Veteran Righties Roost Among the Great Lakes

DALLAS — The dawn of a new baseball season brings relief from the monotony of winter, hope for a successful campaign, and a multitude of questions in the vein of “Wait, where did Player X sign? How long has Player Y been on the Rays?”

In a (possibly vain) effort to head off those questions, here are some developments from the Winter Meetings: Alex Cobb has signed a one-year contract with the Detroit Tigers for $15 million, with an additional $2 million available through incentives. The details of the contract took a while to come out as Cobb took a physical; that’s a pro forma step in your garden variety free agent signing, but likely an adventure for Cobb. More straightforward: The Toronto Blue Jays have agreed to a two-year, $15 million pact with right-handed reliever Yimi García.

Both Cobb and García changed teams at the most recent trade deadline; in fact, García was traded by Toronto less than five months ago.

These older guys — Cobb just turned 37, García 34 — aren’t splashy names, but they’re the kind of pitcher every team needs to get through a season.

Cobb’s career has had a fascinating shape. We think of “injury-prone” pitchers as being recidivist Tommy John surgery recipients, or victims of thoracic outlet syndrome. This will be Cobb’s 15th season of major league experience. He made nine starts in his debut year, 2011, and 10 starts in the pandemic-shortened 2020 campaign. He’s made between 18 and 29 starts on nine occasions, spending the odd fortnight on the IL, usually with blisters or a cracked fingernail or the like.

But Cobb has made between zero and five starts in four different seasons. One of those was from a pretty milquetoast injury — a torn UCL — that managed to wipe out all of 2015 and most of 2016 due to his surgery coming in midseason. And in 2019 and 2024, Cobb was limited to three regular-season starts by a hip injury.

Nevertheless, Cobb continues to be valuable because when he’s healthy, he’s usually solid. Durable, even, by today’s standards. Despite all the nagging injuries and busted joints, Cobb has seven seasons of at least 130 innings in his career. And age hasn’t slowed him down too much. Since 2021, Cobb has a 3.75 ERA and 3.29 FIP in 410 2/3 innings. That’s 8.3 WAR total, for about the same innings-to-WAR ratio as Zac Gallen and Tanner Bibee.

Not that you’d put Cobb in the same conversation as someone like Gallen, but the Tigers don’t need him to be. They have the reigning AL Cy Young winner (Tarik Skubal), one of the most talented young starting pitchers in the league (Jackson Jobe), and plenty of depth in the form of Kenta Maeda, Reese Olson, Casey Mize, and a handful of former first-rounders on the 40-man roster.

At the end of July, the Guardians thought highly enough of Cobb to trade two prospects to get him, even though he hadn’t thrown a competitive pitch all season. And then Cobb went straight into the playoff rotation… and straight back out after he got hurt again. So there are risks here, obviously.

But that risk, best expressed by Cobb’s age and the shortness of his 2024 campaign, was apparently not enough to put Detroit off of offering him $15 million guaranteed, plus an additional $1 million each for passing the 140- and 150-inning thresholds. If he hits his incentives, Cobb will nearly double the AAV of the three-year, $28 million deal he signed with the Giants before the 2022 season.

For that matter, this is more guaranteed money than the Tigers gave Jack Flaherty a year ago, on one of the plushier pillow contracts of the 2023-24 offseason.

It’s enough to make a person go, “Huh?”

But that’s the state of starting pitching. The equally injury-prone Matthew Boyd nearly doubled the contract his ex-Guardians teammate Cobb (very, very briefly) received. Conversion project Clay Holmes is also beating Cobb’s previous contract, by $10 million. The Athletics, hailing from Parts Unknown, found $67 million in an envelope by the kitchen telephone and gave it to Luis Severino. Even at the top of the market, Max Fried is getting $218 million over eight years.

I’ve gotten pretty jaded about capitalism over the years, but the starting pitching market now is restoring my faith in the invisible hand. If you think of pitching as a resource, teams have gotten pretty profligate with it over the years. They’ve worn out and used up a ton of arms, and there just aren’t enough guys left to sacrifice to the God of Innings. Even as recently as 2022, $15 million a year over multiple seasons was enough to buy a reliable league-average starter.

Now, a one-year deal at that AAV will land a pitcher like Cobb, who has, I don’t know, a 60% chance of making 25 above-average starts.

That precious resource, having been used up, is now scarce. And after decades of regulatory capture, monopolism, cronyism, government bailouts, outright fraud, and class warfare, in this one specific sliver of the economy, we’re seeing that resource become incredibly expensive as it gets rarer. That’s supply and demand, baby, just like Father Guido Sarducci taught us.

God bless America.

God bless Canada, too, for that matter, because the Blue Jays (in addition to having a new star second baseman) have brought back a familiar bullpen workhorse.

García represents a contrast to Cobb not just in role, but in arsenal. While Cobb’s approach is fairly simple, García throws six, count ’em, six pitches, with multi-pitch mixes for each side of the plate.

Is it a bit belt-and-suspenders to have three breaking pitches for right-handed hitters? Maybe, but the Blue Jays don’t seem to be bothered.

García’s surface stats have been fine, but not special, in his career. But he’s been a favorite of contenders looking for bullpen help at the deadline. García languished as an up-and-down guy who got periodic low-leverage work for the Dodgers in his 20s. But from 2020 to 2022, he played for three different playoff teams: the Marlins, Astros, and Blue Jays. And this past July, the Mariners picked García up to bolster their own (ultimately unsuccessful) playoff push.

The by-then-moribund Blue Jays had little reason to keep this free agent-to-be, so a trade made lots of sense at the time. He looked like a deadline rental for Seattle, but now he’s that rarest of beasts: The trade deadline loanee. It’s the best dumb talk radio caller idea: Trade an upcoming free agent, then re-sign him once the season’s over.

It usually doesn’t work, obviously, but there are exceptions. Well, this one at least. And García probably isn’t the class of player people have in mind when they’re proposing that, like, the Astros do this with Kyle Tucker. Still, full credit for pulling it off.

The dollar figure — two years, $15 million — on García’s contract is intriguing as well, considering the other member of the 2024 Toronto bullpen who signed in the past 24 hours: Jordan Romano. Romano, the Blue Jays’ closer from 2021 to 2023, missed most of 2024 with an elbow injury that resulted in arthroscopic surgery. The Jays non-tendered him rather than go to an arbitration hearing that was projected to net a $7.75 million award.

The Phillies beat that number, with a one-year deal worth $8.5 million plus incentives. And one day later, the Jays agreed to a deal with a different right-handed reliever with whom they were already familiar. I doubt either team’s fortunes will rest entirely on their medium–to-high-leverage setup guys, but the proximity of these two pitchers in signing date and cost will make for an interesting ongoing contrast.

Neither Cobb nor García is a stop-the-presses signing — indeed, I claimed this post mostly to kill some dead time in the media workroom — but they’ll both be expected to pitch substantial innings at relatively high quality for teams with playoff aspirations. So it’s worth remembering these names, even if you need a refresher in April.

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