Starting pitchers more valuable than ever at winter meetings – Blogging Sole

DALLAS – The enormity of Juan Soto‘s contract – spanning 15 years and guaranteeing $765 million, not a cent of which is deferred – brought an initial jolt to Major League Baseball’s winter meetings Sunday night. It was monumental and far-reaching, but it was also an exception, given the uniqueness of landing one of the greatest hitters in history in his mid-20s. As the days passed, subsequent trades took place and the offseason began to take shape. A more telling trend emerged at the sprawling Hilton hotel that hosted baseball’s annual gathering earlier this week.

A prominent agent put it succinctly Tuesday evening, in the middle of a lobby emptying after a series of dizzying transactions.

“Man,” he said, “the starting pitchers get paid.”

Hours earlier, Max Frit signed an eight-year, $218 million deal with the New York Yankeesblowing up the most famous projections. Later, Nathan Eovaldi got a three-year, $75 million contract to return to Texas Rangersmore than doubling his previous deal’s guarantee in the mid-30s. And just a day before, Alex Cobba 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’s not just top starters getting paid, but also innings eaters and reclamation projects, age be damned.

Fried, Eovaldi and Cobb followed a path already blazed by figures like Blake Snell (five years, $182 million with the Los Angeles Dodgers), Luis Severino (three years, $67 million with Athletics) and Matthew Boyd (two years, $29 million with the Chicago Cubs). Everyone did better than expected. Everyone raised a fundamental question:

Why, in an era where starting pitchers are increasingly relied upon, are they more expensive than ever?

Executives, agents and coaches interviewed in the 72 hours since baseball’s winter meetings discussed a range of theories.

One general manager noted that starting pitchers who can regularly go five to six innings and around 160 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 type of demand that can drive prices higher. Another highlighted the impact of big-market teams chasing high-profile free agents and how that affected those below them. Another specifically highlighted the New York Metswho gave Soto a record contract but could have set the tone in a different way – by signing Frankie Montas earlier this month to a two-year, $34 million deal that was considered in some circles an overpayment.

But most of the conversation has focused on the rapid rate of arm injuries that have plagued the industry and made teams hyper-paranoid about their starting pitching depth.

Nowadays, even more than before, we can never have enough.

“It used to be that teams felt good if they could go into a season with, I would say, seven or eight guys that they can count on to start games at the major league level, at least to some extent,” one official said. from the front office. “Now that number is like 11.”

The approach taken by two of the sport’s most successful franchises illustrates this.

The Yankees already had five solid players Gerrit Cole, Carlos Rodon, Luis Gil, Marcus Stroman And Clarke Schmidt — but Fried was their obvious pivot after missing out on Soto, enough to cross the $200 million threshold that few predicted for the soon-to-be 31-year-old southpaw. The Dodgers, who beat the Yankees in the World Series, had to find a rotation composed of Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Tyler Glasnow, Shohei Ohtani, Tony Gonsolin And Dustin Mayall while being backed by a pitching pipeline that has become the envy of the sport — and yet they focused on Snell early in the offseason.

“I know as a team we felt it more acutely,” said Dodgers general manager Brandon Gomes, whose club has dealt with numerous pitching injuries in 2024. “You feel like ‘to have depth that comes, and sometimes it maintains and sometimes it doesn’t. It’s a little scary of an unknown.

The rise in pitching injuries has raised alarms for nearly a decade, but a presentation at this week’s winter meetings put the situation in a new light. The sport’s 30 managers gathered in a conference room Wednesday morning as MLB officials walked them through the key findings of a yearlong study of pitcher injuries that involved input from more than 200 experts in various roles. One of the slides showed that surgeries to repair damaged ulnar collateral ligaments at the minor league level had nearly doubled in the past 10 years. Not only are today’s major league pitchers crumbling, but so are the foundations that underpin them.

A manager present said: “It was mind-blowing. »

The commercial market had not reached its full potential by the time most agents and industry executives boarded their flights home Wednesday afternoon. But it was expected to pick up again soon, especially when it came to starting pitchers. Teams seeking alternatives to higher free agent prices have expressed interest in Dylan Cease, Pablo Lopez, Framber Valdez, Jesus Luzardo And Luis Castillonames that are expected to gain popularity after Chicago Sox ace Garrett Hook was distributed to Boston Red Sox for an impressive number of prospects.

Two of the Red Sox’s division rivals, the Baltimore Orioles and the Toronto Blue Jaysare still looking for frontcourt starting pitchers. The Mets and San Francisco Giantstwo of the busiest teams of the offseason. The same goes for many others.

A dozen starting pitchers have signed for a total of $788.5 million through the first five weeks of this offseason, already about 63% of the spending in that department compared to last year – with Corbin Burnes it is still expected to exceed $200 million and Jack Flaherty, Sean Manaea, Nick Pivetta, Walker Bühler, Max Scherzer And Justin Verlander among the approximately 75 other entries available. And while the player pool is widely considered better than it was a year ago, and many executives caution that early deals tend to be inflated, raising the possibility that those who remain are not as successful, one thing is clear. :

Starting to throw, which is no longer fashionable in the modern game, remains a priority.