Millions of dollars. Your choice of multiple offers. Wining and dining. Swag. Perks. Private jets. A better version of the lottery. Such are the images we have come to associate with MLB free agency, especially after teams have just forked over $2.6 billion in the 49th go-round of the free-agent carousel that began with the 1976 Basic Agreement.
For Corbin Burnes, one of the top pitchers on the market, the reality of free agency was more prosaic. It included only three offers, lots of talk about day care and school commutes, five weeks that went by with nothing but crickets from his family’s preferred destination, advice from his agent, Scott Boras, about patience, just one in-person visit and only one piece of swag—the Toronto Blue Jays let him keep a tablet pre-loaded with recruiting material about the organization’s facilities and support staff.
“You don’t know what’s going to happen,” Burnes said about his first venture into free agency. “Every other [offseason] you know where you’re going to be and you’ve got your staff you’re working with, from the team phone calls, workouts, throwing programs, whatever.
“So, the biggest factor was the unknown. I think just even from the get-go, there’s just some nerves of, ‘What’s going to happen?’ That’s one of the things people don’t get. We get free agency, yes, but we really can’t control it. People go, ‘You finally get to pick the team you play for.’ It’s really not the case at all.”
In the last hour of Dec. 27, Burnes, 30, agreed to a six-year, $210 million deal with the Arizona Diamondbacks, a deal that seemed to come out of nowhere and pleased him immensely. Burnes lives in Scottsdale, Ariz., with his wife, Brooke, son Carter, 3, and twin daughters Charlotte and Harper, who were born in June. They will not have to switch homes to accommodate his work, not even for spring training.
“And when they start school,” Burnes says, “I can wake up in the morning, and take them to school. And I don’t have to worry about FaceTiming them in the morning and saying, ‘Have a good day at school.’ Like, something happens every day. You don’t have to worry about switching pediatricians in the middle of the season.
“I travel 83 or 84 days of the year and get to be home the rest of those days and not worry about traveling back and forth to be in different cities. I don’t have to split the family up.”
As free agency began, Burnes agreed to provide Sports Illustrated a peek behind the scenes of free agency—not so much the business side of it, but more about the personal side. This is his story. It is his personal timeline of his 57-day journey into free agency.
Sweet dreams, Snakes fans. 🤩
— Arizona Diamondbacks (@Dbacks) December 31, 2024
🎥: @MLB pic.twitter.com/APK15tc0Wn
Oct. 31
Free agency begins. According to the Basic Agreement, free agency begins the day after the World Series concludes. Incumbent clubs have an exclusive window until 5 p.m. of the fifth day after the World Series. The Baltimore Orioles were Burnes’s incumbent team.
“We were open to anything,” Burnes says. “Obviously I had just played in Baltimore and had a good year there. There was definitely some mutual interest in going back there.”
Burnes and Boras had huddled for two hours at Burnes’s house during the World Series to develop a plan. They knew Burnes had tremendous value as one of the best, most reliable starting pitchers in baseball as the inventory of such workhorses keeps plummeting. From 2021 to ‘24, Burnes ranked second in ERA, second in strikeouts, second in WHIP and fourth in innings pitched. Even the teams that made it to the World Series, the Los Angeles Dodgers and New York Yankees, knew they would be shopping for an elite starter on the free-agent market.
Boras asked Burnes to make a list of everything he hoped to find with a new team. Then, Boras went through all 30 clubs with him by asking the same questions: “Can you see yourself playing there? Can you see your family there?”
The agent also told him how the process would play out.
“You’re going to have three or four teams that come at you heavy at the beginning,” Boras told him. “And then there’s going to be three or four more in the middle, and three or four more at the end. So, if you prefer, it pays to be patient and let things play out. If you see something you want to jump on, great. But if that’s not there, you have to be patient. And you wait for something that you like.”
Boras reminded Burnes how Bryce Harper signed with the Philadelphia Phillies in February and Gerrit Cole with the Yankees in mid-January. Both are Boras clients. Time was on his side.
Nov. 4
The incumbent window ends. That week, three clubs joined the Orioles in expressing interest in Burnes: the Yankees, Blue Jays and Boston Red Sox, making the chase an all-AL East race at the start.
“We knew that those were the teams that were going to have money to spend, and they wanted to upgrade the rotation,” Burnes says. “So, it wasn’t a shock at all. We heard from those teams as we expected, and pretty quickly out of the gate.”
Free agency was unfolding just as Boras had predicted.
“We had three or four teams reach out and it’s kind of weird how they come in groups,” Burnes says. “Like, we went from nowhere to these three teams in a day. And then, okay, nothing for another week or so. And then all of a sudden, these four teams reached out in a matter of two days. So, it’s just kind of strange how things kind of ebb and flow as the market goes.”
Nov. 10
Burnes had a good idea of which teams had money to spend, what teams needed rotation help and where teams were on the arc of winning.
“Are they coming out of a rebuild? Are they going into a rebuild?” he says. “Just that kind of thing. And obviously you want to be in a spot where you’re competing every year. You don’t want it to be in a year where it’s, ‘Hey, you’re going in knowing you’re only going to win 70 games.’ That’s kind of a big thing. And then after that, it was kind of digging into organizations and how they treat families.”
Here is where he needed help. Corbin and Brooke leaned on other players, especially fellow Boras clients, to gather behind-the-scenes information about family issues.
“That’s when the phone calls happened,” he says. “The way me and Brooke did it, it was basically looking at, how would family life be? Is it going to be easy or tough?
“It does get more important going from one kid to three kids. Obviously, you’ve got to have help because if Brooke wants to go to a game or just when we’re on the road, do you have access to a doctor through the team if all of a sudden a kid gets sick? How good are they then? And then there’s schooling and day care or when my kids are getting to the age of when they’re at the field, are they running amok or do they have activities? Are they able to take care of the families if I’m on the road and something happens?
