Pete Fairbanks Is a Different Kind of Fish Now

One can’t help but imagine the chagrin of Pete Fairbanks’ dermatologist. The fair-haired closer has spent nearly his entire major league career with the Rays, racking up at least 23 saves in each of the past three seasons. And now, instead of leaving the Sunshine State, he’s traveling even farther south to Miami. The 32-year-old Fairbanks has signed a one-year, $13 million deal with the Marlins. He was the last closer available in free agency, and with Ronny Henriquez out for the season due to a torn UCL, Fairbanks will play a crucial role for a Miami bullpen that finished in the bottom 10 in just about any category you can think of. Will Sammon of The Athletic broke the news, while Jeff Passan of ESPN reported the terms, and Mark Feinsand of MLB.com reported that the contract included a $1 million signing bonus and another $1 million in incentives. According to AJ Eustace of MLB Trade Rumors, Fairbanks would also get a $500,000 bonus if he’s traded.

The move represents a reunion with president of baseball operations Peter Bendix, who previously served as Tampa Bay’s general manager. Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, Fairbanks made it clear that Bendix’s role with the Marlins was part of their appeal. “To hear all the things that he’s been doing over his tenure down in Miami, from what I’ve heard previously to what I have now, how much things are changing and how much he has been attempting to put his stamp on things. I felt like that made it a pretty easy choice, and I am excited to see the direction that he takes.” (Hat tip to Kevin Barral of Fish on First, who published this quote and the others you’ll read in this article.) Fairbanks also noted that moving just a four-hour drive away from Tampa is a boon because he and his wife are expecting their third child “basically on Opening Day.” This is the first All-Star break baby we write in 2026, but I can assure you that it won’t be the last.

From 2020 to 2023, Fairbanks was one of the best pitchers in the game by just about any standard. He ran a 35% strikeout rate, the 11th highest among all pitchers (minimum 130 innings pitched). As a result, he ranked in the top 20 in ERA and top 10 in FIP. He also dealt with a host of injuries, which Jon Becker detailed earlier this week, reaching 27 innings pitched just one time in his first four seasons. He has been more consistent since 2023, reaching 46 appearances three years in a row and setting a career record with 61 appearances and 60 1/3 innings pitched in 2025.

Although he’s been healthier of late, Fairbanks’ strikeout rate plummeted in 2024. Over the past two seasons, he’s run a combined 24% strikeout rate, not far above the league average. He put up a 3.57 ERA in 2024, his worst since his debut in 2019. Although he dropped his ERA to 2.83 in 2025, he was aided by a career-low .239 BABIP. His FIP and other ERA estimators stayed up in the threes. Fairbanks missed our Top 50 Free Agents list not because he wasn’t good enough, but because the Rays somewhat surprisingly declined his $11 million option for the 2026 season the day after the list ran. He came in at 27th on Baseball Prospectus’ list, where Ginny Searle mentioned more reasons for pessimism than optimism. Ginny wasn’t wrong, but Fairbanks exhibited some encouraging signs, too.

Fairbanks has historically thrown a four-seamer and a slider, mixing in a changeup very rarely. Over the last two years, the fastball has lost some velocity. It only fell from 99.0 mph to a still-very-hard 97.3 mph, but it also lost some spin efficiency, which cost it an inch or two of movement. Those changes absolutely tanked its grades from the stuff models. It went from one of the highest-rated fastballs in the game to a bit below average. However, Fairbanks also raised his arm angle in 2025, and Lance Brozdowski noticed that doing so was likely the reason that Fairbanks was able do a better of job of locating the pitch in the upper part of the strike zone. (That Lance Brozdowski, he always seems to notice.) The improved location was enough to make the pitch more valuable than it had been since 2022, according to Baseball Savant’s run values. It had a league-average whiff rate and a scarily high hard-hit rate, but it resulted in plenty of popups and grounders and, most important, it hit the zone an awful lot. That’s just one season of results, so we should take it with a grain of salt, but if Fairbanks can continue locating the fastball so well, it could continue playing up even if the velocity continues falling.

In the previous paragraph, I said that Fairbanks had historically relied on the four-seamer and slider, and that adverb was important. He added a new pitch at the end of the 2025 season, a cutter that pitch models adored. “I’m good at getting on the outside of the ball,” said Fairbanks on Wednesday. “Whenever I was messing around with [Tampa Bay pitching coach Kyle Snyder] pregame, I was like, ‘Eventually I’m just gonna start throwing whiffle sliders for fun.’ Turns out, it grades out well, and I’m able to throw it in the zone… It just seems like it’s an easy spot for my hand to get into throughout the delivery. As long as we’re able to continue making the ball move [according to] the intention behind it, and it’s not blending with any of the other breaking balls, I think we should be pretty good.” The results, though extremely limited, were preposterous. Last year, 273 pitchers threw at least 25 cutters. Among them, Fairbanks and his cutter ranked 16th in whiff rate and first in run value, xwOBA, and barrel rate. Now we’re talking about a tiny, tiny sample here. Fairbanks threw just 42 cutters. Only nine of them got put into play, and five of those nine were hard-hit. But this is exactly what stuff models are for; they give a quick snapshot of a pitch based on its underlying characteristics, and several of them freaked out over the pitch. That’s definitely an encouraging sign.

Fairbanks offers plenty of risks. The cutter is exciting but unproven. The fastball command may or may not stick. He’s entering his age-32 season, and he’s got a long injury history. His stuff has started to tick down, and the strikeouts have done the same. Still, he was one of better relievers on the market, and he’s going to a Marlins team that really needs him, even if he regresses to the league-average form he displayed in 2024.