A randomly great year for the 2024 Rangers’ closer
With the 2024 regular season over, it is time for us to go back and take a look at the players who appeared for the Texas Rangers this season.
Today, we look at pitcher Kirby Yates.
I don’t think we have quite wrapped our minds around how great a season Kirby Yates had in 2024 for Your Texas Rangers.
Here is a complete list of every Texas Rangers pitcher to have an ERA of less than 1.75 in 60 innings or more in a season:
Jim Kern, 1979 — 1.57
Joe Nathan, 2013 — 1.39
Kirby Yates, 2024 — 1.17
That’s it. That’s the list. There are five more pitchers with an ERA ranging from 1.88 to 1.99 in 60 innings or more*, so even if we expand the criteria, the folks can still be counted on two hands without using thumbs, and Yates is still the leader.
* The other five are Tanner Scheppers, John Wetteland, Matt Moore, Brock Burke, and Jeff Russell.
Kirby Yates had a 340 ERA+ in 2024. No pitcher in Rangers history has had an ERA+ of better than 300 in 60+ innings. Only three pitchers — Nathan, Kern and Wetteland — have a season for the Rangers with an ERA+ better than 240.
Here’s another fun fact — in the live ball era, there have only been 29 pitcher seasons where a pitcher has thrown 60+ innings and had an ERA of less than 1.25. Two of those were starters — Bob Gibson in 1968 and Jacob deGrom in 2021 — and the other 27 were done by relievers. Rarified company, indeed.
And there have only been three pitchers to do that twice. Those pitchers are:
Wade Davis (2014 and 2015)
Craig Kimbrel (2012 and 2013)
Kirby Yates (2019 and 2024)
Crazy, huh?
So not only did Kirby Yates have the best season in terms of ERA/ERA+ by our measure above in Ranger history, he had one of the best seasons in terms of ERA in the live ball era, and is personally responsible for 6.9% of those seasons in the live ball era.
And what makes it even more weird is that while Davis and Kimbrel had their seasons in back-to-back years — which makes sense because they were at the top of their games — Yates had a five year gap between such seasons, which included missing most of two seasons due to Tommy John surgery.
Looked at objectively, it is one of the best free agent signings — certainly one of the best one year free agent signings — the Rangers have ever made.
That sort of performance would seem to have set the stage for Yates to be one of the hottest commodities on the free agent market this past offseason. A historically great 2024 season, having previously had a historically great 2019 season, and a 2.21 ERA since the start of the 2018 season, for a guy who has been a closer? Its a license to print money!
And of course, as we all know, that didn’t happen. Yates didn’t get a big multi-year contract. He got a one year, $13 million deal from the Los Angeles Dodgers for 2025.
And yes, I would not sneeze at $13 million. If I had $13 million I’d quit practicing law and…well, I’d probably keep doing LSB, because I’m in this for the love of the game, but still. I’m not suggesting that $13 million isn’t a lot of money.
But compare it to other free agent pitchers this offseason.
Yates got just $3 million more than Jose Leclerc did. He got $2.25 million more than Aroldis Chapman did. He got $2 million and $2.5 million less than Justin Verlander (5.48 ERA in 90 IP in 2024) and Max Scherzer did. He got $2 million less than Alex Cobb did, and Alex Cobb threw 16 innings last year.
A.J. Minter got $11 million from the Mets with an $11 million player option for 2026. Yimi Garcia got $15 million over two years. Jeff Hoffman got $33 million over three years.
What gives?
One factor is obviously age — Yates turns 38 right at the end of spring training. He’s old, and teams don’t want to give old pitchers lots of years.
But there’s also the fact that Yates’ overall body of work is kind of all over the place. He didn’t make it to the majors until his age 27 season, after not signing with the Red Sox out of high school and then signing with Tampa as an undrafted free agent four years later. He bounced around from Tampa to the Yankees to the Angels until the Padres picked him up early in 2017, when he had a solid if unspectacular season in their pen.
That was followed by a really good 2018 season, the great 2019 season mentioned above, 6 runs allowed in 4 innings in 2020, nothing in 2021, and seven innings in 2022. 2023 saw him put up a gaudy 3.28 ERA, but with a 4.51 xERA and 4.63 FIP. There’s a reason he was available for just $4.5 million last offseason.
And his 2024 season saw some outlier numbers. He allowed just a .168 BABIP, which is the fourth lowest for any pitcher with 60+ innings in a season in the live ball era. He had an 88.1% left on base rate, which was the second highest strand rate of any pitcher with at least 60 innings pitcher in MLB in 2024.
Yates put up a 1.86 xERA in 2024, which is great, though a little over 50% higher than his actual ERA. He had a great K rate, but more importantly, was able to avoid hard contact, which resulted in a 13% line drive rate along with just three home runs all season.
And I suspect that teams don’t view that as something Yates will be able to maintain going forward. And thus they model him as being more in line with the 2.50 FIP he put up last season than the 1.17 ERA pitcher he was, factor in the age and injury history, and price him as a very solid older reliever.
None of which changes the fact that Kirby Yates was, to use one of Chris Woodward’s favorite words, elite in 2024. He did amazing work for the Rangers, and it is just unfortunate he did that work for a team that ended up out of the playoff hunt.
Previously: