Starters were more valuable than ever in winter meetings
What did Max Fried and company teach us this week? Starting pitching, which has become famously unfashionable in modern baseball, is more expensive than ever.
DALLAS — The enormity of Juan Soto’s contract — which spans 15 years and guarantees $765 million, not a penny of which is deferred — caused an initial shock at Major League Baseball’s winter meetings on Sunday. the night. It was monumental and powerful, but it was also an outlier, given the uniqueness of landing one of the greatest hitters in history in his mid-20s. As the days passed, subsequent transactions were made and the offseason began to take shape, a more telling trend emerged at the sprawling Hilton hotel that hosted baseball’s annual meeting earlier this week.
One prominent agent put it succinctly Tuesday night, in the middle of an empty lobby after a dizzying round of transactions.
“Man,” he said, “the starting pitchers are getting paid.”
Hours earlier, Max Fried signed an eight-year, $218 million contract with the New York Yankees, surpassing the most reliable projections. Nathan Eovaldi later got a three-year, $75 million deal to return to the Texas Rangers, more than double the guarantee of his previous contract when he was 30 years old. And just a day earlier, Alex Cobb, a 37-year-old who made three starts while dealing with a litany of injuries last season, cost the Detroit Tigers $15 million on a one-year deal, a sign they weren’t It was only the best starters who received their salaries, but also the inning guzzlers and turnaround projects, regardless of age.
Fried, Eovaldi and Cobb followed a path already laid out by players like Blake Snell (five years, $182 million with the Los Angeles Dodgers), Luis Severino (three years, $67 million with the A’s) and Matthew Boyd (two years, $29 million with the Chicago Cubs). They all did better than expected. All of them raised a fundamental question:
Why, at a time when starting pitchers have never been more counted on, are they more expensive than ever?
Executives, agents and coaches surveyed in the 72 hours spanning baseball’s winter meetings posed a variety of theories.
One general manager noted that starters who can consistently pitch five or six innings and 160 or more over the course of a six-month season are no less important, even in an era of heavy bullpen usage; They are simply rarer, triggering the kind of demand that can drive up prices. Another pointed out the impact of big-market teams pursuing top-tier free agents and how that has affected those below them. Another specifically pointed to the New York Mets, who gave Soto a record contract but could have set the tone in a different way, signing Frankie Montas earlier this month to a two-year, $34 million deal that was seen in some circles as an overpayment.
But most of the talk returned to the rapid rate of arm injuries that have plagued the industry and made teams hyper paranoid about the depth of their starting pitching.
Nowadays, even more than before, it is never enough.
“Teams used to feel good if they could start a season with, I would say, seven or eight players that they could count on to start games at the major league level, at least in some capacity,” said one front-office executive. . “Now that number is like 11.”
The approach taken by two of the most successful franchises in sports illustrates this.
The Yankees already had a solid quintet of Gerrit Cole, Carlos Rodón, Luis Gil, Marcus Stroman and Clarke Schmidt, but Fried was their obvious pivot after losing Soto, enough to cross the $200 million threshold that few others They predicted for the left-hander who will soon turn 31 years old. The Dodgers, who beat the Yankees in the World Series, had planned to have a rotation composed of Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Tyler Glasnow, Shohei Ohtani, Tony Gonsolin and Dustin May, in addition to having a group of pitchers that has become the envy of the sport, and yet they focused on Snell at the beginning of the offseason.
“I know as a team we’ve felt it more acutely,” said Dodgers general manager Brandon Gomes, whose club suffered a series of pitching injuries in 2024. “You feel like you have depth coming in, and sometimes it’s maintains and sometimes it doesn’t. The unknown is a little scary.
The number of pitching injuries has been ringing alarm bells for the better part of a decade, but a presentation at this week’s winter meetings put that in a new light. The sport’s 30 managers gathered in a conference room Wednesday morning as MLB officials walked them through key findings from a year-long study of pitching injuries that involved input from more than 200 sports experts. a variety of roles. One of the slides showed that surgeries to repair damaged ulnar collateral ligaments at the minor league level had basically doubled in the last 10 years. Not only are current major league pitchers declining, but so is the foundation behind them.
Said a manager present: “It was amazing.”
The foreign exchange market had not reached its peak when most traders and industry executives boarded their flights home on Wednesday afternoon. But the expectation was that he would soon bounce back, particularly when it came to starting pitchers. Teams looking for alternatives to higher free agent prices have expressed interest in Dylan Cease, Pablo López, Framber Valdez, Jesús Luzardo and Luis Castillo, names that should gain more traction after Chicago White Sox ace, Garrett Crochet, traded to the Boston Red Sox for an impressive haul of prospects.
Two of the Red Sox’s division rivals, the Baltimore Orioles and the Toronto Blue Jays, are still searching for top starting pitchers. So are the Mets and the San Francisco Giants, two of the most active teams of the offseason. And many others too.
A dozen starting pitchers have signed for a total of $788.5 million in the first five weeks of this offseason, already representing about 63% of last year’s spending in that department, and Corbin Burnes is expected to top $200 million. and that Jack Flaherty, Sean Manaea, Nick Pivetta, Walker Buehler, Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander are among the approximately 75 starting pitchers available. And while the pool of players is widely considered to be better than it was a year ago, and many executives will caution that early deals tend to be inflated, creating the possibility that those remaining may not fare as well, a one thing is clear:
Starting pitchers, known to have fallen out of fashion in the modern game, remain highly sought after.
