Dodgers Say, “Buenos Díaz”

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.

There’s great beauty in the simplest solution.

In 2025, the 31-year-old Díaz saved 28 games, with an ERA of 1.63. There’s been a lot of chatter recently about how it’s a bad idea to use single-season ERA to evaluate relievers, with the trade of Jose A. Ferrer and the Mets signing Devin Williams as Díaz’s heir presumptive. OK, then: Díaz was eighth among qualified relievers in FIP-, second in strikeout rate, third in K-BB%, and fourth in xERA. Nobody who’s ahead of him in any of those categories is a free agent this season.

Díaz is, therefore, our no. 10 overall free agent and top free agent reliever this winter.

The Dodgers, of course, have shopped at the top of the relief pitcher market before, and with disastrous effect. In 2025, the Dodgers spent roughly $30 million on Tanner Scott, Kirby Yates, and Brock Stewart — their two big reliever free agents and their big deadline acquisition — and got zero playoff innings out of the trio. Incumbent relievers Evan Phillips, Michael Kopech, and Brusdar Graterol were all hurt. Blake Treinen might’ve done less damage to the cause if he’d been hurt too. So the Dodgers know better than anyone that Díaz is not a sure thing.

But, like, he’s about as close as you can get. Over a decade in the majors, between stints in Seattle and New York, Díaz has consistently been one of the best relief pitchers in baseball. Since 2020, he’s second among qualified relievers in FIP- and K-BB%. Since his rookie season of 2016, he’s third and eighth in those categories.

There have, of course, been hiccups. Díaz blew out his knee while celebrating a Puerto Rico win at the 2023 World Baseball Classic, forcing him to miss the whole of that major league season. Since his return, his fastball has been more in the 97 mph range rather than 99, but with that kind of velo and consistent strikeout rates in the high 30s, he’s lost very little in terms of performance.

Díaz was also messy and walk-prone during the Mets’ run to the 2024 NLCS. He famously allowed three runs in a five-batter span in Game 2 of the NLDS in Philadelphia — though not as famously as it would’ve been had the Mets dropped any other game of that series. He’d previously blown a save in an equally chaotic final-day clincher in Atlanta.

Those failings, if repeated in the playoffs in Los Angeles, would surely lead to much consternation in Dodgers World, but I’m inclined to cut Díaz a little slack given the circumstances. Díaz, a one-inning closer for his entire career, was being stretched to cover multiple innings as manager Carlos Mendoza white-knuckled his team over the line. Díaz threw 96 pitches over his final three regular-season appearances of 2024, then 39 more in his first playoff outing, and then at least 22 in every appearance that followed. More than anything, Díaz looked gassed, and the extent to which he bounced back in the 2025 regular season supports such a reading.

Liberating Díaz from Mendoza will do the former good. Surely the Dodgers’ manager doesn’t have a history of weird high-leverage bullpen decisions…

As gaudy as Díaz’s achievements have been over the past decade, I do think it’s fair to worry about the future of a power pitcher who’ll turn 32 in the week before Opening Day. Díaz also has highly limited postseason experience — and not much to brag about when he has pitched in October — which might matter, or it might not. Even if Díaz can only serve as a traditional closer, that’ll solve a lot of problems for the Dodgers’ bullpen downstream, but such a limitation isn’t ideal for a high-profile relief ace.

The yellow flag I’m actually worried about with Díaz is his quality-of-contact numbers. The thing that made him the best reliever in baseball in his prime was not just that he missed more bats than a homesick vampire; Díaz also had terrific quality of contact-suppression numbers. But a 97th-percentile hard-hit rate in 2024 turned into a 57th-percentile hard-hit rate in 2025 — not exactly alarming, given the still-elite whiff rate, but worth monitoring.

That number would’ve dissuaded me from offering Díaz another $100 million contract, but the Dodgers didn’t have to do that. Ben Clemens predicted a three-year, $75 million contract; our median crowdsource estimate was four years and $84 million. To get Díaz for three years and $69 million seems like a tidy piece of business for Los Angeles.

You’d expect ZiPS to hate a relief pitcher in his 30s signing for big money, but that’s not really the case; ZiPS projects Díaz to be worth $58 million over the next three seasons:

It’s worth noting that Los Angeles is getting back on the expensive closer carousel just one year into Scott’s four-year contract. Even with approximately $48 million (accounting for deferrals) still owed to Scott, the Dodgers haven’t waited around to see if he can be salvaged. With this much money available, and so much of the lineup and rotation already set, they’re not going to risk their 2026 playoff ambitions by tempting the sunk cost fallacy. If Scott wakes up tomorrow and decides not to be as ludicrously hittable as he was in 2025, so much the better. But Andrew Friedman and his merry band are wise not to bet the season on that happening.

Spare a thought, also, for the Mets, who just lost their franchise closer. Replacing Díaz with Williams was a smart move; I’d rather have Díaz for 2026 in isolation, but given the choice between Díaz at $23 million a year or Williams at $15 million a year, I’d take Williams and reallocate the savings elsewhere.

And the Mets do have bigger needs than the bullpen. Either re-signing or replacing Pete Alonso has to be the top priority; the Mets’ lineup thins out very rapidly as currently constituted. The rotation has some depth, but no bona fide no. 1 starter unless the messianic hype surrounding Nolan McLean comes good quickly. With those holes still to fill and Williams already under contract, the Mets could afford to let Díaz walk.

It makes sense that Díaz is moving from one of the two richest teams in the league to the other; an elite closer is a luxury player, becoming more useful the better his 25 teammates are. It’s possible to win a World Series without one, of course, but it’s tough. The Dodgers just showed that; it’s quite reasonable that they aren’t eager to repeat the experiment.