This post was submitted by Avi Miller (@AviMiIIer)
Corbin Burnes was reliably the ace of the Baltimore Orioles in 2024. He posted a 3.27 ERA over 194.1 innings, making all 32 of his starts when his turn in the rotation came up. Aside from a four-start stumble in August (20 ER in 20.2 IP), Burnes was as good as expected when the team made the trade for him from Milwaukee last winter. In his second-ever playoff start, he was brilliantly dominant in the Wild Card series, pitching into the ninth inning against the Royals & allowing just one run (never mind the overall outcome of the game).
Now Burnes enters free agency as the far and away best right-handed starting pitcher on the market in a league full of scrappy rotations pieced together haphazardly due to the ever growing number of elbow and shoulder injuries throughout the game.
The Orioles will presumably offer Burnes the Qualifying Offer (1-year, $21 million), he will reject it, and his free agency adventure will begin.
There’s a handful of factors in play when it comes to projecting a potential contract for Burnes this offseason. His age, statistics, overall body of work, comparable contracts in recent years, and the overall free agent market will be taken into account.
Taking a look at outcomes for premier starting pitchers with meaningful track records and no immediate health concerns, these are the most relevant to Burnes (3.7 fWAR in 2024) in nature:
- Aaron Nola | 2023 fWAR: 3.9 | Age: 31 | 7 years, $172 million (AAV: $24.6 million)
- Robbie Ray | 2021 fWAR: 3.9 | Age: 30 | 5 years, $115 million (AAV: $23 million)
- Carlos Rodón | 2022 fWAR: 6.2 | Age: 30 | 6 years, $162 million (AAV: $27 million)
- Zack Wheeler | 2019 fWAR: 4.2 | Age: 30 | 5 years, $118 million (AAV: $18 million)
- Zack Wheeler (extension) | 2023 fWAR: 5.9 | Age: 34 | 3 years, $126 million (AAV: $42 million)
Burnes will turn 30 years old in just over a week (on Oct. 22), putting him on the younger end of high-value free agent opportunities as well, especially considering the money given to Max Scherzer (3 years, $130 million at age 37) and Justin Verlander (3 years, $122 million at age 40) recently.
Others will try to point to Gerrit Cole’s 9-year, $324 million guarantee from the Yankees in 2020 as a more apt comparison. Cole was coming off of a 7.5 fWAR season in Houston, had a combined 16.8 fWAR in his three most recent seasons combined (compared to 11.7 for Burnes), and peripheral metrics like an elite strikeout rate that made him an attractive target for such a contract. Burnes has seen a steady decline in his strikeout rate over four seasons now, is a year older than Cole was at the time of that deal, and simply has not been as valuable as Cole was leading up to his free agency.
Instead, a more fitting starting point may be Aaron Nola. The commonalities between Nola and Burnes are alarmingly robust.
These are two workhorse pitchers that have stayed healthy and available for virtually their entire big league careers, pitching at well above average levels for their clubs to date. Both have seen consequential drops in strikeout rates over the past few years. Burnes comes with a higher velocity arsenal (97.0 mph sinker in 2024) compared to Nola (92.5 mph sinker in 2024), which has helped lead to a slightly better swing and miss rate, a lower hard-hit percentage, and in turn a sizably lower BABIP as well.
And those figures matter, as they impact on-field results and in turn are more prominent in larger sample sizes than anything else when it comes to showcasing success in run prevention.
Nola was the same age as Burnes is now when he signed his deal last November with the Phillies, having just received the qualifying offer to stay in Philadelphia just two weeks prior.
This year’s free agent class also includes Yusei Kikuchi (34 years old, 3.5 fWAR) and Max Fried (31 years old, 3.4 fWAR). Kikuchi is four years older than Burnes, Fried comes with a complicated injury history to date, and both are left handed. Burnes is the clear cut best right-handed starting pitcher option on the market this winter, and it’s not close. That fact will also take a role in his leverage with teams in negotiations.
Scott Boras, who represents both Burnes and Kikuchi, did notably run into concerning contract obstacles last winter, though, failing to secure long term deals for two of his top tier clients in Blake Snell and Jordan Montgomery.
Snell, coming off of a Cy Young Award in San Diego in 2023, settled on a 2-year, $62 million pact (with an opt out) with the Giants well into Spring Training. A week later, Montgomery was guaranteed just $25 million on a 1-year deal with the Diamondbacks (plus a vesting option) after running a 3.20 ERA and winning a World Series ring with the Rangers.
Taking Nola’s deal as a starting point for Burnes, the higher AAV of Rodón’s 2020 deal, and slight increases due to inflation, it is well within reason to expect the Orioles ace to secure a seven-year contract this offseason in the realm of $190-205 million.
The involuntary assumption for anybody around the Orioles in the past handful of decades is that Corbin Burnes will not return to Baltimore. The team has never shown an inclination of spending large sums on free agent pitching. The largest contracts given out to free agent starting pitchers in team history were to Alex Cobb ($57 million), Ubaldo Jimenez ($50 million), Sidney Ponson ($22.5 million), and Yovani Gallardo ($22 million).
Consider that if Burnes were to net north of $231.3 million in total this winter, that figure would surpass the amount of money the Orioles have spent in total on free agent starting pitching in franchise history.
