Get Your Relief Pitcher Transactions in Before It’s Too Late

During the last week of spring training, after rosters have been more or less settled, some teams will find they have more pitchers than they can use at the moment. There’s a no. 6 starter who’s pitched well enough to earn a job, but there’s no room for him on the roster and he’s out of options. Good news: Another team needs a pitcher and is willing to trade a minor league depth infielder, say, to jump the waiver line and trade for yours.

I find this process oddly heartwarming, because everyone benefits: Both teams get a more balanced roster, and the pitcher in question gets a spot on a major league roster instead of getting DFA’d. Professional baseball is usually a zero-sum competition, but that doesn’t mean you can’t help your friends out.

A couple pitchers you’ve all heard of are on the move. The Braves traded Ian Anderson to the Angels for José Suarez. Ryan Yarbrough, who opted out of his minor league contract with the Blue Jays, has found gainful employment with the Yankees.

Over on the other side of the country, some teams are happy with what they’ve got: The Diamondbacks signed 23-year-old reliever Justin Martinez to a contract extension that’ll buy out his remaining pre-free agency years and then some. Martinez will make $18 million over the next five seasons, with a pair of club options that could bring the total value of the contract up to $34 million over seven years.

Anderson is (and perhaps at this point will be) best remembered for his ridiculous rookie season and postseason heroics in 2020, which he followed up with a ridiculous second rookie season and further postseason heroics in 2021. (Thank you, COVID.) Over those two years, between the regular season and playoffs, opponents hit .158/.268/.282 with a 37.4% whiff rate against the young right-hander’s changeup.

To this day, Anderson has the third-lowest postseason ERA by a starting pitcher with at least seven playoff starts. Is that an arbitrary endpoint? Sure, but Christy Mathewson, Sandy Koufax, Stephen Strasburg, and Bob Gibson are nos. 1, 2, 5, and 8 on that list.

I wrote about this some earlier in the spring, but things went south for Anderson after that. He posted a 5.00 ERA in 2022, and hasn’t pitched a meaningful major league game since. In 2024, he posted a 3.44 ERA in 15 minor league starts (admittedly with a 10.1% walk rate); that, and a rebound in his fastball velocity meant he entered camp with a shot to make a slightly injury-depleted Braves rotation.

It was not to be. I’m usually indifferent to the point of ignorance when it comes to spring training stats, but Anderson walked 20 out of the 88 batters he faced this spring and struck out only 10. On the Joe Girardi Memorial “It’s Not What You Want” Scale, that’s about an 8.5. Anderson allowed only eight hits this spring, six of them singles, in 20 innings, which kept his ERA down to a respectable (if mystifying, given all the walks) 2.25.

Atlanta’s rotation might not be as much of a sure thing as the Chris Sale–Spencer Strider–Spencer Schwellenbach front end might lead you to believe, but the Braves still have too much depth and potential to tolerate a starter with that little command.

In return, Atlanta gets Suarez, a stocky, low-arm-slot lefty who’s actually been an effective major league starter more recently than Anderson. But after a decent 2022 (109 innings, 3.96 ERA, 1.6 WAR), Suarez has bounced from minors to majors and from rotation to bullpen. His peripherals have never been great, but in 2023 and 2024, his strand rate has collapsed and his BABIP has skyrocketed. Not that a 5.63 FIP in 86 innings over the past two seasons is great, but it’s not as bad as Suarez’s 6.91 ERA would make it look.

Despite appearances, Suarez isn’t really a lefty specialist candidate (for his career, left-handed batters have a .333 wOBA against him, compared to .356 by righties). But Atlanta has plenty of right-handed starters in their mid-20s. And most of those guys — Hurston Waldrep, AJ Smith-Shawver, Bryce Elder — have both a higher floor and a higher ceiling than Anderson does at this point in his career. By contrast, Atlanta has 20 relief pitchers either on its 40-man roster or its NRIs. Just four of them are left-handed, including Suarez. This trade is the baseball equivalent of going to lunch at a diner and trading your pickle for your friend’s coleslaw.

The Angels had six lefty relievers on their 40-man roster alone before they traded Suarez, for what it’s worth. According to manager Ron Washington, they’re at least thinking about trying Anderson out as a one-inning reliever. Not even in the Angels’ bullpen is a 20% walk rate acceptable, but sure, why not? Not like things can get any worse.

