Top MLB free agents for the 2025-26 offseason: Kyle Tucker, Bo Bichette lead solid class

Cease’s 2022 season, when he posted a 2.20 ERA and ended up second in the AL Cy Young race with the White Sox, now looks like a huge outlier. His slider was the most valuable pitch in baseball in 2022 by Statcast’s data, worth 35 runs above average, and it was the most valuable pitch in MLB again in 2024 at +25 runs, but he hasn’t come close to that in any other season and doesn’t have another plus pitch to go with it.

His biggest selling point in free agency is his durability, as he’s made 32 or 33 starts every year for five straight years, and I believe he hasn’t missed a turn in the rotation since his promotion to the majors in July 2019. He’s had one of the worst strand rates among MLB starters in the last three years, as he’s been worse from the stretch over the course of his career, and has shown a small but consistent platoon split. He’s a mid-rotation starter who has the raw materials to put together another 5+ WAR season, but his baseline level is more around 2-3 wins, with the added value of the likelihood that he gives his team close to 200 innings.

Woodruff returned late in 2025 from shoulder surgery that also cost him all of the 2024 season, but then he suffered a lat strain in mid-September that ended his regular season and kept him out of the playoffs. He has a mutual option that I thought he was sure to decline, but after the second injury, I wonder if he’ll accept the $20 million and try to have a healthier 2026. The Brewers owe him $10 million regardless, so picking up another $10 million on their end of the option is a no-brainer. His velocity was down this year about 2.5 mph from where he sat in 2023, but he still had good ride on the pitch, and his changeup remains plus. Somehow, he turned that into the highest strikeout rate of his career, bearing in mind he threw about a third of a season’s worth of innings, and generated a lot of weak contact. I’m not sure how much to buy into the performance given where his stuff was, but you could also hope he gets a little more arm strength back with more time to work on strengthening the joint. He was a No. 2 starter for the three years before his injury, and even if he never gets back there, he should be a solid No. 4 as a floor.

Flaherty couldn’t repeat his strong 2024 season, but still had a solid year in the Tigers’ rotation, taking the ball 31 times, striking out 27.6 percent of batters he faced but with a big jump in his walk rate from a career-low 5.9 percent in 2024 to 8.7 percent. He was quite homer-prone for the second year in a row, which seems like it’s going to be a feature going forward. Flaherty was also awful in high-leverage spots, allowing a .333/.433/.605 line in such situations, which seems like a combination of bad luck and overuse of his four-seamer at those times. The four-seamer has never missed a ton of bats, but when he was sitting closer to 94 mph and had better command of it, the pitch was much more effective. In 2025, he had his lowest average four-seam velocity in any season, 92.9 mph, and allowed his highest hard-hit rate ever on the pitch at 47.7 percent. He can’t live in the middle of the zone with that pitch anymore, and he went to it too often in high-leverage spots. That’s a long way of saying I think he can be better than he was in 2025, at least halfway between what he produced in 2025 and what he produced in 2024 (3.1 bWAR/3.3 fWAR).

He’s made 86 starts over three years, with 161 and 162 innings in the past two seasons, and should at least provide some league-average work in the back half of a rotation. I think he gets paid more than that by a team that thinks they can unlock the 2024 version — lower walk rate, better pitch selection — and get more value. He has a $20 million player option but is likely to test the market.

Kelly will pitch at age 37 in 2026, but his performance this past year says he can still contribute at the back of someone’s rotation. His four-seamer and sinker are both pretty light, with the sinker getting the worst results he had on any pitch he used last year. He succeeds by working lower in the zone, limiting walks and leaning on his plus changeup, which has excellent fading action to generate whiffs and induce chases. There are warning signs, to be sure, as his velocity is trending down, and lefties tagged him for 17 homers and a .428 slugging percentage in 2025, the biggest platoon split he’d shown in the majors. I’d give him $8-12 million on a one-year deal to be my fourth starter, hoping for league-average work and some of the durability he’s shown since reaching the majors in 2019, with 150 or more innings five times in six full seasons.

