Most of the 62 remaining unsigned MLB free agents have one thing in common that could account for why they have not found any takers in free agency yet – they’re old. At least in baseball terms. For example, reliever David Robertson will be 40 in April. Slugger J.D. Martinez is 37. First baseman Anthony Rizzo is 35. Bullpen righty Joe Kelly is 36. In fact, of those 62 unsigned free agents only five are younger than 34 years old. And two of those are 31.
And then there is Alex Verdugo. At 28 years and nine months old, the former New York Yankees outfielder who struck out to end the 2024 World Series is the youngest free agent still without a team – a puzzling fall from grace for a six-year veteran who is 2019 was the Los Angeles Dodgers No. 1 prospect.
While Verdugo’s career has been disappointingly mediocre so far with a career OPS of .742, which translates to an OPS+ of 101 (the MLB average OPS+ is set at 100), there is no question that he is at least useful outfielder still in his prime years. But the Yankees showed no interest in retaining him. Why has he found no one to sign him?
Longtime MLB insider journalist Ken Rosenthal wondered the same thing, speaking on his “Fair Territory” podcast Friday. Rosenthal appeared to conclude that the answer may lie in Verdugo’s “different” personality. “I don’t know what the problem is here,” Rosenthal said on the podcast, discussing Verdugo’s predicament. “Yes, he has a different personality, but teammates seem to like him. Maybe at times, he can rub teams the wrong way, and certainly did not finish well with the Yankees, but is he a major league outfielder? Can he help some team? Absolutely.”
More MLB: Vladimir Guerrero Jr. Reveals He Wants 20-Year Contract But Will Lower Demands Verdugo has rubbed his manager the wrong way at times. In 2023, his final year with the Boston Red Sox, manager Alex Cora benched him twice, the first time in June for a failure to hustle on the base paths, and then again in August allegedly for showing up late to the ballpark.
“He didn’t play today,” Cora said at the time. “We have to make sure everybody’s available every single day here for us to get to wherever we’re going to go. And that wasn’t the case. And as a manager, I’ve got to take charge of this, and I decided he wasn’t going to play.”
In New York in 2024, Yankees manager Aaron Boone took a different approach. After Verdugo failed to run out a ground ball, Boone defended the player.
More MLB: Orioles-Nationals Game Features Gift to Workers Affected by Federal Layoffs “He’s beat up,” Boone said. “He picks his spots to where –when he needs to, he beats out the force play, beats out a double play, gets the infield hit. Sometimes I wish it would look a little better on certain ones.” Making the mystery of Verdugo’s failure to find a new team in free agency even more mysterious, on Friday Jon Heyman of the New York Post reported that “earlier” in the offseason, the Pittsburgh Pirates “broached” the idea of signing Verdugo, “floating” an offer in the $8 million range. But Heyman did not specify if the $8 million offer was ever formally made to Verdugo, or when. The Pirates needed to fill a corner outfield role, but have since signed 37-year-old, 11-year veteran Tommy Pham to take that spot, so presumably the offer to Verdugo is now off the table, if it was ever on the table in the first place.
