BURNES BABY BURNES

D-Backs have signed Corbin Burnes!

Wow!

Late Friday night we all got a “where were you when the notification hit” moment when the Diamondbacks signed Corbin Burnes out of nowhere. The 2021 Cy Young Award winner who has been to 4 straight All-Star games shocked the baseball world with a 6 year, $210M deal with the Arizona Diamondbacks. Here’s the full breakdown:

-Burnes will make $30M a year in 2025 & 2026.

-Burnes can opt out after 2026 or opt into a 4 year $150M deal 2027-30.

-Each year will have $10M deferred.

-Burnes reportedly had $250M offers from SF & TOR, but wanted to sign with Arizona as he just bought a house in Scottsdale & had just had twins.

We assume Jordan Montgomery will be traded before Spring Training, but the Diamondbacks payroll will likely now pass $200M…. the Ken Kendrick haters are sick!

You have to give a lot of props to Ken Kendrick as he took advantage of this golden miracle opportunity. Corbin Burnes, who is easily one of the top 5 SP’s in baseball, hand picked Arizona and was willing to take a significant paycut to come here too as long as Ken Kendrick was willing to stretch his wallet. The Diamondbacks do have a good amount of payroll coming off the books in 2026, but the 2025 payroll should now clear $200M, a figure I didn’t think the Diamondbacks would cross anytime soon.

Zac Gallen is a free agent next year and the vibe around him has been that he’s not signing an extension before free agency and certainly won’t be taking any hometown discounts. Gallen will be hitting free agency at 30 just like Corbin Burnes and while they’re both Boras clients, if a player wants the max contract they can get Boras is ready to go to war. So the Diamondbacks logic of:

Why not give that money to Burnes, on a contract everyone thinks is a steal, who also honestly is better than Gallen, plus you now have both guys in 2025 and get a comp 1st round pick if Gallen does leave next season.

Does makes a ton of sense.

I’ve been extremely critical of the Diamondbacks obsession with old, crafty LHP and paying them a ton of money (Madison Bumgarner, Jordan Montgomery, Eduardo Rodriguez). Luckily Corbin Burnes is the complete opposite of those dudes.

Thats a lot of red and red is very good. 98 percentile implies Corbin Burnes is a top 2% pitcher in all of baseball, and that includes RP’s too. The fastball is truly elite sitting 97 MPH, while across the board with all pitches getting elite whiff and soft contact rates.

The one weird stat is Burnes K% went to down to league average, but literally everything else stayed elite? I think this is tied to 2 things, the decrease in offspeed pitch success and the move away from the Brewers elite pitching factory to the Baltimore Orioles.

In 2024 Corbin Burnes offspeed “pitch value” which tries to grade how good your pitches were, implied that it was league average. Let’s take a look at Burnes last season in Milwaukee, his offspeed pitch value was +5 and while his breaking ball stayed elite at +8.

If anything, Burnes overall profile and “stuff” improved a little in 2024, I’d sum up the drop in K rate to simply a drop off in overall scouting and game planning. Again, Milwaukee is elite at developing pitchers where the O’s are far from it. Burnes was the same pitcher stuff wise both years, so I’d expect with the D-Backs new pitching coaching staff (AZ sniped coaches from analytic and forward pitching thinking Phillies & Guardians), Burnes K rate will rise.

I fully believe Corbin Burnes will age a lot better than previous Diamondbacks big signings. The lefties who don’t throw hard were obvious decline candidates (Mad Bum, Montgomery, E-Rod who has been battling injuries). Zack Greinke’s 6/206.5 deal I’ve long stood on the table and fought that was a successful contract. Yes Greinke did “struggled” year 1 in 2016 to a 4.37 ERA where he has a midseason oblique strain and never bounced back fully. Zack Greinke was elite in 2017-2019 though, going to 3 straight All-Star Games. The Diamondbacks were able to get fully off the contract last 2 years money wise with Houston (unfortunately Hazen whiffed on the 4 prospects coming back). Greinke is the exception not the rule though as he sat 89-91 MPH but it worked due to him being the closest thing to Greg Maddux we’ve seen in this era.

2019 was Greinke’s last elite front line All-Star caliber season as he was good-not-great in 2020 but never close to 2017-19 again. Here was his Statcast for the years before the fall off.

Nothing close to how dominant Corbin Burnes stuff still is. Here is Madison Bumgarner in his final season in SF before signing with Arizona.

2023 Jordan Montgomery

Eduardo Rodriguez 2023

All these guys stuff was pretty below average (blue heavy) before their bad 2024. Side note, WOW E-Rod was worse than I thought in 2024:

Corbin Burnes bucks the trend of the failed SP’s of prior, so be excited!

The Diamondbacks new look rotation is pretty good:

SP1 Corbin Burnes

SP2 Zac Gallen

SP3 Merrill Kelly

SP4 Brandon Pfaadt

SP5 Eduardo Rodriguez (hopefully a fully healthy Spring helps)

SP6/Long RP/Next Man Up Ryne Nelson

I really like Yilber Diaz as the SP7, while he has a fastball/curveball mix that would play well in the bullpen, he’s so young and if he can hone in his curveball control and mix in a 3rd pitch, the SP upside is still there.

There’s no doubt in my mind if Jordan Montgomery was a free agent right now, he would get $8-12M on a 1 year bounce back deal. I expect the Diamondbacks to salary dump him somewhere very soon.

The overall vibes from Diamondbacks fans were low after the September collapse and losing Christian Walker, Joc Pederson and the entire NL West reloading with Willy Adames, Blake Snell and Roki Sasaki having final meetings with the Giants, Padres, Dodgers. The Corbin Burnes signing is a massive jolt to the entire organization. I cannot wait for Spring Training and Opening Day…

And yes, Corbin Burnes should be the Opening Day starter. This year, next year and 4 more years after that.

-Goldy Happens