Gallen finished among the top 5 in the NL Cy Young voting in 2022 and 2023, throwing 394 innings with a 3.04 ERA/3.16 FIP, production that was worth over 9 WAR in both formulas. He didn’t finish 2023 strongly, however, and hasn’t been the same guy since, as his four-seamer, once a dominant pitch, has become quite ordinary. It’s not showing up in the metrics — he’s down about a half a mile an hour, at most, and the induced vertical break hasn’t really changed — but the pitch doesn’t seem to have the same ‘rise,’ and the whiff rate on it went from about 19.5 percent in those two peak years to 13 percent since. He’s been durable, with only one IL stint for a hamstring strain in the last four years, which provides some value even at this reduced level of effectiveness. He’s probably not getting back to the 2022-23 peak without a significant change to his arsenal, which should put him more in line for fourth starter money and probably just a two-year deal.

Díaz will head to free agency if he declines, as expected, the two-year, $37 million player option in the huge contract the Mets gave him after the 2022 season. The 2025 season was his best since he signed the last deal and one of the best of his career, with a strikeout rate of 38 percent that was the second-best among MLB relievers last year, behind only Mason Miller. His velocity has been down since he missed the 2023 season, dropping from 99.1 mph in 2022 to 97.2 mph last year, with a similar drop on his slider, but both pitches remain plus with high whiff rates. The fastball gets tremendous run, and the slider is short but very deceptive, and even with a higher hard-hit rate last year (39.7 percent, his highest since 2019), he was still very effective because he missed more than enough bats. His only significant injury was as big a fluke as it gets, when he blew out his knee in a celebration during the 2023 World Baseball Classic, and perhaps that year off from pitching had a silver lining in giving his shoulder and elbow a break. I am skeptical of any reliever going into their 30s, and if Díaz loses any more stuff, in any dimension, he’s going to be a lot less effective in a big hurry. He’ll get way too long a contract, as the market continues to do with all capital-C Closers, even with the dismal history of four- and five-year deals for relievers.

Bieber’s results were just so-so in his return from Tommy John surgery, mostly because he was quite homer-prone (eight in 40 innings), but the underlying stuff looked good and his control was back as well. He also added a kick-change, a pitch that absolutely dies as it reaches the plate, and that gives him a potential out pitch, with a 39 percent whiff rate. That may matter if his command doesn’t get back to where it was pre-surgery; it still might, as he’s only thrown 40 innings plus the postseason, and isn’t even 20 months off the operation. He got hit harder in the zone in 2025, with more mistakes middle-middle, which isn’t the Bieber we all beliebed in. I think his reputation and the brief look at his stuff will lead to some three-year offers, so maybe he’ll finally get paid like he deserved to be when he was at his peak.

Iglesias’ velocity has been drifting down for a few years now, but the fastball is still wildly effective — his fastballs in total were worth +22 runs above average in 2025, per Statcast — and he pairs it with an above-average changeup. He’s also held up extraordinarily well for a reliever, throwing at least 55 innings in every full season since he moved to the bullpen in 2016. And he throws strikes, never walking even as many as 9 percent of batters in any year. It’ll work until it doesn’t, probably when his fastball eventually drops too much to miss bats in the zone. He’s at 18.8 career bWAR already, which is more than two-thirds of the way to Billy Wagner’s career total, and Wagner’s in the Hall of Fame.

The Padres gave Suarez a five-year deal off his 2022 MLB rookie season, which came after he’d pitched six seasons in NPB, so he was already 31 and pretty well developed by the time he reached the majors. That contract included two player options, so it will turn into a three-year deal when Suarez opts out this winter, as expected. It sort of worked out for San Diego as Suarez gave them 4.4 bWAR/2.8 fWAR over 162 innings for $30 million guaranteed. Suarez heads to free agency off his best season, with a career-low (in MLB) walk rate of 5.9 percent and his second-best strikeout rate. It’s a pretty easy 98-100 mph with ride and a little arm-side run, made harder to hit by his 6.8-foot extension out front and the added deception of a solid, if hard changeup. In addition, hitters just can’t seem to pull the heater in the air: Right-handed hitters put 80 of Suarez’s fastballs into play last year, and only five went to left field. He’s walking away from two years, $20 million; that’s about what I think he should get, but I think the market will give him three or four years with more like ‘closer’ money.

