably small, magnificent portion of a season Jacob deGrom can provide. If you’re keeping track at home, the average age of those pitchers is 32.28 years. Bradford is the baby, as he’ll be a tender 27 when the season starts. Dane Dunning, who took a step back last season (and turns 30 the week after next), will also be available. The rotation could also get an infusion of youth from Kumar Rocker, who absolutely annihilated the minors and pitched well in three big league starts during the 2024 season, and Jack Leiter, who struggled mightily in nine big league appearances.

That might just be enough starting pitching depth to make it through the season, but – with the exception of free agents Andrew Heaney and Max Scherzer – the Rangers are running back a rotation that finished the season ranked 22nd in WAR and 21st in ERA, FIP, and xFIP. Even in their championship 2023 season, the Rangers ranked just 18th in all four of those metrics. And it’s not as if they’re obviously due for a huge bounce-back year. If that group is going to meaningfully improve, it’ll mean deGrom staying healthy and either Rocker or Leiter making that last big jump, and neither of those propositions is what you’d consider a sure thing. Eovaldi is a proven big-game pitcher with a 3.05 career ERA and a 9-3 record in the postseason. (Of course, if the Rangers hope to avail themselves of that skill set, they’ll need to go out and find approximately one entire bullpen’s worth of relievers, but that’s a conversation for a different day). Read the rest of this entry »

DALLAS — The dawn of a new baseball season brings relief from the monotony of winter, hope for a successful campaign, and a multitude of questions in the vein of “Wait, where did Player X sign? How long has Player Y been on the Rays?”

In a (possibly vain) effort to head off those questions, here are some developments from the Winter Meetings: Alex Cobb has signed a one-year contract with the Detroit Tigers for $15 million, with an additional $2 million available through incentives. The details of the contract took a while to come out as Cobb took a physical; that’s a pro forma step in your garden variety free agent signing, but likely an adventure for Cobb. More straightforward: The Toronto Blue Jays have agreed to a two-year, $15 million pact with right-handed reliever Yimi García.

Both Cobb and García changed teams at the most recent trade deadline; in fact, García was traded by Toronto less than five months ago. Read the rest of this entry »

Two days after coming up short in their bid to retain Juan Soto, the Yankees made their first major move of the offseason, landing left-hander Max Fried via an eight-year, $218 million contract. The deal is pending a physical, a nontrivial matter for a pitcher who has made 30 starts just once in the past four seasons while landing on the injured list seven times, though only one of those absences was for longer than three weeks.

Though he was chosen by the Padres in the first round of the 2012 draft out of Harvard-Westlake High Schol in Los Angeles, Fried — who will turn 31 on January 18 — has spent his entire eight-year big league career with the Braves, helping them to seven playoff berths, including a 2021 World Series victory; in fact, he helped seal the deal by throwing six shutout innings in the Game 6 clincher against the Astros. After making just 14 starts in 2023 due to a forearm strain that cost him three months and then a blister that limited him to 10 innings (four in the postseason) after September 12, he returned to take the ball 29 times in ’24, throwing 174.1 innings with a 3.25 ERA, a 3.33 FIP, and a 3.64 xERA. While those were his highest marks in each category since 2019, his ERA still ranked fifth among National League qualifiers and his FIP seventh.

Those numbers were not only quite respectable at face value, they were more impressive once you account for his early-season struggles. In his first turn on March 30, Fried retired just two of the seven Phillies he faced while throwing 43 pitches, walking three and allowing three runs before getting pulled. In his second start, against the Diamondbacks on April 6, he yielded six first-inning runs including a leadoff homer by Ketel Marte (who added an RBI double in the same inning) but hung around until the fifth, when he got into a jam and was charged with two more runs. But from that point to the end of the regular season, he posted a 2.82 ERA and 3.26 FIP, and at times he was downright unhittable. Read the rest of this entry »

After missing out on Blake Snell and losing a Juan Soto bidding war to their crosstown rivals, the Yankees landed a big free agent on Tuesday, signing left-handed pitcher Max Fried to an eight-year contract worth $218 million. Fried, a first-round pick in 2012 for the Padres, had spent his entire MLB career with the Atlanta Braves after being one of the big-name prospects included in the 2014 Justin Upton trade. Fried’s contract contains no opt-outs or elevator clauses or any fancy deferral schemes to bring down the total money. The Yankees are opening their wallets to pay one of the best pitchers available a whole lot of cash. Fried’s contract is the largest for a left-handed pitcher in baseball history.

