'Man, starting pitchers are getting PAID': Winter meetings show it's a good time to be an ace

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 breadth of 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.