Sarris: 5 intriguing MLB free agents that represent a potential bargain

After the big meal on Thursday come the big sales on Friday. Then we’ll start seeing more free agents sign across baseball — but they won’t all come at Friday’s bargain prices. That said, even some of those top-shelf options will feature some bargains once all is said and done. Can we see some of those coming?

In order to get a sense of what might be a value, we have to start with some sort of price in front of us. Tim Britton’s contract projections for The Athletic give us that starting position in terms of cost for the free agents. FanGraphs’ projected wins above replacement framework gives us a way to gauge potential production. Using a standard half-win a year aging curve, we can get a crude sense of price per production over the lives of these contracts.

If you then put them on a table and then remove the players projected to be worse than average — role players that almost always look like bargains when you do this math, and yet are consistently valued that way by the market — then you can create a table that ostensibly shows you the best values in this market.

Player	Pos	proj. WAR	Britton $	$/WAR
Max Scherzer	SP	2	12	5.45
Gleyber Torres	2B	8	45	6.00
Ha-Seong Kim	SS	9	36	6.79
Nick Pivetta	SP	6	48	8.00
Nathan Eovaldi	SP	7	45	8.82
Blake Snell	SP	12	110	9.32
Jurickson Profar	LF	5	48	9.41
Christian Walker	1B	6	44	9.78
Alex Bregman	3B	16	189	11.25
Willy Adames	SS	13	150	11.63

Immediately we see some flaws with even this approach. Health is an open question for Max Scherzer after he struggled through a shortened 2024 season, and a projection that has him pitching 137 innings could be seen as overly optimistic by front offices. Declaring him a value would probably require access to documentation we don’t have.

Also, we used a standard half-win aging curve instead of tighter and more nuanced models used by teams. Those models can take all sorts of things into account, like bat speed, pitch shapes, foot speed and plate discipline, among other metrics. We know some of these things publicly, but here we’re using a hammer instead of a scalpel. We know that projections for players over 32 start to become less reliable just for these reasons, though, and that’s relevant to a couple players on this list.

Let’s pick a few off this list — plus a bonus — that could be good values going forward. In the past, when we tried this sort of exercise, we found Brandon Nimmo and Andrew Heaney in 2022, and Luis Severino and Reynaldo López last year. Maybe we’ll find just the right gift again for your favorite team today.

Gleyber Torres: 3 years, $45 million

Before we get to the flaws, let’s point out why Torres could be a good pickup at $45 million. For one, he’s well-rounded. Over the last three years, here are the only other players that put up 1,000 plate appearances and were above-average when it came to walking, striking out, stealing bases and barreling the ball: Juan Soto, Ronald Acuña Jr., Kyle Tucker, Francisco Lindor, Freddie Freeman, Lars Nootbaar, Mookie Betts, Ketel Marie, Brandon Nimmo and George Springer.

Yes, he’s probably closer to the median than many of these other guys, but he does have a well-rounded game.

So why might a 27-year-old middle infield free agent be in line for a more modest deal? Probably because some of his metrics are going the wrong direction already. He’s never been the best defensive second baseman, but those numbers are in decline. He also has been pulling the ball less and hitting the ball softer in the air with each year, leading to a spray chart that worked fine enough in New York, where the right-field porch is short:

But those home runs the opposite way might not be there for him in another park. The good news here is that Torres has still been able to hit the ball harder than 111 mph every year, suggesting that his bat speed is still there. So a new team may think they can coach Torres into more of a pull approach to better use that decent (if not plus) bat speed. In any case, Torres is a young second baseman projected to be well clear of average who has a well-rounded set of abilities.

Ha-Seong Kim: 2 years, $36 million

After offseason labrum surgery, Kim is now a free agent that represents an interesting risk-reward proposition. He is targeting mid-to-late April for a return, which means that his acquiring team will have to have a different Opening Day option at his position — likely a good plan anyway, given the trickiness of shoulder surgeries. On top of that, Kim has been below-average at hitting the ball hard before an injury that ranks near the top in terms of ramifications for power.

So that’s the bad news.

