‘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.
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Jorge Castillo
TAMPA — Nearly a year after suffering an elbow injury that pushed his season debut back to June, New York Yankees ace Gerrit Cole said he is “in a really good spot” compared with recent years after starting his offseason throwing program earlier than in previous winters.
The right-hander posted a 3.41 ERA in 17 regular-season starts in 2024 before recording a 2.17 ERA in five postseason outings, including a seven-inning gem in Game 4 of an American League Division Series to close out the Kansas City Royals.
Now, two years removed from winning the AL Cy Young Award and entering his age-34 season, Cole expects to regain his place among baseball’s best hurlers.
“My expectations are the same,” Cole said after the Yankees’ first official spring training workout.
For 48 hours in early November, just days after the World Series ended, it appeared as though there was a chance Cole’s days as a Yankee could’ve been over. The star right-hander opted out of his contract — a nine-year, $324 million pact that registered as the largest contract ever for a pitcher when he signed before the 2020 season — with four years and $144 million remaining, giving the Yankees two days to void the opt-out with a one-year, $36 million extension.
The Yankees chose not to, giving Cole a path to free agency. Instead, after discussions between the two sides, Cole chose to remain with the organization on the four-year, $144 million contract he opted out of, as if he had not exercised the clause.
“The intention wasn’t to do anything other than stay,” Cole said Wednesday. “I was happy to be where my feet were, back in Yankee Stadium.”
Manager Aaron Boone said he thought there was a chance Cole could hit the open market where he would surely garner another rich long-term contract. As for potential awkwardness after the brief tango between the two sides, Boone said Cole immediately expunged any.
“He had a good way about it,” Boone said. “He came in, just talked about it openly after the fact when he came back in. So he kind of put us at ease a little bit, and [had] a laugh. And certainly, obviously, I’m excited that he came back.”
Cole’s return was the Yankees’ first transaction in what became an active offseason. Within a week, the Yankees exercised the 2025 option on Boone’s contract. A month after that, Juan Soto spurned them to sign a record-breaking deal with the New York Mets, spurring the club to quickly make a series of moves to improve the roster by the new year.
Max Fried was signed to an eight-year contract atop the starting rotation alongside Cole. Closer Devin Williams and outfielder/first baseman Cody Bellinger were acquired in trades. Paul Goldschmidt signed a one-year deal to play first base. Reliever Fernando Cruz came over in a trade with the Cincinnati Reds for backup catcher Jose Trevino. The result is a roster that is very different from the group that advanced to the franchise’s first World Series in 15 years, but one that is expected to compete for another AL pennant nonetheless.
“He’s a tremendous player,” Cole said of Soto. “He was extremely impactful for us, and a joy to watch and a joy to be around. So, Juan will be missed for a certain extent. But the beauty of the Yankees is the ability to go out and fill the roster and fill the spots with the goal of getting back to the World Series and winning the World Series again.”
Cole was in the middle of the Yankees’ fifth-inning meltdown against the Los Angeles Dodgers in the deciding Game 5 of the World Series, which led a few members of the winning club to bluntly criticize New York’s shortcomings. While Boone said he would like his team “to handle things with a little more class” if the Yankees find themselves in that position, Cole said he didn’t pay much attention to the comments.
“It’s a good push for us,” Cole said of falling short in the World Series. “We’re really proud of what we did. At the same time, we walked away from the season with a bitter taste in our mouths and just a real terrible feeling.”
Other notes from Yankees camp:
• Right-hander Eric Reyzelman, a non-roster invitee to spring training, suffered an allergic reaction before Wednesday’s workout and was admitted to a local hospital, where he was slated to stay overnight, according to a team spokesperson. Reyzelman, 23, was a fifth-round pick out of LSU in 2022. He recorded a 1.16 ERA in 31 games (one start) across three minor league levels last season, culminating with 23 appearances in Double-A.
• Boone said that Ben Rice is “definitely” in contention for the team’s backup catcher job but that the club doesn’t view him as solely a catcher. Rice, 25 and a catcher by trade, made his major league debut last season, appearing in 50 games but logging just one inning at catcher. He started 41 games at first base, batting .171 with seven home runs and a .613 OPS in 178 plate appearances as a rookie.
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Alden Gonzalez
The San Diego Padres filled a clear need in their starting rotation Wednesday, agreeing to terms on a four-year, $55 million contract with veteran right-hander Nick Pivetta, sources told ESPN’s Jeff Passan.
Pivetta’s deal, still pending the completion of a physical exam, includes opt-outs after the second and third seasons and is heavily backloaded. The contract will pay him a $3 million signing bonus and only a $1 million salary in 2025, then calls for salaries of $19 million, $14 million and $18 million from 2026 to 2028, sources told Passan.
The structure helps a Padres team that is trying to keep costs down for a second straight offseason and was already running a 2025 payroll of about $194 million, roughly a $30 million increase from where they were on Opening Day last year.
Pivetta, who will celebrate his 32nd birthday Friday, will likely slot in behind the Padres’ incumbent trio of Dylan Cease, Yu Darvish and Michael King, leaving Matt Waldron and Randy Vasquez, among others, to compete for the fifth spot.
One of few reliable starting pitchers remaining on the free agent market, Pivetta has been lauded for his durability, extension and propensity for missing bats.
With the Boston Red Sox over the past four seasons, he averaged 156 innings, posted a 4.33 ERA and struck out 26.9% of hitters. Last year, while posting a 4.14 ERA in 145⅔ innings, Pivetta finished with the lowest walk rate of his career at 6.1%.
Padres general manager A.J. Preller has navigated through a conservative, relatively quiet offseason since watching his team lose to the eventual World Series champion Los Angeles Dodgers in the National League Division Series.
Preller didn’t make an addition to his major league roster until bringing back catcher Elias Diaz at the end of January. Days ago, the team agreed to $1 million deals with Connor Joe and Jason Heyward, who will make up a left-field platoon.
The Pivetta deal, occurring at the start of spring training, represents the first big move of the Padres’ offseason. Given the absence of front-line starter Joe Musgrove, who will spend the year recovering from Tommy John surgery, it’s an important one.
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