{"id":12193,"date":"2025-07-21T05:33:08","date_gmt":"2025-07-21T05:33:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/12193\/"},"modified":"2025-07-21T05:33:08","modified_gmt":"2025-07-21T05:33:08","slug":"daniel-bard-retires-mlb-trade-rumors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/12193\/","title":{"rendered":"Daniel Bard Retires – MLB Trade Rumors"},"content":{"rendered":"

Veteran reliever Daniel Bard<\/a> is ending his comeback bid and will retire, reports<\/a> WEEI\u2019s Rob Bradford. The 40-year-old Bard signed a minor league contract with the Mariners<\/a> earlier this summer and had pitched well in a limited look with Seattle\u2019s Triple-A affiliate in Tacoma, allowing two runs on six hits and a walk with nine punchouts in 5 2\/3 innings.<\/p>\n

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Originally a first-round pick by the Red Sox back in 2006, Bard made his big league debut in 2009 and quickly became a star reliever in Boston. In his first three seasons, the righty pitched 197 innings of\u00a0 2.88 ERA ball and piled up 79 holds and five saves. Along the way, he fanned nearly 27% of his opponents. That\u2019d be a strong mark even in today\u2019s game, but at the time, the league-average strikeout rate sat around 18% (compared to this year\u2019s 21.9%). Bard ranked 21st among all relievers in strikeout rate over that three-year period and, despite not debuting until mid-May in \u201909, tallied the third-most holds in MLB from \u201909-\u201911.<\/p>\n

In 2012, the Red Sox tried moving Bard into the rotation, hoping some of that single-inning dominance would carry over to lengthier stretches. It didn\u2019t pan out. Bard made ten starts and was hit hard, yielding a 5.30 ERA in 54 1\/3 innings and showing some alarming command troubles. The lanky right-hander walked more hitters (36) than he struck out (34) and plunked eight batters. He was moved back into the bullpen later in the season.<\/p>\n

Bard\u2019s command struggles had actually begun in September of 2011. They continued in 2012 during that shift to the rotation, and reached a tipping point the following season. Bard pitched just one major league inning in 2013, plus another 15 1\/3 frames in the minors \u2014 during which he walked one-third of the batters he faced and threw 11 wild pitches. Bard would eventually learn that he\u2019d also been pitching with an undiagnosed case of thoracic outlet syndrome \u2014 he underwent surgery in 2014 \u2014 and he\u2019s also been candid throughout his career about his ongoing battle with anxiety.<\/p>\n

A series of minor league deals with the Rangers, Cubs, Pirates, Cardinals and Mets didn\u2019t pan out, and by 2017 Bard had opted to call it a career and move onto the next phase of his baseball journey. He took a job with the D-backs, serving as a player mentor\/mental skills coach<\/a> who worked with young players throughout the organization. Bard held that position for a couple years but found that with some time off, his velocity, command and desire to pitch all returned. He worked out for clubs ahead of the 2020 season, signed a minor league deal with the Rockies and embarked on one of the more improbable comebacks in recent memory.<\/p>\n

Bard was heading into his age-35 season and hadn\u2019t pitched in the majors for seven years when he went to camp with the Rockies. He wound up not only earning a spot on the roster in the shortened 2020 season \u2014 he was named National League Comeback Player of the Year. Bard pitched 24 2\/3 innings with the Rockies that season and logged a 3.65 ERA with a 25.5% strikeout rate, 9.4% walk rate, six saves and two holds. His fastball, which had sat 93-94 in 2012-13 while he was unknowingly pitching with thoracic outlet syndrome, averaged a hearty 97.3 mph.<\/p>\n

Bard had a tough 2021 season but was brilliant in 2022 when he saved 34 games and pitched to a 1.79 earned run average. The Rockies signed him to a two-year, $19MM extension that summer rather than ship him out when he would\u2019ve been one of the most popular rental arms on the trade market. That contract didn\u2019t work out, as Bard struggled again in 2023 and missed the 2024 season recovering from a pair of surgeries: one to repair a torn meniscus and another to repair a torn flexor tendon. He\u2019d hoped to make one final run in the majors, but he\u2019ll now wrap up one of the more interesting career arcs this generation of baseball has seen.<\/p>\n

All told, Bard pitched in parts of five seasons with the Red Sox and four with the Rockies \u2014 plus minor league appearances with the Rangers, Cardinals and Mets. He pitched 457 1\/3 big league innings, saved 66 games, tallied 91 holds and recorded a 3.74 ERA. Bard set down just over 24% of the hitters he faced on strikes over the course of his career, and he earned more than $31MM in salary, thanks largely to that late-career extension in Colorado.<\/p>\n

Bard has already taken one non-playing job with the Diamondbacks. It stands to reason that plenty of clubs would welcome someone with Bard\u2019s background to their organization, be it in a coaching role, a player development role or a baseball operations role \u2014 should he choose to again look for new opportunities to stay involved in the game.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Veteran reliever Daniel Bard is ending his comeback bid and will retire, reports WEEI\u2019s Rob Bradford. The 40-year-old…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":12194,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[435],"tags":[49,48,11582,462,1705,82],"class_list":["post-12193","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mlb","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-daniel-bard","tag-mlb","tag-retirement","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12193","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12193"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12193\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12194"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12193"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12193"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}