Editor’s note: This is the first in a regular series profiling potential free-agent targets for the San Francisco Giants this offseason.

It’s a really bad idea to sign pitchers to expensive long-term deals. It almost never works out. And if the San Francisco Giants work around this by signing a variety of mediocre pitchers to smaller contracts on short-term deals, you’ll be furious. Rightfully so.

This is the classic paradox of free agency. The biggest risk is to sit it out entirely.

The best way to build a baseball team is to have five homegrown starters all on pre-arbitration contracts and use the leftover money to throw a really, really fun party. That doesn’t happen nearly as much as it should, though. Once you start building a roster in the real world, you have to mess with free-agent pitchers. The best bets are the ace-iest of aces. The second-best bets are talented bounce-back candidates on one-year deals. If contending teams have to mess with free-agent pitchers (and they do), they should start with the top tiers.

So should we. Framber Valdez is the best pitcher in free agency this offseason. He has been reliable and consistent, and he pitches a style of ball that’s perfect for the Giants and the infield they’re trying to build. What could possibly get in the way of a player like that and a team that’s perfect for him?

Why the Giants would want Valdez

Nobody is the left-handed Logan Webb, nobody is the sidearmed Logan Webb, and nobody is the Australian Logan Webb. There’s just one Logan Webb, and the Giants have him.

However, if there’s one pitcher in all of baseball who is even in the same subgenre as Webb (sinker-forward innings eater), it’s Valdez. There are differences between the pitchers that go beyond handedness, with Webb being more of a kitchen-sink kind of pitcher and Valdez reliably using mostly sinkers, curves and changeups. But you don’t need to be sold on Valdez’s style of pitching. You’ve seen it work. You’ve seen the groundballs go between defenders, too, but it’s an effective strategy overall. More, please.

And, oh, how the grounders will come. Valdez and Webb have been competing for the title of groundball-iest pitcher in baseball for years. In 2022, Valdez was tops in MLB with a 66.5 percent groundball rate, and Webb was second. In 2023, Webb was first with a 62.1 percent rate, and Valdez was second. They’ve leapfrogged each other many times over, and there are other hyper-sinker pitchers now (Jose Soriano, Andre Pallante and Cristopher Sánchez, especially), but Webb and Valdez are two of the most reliable pitchers in baseball in terms of batted-ball results. They’re going to have one of the 10-best grounder rates in baseball every season, if not the best.

Valdez has averaged 30 starts over the past four seasons, with a 3.21 ERA (127 ERA+) and 14.9 bWAR and 16.5 fWAR, which puts him in elite company on all counts. This was the first season in the last four that he didn’t finish with any Cy Young votes, but he was in the top 10 in the three years before that.

Valdez is good. He’s really, really good. He’ll be 32 next season, so if there’s a major concern with his ability to continue his run of success, it’s age-related. Still, you’ll take your chances with a pitcher with a repertoire that relies on sink more than velocity.

Wow, the perfect fit. We got to it in our first free-agent profile. How about that?

I guess there’s the formality of the next section, but what could it possibly contain that changes your mind?

What, indeed.

Why the Giants wouldn’t want Valdez

There is at least one actual baseball reason. You’ve heard about the three-times-through-the-order penalty, which posits that the third time a modern lineup gets to see a starting pitcher, the more likely it is to have success against him. It doesn’t just make intuitive sense; the numbers agree.

So if everyone concurs there, maybe it’s time to look for other penalties of familiarity. This is just the theory of a washed baseball writer, but it’s at least plausible that there’s a two-sinker-through-the-series penalty. As in, let’s say a lineup is prepared to face an elite sinkerballer, looking for pitches up. Maybe it executes, and maybe it doesn’t. But then the very next day, what is it seeing? More of the same, albeit from a different arm.

Would that matter? No idea, but I wouldn’t want to pay $150 million or whatever to find out.

That’s an unfounded theory that’s easy to ignore, though. What’s harder to ignore is this:

This was the pitch that led to a bit of a controversy, as it came after Valdez allowed a grand slam, and a lot of folks suspect it wasn’t just a harmless miscommunication but a deliberate act of revenge from a frustrated pitcher. All sorts of body-language-ologists have chimed in with the meaning of Valdez’s immediate spin, either as proof of intent or evidence that he should be fully exonerated.

I’m not here to add my opinion to the mix. But one of the things that kept coming up after the incident was that it just felt like a Framber Valdez thing to do. Longtime Houston Astros fans weren’t exactly shocked over the situation. It would be Framber being Framber, in other words.

It’s a recurring theme. I’ve never interacted with him or anyone in the Astros clubhouse, so I’m basing this on casual conversations and social-media experience. And there’s always a worry that language barriers and cultural biases are coloring perception. As in, Max Scherzer can be a beloved nutball when he yells his manager off the mound in the American League Championship Series, but a Dominican player might not get that same benefit of the doubt if he can’t laugh with the fellas on the postgame show about it afterward.

So keep that in mind. But, at the very least, it’s fair to say that Valdez has Someone You’re Aware Of status in the clubhouse. Barry Bonds had that status. Jeff Kent had that status. Lots of players have that kind of status, even on the good teams. You can work around a player you’re always aware of in the clubhouse. The Astros won a World Series because of Valdez, not in spite of him.

The 2026 Giants, as constructed, are not expected to have this kind of player in the clubhouse. They’ll have a variety of disparate personalities, but they’re mercifully short on malcontents or grumps. The only person players have to be aware of in the clubhouse is Willy Adames, but that’s because he might muss their hair.

It would be a risk to put a player with any reputation for fussiness into this clubhouse mix, but it would be especially risky to do it with a rookie manager. Tony Vitello is already making the jump from college straight to the pros. Giving him an immediate personnel challenge would be like asking John Olerud to face Mason Miller in every at-bat after going straight to the majors. Might work, but it sure is throwing stuff on the pile.

The Giants can deal with the occasional prickly pear in the clubhouse. Some of their best teams throughout history had several. But it’s something to keep in mind. These innings from Valdez might come with more frustration than it would first appear from his Baseball-Reference page.

Verdict

I would sign him to the deal that The Athletic’s Tim Britton projects (seven years, $196 million) and hope it was just the Houston humidity making Valdez irritable. I turn into a snarling wolverine when it’s Bay Area humid. I can’t imagine actual humidity. A closed-roof ballpark can protect you for only so long.

But I’m looking at this from behind the computer screen. I can imagine 31 starts of 2.80 ERA ball and a National League Division Series that makes Oracle Park vibrate, but I’m not getting into the deep logistics of what it means to work with a fella over a long, long, long baseball season. It matters.

My informed guess is that the Giants have already crossed him off the list. They were always going to be iffy on a bidding war for any pitcher at the top of the market, much less one in his early 30s. Valdez is the perfect fit on paper, but in practice? It would be a long five, six or seven years if it doesn’t work out.

It was so close to working out. Lefty Logan Webb is a beautiful dream to have, but there are probably better ways for the Giants to improve the team. They’re counting on it.