“It's not something that we had thought about initially, until the free agency started coming up, with, ‘Hey, you know, these teams are known for being really good and these teams not so much …’ I wouldn’t say it was top of the list priority, but you definitely take it into account.”
Nov. 13-14
Burnes meets with Blue Jays officials in Southern California. Burnes wasn’t interested in a full-blown tour of teams, considering he has played in all major league cities, and he has three young children at home.
“A Zoom call was preferred, rather than having to miss a day away from the family and traveling back and forth on planes,” he says of his plans. “I do enough flying in season.”
He made an exception for the trip to California because the Toronto contingent was arriving there to meet with Juan Soto, another Boras client.
In the next few days, he met with Yankees and Red Sox officials over Zoom.
“It went well,” he says of the call with New York. “It did, but it didn’t really progress much past that. Yeah, we were told they were looking for a lefty. And I think once they got going with [Max] Fried and they became serious there, it looked like that’s the route they were going to go. Same with Boston, when it came to a lefty.”
Nov. 30
Blake Snell signs a five-year, $182 million deal with the Dodgers.
Asked how the signing affected his market, Burnes says, “Not much at all.”
The deal came as no surprise to Burnes. That’s because Boras also represents Snell.
“I think from my initial conversations with Scott was that he knew that was going to happen quickly,” Burnes says. “He knew that he was their kind of No. 1 target, and they were going to come in quickly and they’d likely get it done.
“It’s kind of funny. Scott, obviously he has so many players in the market, both position players and on the pitching side. He has a complete picture of the top of the market, the middle of the market, and everything. So, he kind of has a feel for everything and he knew right away that that was going to happen. It was kind of funny when it did happen for us, my wife and I were like, ‘Yeah, he called that.’”
Dec. 22
Burnes had two offers in hand: one from the Blue Jays and one from the San Francisco Giants. Boras continued to preach patience.
“Until you get into negotiations and see paper offers, then it gets real,” Burnes says. “And then maybe it’s like, ‘Well, that doesn’t sound as good as it did on the phone,’ when teams start looking at deferrals and that kind of thing.
“So, we had two offers, but nothing that was quite, ‘That’s it!’ It was Toronto and San Francisco. There was some verbal stuff with Baltimore and Boston, but nothing I had seen in writing.”
Dec. 23
This was the day that changed everything. Out of nowhere, the Arizona Diamondbacks said they were prepared to make an offer.
“They were No. 1 on our list,” Burnes says, “just because it means playing at home. And that kind of trumped everything we’ve covered. Living here, sleeping in our own beds year-round, which would be huge … And obviously we had to have something that was fair, and they put a good number in. Once I got word that they were interested in me, all of a sudden it started up. And I mean it went quick.”
Boras and the D-Backs agreed to take a break from talks over Christmas.
“We’re thinking, what are the chances something like that would happen?” Burnes says. “We were just always like, ‘Oh yeah, it’s such a far-fetched dream,’ but we never thought it was going to come true. And all of a sudden, we’re hearing it’s out there. They’re not only interested, but they’re serious about wanting to move quickly to get a deal.”
Dec. 26
Talks between Boras and the Arizona front office resumed in the morning the day after Christmas. Only three months earlier, Arizona owner Ken Kendrick blamed himself for signing left-handed pitcher Jordan Montgomery, another Boras client, to a one-year, $25 million deal with a player option. In a rare and vicious public rebuke by an owner, Kendrick called it “a horrible decision to invest that money in a guy who performed as poorly as he did.”
Yet here was Kendrick diving right back into the free-agent pitching market with the same agent and at much bigger numbers. The negotiations proceeded at a rapid pace.
“I think that just shows you that Scott does a good job of individualizing his clients and knowing that he’s got to continue to have a relationship with these owners and these GMs,” Burnes says. “I saw the market didn’t play out the way that Montgomery had hoped. And obviously there’s a lot more to the backstory that a lot of people don’t know about, and I don’t even know about. I think it does show that Ken was willing to improve his team.”
The Burnes family was leaving Jan. 2 on a 10-day cruise.
“You worry about the stress of being on the cruise and the worry about being on the phone on the cruise,” Burnes says.
The Diamondbacks said they wanted to get a deal done quickly.
Dec. 27
At 8:30 p.m. MST, Boras sent Burnes an agreement letter on a deal with the Diamondbacks. The deal included a $10 million signing bonus, $64 million in deferred salary, an opt-out clause after the 2026 season, a full no-trade clause through the first two seasons and a 14-team no-trade list for the remaining four years if he does not opt out. His $35 million average annual value matches Stephen Strasburg as the eighth highest for a starting pitcher. Because of the deferrals, the present-day value is $32.3 million per year. As an Arizona resident, Burnes does enjoy tax advantages that would not apply to playing in San Francisco or Toronto.
Boras told Burnes the signed agreement letter would be forwarded to the players association for approval and filing.
“It’ll probably come out [in public] in the next hour or so,” the agent told him.
It was 11:21 p.m. MST when the news broke.
“It was already pretty late to open the bottle of wine,” Burnes says. “So, we waited and celebrated the next night. It was definitely a nice little added gift to get it done before the cruise.”
It took a while, and it included just three firm offers, but free agency for Burnes ended in a best-case scenario.
“When the Diamondbacks did call and they were at a number that was comparable to the other offers we were getting, we were just like, ‘You know what? This is a no-brainer.’” Burnes says. “It was. I was like, ‘Scott, don’t screw this up.’ And here we are. This is where we want to be.
“It’s one of those deals that still feels too good to be true.”
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Inside a Star Pitcher’s 57-Day MLB Free Agency Journey.