As the 22 teams that aren’t currently focused on capturing the 2024 World Series title gear up for the coming offseason, many will surely be keeping an eye on the number of high-profile free agent starters set to hit the market this winter with Corbin Burnes , Blake Snell , Max Fried and Jack Flaherty among the consensus top arms. It’s a class that’s not entirely dissimilar from last winter’s group of top arms, which was headlined by a quartet of Snell, Yoshinobu Yamamoto , Aaron Nola and Jordan Montgomery . Those top free agent arms garnered a combined guarantee of more than $600M last winter, and the results were generally commensurate with that production.
While Montgomery struggled badly with the Diamondbacks, Nola put up a fairly typical season by his standards with the Phillies this year (albeit with slightly diminished peripherals) and both Snell and Yamamoto fought through injury woes to dominate as expected when healthy. That said, a starter who was looked at more as a mid-rotation type of arm last winter surprised the baseball world by emerging with numbers comparable to those at the very top of the class. That hurler was Cubs lefty Shota Imanaga , who was generally looked at as a tier below the aforementioned group alongside Eduardo Rodriguez , Lucas Giolito and Sonny Gray .
In spite of rumors that Imanaga’s market could top $100M when all was said and done, the southpaw lingered in free agency into the new year before eventually signing with Chicago on a.
