10:35am: It’s a $69MM guarantee for Diaz, reports Jeff Passan of ESPN. That $23MM annual value is indeed a new record for a reliever.
10:31am: The two sides have agreed to a three-year deal, Sammon and colleague Ken Rosenthal report. It’s presumably at a record-setting annual value for a reliever. Diaz currently holds that record with the $20.4MM AAV on the contract from which he just opted out last month.
10:20am: The Dodgers and right-hander Edwin Diaz have agreed to terms on a contract, reports Will Sammon of The Athletic. Joel Sherman and Jon Heyman of the New York Post reported not long before the agreement that Los Angeles had been showing interest in Diaz, who’s represented by Wasserman.
Diaz returned to the open market this winter, opting out of the final two seasons of the record-breaking five-year, $102MM contract he signed with the Mets the last time he was a free agent. The right-hander had been guaranteed $38MM over the final two seasons of that contract, so by opting out and testing the market, he secured himself an additional one year and $31MM in guarantees.
He’s spent the past seven years in Queens and, after a rocky first campaign, has turned in a collective 2.36 ERA (2.12 SIERA, 2.15 FIP) with a mammoth 40.8% strikeout rate and 8.9% walk rate. Diaz has piled up 144 saves in 332 appearances as a Met.
For the Dodgers, Diaz represents the most on-the-nose means of addressing a problem that nearly doomed them in the postseason: a lack of reliable bullpen help. Injuries to Evan Phillips, Tanner Scott, Brusdar Graterol and others left the Dodgers with a thin enough stock of trustworthy relievers that L.A. turned to Blake Snell, Tyler Glasnow and Yoshinobu Yamamoto (one day after he threw nearly 100 pitches) in pivotal high-leverage settings during their World Series run. That they even progressed to the World Series was largely attributable to historic performances from starters Yamamoto, Snell, Glasnow and Shohei Ohtani in the postseason’s earlier rounds.
More to come.
