It’s the time of year for dreaming about how and where our favorite teams might improve if only they sign the right free agents. And maybe fans don’t care whether the signing is a technically sound and efficient one for the team’s front office; they just want the best players. But one good signing — a free agent who signs and gives the expected production, or better, at the right price and at the right position — makes the team’s next signing more likely. Wins put butts in the seats, get teams to the playoffs, and both mean more revenue for the future. An inefficient signing chews up money without helping the team and sends the organization in the other direction.
So, which free agents out there could be the kind that cost a just-right amount and help the signing team move forward?
We don’t know yet how much each free agent will get this winter, but we do have two sets of good contract projections on The Athletic that we can use as a guidepost, thanks to Tim Britton and Jim Bowden. Using those projections as an idea of how much each player might command in free agency, here are four players who could be the best free-agent additions in terms of likely return on investment.
Tatsuya Imai, SP
Bowden’s figures came in below Britton’s, on average, but even Bowden’s seven-year, $154 million projection for Imai is not cheap for a player who has never pitched in Major League Baseball. His strikeout-minus-walk totals in Japan were good but not great — on par with Yusei Kikuchi and Kenta Maeda on a three-year level, closer to Masahiro Tanaka’s numbers if you just look at his platform year. If Imai is as good as Tanaka (who came over to MLB three years younger than Imai), then Imai will be worth every bit of that money and more. If he comes over and is as good as Kikuchi, who made the switch from NPB to MLB at the same age with slightly worse platform year numbers, Imai will be a slight overpay. A Maeda-like outcome would put him right in the middle, perhaps surprisingly given Maeda’s last couple of seasons.
So, on comps based on the bare minimum of information, Imai already looks like a decent bet in free agency. It gets better if you look under the hood. On velocity alone, Imai sat around 95 mph in Japan and touched 100 — if he sits closer to his max, as is the custom in MLB, he would have the best fastball of this trio by miles per hour. It gets even better once you consider the shape of Imai’s fastball and his arm angle. Estimating his arm angle around 20 degrees, and using pitch movement numbers provided by Marquee Sports analyst Lance Brozdowski, we can find comps for his fastball in the big leagues:
Tatsuya Imai fastball comps
PlayerVeloVertHorizAngle
94.3
13.3
14.9
19.4
93.4
13.3
13.0
21.6
94.3
13.3
14.9
20.6
95.1
12.7
13.8
18.9
94.3
13.2
14.2
20.1
94.9
13.5
14.7
~20
Imai’s fastball is a near match for Joe Ryan’s fastball. Even if you lump in all four fastballs that comp well to Imai’s fastball, the group’s four-seamers were above-average by Stuff+, whiff rates, batting average and slugging when put against league-average fastballs. Most likely, Imai’s low-slot fastball with surprising ride will play well high in the zone and be an asset to him in MLB.
Tatsuya Imai now leads NPB in strikeouts after another dominant shutout 🦁
9.0 IP, 4 H, 0 ER, 2 BB, 12 K, 114 P, 20 Whiffs
He sat 95-96 mph on the fastballpic.twitter.com/E8e040M1n4
— Yakyu Cosmopolitan (@yakyucosmo) August 23, 2025
Imai likely comes over with a plus splitter — a pitch that is all the rage after this past postseason that saw the most splitters ever — and a “reverse slider” like the one Trey Yesavage throws.
Want a shot at a 95 mph-throwing Joe Ryan? With the downside of the beginning of Kenta Maeda’s career? Seems like a good buy.
Alex Bregman, 3B
It’s reductive and doesn’t capture the realities of the market across the board, but matching projected production (by Wins Above Replacement) with salary does give us a window into how teams try to think about efficiency. Every team has its own projections, its own all-encompassing WAR-type stat and its own target in terms of dollars per win. Some teams are willing to bend around that target, and some have hard and tight rules around a low target, but every front office has to think about things in a similar construct.
Throw all the projected free-agent contracts in with their projected contributions on the field, and remove all the players not projected to be around league average next year, and here are the cheapest bats in terms of dollars per win in this market:
Cheapest above-average bats per win?
