‘Man, starting pitchers are getting PAID’: Winter meetings show it’s a good time to be an ace
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Alden Gonzalez, ESPN Staff Writer
DALLAS — The enormity of Juan Soto‘s contract — stretching 15 years and guaranteeing $765 million, not a penny of which is deferred — brought an initial jolt to Major League Baseball’s winter meetings on Sunday night. It was monumental and far-reaching, but it was also an outlier, given the uniqueness of landing one of history’s greatest hitters in his mid-20s. As the days passed, subsequent transactions took place and the offseason began to round into form, a more revealing trend emerged at the sprawling Hilton hotel that hosted baseball’s annual gathering earlier this week.
A prominent agent expressed it succinctly on Tuesday night, in the middle of an emptying lobby after a dizzying round of transactions.
“Man,” he said, “starting pitchers are getting paid.”
Hours earlier, Max Fried signed an eight-year, $218 million deal with the New York Yankees, blowing away the most reputable projections. Later, Nathan Eovaldi secured a three-year, $75 million contract to return to the Texas Rangers, more than doubling the guarantee of his prior deal in his mid-30s. And just a day prior, 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 that it wasn’t just the top starters getting paid, but the innings-eaters and the reclamation projects, too, age be damned.
Fried, Eovaldi and Cobb followed a path that had already been laid out by the likes of Blake Snell (five years, $182 million with the Los Angeles Dodgers), Luis Severino (three years, $67 million with the Athletics) and Matthew Boyd (two years, $29 million with the Chicago Cubs). All of them did better than expected. All of them triggered a fundamental question:
Why, at a time when starting pitchers have never been counted on less, are they more expensive than ever?
Executives, agents and coaches surveyed in the 72 hours that encompassed baseball’s winter meetings brought up an assortment of theories.
One general manager noted that starting pitchers who can consistently tackle five to six innings and 160 or so over the course of a six-month season aren’t any less important, even in an era of heavy bullpen usage — they’re simply more rare, triggering the type of demand that can escalate prices. Another pointed to the impact of big-market teams chasing top-tier free agents and how that has affected those below them. Another pointed specifically to the New York Mets, who handed Soto a record-breaking contract but might have set a tone in a different way — by signing Frankie Montas earlier this month to a two-year, $34 million deal that was viewed in some circles as an overpay.
But most of the conversations came back to the rapid rate of arm injuries that have plagued the industry and made teams hyper-paranoid about their starting pitching depth.
These days, even more so than before, enough is never enough.
“Teams used to feel good if they could go into a season with, I’d say, seven or eight guys they can 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 sport’s most successful franchises illustrates that.
The Yankees already boasted a solid fivesome of Gerrit Cole, Carlos Rodón, Luis Gil, Marcus Stroman and Clarke Schmidt — but Fried was their obvious pivot after missing out on Soto, enough to cross a $200 million threshold few foresaw for the soon-to-be-31-year-old left-hander. The Dodgers, who beat the Yankees in the World Series, were set to return a rotation composed of Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Tyler Glasnow, Shohei Ohtani, Tony Gonsolin and Dustin May, while backed by a pitching pipeline that has become the envy of the sport — and yet they zeroed in on Snell at the onset of the offseason.
“I know that as a team, we’ve felt it more acutely,” said Dodgers GM Brandon Gomes, whose club suffered through an array of pitching injuries in 2024. “You feel like you have depth coming in, and sometimes it maintains and sometimes it doesn’t. It’s a little scary of an unknown.”
The increase in pitcher injuries has been raising alarm bells for the better part of a decade, but a presentation at this week’s winter meetings placed that in a new light. The sport’s 30 managers gathered in a conference room on Wednesday morning as MLB officials guided them through key findings from a yearlong study of pitcher injuries that involved input from more than 200 experts in 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 over the past 10 years. Not only are current major league pitchers breaking down, so is the foundation behind them.
Said one manager in attendance: “It was stunning.”
The trade market hadn’t reached full tilt by the time most of the industry’s agents and executives boarded their flights back home on Wednesday afternoon. But the expectation was that it would soon pick up, particularly as it relates to starting pitchers. Teams seeking alternatives to the 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 was dealt 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 frontline starting pitching. So are the Mets and the San Francisco Giants, two of the offseason’s busiest teams. So are many others.
