As MLB free agency begins seriously with the the deadline for qualifying offers is behind usright-hander Dylan Cease hits the open market with one of the most vexing resumes of any front-end arm in recent memory. With a track record featuring tantalizing highs and confounding lows across a significant sample of innings that has grown continuously over the past half-decade, Cease inspires a wide range of opinions across the industry, paving the way for a uniquely fascinating journey to free agency.
Cease, who turns 30 just before the new year, is something of a Rorschach test for clubs looking for high-end starting pitchers. Some will see a nearly unrivaled strikeout artist with impressive durability, who comfortably guarantees a nine-figure contract comparable to those awarded to some of baseball’s other top starting pitchers. Others will see Cease as unstable and unworthy of a significant long-term commitment, a pitcher who has too often struggled to fulfill his most basic duty of preventing runs.
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Both sides of the ceasefire prospect have merit. Let’s start with the positives. And who better to sell the right-hander’s skills than his agent, Scott Boras, who talked about stopping at GM meetings earlier this month during his latest round of puns and puns:
“You look at pitchers who can give you 30-plus starts five years in a row, and other than Dylan, they cease to exist,” Boras said. Pun aside, Boras immediately highlighted one of Cease’s standout traits, one that makes him utterly unique in an era where so many prominent starters have missed significant time with arm injuries, reducing the frequency with which they rack up a full season’s workload. Cease also had elbow surgery on his ledger, but that happened during his senior year of high school in 2014, an untimely development that impacted his draft stock, but not enough to prevent the Cubs from drafting him in the sixth round and giving him a $1.5 million bonus to sign.
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Since Cease returned from that injury as a teenager and began his professional career, he has been remarkably resilient. Dealt to the White Sox at the 2017 trade deadline in the package for Jose Quintana, Cease rose through the minor league ranks without much trouble and hasn’t been on the injured list with an arm injury once as a major league player since his debut in 2019. And while Boras’ pun-based compliment may have been a minor exaggeration, it wasn’t by much: Cease is one of the four launchers who have made at least 30 starts in each of the last five seasons, alongside José Berríos, Kevin Gausman and Patrick Corbin.
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This level of sustainability is astounding in this era. While the industry is still constantly seeking more clarity on how to prevent and/or predict pitcher injuries, a common saying in baseball is that the best indicator of future injury is past injury. And while Cease’s Tommy John surgery in high school may still be held against him in this case, his ten years of taking the mound without any problems since his amateur days carry more weight, and that’s why his workload is widely considered a positive aspect of his free agent profile.
That said, no pitcher is completely immune to the physical perils of his profession. And while it’s much easier and perhaps logical to point to oft-injured arms as riskier investments than those who haven’t spent much or any time on the IL, it’s not difficult to identify recent examples of pitchers with health histories as long as Cease ultimately having to go under the knife anyway: take Gerrit Cole last year, or Corbin Burnes earlier this season – unfortunately shortly after signing a mega-deal in free agency with Arizona.
With all of this in mind, predicting whether Cease’s durability will continue for the duration of his next contract is probably a fool’s errand. Of course, that’s even more important to Cease’s free agent case than how a lot he launched is how it is launched. Taking the ball every five days or so over the last five years is valuable, but we wouldn’t be talking about Cease at the top of the market if his propensity to eat up innings was his headlining skill.
So back to Boras:
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“And also his strikeouts – he’s a guy who has 200, a very rare guy on the market. And unlike the other famous Dylan, this one is exclusively electric.”
We’ll move past the musical reference and stay focused on the point Boras is trying to make, which is to highlight Cease’s other most obvious strength besides his durability: his knack for racking up whiffs with a high-velocity, high-spin arsenal that is viscerally present every time he takes the mound. Stop the 29.8% Withdrawal Rate in 2025 ranked third among qualified starters behind only Tarik Skubal and Garrett Crochet. He is the only pitcher in baseball to have struck out at least 200 batters. each of the last five seasons. In fact, only six other pitchers have struck out more than 200 batters. three over the past five seasons – Cole, Burnes, Gausman, Freddy Peralta, Aaron Nola and Zack Wheeler – stellar company that helps underscore why Cease is discussed with such esteem.