Eflin’s three-year deal expired at the end of 2025; he generated 6.3 bWAR/7.7 fWAR in the first two years, but three injury-list stints and a back injury significant enough to require surgery made him below replacement level this past season. His four-seamer went from a solid-average pitch to try to set up his other weapons, especially his plus changeup, to an environmental hazard, with a hard-hit rate against the four-seamer of 61.9 percent. He didn’t pitch enough to qualify for the Statcast leaderboards, but among qualifiers, only one pitcher allowed a worse hard-hit rate on any pitch (Sandy Alcantara, 62.3 percent on his four-seamer). There’s a very good chance we see the previous version of Eflin again, where he’s leaning more on his cutter and changeup, both of which were plus pitches prior to 2025, with a fringy curveball and a four-seamer that he can throw for strikes without giving up too much damage. He’d been a mid-rotation starter for about seven years; as long as he’s fully healthy, I expect he’ll be one again, although he might end up taking a one-year offer to reestablish his value as a 2-3 win pitcher.

I guess you’re never too old to learn a new pitch: Verlander added a different curveball in 2025 and it was his best pitch by Statcast’s Run Value, at +7 runs, and had the highest whiff rate of anything he threw. (Statcast calls it a sweeper, by shape, but Verlander has called it a curveball, and it certainly looks like a curveball with a near 12/6 break.) It’s not a plus pitch, but gives him a different look, with harder velocity than old Uncle Charlie, helping him get more whiffs in the zone than he does on the traditional curveball and almost as many as he does on the true slider. There’s some bad news, though, as hitters made more hard contact against Verlander overall in 2025, and they’re hitting him more when he’s in the zone because he’s lost velocity and movement with age. (Haven’t we all, though?) The second curve helps, as does his increased changeup usage in the last two seasons. A year ago, I thought this would be his swan song, but he threw the grim reaper a sweeper and bought himself another yeeper … sorry, year.

Littell finished the year with a career-best 186 2/3 innings, ranking 11th in MLB, with a 3.2 bWAR/1.5 fWAR season that included a trade to a very unfavorable ballpark in Cincinnati. He’s almost an anachronism, a finesse guy with extreme control, posting the lowest walk rate of any qualifying starter — or any pitcher with even 120 innings — in 2025 at 4.2 percent. His ERA of 3.81 had a good bit of luck in it, as he stranded 81.2 percent of runners and allowed a BABIP of .249 that was way below both his career average (.301) and the MLB average (.291), which is why there’s such a wide gap between his two WAR measurements. He has some decent secondary weapons, with an above-average splitter that has decent bottom to it and an average slider, but it really comes down to his ability to limit walks. He’s such a soft-tosser, averaging 91-92 with below-average movement, that if his control ever wavers, he might not be a starter any longer. He was underpaid by a lot last year at $6 million; I’d give him two years and twice that salary, just trying to limit the chances of being around if his walk rate starts drifting up.

Bassitt just keeps rolling along, making 30 or more starts in four straight years, reaching 170 innings in all four of those seasons as well, and in 2025 he even brought his walk rate back down and his groundball rate back up after a blip in the prior campaign. His one real weakness is left-handed batters, as he doesn’t have a good enough pitch to keep his platoon split down; lefties hit .283/.352/.461 off him in 2025, which was actually a mild improvement from the year before, and at his age (turns 37 in February) he’s not likely to get better in this department. He’s been durable, he throws strikes and he does well enough against right-handed batters that the platoon split hasn’t killed him yet. I’d go one year on a contract just because of his age, but the $21 million he earned from the Blue Jays this past season seems about right.

King made only 15 starts in 2025 due to a shoulder impingement and a knee injury, and when he returned late in the season he wasn’t his usual self, struggling to get his normal sink on his two-seamer or locate within the strike zone. He had a $15 million mutual option with a $3.75 million buyout for the team’s side; despite two injuries and the poor showing later in the year, King declined his half of the option and is officially a free agent. He’s a sinker/changeup guy who picked up velocity after returning from 2022 surgery to repair a fractured olecranon in his throwing elbow, and who always pitched above the quality of his stuff thanks to a lower release height that gives him added deception. The 2023-24 version of King was a $25 million/year pitcher, at the least. I’m not sure what the odds are that he comes back to full strength after an offseason to rest the shoulder and the knee.

