The San Francisco Giants have agreed on a one-year deal with starter Tyler Mahle, a league source confirmed to The Athletic. Mahle is the second free-agent starter the Giants have targeted this offseason to address the back end of their rotation, joining Adrian Houser, who signed a two-year, $22-million deal with the Giants earlier in December.
Like Houser, Mahle isn’t likely to throw 180 innings but, if healthy, will give the Giants another strike-throwing veteran arm in a rotation that includes perennial Cy Young contender Logan Webb and Cy Young winner Robbie Ray. The Athletic’s Jim Bowden ranked Mahle as the 31st-best free agent heading into the offseason, while The Athletic’s Keith Law ranked him 44th. The San Francisco Chronicle was the first to report that the Giants were nearing a deal with Mahle.
Mahle, 31, is coming off a promising season in which he posted a 2.18 ERA for the Texas Rangers but it was something less than a platform year because shoulder fatigue derailed him in the second half. His 16 starts and 86 2/3 innings pitched were the most he had thrown in a single season since 2022; he missed most of 2023 after undergoing Tommy John surgery to reconstruct his right elbow ligament and dealt with recurring shoulder issues while ramping up his workload in subsequent seasons.
Mahle finished last season with two September starts in which he allowed just one hit over 9 2/3 innings.
The right-hander began his career in Cincinnati where he made his MLB debut in 2017. He put together his best season in 2021, when he threw a career-high 180 innings over 33 starts, posting a 3.75 ERA and striking out a career-best 210 batters. In 2022, he was traded to the Minnesota Twins in a midseason deal that sent Spencer Steer and Christian Encarnacion-Strand to Cincinnati.
Prior to the 2024 season, the Rangers signed Mahle to a two-year deal, knowing that he’d miss a good portion of the first season while recovering from the elbow surgery. He returned in August to make three starts but was shut down once again with shoulder soreness. This past season, Mahle got off to a hot start, putting up a 2.34 ERA in 14 starts before the shoulder injury sidelined him in mid-June. When he returned in September, he flashed a four-seamer that was back to the 92 mph average it held before the injury. He also relies on a splitter, a cut fastball and a slider.
The Giants are holding fast to the playbook they sketched out at the start of the offseason, when Giants president of baseball operations Buster Posey and chairman Greg Johnson telegraphed that they would not spend at the top of the market for free-agent starting pitchers and instead would target serviceable veterans who were available on short-term deals. Mahle and Houser are remarkably similar: command guys who throw four to five serviceable pitches, change speeds, rely on contact outs, limit walks and keep the ball in the park.
With right-hander Landen Roupp the leading candidate to open as the No. 5 starter, the addition of Houser and Mahle would appear to buy development time for the other young pitchers on the 40-man roster (Hayden Birdsong, Carson Whisenhunt, Trevor McDonald, Carson Seymour, Blade Tidwell and Kai-Wei Teng). Although the Giants are likely done with free-agent starting pitchers, a case could be made that it wouldn’t hurt to add one more. And Max Scherzer, the 41-year-old three-time Cy Young Award winner, is still looking for a team. Scherzer has known new Giants manager Tony Vitello since their time together at the University of Missouri when Vitello was his pitching coach.