Incredibly, Cease’s punchouts were largely the product of just two pitches: a four-seam fastball averaging 97 mph and a slider ranging from 87 to 89 mph. Those two offerings have accounted for about three-quarters of Cease’s total pitches over the past five seasons, with an 82 mph knuckle curve appearing about 10 percent of the time and a new sinker making a few appearances in 2025 and a rare changeup surfacing here and there. There has long been speculation about what Cease could become if he diversifies his pitching mix, although it’s also hard to argue with the effectiveness of his two favorite weapons. That said, how he develops as he ages — especially if his current velocity begins to decline — is something interested teams will definitely consider when considering Cease’s pursuit in free agency.
Durability is a strength for pitcher Dylan Cease.
(IMAGINE IMAGES via Reuters Connect / REUTERS)
Dylan Cease’s main weakness: giving up races
So, Cease provided a consistent amount of innings with an abundance of strikeouts to boot. What’s not to like? Although swing-and-miss can be sexy and is very popular in the modern game, it is not the primary goal for beginning pitchers. Teams win by scoring more runs than their opponent, and Cease’s track record of consistently preventing opponents from scoring is incredibly poor for a pitcher with his peripheral skills. This is where Cease’s case as an elite rotation option gets murky — and how if he gets a big salary he’ll stand out as a historical outlier.
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The general consensus among those projecting free agent contracts this winter is that Cease should easily land a lucrative long-term deal. A sample of these forecasts:
MLB Trade Rumors: 7 years, $189 million ($27 million AAV)
Tim Britton, The Athletics: 6 years, $174 million ($29 million AAV)
Ben Clemens, FanGraphs: 5 years, $155 million ($31 million AAV)
Kiley McDaniel, ESPN: 5 years, $145 million ($29 million AAV)
From Kevin Brown’s historic $105 million pact with the Dodgers in December 1998 to Burnes’ $210 million deal with the D-backs 26 years later, 29 starting pitchers have signed free agent contracts worth a total of more than $100 million. If Cease joins this select cohort in the coming months as expected, he will do so with the highest ERA of his platform season (4.55) before becoming a free agent. The previous record before landing a nine-figure free agent contract belonged to Aaron Nola, who posted a 4.46 ERA in 2023 before re-signing with the Phillies on a seven-year, $172 million deal. Otherwise, no other free agent pitcher in the $100 million sample had posted an ERA even higher than 4.00 before hitting the open market. Only lefties Mike Hampton (1.346) and Barry Zito (1.403) posted higher WHIPs in their platform year than what Cease (1.327) just did.
Cease’s 4.55 ERA in 2025 ranked 43rd out of 52 qualified pitchers, marking the second time in the last three years that he ranked in the bottom 10 in ERA rankings, after ranking 38th out of 44 qualified arms in 2023 with a 4.58 ERA in 177 innings in his final season with the White Sox. Yet with Cease’s terrific 2022 campaign in which his 2.20 ERA ranked third and he finished second in the AL Cy Young voting barely a distant memory, his disappointing performance in 2023 was not enough to deter San Diego from spending considerable prospecting capital to acquire him from Chicago. The Padres were quickly rewarded with a much-improved performance in 2024, as Cease returned to the Cy Young ballots, lowering his ERA to 3.47 and ranking third in the Netherlands in fWAR.
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But Cease regressed again in 2025, turning in a quality start in just eight of his 32 outings and allowing at least four more runs (10) than he allowed one or fewer (9). The strikeouts were of course still there, providing solid peripherals that he (and Boras) could certainly still rely on for positive indicators in the future. At the same time, selling a pitcher who just posted an ERA closer to 5.00 than 3.00 is a much different mission for Boras than touting the ace talents of other recent clients like Burnes, Blake Snell, Carlos Rodón, Cole or Stephen Strasburg.
Overall, Cease’s ability to cash in despite an outlier poor performance compared to his historical parallels as a premier free agent starting pitcher will be an intriguing litmus test for how teams value past performance versus future projections. Cease has provided his potential suitors with a large amount of evidence in both directions, bear and bull, with underlying skills that are still worth dreaming about, but a significant sample of innings that convey an arm that is far less reliable than many of the top starting pitchers.
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And if anything, the real lesson of examining the most lucrative free agent starting pitcher contracts of all time is the vast range of outcomes for these arms once signed. Some of these deals fundamentally improved franchises, while others turned into embarrassing and painful long-term commitments, either due to performance or injuries. Where Cease’s tenure with his new team will fall on that starting pitcher spectrum is anyone’s guess – given the ups and downs of his career.