After Fried was limited to just 14 starts in 2023 due to hamstring and forearm injuries, as well as a blister on his index finger, the lefty returned to the mound last season and pitched well enough and stayed healthy enough to max out his deal in free agency. Enough is the key here because, for the second straight season, Fried missed time with a forearm injury. The more recent one, which was diagnosed as ulnar neuritis, cost him a handful of starts in July, but he returned to the rotation the first week of August. He finished the regular season strong, posting a 2.99 FIP across his final 11 starts, though he faltered against the Padres in his lone playoff appearance. All told, Fried had a solid platform season, with a 3.25 ERA and 3.33 FIP in 174 1/3 innings over 29 starts, good for 3.4 WAR and peripherals right in line with his career numbers.

If I didn’t include the eight-year projections, some of you might picket my house and eat the local chili in vengeance, so here we go.

I’m actually a bit surprised at the bearishness of the projections; ZiPS is thinking he’s worth $120 million, which is shockingly low to me. Most likely it’s from a few things. ZiPS is likely seeing something similar to what’s reflected in his xERA, which was 3.64 last season, and his contact-against numbers have declined a bit. Also complicating matters are Fried’s four IL stints over the past two years — which are keeping his projected inning totals fairly conservative. Beyond that, ZiPS has a lot more excitement for Snell’s upside than it does for Fried’s steadiness. I tend to be more optimistic than ZiPS here.

Even if Fried falls short of being the 1B to Gerrit Cole’s 1A in the rotation, some kind of signing here was necessary for the Yankees after they lost out on Snell and failed to retain Soto. Sure, the rotation wasn’t the team’s biggest problem entering the offseason, but it wasn’t exactly a highlight, either. Even with an improved Carlos Rodón during his second season in pinstripes, as well as a Rookie of the Year campaign from Luis Gil, the Yankees’ rotation was right around league average in terms of WAR. Some of that middling production was due to Cole’s missing the first two and a half months of the season with elbow inflammation, which limited him to 95 innings. However, Cole is now 34, Rodón has a significant injury history, and Gil could be due for some regression. Nestor Cortes and Clarke Schmidt also missed time last season, and Marcus Stroman was inconsistent enough that he was booted from the rotation down the stretch and didn’t pitch in the postseason. Considering all of this, the Yankees were wise to add another dependable arm here, even if Fried’s forearm ailments are a bit concerning.

Maybe it’s just me, but it never felt like the Braves were really all-in on Fried this winter. With the conversion of Reynaldo López back to a full-time starter going successfully and Spencer Schwellenbach’s terrific debut (and very good projections), I’m guessing the team was happy to count on Spencer Strider’s return and a healthy Chris Sale to anchor the rotation.

The Yankees still have a lot to do to fill the Soto-sized hole in their lineup, but they needed to do more than just make up for his lost production. In signing Fried, they’ve fortified their rotation.

According to the Billboard Hot 100 charts, the biggest hit of Justin Bieber’s career is “Stay,” a song you either can’t get out of your head, won’t admit you can’t get out of your head, or just don’t realize you can’t get out of your head because you hear it playing everywhere — all the time — but didn’t know the title or artist. Anyway, it seems as if the not-so-subliminal messaging of one Bieber influenced the other. Shane Bieber has decided to stay (oh, ooh-woah) with the Guardians, and he’s hoping the decision proves to be just as lucrative as Justin’s song.

Bieber’s contract is essentially a one-year prove-it deal with the added security of a player option for a second year. The right-hander will earn $10 million for his age-30 season in 2025. After that, he can either exercise a $16 million option for 2026 or take a $4 million buyout and return to free agency. In other words, the player option is really only worth $12 million to Bieber, which means he surely doesn’t intend to exercise it unless things go particularly wrong. After all, he managed to net this contract halfway through his rehab from Tommy John surgery. The Guardians are prepared to pay him $14 million for half a season of work, and reportedly, that wasn’t even his highest offer. It’s safe to say he’s not picking up that option unless he suffers another injury.

So, if Bieber’s plan is to continue his rehab, rebuild his value, and cash in next offseason, it’s easy to understand why he might have taken less money to stay in Cleveland. Not only does he already have a relationship and a rehab plan with the Guardians, but this is an organization with a strong track record for helping pitchers thrive. Just look at Matthew Boyd, who came back from Tommy John this summer and turned a handful of starts with the Guardians into a two-year, $29 million deal with the Cubs. Alternatively, look at Bieber himself. The organization took a fourth-round draft pick (122nd overall) and 45-FV prospect and developed him into a Cy Young winner. It’s hardly surprising that he wants to stick with the same organization as he works his way back from a career-altering injury. The chances that he’ll ultimately receive a big, long-term deal from the Guardians are slim to none, but he’s counting on them to help him get that offer from someone else. Read the rest of this entry »