Steven Matz Heads to Tampa on Two-Year Mystery Deal

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.

Matz is now in his mid-30s, but his fastball still averages 94.5 mph, right around the league average. After he joined the Red Sox, he started throwing his changeup to lefties a bit, something he hadn’t done much all season, and it will be fun to see whether and how the Rays try to tweak his stuff. Matz throws his sinker nearly 60% of the time, and he has for much of his career. Maybe the Rays want to Rays him up, and maybe they just think it’s a pretty good sinker. The pitching models like the stuff well enough, but they’re really into his command. Matz ran a minuscule 3.6% walk rate in 2025, and his 46% groundball rate was his lowest since 2019. Matz doesn’t miss bats, but when you can avoid walks and keep the ball on the ground, you don’t need to miss many bats.

It also helps to play in front of a great defense, but it would be fair to say that Tampa Bay’s defense was… difficult to evaluate in 2025. The Rays ranked 28th in Fielding Run Value with a mark of -42 runs; they ranked sixth in DRS with a mark of +42 runs. That’s a gap of 84 runs! The two systems saw the Tampa Bay defense as worth the exact same amount of runs, just in completely opposite directions. How is that even possible? Naturally, DRP had the Rays right in the middle, 14th, with 5.7 runs prevented. If we just limit things to the infield, they ranked ninth in DRS with 12 runs and 26th in FRV with -13 runs. DRP no longer had them right in the middle, ranking them 21st with -3.6 runs. So maybe they’re a little worse than average in the infield. However, the Rays allowed a batting average of just .235 on groundballs, the seventh-lowest mark in the league. Is that a good defense for a sinkerballer to pitch in front of? Let’s say maybe and move on before our eyes start to bleed.

Until we get more information from the team, the best we can do is speculate about how the Rays plan on using Matz. They currently have a full 40-man roster, so they will need to make room for him somewhere. There will be no shortage of options when it comes to pitching roles. A solid multi-inning reliever is and will continue to be a hot commodity as starter workloads decline. His sinker and long history as a starter would also make him an obvious candidate for a fireman role, coming in to induce a groundball double play in a big moment. It wouldn’t be a surprise to see Matz as a swingman again, starting and making multi-inning appearances. This doesn’t seem particularly likely at the moment, but in recent seasons, he has been particularly good against lefties, and it’s not hard to envision him spending his twilight years as something of a lefty specialist. And of course, he could just jump into the rotation, though that would be the riskiest case. Rumors about the possibility of a Shane Baz trade have been floating around in recent weeks, and Topkin reported that president of baseball operations Erik Neander said earlier on Monday that the team wanted to bring in a veteran starter. Matz is certainly a veteran starter, and although the sample size is tiny, he was great in his two starts in 2025. He allowed just one run over nine innings, and that accounted for 0.5 of his total 1.1 WAR! Matz is not a sure thing. He’s an older pitcher with a long, frankly depressing injury history. But he also possesses skills that tend to age well. If he’s healthy and effective, he gives the Rays a lot of options.