Imai has had a ton of success in NPB, with a 2.14 ERA in 337 innings over the last two seasons and a 27 percent strikeout rate. His stuff was down slightly in 2025, but he compensated with the best walk rate of his career, just 7 percent, down from as high as 14 percent back in 2021. He does it with deception: he has a low three-quarters arm slot with an extremely low release height, helped by the fact that he is pretty tiny by MLB starter standards, and his fastball is just average if not a tick below. The pitch everyone calls a slider looks a lot more like a screwball to me, as he turns his wrist the opposite way from a slider release, and the pitch has the sharp arm-side break of a screwball to make Carl Hubbell proud. He also added a forkball-style splitter in the last year or so, gripping the pitch between his middle and ring fingers, and he gets an unusually high spin rate on it. The screwball and forkball both generated whiff rates over 40 percent in 2025, and if he has success in MLB it’ll be because of those pitches. He’s really quite small for a starter, and his height along with where he releases the ball mean his four-seamer is very flat, which often leads to a pitch becoming homer-prone in the majors. There’s probably a mid-rotation starter formula here, especially the first time around the league as hitters have zero history with him, but there’s definitely the downside of a guy who’s going to allow too much hard contact on the heater to stay a starter.

Williams’ one year in the Bronx didn’t look great on the surface, with a 4.79 ERA and -0.2 bWAR, but there was more noise than signal in there — 45 percent of the batters he allowed on base eventually scored, and his .299 BABIP allowed was his worst since 2021. Of more concern is that his fastball is backing up just enough to cut into his strikeout rate, dropping it to a career-low 34.7 percent. His changeup, the “Airbender”, is still an elite pitch by results or metrics, although unless you’re Tommy Kahnle, your changeup’s effectiveness is tied to the strength of your fastball. I never advise investing in relievers for the long term because their attrition rate is so high, but I’d be fine giving Williams two years and so-called ‘closer money’ to see if regression to the mean (and to that 2.68 FIP) sets in.

Taiwanese players tend to come to MLB either by signing as amateurs or after a stint in Japan, so Hsu will be an unusual case if he ends up signing with an MLB club now — he’s 25 and has only pitched in Taiwan’s top league, the CPBL, where he had the best strikeout rate and strikeout/walk ratio among all starters this past season. He’s 95-98 with up to 21 inches of induced vertical break, helping him compensate for his diminutive stature (listed at 5-10), with an above-average changeup, a cutter and a show-me curveball, enough of an arsenal to send him out as a starter. He missed 2022 and much of 2023 while recovering from Tommy John surgery, and his 114 innings in 19 starts were both career highs to date. He doesn’t spin the ball particularly well, which is probably why he’s settled on a cutter as the third pitch, and between that and his height there is some reliever risk here. The delivery’s fine and he certainly can find the strike zone; with the quality of the fastball he could be a mid-rotation guy, and I would absolutely sign him with the full intention of starting him.

Martinez accepted the qualifying offer from the Reds last November, eschewing free agency and ensuring that he could go back on the market this offseason without the draft pick compensation attached to him. His 2025 performance was actually his worst by ERA since he returned from four years in NPB in 2022, and probably further underscores that his best role is as a swingman, rather than primarily a starter as the Reds used him. He’s a serviceable fifth or sixth starter, but the more he’s worked in the rotation the worse his performance there has become. In the last four years, he has a lower ERA in relief (2.94 versus 4.11), a higher strikeout rate (21.7 percent to 19.1 percent), and lower walk rate (5.8 percent to 6.8 percent). It’s hardly rocket science; he throws harder in relief, nearly a full mile per hour, and he gets more whiffs on his out-pitch, the circle change, in relief too. There’s a lot of hidden value in a pitcher who can move back and forth as Martinez did, and do so over a very high workload for a swingman (165 innings this year, a career high), so even off his down year he should still get one- or two-year offers in that $20 million/year range.

Houser is finally reaching free agency 15 years after the Astros took him in the second round of the 2011 draft, the same draft class that produced fellow Oklahoma high school pitchers Dylan Bundy and Archie Bradley, both now out of baseball entirely. Houser started 2025 in the Rangers’ system after signing with Texas as a minor-league free agent. He was released in May and then signed with the White Sox, after which point he had the best season of his career: 2.3 fWAR/3.3 bWAR, with a 3.31 ERA and 3.81 FIP over 125 innings, the last of which is the second-highest total he’s posted in the majors. He’s never had a significant arm injury, with just one IL stint for anything related to his elbow or shoulder in the big leagues, and he’s generally efficient as a sinkerballer who posts above-average walk rates. He doesn’t have an out pitch, however, even though the curveball looks like it could be one, and he doesn’t have a good enough pitch for lefties, with a .282/.367/.456 line allowed to left-handed hitters in his career that was still in evidence in 2025. He’s a fifth starter as-is, with some value from his durability, although he could be more if he found a more viable changeup or splitter.

