Alden Gonzalez, ESPN staff writer
DALLAS — The sheer size of Juan Soto’s contract — 15 years, $765 million guaranteed, with not a cent extended — provided the initial shock to Major League Baseball’s Winter Meetings on Sunday night. It was monumental and impactful, but also an outlier given the uniqueness of acquiring one of the greatest hitters in history in his early 20s. As the days wore on, subsequent trades were made and the offseason began to get official, a more revealing trend emerged earlier this week at the massive Hilton hotel that hosted baseball’s annual gathering.
One prominent broker put it succinctly in the middle of an empty hall Tuesday night after a dizzying round of trading.
“Man,” he said, “starting pitchers are getting more and more Paid“.
Hours earlier, Max Fried defied even the most credible predictions by signing an eight-year, $218 million contract with the New York Yankees. Later, Nathan Eovaldi was offered a three-year, $75 million contract to return to the Texas Rangers, more than his contract guaranteed in his 30s More than doubled. Just a day earlier, 37-year-old Alex Cobb, who made three starts last season due to a series of injuries, signed a $15 million deal with the Detroit Tigers. A one-year contract suggests otherwise. Only the top starters get paid, but the inning-eaters and reclamation projects are also getting older.
Fried, Eovaldi and Cobb follow Blake Snell (five years with the Los Angeles Dodgers, earning $182 million), Luis Severino (three years with the Athletics, earning $6,700). A path already charted by the likes of Matthew Boyd ($67 million in three years with the Los Angeles Dodgers). year, contributed $29 million to the Chicago Cubs). All of them performed better than expected. All of this raises a basic question:
Why are starting pitchers more expensive than ever when expectations for them have never diminished?
Executives, agents and coaches surveyed during the 72 hours leading up to baseball’s winter meetings came up with a variety of theories.
One general manager pointed out that starting pitchers who can consistently handle 5 to 6 innings and 160 or so innings over a six-month season are just as important, even in an era of high bullpen usage – they’re just more rare, Inducing the type of demand that can lead to price increases. Another pointed out the impact of big-market teams chasing top free agents and how that affects those below them. Another singled out the New York Mets, who gave Soto a record-breaking contract but may have set the tone in a different way — signing Frankie Montas earlier this month. Signed a two-year, $34 million contract that some thought was the right deal. Circle as overpayment.
But most of the conversation returns to the rapid onset of arm injuries that have plagued the industry and made teams overly paranoid about their starting pitching depth.
Today, more than ever, “enough is not enough.”
“It used to be that teams would feel good if they could have seven or eight players in a season that they could count on to at least start at the major league level in some capacity,” one front-office executive said. “Now the number is about 11.”
The approach taken by two of the most successful teams in the sport illustrates this point.
The Yankees already have a solid five of Gerrit Cole, Carlos Rodon, Luis Gil, Marcus Stroman and Clark Schmidt, but after missing out on Soto, Vernon Reed was clearly their linchpin, enough to cross the $200 million threshold that few saw coming. -31 years old, left-handed. The Dodgers, who defeated the Yankees in the World Series, will return a rotation that features Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Tyler Glasnow, Shohei Ohtani, Tony Gonsolin and Dustin May, while getting the players who made the sport famous. Envy of pitching staff support — yet they targeted Snell at the start of the offseason.
“I know as a team we’re feeling it more acutely,” said Dodgers general manager Brandon Gomez, whose club has suffered a series of pitching injuries in 2024. “You feel like you have depth, and sometimes it holds and sometimes it doesn’t, and it’s a little bit scary about the unknown.”
The rise in pitcher injuries has been sounding alarm bells for nearly a decade, but a presentation at this week’s Winter Meetings shed new light on the issue. 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 more than 200 experts at various positions. opinions. One of the slides showed that surgeries to repair damaged ulnar collateral ligaments at the minor league level have essentially doubled in the past 10 years. Not only are major league pitchers broken now, but so is the foundation behind them.
One manager in attendance said: “It was shocking.”
When most of the industry’s agents and executives boarded flights home on Wednesday afternoon, the trade market had not yet fully tilted. But the expectation is that this situation will improve soon, especially as it relates to starting pitching. Teams looking for alternatives to higher free agent prices have expressed interest in Dylan Cez, Pablo Lopez, Franber Valdez, Jesus Luzardo and Luis Castillo , these names should get more attention after Chicago White Sox ace Garrett Crochet was traded to the Boston Red Sox for a huge price. An impressive prospect.
The Red Sox’s two division rivals, the Baltimore Orioles and Toronto Blue Jays, are still looking for frontline starting pitchers. The Mets and San Francisco Giants are also two of the busiest teams in the offseason. So did many others.
More than a dozen starting pitchers have been signed for a combined $788.5 million through the first five weeks of the offseason, already about 63% of what the department spent last year — with Corbin Burnes expected to exceed $200 million , the signing value of Jack Flaherty and Sean Maneaea will exceed $200 million. , Nick Pivetta, Walker Buehler, Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander, among about 75 other starters. While the player pool is generally believed to be in better shape than it was a year ago, and many executives will warn that early trades tend to be inflated, which can lead to underperformance from the players who remain, one thing is clear:
Starting pitchers have fallen out of fashion in the modern game, but are still very expensive.
