Let’s just put the headline up right away. Luis Severino is now an Athletic:

BREAKING: Right-hander Luis Severino and the A’s are in agreement on a three-year, $67 million contract, sources tell ESPN. It is the largest guarantee in the history of the A’s franchise. And even with the qualifying offer attached, Severino got well over market expectations.

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) December 5, 2024

Now this is an interesting free agent signing. The A’s just signed the second-biggest deal of the offseason so far, and the largest in franchise history. They have one other player with a guaranteed contract on the team – and that’s lefty reliever T.J. McFarland, making $1.8 million in 2025. This is a sea change in terms of how the team operates, so let’s talk about why they did it and the ways it could succeed or fail.

First things first: The A’s could use some pitching. They were better than you’d think in 2024 – they won 19 more games than their dispiriting 2023 campaign. Three different A’s hitters – Brent Rooker, Lawrence Butler, and JJ Bleday – eclipsed three wins above replacement, the first time that had happened since the team shipped out Matt Olson and Matt Chapman. All three of those guys are young and under team control for a while. Shea Langeliers and Zack Gelof both look like good everyday players. Jacob Wilson is an intriguing top prospect. If it weren’t for the overall John Fisher stink of the franchise, this lineup would feel mighty tantalizing.
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Today, at FanGraphs dot com, we’re turning over a new leaf. The last two times Aroldis Chapman changed teams — when he signed with the Pirates last January and when he was traded from Kansas City to Texas seven months prior — Jay Jaffe and I both referenced the Tattoo Infection Incident of 2022. It’s memorable and useful as a shorthand for the ignoble end to Chapman’s tenure with the Yankees — though both of his stints in New York were to a greater or lesser extent ignoble throughout.

More than that, Lindsey Adler’s story on the situation introduced a novel clause to the sportswriting canon, a literary construction so vivid it clearly fascinated both Jay and myself for months after the fact. But no more. I’m going to write an Aroldis Chapman story without quoting the phrase, “veritable moat of pus.”

Oh crap, I said the phrase that pays. What a pity; with that said, I’ll surely have another opportunity to write a clean transaction story about the veteran left-hander when he changes teams again. Because if Chapman is still able to command a one-year, $10.75 million contract from the Red Sox, it seems major league teams are determined to keep giving chances to a player who ought to have exhausted the sport’s patience by now. Read the rest of this entry »

After 17 seasons as a professional baseball player – very nearly half his life – Kyle Higashioka has signed his first major league free agent contract. And the timing couldn’t have been better. Higashioka entered a thin catching market coming off the most productive offensive season of his career, and he cashed in to the tune of a slightly back-loaded two-year, $12.5 million deal with the Rangers. The deal also has a $7 million mutual option for 2027 with a $1 million buyout, which means Higashioka is guaranteed to make $13.5 million.

One very disappointing year removed from a World Series championship, the Rangers are hoping that the 34-year-old’s consistency can help them bounce back into contention. Higashioka has now strung together three consecutive seasons in which he’s played at least 83 games and put up at least 1.3 WAR. Texas would love to see him make it four. Read the rest of this entry »

The Chicago Cubs got their offseason into gear Monday morning, with the reported signing of veteran left-handed pitcher Matthew Boyd to a two-year contract worth $14.5 million per year, plus incentives. Hey, Boyd is a name people know, and he had that one really good year a while back, didn’t he? There’s got to be a reason the Cubs are handing out a multi-year deal for almost $30 million to a pitcher who made eight starts in 2024, hasn’t broken 80 innings in a season since 2019, and turns 34 before the start of spring training.

It makes sense, but you have to work a little to see it. Read the rest of this entry »

Last offseason, the Mets got in early on the starting pitching market. They signed Luis Severino in late November, later pairing him with Sean Manaea atop their rotation. Both deals were modest and short term, essentially chances for the players to rebuild their résumés while pitching for a playoff contender. And that’s exactly what happened. So now, with Severino and Manaea in line for larger paydays, the circle of life restarts: The Mets have signed Frankie Montas to a two-year, $34 million deal with an opt out after the first year.