When Giolito reached 140 innings on the season in mid-September, it seemed like a dead certainty that he’d decline his newly vested player option to return to free agency, coming off his best year since 2021. His elbow, surgically repaired for the second time before the 2024 season, flared up in late September, shelving him for the rest of the season, although he has no structural damage and was told to stop pitching to allow the inflammation to recede. Prior to that, his velocity was a shade above where we last saw it prior to the surgery, and his issues keeping four-seamers from resulting in home runs from 2023 didn’t appear at all in 2025. However, his changeup, once a plus pitch, lacked its usual depth, and even the new slider the Red Sox helped him add didn’t give him an above-average breaking ball. That pitch doesn’t have a ton of spin or break, but the pitch makes up for it with more velocity, peaking at 90.4 mph where it looks and functions as much like a cutter as it does a slider. (Pitch nomenclature has become a very slippery thing.) He’s probably a league-average starter if everything clicks, especially if he can bring his walk rate down a little more in his second year back from the surgery, but some of the underlying data point to regression from his strong 2025, and on top of that I assume teams will want to discount him because of the elbow issues at year-end. He’s better than the one-year, make-good class of free agent starters, but probably is looking at two-year deals as he did after 2023.

We’ll see if Civale ends up just “the guy who was traded for Andrew Vaughn,” but for now, he’s a serviceable back-of-the-rotation starter who throws strikes and is a little too homer-prone to be more than anyone’s fourth starter — and probably a fifth starter on a contending team. His arm slot drifted downward a little last year and it seems like he got on the side of the ball a lot more than usual, making several of his pitches less effective than they were the year or two prior. Maybe just getting his arm back up will help; he seems to have at least three average pitches in the cutter, changeup and his seldom-used slider to keep him as an innings-eater who’s a little below league-average — or maybe he’ll go to the bullpen, where he pitched very well in a short stint for the Cubs to end the season. He’s a one-year contract guy either way.

Mahle hasn’t had a healthy season since his big breakout year in 2021, when he threw 180 innings and tied for the league lead with 33 starts. Since then, he’s hit the IL with shoulder soreness in three separate seasons, missing over three months due to that reason in 2025, and had Tommy John surgery that wiped out nearly all of 2023. The good news is he pitched quite well this past year before and after the IL stint, and his velocity was pretty similar post-injury (92 mph on the four-seamer prior, 91.4 in two starts after), so he heads to free agency on a reasonably positive note. His 2025 performance was fairly lucky, with a .260 BABIP and 85 percent strand rate giving him an ERA more than a run below his FIP and two runs below more advanced ERA estimators. He’s qualified for the ERA title just that one time, and his 86 1/3 innings last year marked his highest since 2022, so I would value him as someone who might throw 100 innings and maybe 16-20 starts, pitching around a league-average level (4.36 xERA last year). That’s probably a one-year, $10-12 million guy, maybe getting creative to give him a bunch of salary escalators as his innings total increases so everyone wins.

Takahashi went to Driveline three years ago and saw his velocity jump, although it hasn’t translated into strikeouts. His career-high strikeout rate was 20 percent back in 2020, and it dropped to 14.3 percent this past season. He’ll show an above-average slider and splitter, coming from a three-quarters slot with a very clean delivery where he gets on top of the ball well, pitching more north-south than east-west. He’s succeeded in Japan, albeit more as a league-average guy lately, because he doesn’t walk many and he has very good feel for using all of his pitches to try to limit hard contact. That’s a formula that hasn’t historically worked that well for pitchers coming to MLB from overseas; Tomoyuki Sugano was also a feel/command guy who had even lower walk rates than Takahashi, and he became very homer-prone as his first MLB season went along. As is, Takahashi’s probably a good fifth starter, but he’d need another pitch or a significant improvement to one of his existing ones to be more.