Speaking of which: Yarbrough has always been a favorite of mine. The lefty won 16 games as a rookie in 2018 as the Rays’ original post-opener bulk guy. He’s a throwback, a rubber-armed five-pitch junkballer who sprays five pitches all over the plate with varying movement and speed. The difference in horizontal movement between Yarbrough’s sinker and curveball can be as much as four feet.

Yarbrough’s four-seamer averaged just 86.7 mph last year, which was the third slowest in baseball behind only Tyler Rogers and Brent Suter. (Which is how you know you’re in real slop-tossing sicko territory. A hundred thousand guys in Jamie Moyer jerseys just stood up and saluted.) He misses bats about as much as you’d miss bats if you’d just had to pay an exterminator thousands of dollars to humanely clear out an infestation of actual bats in your attic. But he’s hard to square up; Yarbrough’s HardHit rate last year was 29.4%, which was fifth lowest in baseball. The two guys just ahead of him: Tanner Scott and Blake Snell.

Living and dying at the mercy of the BABIP gods, as Yarbrough does, can be a bit perilous. With the Dodgers last year, he survived a 13.9% strikeout rate to post a 3.74 ERA as a multi-inning reliever. Fearing that the run-and-a-half gap to Yarbrough’s FIP might slam shut with their fingers in it at an inopportune time, the Dodgers flipped the big lefty to Toronto at the deadline for his former teammate, Kevin Kiermaier.

After the trade, Yarbrough allowed only seven earned runs in 31 1/3 innings over 12 relief appearances — an ERA of 2.01, which made him something of a fan favorite. But it wasn’t enough to secure a second tour with the Jays, who cut him loose over the weekend.

Suffice it to say, Yarbrough landed on his feet. Quick: Name a team that’s desperate for bulk pitching, doesn’t mind unorthodox lefties, and has a thing for guys in their 30s? That’s right: the Yankees, who lavished a one-year, $2 million contract on Yarbrough, with an additional quarter million dollars available in incentives. Not a bad piece of business for someone who just got dumped from a minor league contract. He’ll get to pitch — a lot, I’d suspect — and if the Yankees’ injury situation doesn’t deteriorate any further, he might get a chance to play in the playoffs.

And hey, since we’re talking about the playoffs, let’s think back to what the Arizona Diamondbacks bullpen looked like the last time they were there. D-backs relievers threw 70 1/3 innings over four playoff rounds, and while they converted six of seven save attempts, their 3.58 team ERA did not make Torey Lovullo’s job easy.

Some of those pitchers are gone (Paul Sewald walked as a free agent; Miguel Castro got released; Andrew Saalfrank got suspended for gambling), but Ryan Thompson, Kevin Ginkel, and Joe Mantiply are still banging around in the middle innings.

What’s changed is the high-leverage group: big lefty A.J. Puk and 23-year-old righty Justin Martinez, who just signed that five-year extension. Martinez allowed 14 earned runs in 10 major league innings in 2023, and thus played no part in the run to the World Series. But in his first full major league season, 2024, Martinez posted a 2.48 ERA with 91 strikeouts in 72 2/3 innings.

Rookie middle relievers on non-playoff teams tend not to get too much shine, unless the rookie in question is Mason Miller and the team is extremely non-playoff. But Martinez throws 100 mph, with a power slider and a power splitter, both around 90 mph, both with whiff rates around 50%. Last season, 1,173 pitcher-pitch type combinations generated 100 or more swings. Of those, Martinez’s splitter was the sixth-most-whiffed-upon pitch, and his slider was 45th.

This contract buys out the remainder of Martinez’s team control for $18 million, and gives Arizona the ability to extend him into 2030 for $7 million, and into 2031 for $9 million. It’s a massive risk to give any rookie reliever a five-year guaranteed contract… well, I say “massive,” but $18 million spread over five seasons is peanuts to a big league team, so the risk of Martinez breaking down or flaming out is kind of baked in here. (If you want to know how substantial the flameout risk is for a hard-throwing rookie, Ctrl+F “Ian Anderson” in this post.)

Martinez could’ve made more by playing it straight through arbitration, perhaps even much more if he were to develop into a frontline closer. But he would’ve had to wait until 2026 before he got even early-arbitration money, and the salary ceiling for a team-controlled reliever isn’t as high as you’d think. Even Devin Williams is only making $8.6 million this season, his final year of arbitration. Martinez is slated to make $5.9 million in his equivalent season, so he’s taking a bit of a haircut there. But that’s assuming that a lot of things go right. Now, Martinez is guaranteed a seven-figure paycheck through the end of the decade, and instead of settling for around the league minimum, he’s making $1.9 million now. That’s a decent tradeoff for the rookie.

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