At surface level, Montas doesn’t seem like a blockbuster signing. He just posted a 4.84 ERA (and 4.71 FIP, this wasn’t some weird BABIP issue) in his first year back after missing most of 2023 due to a shoulder injury. He’s about to turn 32. His last excellent season was in 2021. The list of drawbacks is lengthy.

Ah, but “knowing which drawbacks to overlook” might be David Stearns’ superpower. Manaea was coming off of two straight abysmal seasons when he signed in New York, and Severino hadn’t been great since 2018. But both had the capability to excel – they already had in their careers, and not in a fluky way. The right surroundings, the right defense, a pinch of luck here and there: It wasn’t hard to see how those two deals could work out. Likewise, Montas might have been down in 2024, but I have no trouble talking myself into an improved 2025.

Montas has never been a pure bat-missing strikeout machine. When he was at his best in Oakland, he did everything just well enough for the total package to work. He struck out more batters than average, walked fewer than average, kept the ball in the ballpark, and went six or so innings a start. No one would mistake him for Cy Young, but doing a bunch of things well added up to an ERA in the mid-3s. That’s a clear playoff starter, exactly what the Mets need.
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If you’re a team in the market for a top starting pitcher this winter, cross one of the best off your holiday list. The Dodgers, a team desperately in need for dependable starting pitchers whose arms are fully connected at the shoulders and elbows, signed Blake Snell to a five-year contract worth $182 million. The deal also includes a $52 million signing bonus. Snell, one of last year’s big name free agents who signed a shorter-term deal after not getting the offer they wanted, started 20 games for the Giants in 2024, putting up a 3.12 ERA, a 2.43 FIP, and 3.1 WAR in a season that was marred by an adductor strain. Compared to last winter, when Snell’s fate went unanswered until he signed in late March, you might as well start calling him Blake Schnell. Wait, don’t do that, that’s a terrible joke even by my standards.

Left-hander Blake Snell and the Los Angeles Dodgers are in agreement on a five-year, $182 million contract, pending physical, sources tell me and @jorgecastillo. The World Series champions get the two-time Cy Young winner in the first nine-figure deal of the winter.

— Jeff Passan (@jeffpasan.bsky.social) 2024-11-27T04:00:23.933Z

One of the biggest risks a team winning the World Series faces is complacency. It’s a perfectly natural thing to feel pleased with the moves that led to your team winning a championship, but a team that believes it can mostly stand pat and run it back is planting the seeds of its own demise. Even with all the talent on their team, the Dodgers still have significant roster holes to fill this offseason, and it’s a good sign for those hoping for a repeat that less than a month after hoisting the trophy, they’ve already addressed one of those weaknesses. Whatever one thinks of Dave Roberts as a manager, it’s difficult to deny that he did a convincing job this past postseason managing a pitching staff that basically had two healthy and reliable starting pitchers. The Dodgers won the World Series despite their injury-thinned rotation, not because of it.

Now, Snell isn’t the type to give you seven or eight innings per start. Who is in 2024, really? What Snell brings to the table – outside of being a really good pitcher – is that he has a pretty solid record when it comes to injury. That’s not to say that he doesn’t get hurt. On the contrary, only twice has he made at least 30 starts in a season. However, what he has avoided are the serious injuries that cause pitchers to miss months or entire seasons. His IL stints are generally for short-term nagging ailments, frequently adductor strains. His worst elbow injury was a procedure to remove loose bodies in his elbow about five years ago, not major reconstructive surgery. The Dodgers will be happy to get their five or six innings from him 25 or so times a year.