A dozen starting pitchers have signed for a combined $788.5 million through the first five weeks of this offseason, already about 63% of the spending in that department from last year — with Corbin Burnes still expected to exceed $200 million and Jack Flaherty, Sean Manaea, Nick Pivetta, Walker Buehler, Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander among the roughly 75 other starters available. And though the player pool is widely considered to be better than it was a year ago, and many executives will caution that early deals tend to be inflated, setting up the possibility that those who remain don’t do so well, one thing is clear:
Starting pitching, famously out of vogue in the modern game, is still at a premium.
HOUSTON — San Diego Padres designated hitter Luis Arraez was carted off after colliding with Mauricio Dubon on a play at first base in the first inning of Sunday night’s game against the Houston Astros.
According to the Padres, Arraez was transported to Houston Methodist Hospital for further evaluation, and he was stable, conscious, responsive and could move his extremities.
During an in-game interview with ESPN’s Buster Olney on “Sunday Night Baseball,” Padres manager Mike Shildt said that Arraez has “a little bit of a cut on the jaw,” and that the club is “worried about the jaw, the stability of that.”
Arraez was seen in the Padres’ clubhouse after the game, which San Diego won 3-2.
On the first pitch of his at-bat, Arraez hit a drag bunt down the first-base line to Christian Walker, who flipped it to second baseman Dubon as he ran to cover first. Dubon then collided with Arraez, who appeared to hit Dubon’s arm or elbow with his face.
Both players hit the ground, but Arraez took the worst of it, lying motionless in foul territory next to first base as trainers and coaches from both teams attended to him.
Dubon and Walker, as well as Fernando Tatis Jr. and Manny Machado, watched as Arraez was placed on a backboard and carted out of the stadium. As he was being placed on the cart, Arraez put his arm around Shildt.
Arraez entered hitting .287 with three home runs and seven RBIs this season. He is in his second season with the club after he was dealt to San Diego by the Miami Marlins last year.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Tennessee quarterback Nico Iamaleava officially announced his transfer to UCLA via a social media post Sunday.
“My journey at UT has come to an end,” he wrote on Instagram. “This decision was incredibly difficult, and truthfully, not something I expected to make this soon. But I trust God’s timing, and I believe He’s leading me where I need to be.
“Even though this chapter is ending, a new chapter has begun and I am committed to UCLA!”
Iamaleava was a highly regarded recruit who led Tennessee to the College Football Playoff last season. He was No. 1 in ESPN’s transfer portal rankings and immediately gives UCLA one of the best-known players in the sport upon his arrival. The Bruins are coming off a 5-7 debut season by coach DeShaun Foster.
Iamaleava, a five-star prospect from Long Beach, California, was recruited by UCLA out of high school. His younger brother, Madden Iamaleava, committed to UCLA out of high school but changed his commitment on the morning of signing day and signed with Arkansas.
Those recruitments gave both sides plenty of familiarity and the ability to potentially move quickly.
Iamaleava passed for 2,616 yards, 19 touchdowns and 5 interceptions in his first season as a starter, but in nine games against SEC opponents and Ohio State in the playoff, he threw for more than 200 yards only twice.
Tennessee’s offense finished No. 9 in the conference in scoring with 25.0 points per game in SEC play. The Volunteers’ offense was No. 1 in rushing and No. 11 in passing in league play.
UCLA is coming off a season in which it finished No. 14 in scoring offense and No. 12 in total offense in Big Ten play.
Iamaleava was earning $2.4 million at Tennessee under the contract he signed with Spyre Sports Group, the Tennessee-based collective, when he was still in high school. The deal would have paid him in the $10 million range altogether had he stayed four years at Tennessee.
Tennessee coach Josh Heupel announced last week after the Volunteers’ spring game that the program was moving forward without Iamaleava after he missed practice and meetings April 11. He hadn’t alerted anyone on the team and was unresponsive afterward.
Heupel thanked Iamaleava and called the situation unfortunate, but added, “There’s no one bigger than the Power T, and that includes me.”
Iamaleava, a rising redshirt sophomore, officially entered the transfer portal Wednesday with a do-not-contact tag.
ESPN’s Pete Thamel contributed to this report.
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