Nathan Eovaldi is headed back to Texas. The Rangers finalized the right-hander’s three-year free agent deal on Thursday evening. It’s reportedly a $75MM guarantee for the ACES client.
The deal includes a $12MM signing bonus that’ll be paid in $6MM in installments after the 2026 and ’27 seasons. Eovaldi’s salaries for the next three years will be $18MM, $25MM and $20MM, respectively. The backloaded contract affords Texas some short-term payroll flexibility. Eovaldi also gets a full no-trade clause.
It’s a somewhat shocking contract for the right-hander in a hot pitching market that has exceeded expectations across the board. Eovaldi is the latest pitcher to beat early offseason projections, and his guarantee significant outpaces the two-year, $44MM pact that MLBTR predicted for the righty as part of our annual Top 50 MLB Free Agents list. The fact that the Rangers went to a third year in order to land Eovaldi is particularly noteworthy, as it’s just the third time since 2010 that a pitcher entering his age-35 season or later has landed a guarantee longer than two years according to MLBTR’s Contract Tracker. Rich Hill’s three-year pact with the Dodgers is nearly a decade old at this point, and good a pitcher as Eovaldi is, he’s not a Hall of Fame-caliber talent like Max Scherzer and Jacob deGrom before him.
On the other hand, it’s worth pointing out that deGrom’s aforementioned contract was signed just two winters ago by the same Rangers club that has now brought Eovaldi back into the fold. That could suggest that Chris Young’s front office is simply more willing to roll the dice on aging pitchers they believe in compared to other organizations. If that’s the case, it’s certainly understandable that they’d choose Eovaldi to place that bet on. In his first two years with the club, the veteran right-hander provided much-needed stability to the club’s rotation with a 3.72 ERA (110 ERA+) and 3.86 FIP in 54 starts.
While those numbers may not immediately jump of the page, Eovaldi’s underlying metrics suggest he’s still among the better front-of-the-rotation options available this winter even as he starts to age. His 95.6mph average fastball velocity is still strong, and he’s still limiting walks (7.0% with the Rangers) and generating grounders (49.5% groundball rate) at a high clip. Those strong peripherals come in addition to his phenomenal resume in key moments. Eovaldi offered the Rangers a dominant six-start performance in the postseason as he helped lead the Rangers to the first World Series championship in franchise history back in 2023, when he pitched to a 2.95 ERA and struck out 26.8% of opponents in 36 2/3 innings of work to add to an impressive postseason resume from his years with the Red Sox.
It’s that stability the Rangers hope Eovaldi will continue to bring to the front of their rotation going forward. The club has a number of interesting options, ranging from the elite but oft-injured deGrom to exciting but unproven youngsters like Kumar Rocker and Jack Leiter. With Eovaldi and Andrew Heaney both ticketed for free agency this winter, however, the Rangers were left with zero pitchers who made even 20 starts for the club in 2024. That made adding a stable source of innings a priority for the club, and they’ve now done so by bringing Eovaldi back into the fold where he’ll head a rotation that also figures to feature some combination of deGrom, Rocker, Leiter, Jon Gray, Tyler Mahle, Cody Bradford, and Dane Dunning. It’s possible they’ll continue to add to that rotation mix, as Bob Nightengale of USA Today reported in the aftermath of Eovaldi’s decision that the Rangers hope to add another starter in addition to bullpen help this winter.
Those pursuits could come amid a bit of a budget crunch for the club. Reporting early this offseason suggested that the club could look to duck under the luxury tax threshold this winter. With Eovaldi back in the fold, RosterResource projects the club for a payroll just north of $219MM for tax purposes in 2025. That leaves the club with around $21MM in breathing room before they go over the first threshold, which is set at $241MM. Adding multiple relievers and another starter in free agency could be a tall order with that limited budget room unless the club is willing to deal salary elsewhere, though the trade market could also represent a way to add pitching talent at a lower financial cost.
Turning to the pitching market as a whole, the majority of top free agent starters are off the market at this point. Right-handers Corbin Burnes and Jack Flaherty are still available in terms of potential front-of-the-rotation arms, while mid-rotation pieces Sean Manaea and Nick Pivetta also remain available. Of that quartet, only Flaherty isn’t encumbered by a Qualifying Offer that would force acquiring clubs to forfeit draft capital and international bonus pool money in order to sign him. For clubs looking to avoid signing another club’s qualified free agent such as the Orioles, whiffing on Flaherty (and, in the case of Baltimore specifically, Burnes) would leave them forced to resort to back-end veterans such as Heaney and Jose Quintana or reclamation projects such as Walker Buehler in order to add starting pitching talent.
Robert Murray of FanSided first reported the Rangers were re-signing Eovaldi. Jeff Passan of ESPN was first with the three-year, $75MM terms. Evan Grant of the Dallas Morning News reported that it was a backloaded arrangement with an $18MM salary in year one. Jon Heyman of the New York Post had the specific salary breakdown and the no-trade clause.