The good news is that power wasn’t really a huge part of his game, and in terms of making contact and taking walks and defending well, he has good peers. Over the last three years, only Adley Rutschman has had more defensive value and a better walk and strikeout rate than Kim, according to FanGraphs. Among middle infielders, only Marcus Semien and Francisco Lindor have been all that close to hitting those benchmarks. There’s evidence that today’s game puts more pressure on making contact and playing defense well in your thirties, too.

The fact remains that trying to find a shortstop in free agency is a tough thing to do. At 29, Willy Adames and Kim are probably the only starting shortstops on the free-agent board, and over the last three years, Trea Turner is the only shortstop who has put up multiple seasons that qualified for the batting title over the age of 30. In other words, shortstop is a position for young players. Kim’s excellent glove gives him a chance to man that position for a few more years and that’s going to be enough for contenders with a need at shortstop (like the Giants and Rays, perhaps) to take a two- or three-year plunge.

Nick Pivetta: 3 years, $48 million

Only Corbin Burnes has better stuff among free-agent starting pitchers, at least according to Stuff+. Pivetta struck out over 30 percent of the batters he’s faced over the last two years, something that only Garret Crochet, Tyler Glasnow, Blake Snell, Chris Sale and Tarik Skubal can say among starters who have thrown at least 150 innings during that same stretch. Pivetta doesn’t have a command problem, he excels at striking guys out and not walking them and the advanced stats like him, so why won’t he do better on the market?

Because all of those things have been true for a while now, and yet, he still hasn’t put up a seasonal ERA under four. Pivetta has pitched in some tough home parks, but his career ERA away from those parks is still over four. What’s the issue?

Only seven pitchers from that list above have given up more homers per nine innings — that’s the obvious flaw in the results. Each of those pitchers who rates well by stuff metrics still manages to give up a slugging percentage over .400. It’s not bad luck, either. A coming revamp of Stuff+ includes a statistic called xHR100, or expected homers allowed per 100 pitches. His .81 xHR rate puts him in the bottom third of the league, right next to Jose Quintana and Chris Flexen among starters. It’s possible that Pivetta’s high over the top arm angle telegraphs his high-rising four-seamer or that his whiff-chasing heat map also just leads to homers:

In the end, Pivetta is a high-stuff starter available at a back-end starter price. The team that gets him will think they have the right tweak to finally unlock a great season from his arm.

Christian Walker: 2 years, $44 million

At 33, it’s obvious that age will limit Walker’s next contract. He might end up replacing a first baseman in New York who was 33 at the beginning of the 2023 season and has hit .237/.315/.358 with 20 homers combined in two seasons since. Why would Walker suffer a better fate than Anthony Rizzo?

One thing that Walker has done better than the lefty in his career is hit the ball hard. Over the last three years, he has put up an 11.9 percent barrel rate and a 44 percent hard-hit rate, which puts him in the top third of the league in either stat. It’s also well ahead of the 7.2 percent barrel rate and 38 percent hard-hit rate that Rizzo was showing heading into his contract with the Yankees. Walker strikes out a bit more, and because of that and his fly ball rate, his batting average can fluctuate, but he seems a lock for 30 homers in a full season, and some team will take advantage of the opportunity even at his age.

Clay Holmes: 2 years, $20 milllion

For Yankees fans, the biggest stat might be the 13 blown saves Holmes put up last season, the most in baseball by a full five. In the postseason, he seemed to find his role, though, and that role might just make him the best setup man in baseball — or a closer somewhere other than New York. He can obviously keep the ball on the ground like no other, with the second-best ground-ball rate over the last three years, but he also misses bats. Only Jhoan Duran has also had a better than 60 percent ground-ball rate and an above-average strikeout rate.

Add it up, and it’s a great way to miss homers. Remember that expected home run rate? Here are the ten pitchers with the lowest xHR100 from last season.

Player	xHR100
Ben Joyce	0.337
Justin Martinez	0.360
Brendon Little	0.361
José Alvarado	0.382
Emmanuel Clase	0.390
Clay Holmes	0.399
Tyler Rogers	0.413
Jhoan Duran	0.415
Jose A. Ferrer	0.417
Tim Hill	0.424
Josh Hader	0.432