Tanner Scott, the top reliever on the MLB free-agent market, got paid like it.
The former San Diego Padres southpaw has agreed to a four-year, $72 million deal with the Los Angeles Dodgers, according to multiple reports. Scott gets to join an increasingly deep Dodgers bullpen, and gets paid well to do it.
Scott, who was traded from the Marlins to the Padres at last summer’s deadline, posted a 2.73 ERA with 31 strikeouts in 26 1/3 innings with San Diego in the second half.
The deal is among the largest ever given to a reliever, with Edwin Díaz’s five-year, $102 million contract with the New York Mets still representing the high-water mark.
Yahoo Sports ranked the 30-year-old Scott as the No. 22 free agent on the market this offseason and the highest among the available relievers.
Tanner Scott was unhittable in last year’s MLB playoffs
If you ascribe to the Baseball Reference calculation of WAR, no reliever has been more valuable over the past two years than Scott at 7.6, more than a win clear of the second-place Tyler Holton. Scott posted a 1.75 ERA last year between the Padres and Miami Marlins, and he looked unhittable in the playoffs, striking out seven in five scoreless innings.
Four of those strikeouts were at the expense of Shohei Ohtani.
Scott features a fastball/slider combination from the left side that hitters almost never square up. He held the lowest hard-hit rate among MLB pitchers with at least 70 innings last year and missed plenty of bats, too, with a 32.7% whiff rate.
The big question with him has always been whether he’s finding the strike zone. Scott struggled heavily earlier in his career, when he was walking more than six guys per nine innings, and then he became elite when he got that number down to merely bad territory. Judging from this contract, MLB teams clearly believe Scott will continue to keep the walks down.
Scott has worked as both a closer and a setup man since his step forward and isn’t tied to either, which is the kind of flexibility teams usually look for in his price range. Every MLB contender knows that it will need a reliever to shut down lefties and give righties a hard time for at least one late inning during the playoffs, and Scott is as good at that as it gets right now.