Given what the Dodgers have faced injury-wise these last few years, that may be especially valuable to them. Bad luck has to figure into some of these injuries, but their problems in October was the downside of the approach they’ve taken toward the pitching staff in recent seasons. The Dodgers haven’t really prioritized certainty among their pitchers. Instead, they’ve depended on high-upside, high-risk guys such as Tyler Glasnow, late-era Clayton Kershaw, and any of the young flamethrowers who dominate upon arrival before blowing out their arms. For the most part, the Dodgers have made this work because they’ve kept enough of these pitchers around to put together a capable rotation of four or five pitchers at any given moment. Generally, this has proven an effective strategy for the Dodgers, but this time, they rolled snake eyes a few times in a row, and ended up in a difficult situation at the most crucial time of the year. They made it work, but they are smart enough to recognize they might not be able to thread the needle through such a narrow margin for error again.

So, what about Snell himself? Let’s run the projections for him with the Dodgers.

The Dodgers are projected as one of the absolute best teams for Snell to end up with, and ZiPS projects performance that it would value at five years, $144.2 million. That’s a bit below the actual $182 million deal he received, but then again, so is the actual contract itself! As with Shohei Ohtani, the top dollar figure becomes a bit less sexy when you consider how the deal is structured. Some of the money is deferred, to the extent that it drops the present value enough so that the deal is worth more in the neighborhood of $160 million instead.

In some respects, Snell’s 2024 season was more impressive than the 2023 campaign that earned him the second Cy Young award of his career. Snell allowed a lot of walks in 2023, but he survived it because he was excellent with runners on base. That’s the kind of thing that’s hard to sustain, but he didn’t have to in 2024, as he shaved off the extra walk per game he’d added the year before. Snell’s strikeout rate was the best of his career, and it was powered by a career best in contact percentage. Snell has been a successful starter in the majors for years, but he has more varied tools now than he did before. Most notably, his changeup has become more of a weapon against righties, especially with two strikes.

With Snell under contract, the Dodgers rotation looks something like this: Snell, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Glasnow, and Shohei Ohtani, along with whichever one or two other starters are healthy at any given time. At least in the way-too-early ZiPS positional projections for 2025, Snell’s arrival leapfrogs the Dodgers over the Phillies, Mariners, and Braves for the top rotation in the majors, though things can change a bit depending on how your distribute the innings. And the Dodgers might not be done adding to their rotation, either. They are expected to be serious contenders to sign Roki Sasaki, and they could still bring back Kershaw on another one-year deal.

Does adding Snell fundamentally change the outlook for the Dodgers? Not really; they were always going to be a contender in 2025. However, what signing Snell does is give the Dodgers a better chance to get through the season with fewer surprises and go deep into the playoffs again. Not since the 1999-2000 Yankees a quarter century ago has a team won consecutive championships. Snell puts the Dodgers in a strong position to alter that factoid.

Enlightenment era poet Alexander Pope famously wrote, “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.” His words imply that angels are the opposite of fools. If that’s true, I wonder if it wouldn’t be such a bad thing for angels to give rushing in a try every once in a while. Could that be precisely what Perry Minasian is thinking?

Including the piece you’re reading right now, the FanGraphs staff has written about four trades and three free agent signings this November. Five of those seven transactions have involved the Angels. It started with the first major trade of the offseason: Before the Dodgers even held their parade, the Angels flipped Griffin Canning to the Braves for Jorge Soler. Then they signed free agents Kyle Hendricks, Travis d’Arnaud, and Kevin Newman. Along the way, the Halos also picked up Scott Kingery and Ryan Noda, and dropped Patrick Sandoval (among others) ahead of the non-tender deadline.

