After baseball’s winter hot stove raced to its end and teams finally solidified their Opening Day rosters, we can look back at the riches and debris and take stock of what went right and what went wrong in free agency.
In total, MLB franchises spent about $3.8 billion in free agency since the end of the World Series. Some of those deals will help push a team to the World Series. Some of them turned pretenders into contenders. Some of them hardened already stout clubs. Some of them pointed a team toward a hopeful future. And some of those deals, let’s be honest, will turn into mistakes.
Teams have been doling out bad free-agent contracts as long as there has been free agency. In some cases, clubs are close to getting out from under bad deals. In others, they’ve got years left to go. Some teams used this winter to add more bad contracts to rosters full of them. Other organizations have been more circumspect when handing out deals — or maybe just luckier.
But creativity can salvage a team. One team’s bad contract could be another’s salvation. The classic “change of scenery” trade is a time-honored idea in baseball.
For accounting purposes, here were the worst contracts for (almost) every team in the major leagues after that multi-billion-dollar winter — and what, if anything, they can do about them now.
Toronto Blue Jays
LHP Hyun-jin Ryu
2022: 2-0, 5.67 ERA over 27 innings
Remaining contract: One year, $20 million
Ryu was limited to just six starts in 2022 and none came after June 1. He underwent Tommy John surgery that month and is hoping to return this season. It’s a bummer situation. Ryu is an excellent pitcher. But elbow injuries are the Baba Yaga for pitchers, an ever-present danger. The Jays rolled craps on the final year of his contract. But even then, he could return by July, in plenty of time for a stretch run.
Is there a way out? This is a tough one. Sure, it only takes one team to bite (and they’d have to be getting a substantial amount of money along the way), but Ryu can also block a deal to eight teams. That combo is rough. Keeping him is a fine option, too.
Baltimore Orioles
None
The Orioles have just one (one!) guaranteed multi-year contract right now, and that’s James McCann. And the Mets are paying 80 percent of the remaining $24 million left on his contract. Baltimore is basically paying McCann $2.5 million for each of the next two years; if they wanted to move that (and it’s unlikely that they do), they’d have zero problems finding a taker.