If you’re a Milwaukee Brewers fan, you probably know the volume and quality of Colin Rea’s work the past two seasons. Last season, only 58 pitchers qualified for the ERA title, and Rea was among them. Over the past two seasons, Rea is second among Brewers pitchers in starts, innings, wins, and strikeouts, trailing only Freddy Peralta in those categories.
If you’re not a Brewers fan, you might have seen the news that Rea signed with the Cubs and thought, “Oh, is this guy the Padres tried to trade with a torn UCL? Is he back from Japan?”
In an offseason defined by the scarcity of starting pitching, it’s a bit jarring to see a starter sign for one year and $5 million. Especially one who just threw 167 2/3 innings in 2024. There aren’t enough of those guys in the entire league for every team to have two. Roughly 15 times as many people summited Mt. Everest in 2024 as qualified for the major league ERA title. And Rea got just $5 million? What gives?
Let’s say you want to sign a starting pitcher to a one-year contract. Which is all the Cubs really need, if we’re being honest. They let Kyle Hendricks walk, but they also brought over Cody Poteet in the Cody Bellinger trade; when I wrote about that deal back in December, I mentioned that the Cubs didn’t really seem to need Poteet all that much.
With the caveat that you can never have too much starting pitching, Chicago’s rotation does seem pretty deep. The Cubs are returning four pitchers who threw 130 or more innings last year; some of them — Justin Steele, Shota Imanaga, maybe Jameson Taillon — are pretty good. I don’t think there’s a bona fide ace in there, but you could start those guys in a playoff game.
Speaking of starting playoff games, the Cubs also added lefty Matthew Boyd. The veteran made only eight regular-season starts in 2024, but he took the rubber in three postseason games for the Guardians. Incidentally, the Cubs’ rotation collectively has the same playoff record as 2024 Boyd — three starts, zero wins — across the past seven seasons.
Add in Javier Assad — whom I love, even as I enter Year Three of waiting for the other shoe to drop — and there’s your five-man rotation. And if any of those guys get hurt or forget how to throw strikes, Chicago has another rotation’s worth of depth, ranging from guys who own a glove and have presumably seen a jar of giardiniera in person (Poteet, Jordan Wicks) to actual prospects like Cade Horton.
Would signing someone like Jack Flaherty make the Cubs better? Certainly. Enough to justify the expense for a team that’s apparently willing to fight Kyle Tucker for the last couple million dollars in arbitration? Probably not.
I speculated that Poteet could be as low as 10th on the team’s starting pitcher depth chart. Rea is better and will likely be higher. But I doubt that Chicago’s Plan A involves Rea matching his 2024 innings total. Instead, he’s an old-school no. 5 starter. Someone to go five-and-dive once a week, or fill in when injury or fatigue demands it.
A proven front-end starter like Corbin Burnes, Blake Snell, or Max Fried costs in the $200 million range in this market, and even then all of those guys have question marks. Second-tier starters with playoff experience cost in excess of $20 million a year, often on multi-year contracts. To get a starting pitcher with any kind of upside, the price is a multi-year contract, $15 million a year, or both. And that seems to involve taking on huge risk in terms of injury, age, and/or performance. Trevor Williams and Patrick Sandoval got multi-year contracts.
If Rea possesses such upside, it’s not immediately obvious to me. He threw six pitches in 2024, and while he managed to put a wide variety of movement on his various offerings, none of them stood out; PitchingBot rated all of them between 37 and 44 on the 20-80 scouting scale. Baseball Savant had all six pitches within two runs of average. He managed an opponent wOBA under .250 only on his sweeper, and a whiff rate over 25% only on his splitter, though hitters slugged .492 overall against that pitch.
The one place Rea excelled was in command and control: He walked just 6.0% of opponents. Which you could’ve guessed, because guys who throw 92 and don’t miss bats only get signed to major league contracts if they throw strikes. (Guys who throw 92, don’t miss bats, and walk a bunch of guys are known as real estate agents.) That 4.29 ERA and 4.75 FIP Rea posted in 2024 are in line with his numbers from 2023, and if he repeats the trick in 2025 I imagine everyone will be satisfied.
That isn’t all that interesting in a vacuum, but it’s yet another illustration of how expensive competent starting pitching has become.
A team that wants a no. 5 starter — or a no. 6 starter, given the shape of modern pitcher usage — will find itself in a bit of a bind. Basically anyone with the capacity to be more than a no. 5 starter, if not homegrown, will have the leverage to demand a bigger role and the salary that comes with it. You can still find a replacement-level pitcher pretty easily, but the starter who’s just a little bit better than that? To paraphrase the great English poet Yusuf Islam: The first win above replacement is the most expensive.
So far this offseason, 15 starting pitchers who appeared in the majors last year have signed one-year free agent contracts. Here they are, along with selected 2024 stats and their projected 2025 WAR.
Innings Are Expensive, Even in Bulk
So unless you want to stand vigil at the lighthouse waiting for Adrian Houser to put it all together, this is the market. And hey, one way to look at it is that Rea was better than Justin Verlander last season, in a much higher volume, and the Cubs got him for a third of what the Giants paid Verlander. You know what? Let’s look at it that way. That seems like fun.