On Monday morning, the Angels continued getting an early start on the offseason – this time in more ways than one. At 5:38 AM PST, news broke that they had agreed on a three-year, $63 million deal with left-hander Yusei Kikuchi. I’m imagining the news came out so early in the morning because Kikuchi is in Japan right now, and given Kikuchi’s well-known sleep schedule (and the 17-hour time difference), Minasian only had a brief window in which both he and his top target were awake. Like MacGyver racing to deactivate a time bomb, Minasian cut the right wire just in time and successfully negotiated the biggest free agent deal of his Angels tenure. Read the rest of this entry »

Most of the time, you can count on early November to take a break from following baseball news. The World Series has just ended, but free agency hasn’t started in earnest. International free agents generally get posted closer to the mid-December deadline. Big trades are more of a December/January thing. But the Angels don’t operate that way. First they traded for Jorge Soler. Then they signed Kyle Hendricks. Now they’ve signed the first multi-year free agency deal of the offseason, linking up with Travis d’Arnaud on a two-year, $12 million contract.

At first blush, this feels like so much shuffling of deck chairs. The Angels have a lot of needs, to put it bluntly. Catcher was one of their best positions last year. They need more starters, more relievers, more outfield depth, more infield depth, and more top-of-the-order bats. Incumbent Logan O’Hoppe was one of only three hitters on the team to eclipse the 2-WAR mark. Why not sign a second baseman, or another starting pitcher, or pretty much anyone else?

I think there’s more here than meets the eye, though. We’re not talking about a blockbuster signing, and quite frankly, we’re not talking about a playoff team. A good season for the Angels in 2025 would mean flirting with .500 and developing a few new everyday players. Maybe Jo Adell will take a step forward and Mike Trout will play a full season at his normal standard of excellence. Maybe Zach Neto will continue on his current trajectory towards borderline All-Star production (once he’s back from shoulder surgery, of course) and Reid Detmers will rediscover his wipeout slider. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, the Angels aren’t waiting around, are they? In the week immediately following the World Series, the Halos have completed the only trade so far this offseason involving players going in each direction. They’ve also acquired Scott Kingery from the Phillies for cash considerations and executed a waiver claim on Oakland’s Ryan Noda, both low-risk acquisitions with the potential to fill a niche at the big league level.

The Triple-A first base depth chart for the Angels right now lists Noda alongside Niko Kavadas and Sonny DiChiara, which is a bumper crop of cube-shaped college sluggers if ever there were one. Someone find out what Tim Elko is up to and give him a call so the Angels can have the full set. But I digress.

Amidst all that other activity, Perry Minasian and Co. have made this offseason’s most notable free agent signing to date: right-handed pitcher Kyle Hendricks, late of the Chicago Cubs. Hendricks was the second major league free agent to sign so far this offseason, after Dylan Covey’s one-year deal with the Mets, and he’s a bigger name by far. A two-time Cy Young vote-getter and a cornerstone of the successful Cubs teams of the late 2010s, Hendricks joins the Angels on a one-year, $2.5 million deal. Read the rest of this entry »

Some 49 hours before their first regular season game, the Arizona Diamondbacks brought up the house lights to end the 2023-24 Hot Stove League. Jordan Montgomery is headed west on a one-year contract with a vesting option.

The 31-year-old Montgomery had been a well-regarded high-volume starter, but the 2023 postseason brought him to the verge of stardom. The Texas Rangers traded for Montgomery at the deadline, and with Jacob deGrom and Max Scherzer battling injuries, it was the big South Carolinian who emerged as the team’s ace. He won three games in the postseason, including Game 7 of the ALCS in a multi-inning relief appearance on two days’ rest, and was one of the World Series champion’s breakout stars.

That championship, of course, came at the expense of Arizona, his new team. The Diamondbacks, having come so close to winning it all, had already brought in reinforcements by trading for third baseman Eugenio Suárez and signing outfielder Joc Pederson and lefty starter Eduardo Rodriguez. Last October, this was a team with an improvised rotation; with Montgomery, Rodriguez (once he returns from his season-opening IL stint), Zac Gallen, Merrill Kelly, a full year of a maturing Brandon Pfaadt, and a healthy Tommy Henry, it’s among the best in the sport. Read the rest of this entry »