PlayerAge25 WARx$xWARx$/WAR
32
2.6
35
3.5
10.0
34
3.8
69
5.7
12.1
32
3.5
171
14.1
12.1
28
3.8
212
14.8
14.3
30
4.9
182
11.4
16.0
For this table, we used Britton’s $171 million over six years projection to judge Bregman’s cost, and Bowden had the same terms but another $11 million on top. Bregman stands out on this list for a couple of reasons, even though he’s more expensive than the first two. He is the second-best player on this list overall, projected to be a 3.5-win player (four-win players are usually All-Stars) next season. He’s 32 and definitively post-peak, but if you age him the standard half win a year, he’s still a productive player in the last year of a six-year contract, maybe on the level of what Davis Schneider and Tommy Edman did this year in limited time. Even if Bregman gives a team only 10 wins, he wouldn’t end up being a terrible value.
As a player, Bregman is intriguing not because he hits the ball hard or runs fast, but because of his skills at the plate.
“I only want to swing at pitches I could homer on,” he once told me, and that sort of approach ages well.
He doesn’t chase pitches outside the zone (top 10 in chase rate last season), and contact on those pitches ages terribly. He comes from an elite place in terms of walks, strikeouts and defense, and in the right park that treats his pull-in-the-air approach well, his power could age surprisingly well, too, despite the lack of those elite exit velocities.
Ryan Helsley, RP
A metric like Stuff+ — a number that captures the physical qualities of a pitch — has a more complicated relationship with starting pitcher outcomes because of their elaborate arsenals, but Stuff+ has a more direct correlation with reliever success. Look at the top 10 relievers by the Stuff+ number, and even if they don’t all have top-of-the-league gas, almost all of them had success.
Best Stuff+, MLB Relievers
So why didn’t Ryan Helsley pitch to his stuff last year? A late-August article attributed his struggles to pitch tipping, and the piece noted Helsley was working on his mechanics to fix it. He was setting up and getting into his delivery differently on the fastball and slider, and it was apparent to hitters.
Ryan Helsley’s slider and fastball setups. (Eno Sarris / The Athletic / Baseball Savant)
But even once he knew this was a problem, he couldn’t quite get a handle on his fastball because he didn’t feel comfortable with the new mechanics. This mirrors some issues that Jesús Luzardo had during the 2025 season, and it took the Philadelphia Phillies’ lefty about a month to work through the fixes. Maybe Helsley just didn’t have enough time to get used to the adjustments before the season was over.
Either way, a one-year deal for a reliever who sits 99 mph with above-average ride with a 90 mph slider that has more drop than average is something almost any team should be interested in.
Cody Ponce, SP
When shopping among pitchers coming back from Korea, every team wants the next Merrill Kelly. They’d rather not have the next Josh Lindblom. They might settle for the next Erick Fedde.
What separates those who make successful returns to MLB from Korea from those who struggle? When it comes to Kelly, he upped his velocity and added a cutter. Fedde didn’t add velocity, but he added a sweeper that ended up being his second-most thrown pitch when he came back to the States.
The good news for whoever signs Cody Ponce is that he did both.
Free Agent Cody Ponce setting a KBO record with 18 strikeouts in a 9 inning game. His teammate Hyun Jin Ryu had the previous record with 17.
157 KMH = 97.5 MPH pic.twitter.com/kpbXX6o2lW
— Avery Chenier (@AveryChenier) November 18, 2025
After sitting 93 with the Pirates in 2020-21, Ponce was up two ticks with the Hanwha Eagles. Those ticks also made his breaking balls better, as they were unimpressive by shape when he was last in MLB. The new pitch was a plus splitter that he threw more than any other secondary. The result was a strikeout percentage that was better than any of the other pitchers who have come over from the KBO.
Neither Britton nor Bowden has a projection for Ponce, but the high-water mark for pitchers returning from Korea so far has been Fedde’s two-year, $15 million deal. Ponce would probably be worth the risk even at a higher price than that.