Ranger Suárez shouldn’t still be a free agent. There are 150 openings for a starting pitcher around baseball, in theory, and Suárez is one of the top 25 in baseball. He might be top 10. If you’re skeptical of that claim, just rank starting pitchers by WAR since 2021, his breakout season:
1. Zack Wheeler (27.6 WAR)
2. Logan Webb (21.5)
3. Max Fried (20.6)
4. Corbin Burnes (18.5)
5. Tarik Skubal (18.0)
6. Ranger Suárez (17.7)
7. Gerrit Cole (17.6)
8. Framber Váldez (17.3)
9. Dylan Cease (16.8)
10. Kevin Gausman (16.4)
Six of those 10 pitchers have reached free agency in the last five seasons. The average contract for them was seven years, $192.5 million. Yet when you check in with the reliably reliable offseason projections from our own Tim Britton, Suárez gets six years and $153 million. It’s hard to call that a bargain, but it’s certainly not unreasonable, considering the company he’s been keeping.
Yet Suárez is stuck, perhaps waiting for Framber Valdez to set the market, unless it’s the other way around. Teams will literally trade their best prospects rather than go to therapy and sign Ranger Suárez.
Now it’s time to see if the San Francisco Giants should take advantage of the seemingly calm market for one of the better pitchers of the last few seasons.
Why the Giants would want Ranger Suárez
We’ve established that he’s a good pitcher. The Giants would like as many of those suckers as they can get. They don’t want to give any of them a nine-figure contract, necessarily, but they’d love to build a collection.
For selfish reasons, though, I want to watch a prototypical lefty in San Francisco’s rotation again. You know, a lefty lefty. Hittin’ the corners on both sides of the plate. Getting the changeup just below the zone. Having enough movement to come in on the hands of right-handed hitters, even if the velocity won’t scare them. Here are the left-handed pitchers to get at least 15 starts for the Giants since Kirk Rueter was hosting folks at The Shed:
LHP (20 game min.) since Kirk Rueter
Player
GS
BB9
SO9
Robbie Ray
39
3.7
9.7
Blake Snell
20
3.8
12.5
Kyle Harrison
35
3.1
8.8
Carlos Rodón
31
2.6
12
Alex Wood
64
2.7
8.8
Drew Pomeranz
17
4.2
10.7
Matt Moore
43
3.7
8
Madison Bumgarner
286
2.1
8.7
Randy Johnson
17
2.9
8.1
Barry Zito
197
3.9
6.2
Jonathan Sánchez
118
4.8
9.4
Noah Lowry
100
3.6
6.1
Damian Moss
20
4.9
4.5
Shawn Estes
57
4.8
6.3
No, no, no. Those are not the lefties I’m talking about, friends. Look at that walk column. Shameful. Alex Wood was the closest to the classic prototype, but even he had too much stuff. Late-stage Madison Bumgarner was classic-lefty adjacent, but he still had snotrockets and gumption. We’re talking the Platonic ideal of the form, where has he gone?
Suárez is one of them. He can still get strikeouts, but he’s barely cracking 90 mph these days, in the bottom-10th percentile of all major-league pitchers for velocity. He wouldn’t have been the softest tosser in the days of Tom Glavine, but he wouldn’t exactly have been a candidate to close, either. Suárez’s a classic lefty in the best sense.
Click through that link in the last paragraph, though, and take a gander at all the red ink on his Baseball Savant page. There is just so much of it, and there always is. Suárez is one of the best at allowing weak contact, with hitters having some of the worst exit velocities in baseball against him, season after season. And while he hasn’t gotten better at missing bats, he has gotten better at getting batters to chase, which leads to even weaker contact.
From an aesthetic perspective, yes, this is the kind of left-hander I want to watch. It’s been too long.
Ranger Suárez is a classic lefty in the mold of pitchers from eras gone by. (James A. Pittman / Imagn Images)
From a roster-building perspective, though, this is a pitcher who is begging to pitch in front of a slick defensive infield. This is a pitcher who wants a top-notch pitch framer to help him steal more strikes, considering he’s pitched for one of the worst strike-stealing teams in baseball. This is a pitcher who doesn’t need help keeping the ball in the park, but could always use an extra couple of marine layers.
By gum, this is a pitcher who should be interested in the Giants. And for their part, he offers plenty, including consistency and innings, and he has a relatively clean injury history. The “relatively” is in the eye of the beholder, but that’s for the next section. In this one, the Giants should be eager to take his 150 innings and add them to the pile every season for the next few.
If this is reading like an infomercial, well, guilty. Suárez has been the best fit for San Francisco all offseason, and that hasn’t changed just because they’ve signed Tyler Mahle and Adrian Houser. The Giants have built a lineup that can win with enough pitching. Here’s some of that pitching. Go on, help yourself. For a nominal fee.
Why the Giants wouldn’t want Ranger Suárez
Let’s copy and paste the relevant disclaimer from the Zac Gallen profile.
The first reason is a simple one: Suárez will cost San Francisco a draft pick. It wouldn’t be the No. 4 pick they somehow lucked into — that one is protected — but they’d lose their second-highest pick (a high second-rounder), as well as $500,000 in international bonus money.
That’s not a minor consideration, pun most definitely intended. The Giants can take their time and get to July with the five starting pitchers they have now. Then they can pick and choose from all sorts of pitchers. Old pitchers, tall pitchers, expensive pitchers, inexpensive pitchers. Getting Suárez for the four months before that would help a lot, but would it help in a $150 million kind of way? Hard not to see the practical argument for a wait-and-see approach.
There’s also the part where Suárez has been relatively healthy, which is a wishy-washy description for a reason. He’s never missed more than a month-and-a-half — that was for elbow soreness in 2023 — but he seems to land on the injured list nearly every season for a back issue. It’s not like there’s a good injury for a pitcher to have, but back injuries have a way of getting weird and frustrating. That’s not to say that Suárez is doomed because of a couple of IL stints. He’s not the same kind of workhorse that Gallen has been, though.
The Giants could also use another hitter, whether at second base or in the outfield. There was even a stray Kyle Tucker rumor in the wild, unlikely as that still is. Signing Suárez would require a lot of capital to commit to a position that will need to fill several holes again next offseason. This would be their big shot, so to speak. They can’t have buyer’s remorse a year from now, when they’ll need someone else.
Verdict
I like watching left-handed pitchers who pitch like Suárez. It’s entertaining to me, the main character of the universe. I don’t root for a baseball team anymore, but I can root for an aesthetic, dang it.
But it also seems like a good baseball fit all around, depending on what the Giants’ budget actually is, what they’re willing to spend, how it will impact future real estate plans, et cetera. I dare say it moves San Francisco from a wild-card contender to a wild-card favorite, at least on paper.
Don’t get too excited: It probably won’t happen. One of the other teams will snap and decide to meet Suárez’s asking price. I’m not sure which left-hander will sign first between Ranger and Framber, but the other one will probably sign shortly after.
If there’s a remaining offseason dream, though, this is probably the one. Suárez fits in so many ways. He might not sell a ton of jerseys, but he would almost certainly make the Giants better.