San Francisco Giants Potential Free Agent Pitching Target Signs With AL Club

The San Francisco Giants have missed out on a potential free agency target, but he did sign a deal that brings him to the west coast.

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The San Francisco Giants have missed out on a potential addition to their rotation with the first major domino in the starting pitching market falling.

Now former Houston Astros left-handed starting pitcher Yusei Kikuchi is signing a three-year deal worth $63 million with the Los Angeles Angels as first reported by Jon Heyman of the New York Post.

Kikuchi, now 33 years old, picked the right time down the stretch this past season to have the best run of his career. After Houston acquired him at the deadline from the Toronto Blue Jays, Kikuchi started 10 games for the Astros and put up a 2.70 ERA with the highest strikeout per nine of his career and a WHIP below 1.0, something he has never done over a full season in six years in the league.

Because of the need for an additional arm in the rotation really with or without bringing Blake Snell back, Kikuchi was a name that potentially was going to make a lot of sense. But perhaps the Giants dodged a bullet here by not giving the veteran lefty the huge deal that the Angels awarded him with.

At the $21 million AAV he wound up signing for, it's probably a good thing that Kikuchi ends up elsewhere. While he certainly put up some impressive numbers after arriving to Houston, those numbers were ultimately a fairly significant outlier from anything else he had put up in his career including his first half of 2024 with Toronto. 

With a 4.75 ERA during the first half of the year along with a career mark of 4.57 and a WHIP of 1.344, Kikuchi has never been better than an average starting pitcher both with the Blue Jays and at the start of his MLB career with the Seattle Mariners. Even in his lone All-Star season in 2021, Kikuchi posted a 4.41 ERA over 29 starts.

San Francisco will have to hope that Kikuchi's big deal is not indicative of the rest of the starting pitching market. If a 33-year-old who has posted just 10 real elite starts in his career is valued at $21 million per year, what will the top of the market deals for a two-time Cy Young winner like Blake Snell look like?

The Giants have work to do, and a possible target being off the board plus the demonstrated urgency across the league for starting pitching makes that work just a little bit tougher.