San Francisco Giants free-agent profile: Corbin Burnes, RHP

I’ve been off social media for almost a month now, and I highly recommended it. I still don’t know the Niners score from Sunday, and I’ll have a private Monday Night Football party tonight. When it comes to current events, I’m completely oblivious, just an absolute moron. It’s bliss. Text me if the Yellowstone caldera blows.

And it means that when I go on vacation for a few days, all of the Hot Stove rumors start backing up on me. It’s like someone’s kinked the hose, and now that I’m back, I can let them rain down and soak me silly. Release the rumors!

There was one Giants rumor.

At least it was a good one. Corbin Burnes makes sense for a team trying to build a pitching-and-defense heavy team. He also makes sense for a team that let Blake Snell leave to sign with the Dodgers. “Hey, wait a sec? Can they do that? We should probably look for a good pitcher, too.”

Burnes will probably be the most expensive pitcher of the offseason, and if you’re skeptical that the Giants are truly interested, you should be. But every rumor is a palm tree on the horizon in the offseason desert. We’d be fools not to take a peek. There could be fresh water, you know.

Why the Giants would want Corbin Burnes

Look at all of the postseason teams for last season. There’s no way for the Giants to acquire three MVPs in their prime over the next five seasons. Not with that attitude. So forget about chasing the Dodgers. Instead, zoom in on some of the ones who weren’t consensus picks before the season started. Take a second to compare them to how the 2025 Giants are shaping up. Then ask how the Giants can ape the success of those teams.

The Royals are a decent place to start. They had an MVP-caliber position player, which helps an awful lot, but the rest of their lineup was mediocre at best. They made the postseason almost entirely through the strength of their rotation. The rest of their roster is an imperfect match, but you can start there. They spent money on the rotation last offseason, supplementing the pitchers they already had on hand, and the strategy took them to the playoffs.

Of course, there isn’t one correct path to the postseason. The Royals’ had the best rotation in baseball according to Wins Above Average, but the Reds had the second-best, and it didn’t help them. The Guardians had the second-worst rotation in baseball, but their bullpen was so good, they cruised into October. The Dodgers had the fifth-worst rotation in baseball, but their lineup was twice as good as the second-best lineup in the NL. The Orioles acquired an ace at great expense, and they made the postseason, so maybe that’s the correct formula. Except the Brewers traded that ace away, and they ran away with the NL Central. That ace happens to be the subject of this profile. Go figure.

Postseason teams are like a box of chocolates. Sometimes they’re filled with things you expect, and sometimes they’re filled with absolute poison, but they all made it into the box. One of them will give you digestion problems for years, and there isn’t a bidet powerful enough to make you whole again. But of all the templates, the Giants are closest to the pitching-and-defense model of the Royals. They aren’t going to get Bobby Witt Jr.-level production from anyone, but the easiest way to make up the difference is in the rotation.

The Brewers are coming to Oracle Park for a four-game series in April next season. Put yourself in the shoes of a Brewers fan and imagine a “Probable Pitchers” slate that looks like this:

Mon. — Logan Webb
Tues. — Corbin Burnes
Wed. — Robbie Ray
Thurs. — Hayden Birdsong

I’m assuming the Giants would want to keep lefties Ray and Kyle Harrison apart, but you can add Harrison into the mix if you want. Maybe the Giants sign two pitchers and have Birdsong and Harrison compete for the final spot. Maybe they’re bullish on the potential that Jordan Hicks showed in the first half, and they figure that another offseason of preparation will get him up to full strength. Regardless of how it’s filled out, it wouldn’t be a rotation that makes the Brewers or their fans feel comfortable.

Now imagine it’s not April, but October. That’s the dream.

And unlike goofs like Blake Snell 🙄🙄🙄, whom nobody ever wanted on the Giants anyway, Burnes can actually throw 200 innings in a season. The last start he missed was in May 2021, which was his Cy Young season. He’s made the NL All-Star team four seasons in a row, and he’s finished in the Cy Young top-10 five seasons in a row. He has all sorts of red ink (the good kind) on his Baseball Savant page, and his cutter/curve combo moves in directions that Webb’s pitches don’t, which seems like a perfect complement for a 1-2 punch.

If the Giants can get 60 starts out of Burnes and Webb, they have a shot. Maybe not to win the division, and maybe not a great shot, but they’ll have one. That’s a dream worth chasing, and it’s a dream worth paying for.

Also, my Simpsons references would increase 200 percent. I haven’t been this excited for a free agent since the Giants were interested in Hank Moleman.

Why the Giants wouldn’t want Corbin Burnes

Every free-agent ace is a looming disaster, and you know it. Look at some of the previous multi-year contracts teams handed out in free agency, like Gerrit Cole and Zack Wheeler. Disasters, all of them.

Well, that’s how it used to be, anyway. And while I would put Burnes up there with Cole as one of the few trustworthy pitchers worth gambling on, there’s evidence that teams should be more skeptical. Here’s Burnes’ strikeout rate over the last few seasons:

2021: 35.6 percent
2022: 30.5
2023: 25.5
2024: 23.1

His effectiveness? The same. The quality of contact against him? The same. His velocity? The same. He’s just missing fewer bats for whatever reason. It doesn’t have to scare you, but a little healthy skepticism wouldn’t hurt. Batters are swinging at his pitches outside of the strike zone even more than ever, so maybe that’s a part of it. He also got fewer called strikes than ever before, and that can explain a lot of the missing strikeouts away.

Still, it’s a trend that has to be considered. And that part about the velocity remaining constant was mostly true, but a closer look shows that he was near career lows in the second half of last season, and he was absolutely dreadful in August, with a 7.36 ERA. He rebounded for an excellent September, and he was outstanding in his only postseason start for the Orioles, so there were silver linings. Plus, it’s not like Burnes is like Jack Flaherty, whose effectiveness varies wildly depending on his velocity. Burnes is a pitcher’s pitcher, hitting spots and mixing things up. Throwing hard and getting whiffs isn’t his goal; they’re the byproduct of his goal. He seems like the kind of pitcher who might maintain effectiveness as he adjusts to lower velocity.

Still, fewer whiffs and second-half velocity weirdness is a noxious brew when it comes to five, six or seven years for a starting pitcher. Perseverating on the long-term effectiveness of starting pitchers is a great way to never sign a pitcher to a long-term contract, and they’ll all have warts if if the microscope is powerful enough, but Burnes has two of the concerns that should make you the most uncomfortable.

Burnes will also cost the Giants their second- and fifth-round picks in the 2025 draft, as well as $1 million from their international signing pool next period. Those aren’t minor concerns, pun intended, especially for a team that knows the only path toward NL West relevance runs through the farm system.

Verdict

Of course Burnes makes sense. Every really good player makes sense for the Giants, whose biggest problem is that they don’t have enough really good players. If I don’t copy and paste this part for my Max Fried profile, it’s only because I forgot. Yes, the Giants would be better with Good Player. They should sign him.

There’s something about the pairing of Burnes with Webb, though, that combines with the stable of interesting young arms to give the Giants a lot of flexibility. They wouldn’t have to scramble in the event of an injury, and they recoil in horror when another team asked for a promising young pitcher in trade. There’s no such thing as a predictable rotation, but some pitchers give you a better chance than most. Burnes is one of those pitchers.

Besides, Saint Mary’s College unleashed Patty Mills on the Bay Area, which was very rude. Without looking, I’m going to guess that he averaged 60 percent on threes against the Warriors. It’s time for them to make amends with a star alum in the Giants’ rotation. Here’s a very obvious, very exciting way to give back to their own community.