As MLB free agency begins in earnest with the qualifying offer deadline behind us, right-hander Dylan Cease hits the open market with one of the more vexing résumés of any front-end arm in recent memory. With a track record featuring tantalizing highs and confounding lows over a sizable sample size of innings that has grown uninterrupted over the past half-decade, Cease inspires a wide range of opinions across the industry, setting the stage for an especially fascinating trip to free agency.
Cease, who turns 30 just before the new year, is a Rorschach test of sorts for clubs seeking high-end starting pitching. Some will see a nearly unrivaled strikeout artist with impressive durability, one who comfortably warrants a nine-figure contract commensurate with those awarded to some of the other best starting pitchers in baseball. Others will see Cease as volatile and unworthy of a significant long-term commitment, a pitcher who has too often struggled to perform his most basic duty of preventing runs.
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There is merit to both sides of the Cease outlook. Let’s start with the positives. And who better to sell the skills of the right-hander than his agent, Scott Boras, who spoke on Cease at the GM Meetings earlier this month during his latest round of puns and wordplay:
“You go and look at pitchers that can give you 30+ starts five years in a row, and other than Dylan they cease to exist,” Boras said. Pun aside, Boras immediately hit on one of Cease’s standout traits, one that makes him quite unique in an era when so many prominent starters have missed significant time due to arm injuries, lessening the frequency with which they are amassing a full season’s workload. Cease too has an elbow surgery on his ledger, but it came during his senior year of high school in 2014, an untimely development that impacted his draft stock, though not enough to sway 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 pro career, he has been remarkably durable. Dealt to the White Sox at the 2017 trade deadline in the package for Jose Quintana, Cease ascended the minor-league ranks without much trouble and hasn’t been on the injured list once for an arm injury as a major leaguer since debuting in 2019. And while Boras’ pun-based compliment may have been a minor exaggeration, he wasn’t off by much: Cease is one of just four pitchers who have made at least 30 starts in each of the past five seasons, alongside José Berríos, Kevin Gausman and Patrick Corbin.
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This degree of durability is staggering in this era. While the industry is still in constant search for more clarity regarding how to prevent and/or forecast pitcher injuries, one common saying in baseball is that the best predictor of future injury is past injury. And though Cease’s Tommy John surgery in high school could still be held against him in this case, his decade-plus of taking the mound without any issues since his amateur days carries more weight, and is why his workload is largely viewed as a positive aspect of his free-agent profile.
That said, no pitcher is fully immune to the physical perils of their profession. And while it’s much easier and perhaps logical to point at oft-injured arms as more risky investments than those who haven’t spent much or any time on the IL, it’s not hard to identify recent examples of pitchers with similarly lengthy track records of health as Cease ultimately needing 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 that in mind, predicting whether Cease’s durability will sustain over the duration of his next contract is likely a fool’s errand. Of course, even more important to Cease’s free-agent case than how much he’s pitched is how he’s pitched. Taking the ball roughly every fifth day for the past five years is valuable, but we wouldn’t be talking about Cease at the top of the market if his proclivity to munch innings was his headlining skill.
So, let’s get back to Boras:
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“And also his strikeouts — he’s a 200-strikeout guy, 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 that Boras is trying to make, which is to highlight Cease’s other most obvious strength alongside 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. Cease’s 29.8% strikeout rate in 2025 ranked third among qualified starters behind only Tarik Skubal and Garrett Crochet. He is the only pitcher in baseball to strike out at least 200 batters in each of the past five seasons. In fact, only six other pitchers have struck out 200+ batters three out of the past five seasons — Cole, Burnes, Gausman, Freddy Peralta, Aaron Nola and Zack Wheeler — stellar company that helps highlight why Cease is discussed in such high regard.
Incredibly, Cease’s punchouts have largely been the product of just two pitches: a four-seam fastball averaging 97 mph and a slider ranging from 87-89 mph. These two offerings have accounted for roughly three-quarters of Cease’s total pitches over the past five seasons, with an 82 mph knuckle-curve appearing about 10% of the time and a new sinker making some cameos in 2025 and a rare change-up surfacing here and there. There has long been speculation about what Cease could become if he diversifies his pitch mix, though it’s also difficult to argue with the effectiveness of his two go-to weapons. That said, how he evolves as he ages — especially if his current velocity begins to decline — is something interested teams are sure to be contemplating when weighing a pursuit of Cease in free agency.
Durability is a strength for pitcher Dylan Cease.
(IMAGN IMAGES via Reuters Connect / REUTERS)
Dylan Cease’s top weakness: Giving up runs
So, Cease has provided a steady supply of innings with an abundance of strikeouts to boot. What’s not to love? While swing-and-miss may be sexy and is very much in vogue in the modern game, it is not the primary objective for starting pitchers. Teams win by scoring more runs than their opponent, and Cease’s track record of consistently stopping opponents from scoring is shockingly shoddy for a pitcher with his peripheral skills. This is where Cease’s case as an elite rotation option becomes cloudy — and how if he secures a major payday, he will 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 sampling of such forecasts:
MLB Trade Rumors: 7 years, $189M ($27M AAV)
Tim Britton, The Athletic: 6 years, $174M ($29M AAV)
Ben Clemens, FanGraphs: 5 years, $155M ($31M AAV)
Kiley McDaniel, ESPN: 5 years, $145M ($29M AAV)
From Kevin Brown’s historic $105 million pact with the Dodgers in December of 1998 to Burnes’ $210 million deal with the D-backs 26 years later, 29 starting pitchers have signed free-agent contracts with a total value in excess of $100 million. If Cease joins this select cohort in the coming months as expected, he will do so with the highest ERA in his platform season (4.55) before becoming a free agent. The previous high watermark before securing a nine-figure free-agent contract belonged to Aaron Nola, who posted a 4.46 ERA in 2023 before re-upping with the Phillies on a seven-year, $172 million contract. Otherwise, no other free-agent pitcher in the $100 million sample had posted an ERA even above 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 past three years that he ranked in the bottom-10 on the ERA leaderboard, having ranked 38th of 44 qualified arms in 2023 with a 4.58 ERA in 177 innings in his final season with the White Sox. Still, with Cease’s stupendous 2022 campaign in which his 2.20 ERA ranked third and he finished second in AL Cy Young voting hardly a distant memory, his disappointing 2023 performance wasn’t nearly enough to dissuade San Diego from spending considerable prospect capital to acquire him from Chicago. The Padres were promptly rewarded with a much-improved showing in 2024, as Cease returned to Cy Young ballots, lowering his ERA to 3.47 and ranking third in the NL 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 runs more times (10) than he allowed one or fewer (9). The strikeouts were still there, of course, providing some strong peripherals that he (and Boras) could certainly still lean on positive indicators moving forward. At the same time, selling a pitcher who just posted an ERA closer to 5.00 than 3.00 is a much different assignment for Boras than extolling the ace-like 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 relative to his historical parallels as a top-tier free-agent starting pitcher will be an intriguing litmus test for how teams value past performance vs. future projection. Cease has provided his potential suitors with an ample amount of evidence in both directions, bearish and bullish, with underlying skills still worth dreaming on but a sizable sample of innings that convey an arm that is far less reliable than most top-dollar starting pitchers.
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And if anything, the real lesson in reviewing the most lucrative free-agent starting pitcher contracts ever is the vast range of outcomes for these arms once signed. Some of these deals have fundamentally changed franchises for the better, while others have devolved into embarrassing and arduous long-term commitments, either due to performance or to injury. Where Cease’s tenure with his new team will fall on this spectrum of starting pitcher — considering how up-and-down his career has been — is anybody’s guess.
