Giants superstar pitcher expecting long-term contract this winter, per insider

The free agency saga leading into the 2024 Major League Baseball season was one of the strangest in recent memory. Soon, all eyes will be on how the sequel plays out.

Though the biggest name, Shohei Ohtani, signed relatively early on in the winter, many of the biggest stars available were still on the market as teams opened their Spring Training camps. Several signed short-term, incentive-laden deals, and debuted in mid-to-late April.

Part of what made that free-agent class so memorable was the difficulty teams had in judging the career accomplishments of the top names on the market. And because of the deals they signed, many of those names could be right back on the market.

Blake Snell of the San Francisco Giants is perhaps the chief case study in the strange free agent class from a season ago.

A two-time Cy Young Award winner, Snell has the stuff to be the best pitcher in baseball any time he takes the ball. But he's had good stretches and bad stretches throughout his career, and teams seemed unwilling to sign him to a nine-figure contract.

In ranking his top 50 impending free agents, Jim Bowden of The Athletic reported that Snell expects to land the long-term deal he sought in free agency the first time around. Though he has a $30 million player option for 2025, Snell is expected to opt out.

"He’ll get that long-term contract this offseason — too many teams are looking for a top-of-the-rotation starter," Bowden said of Snell. "He has a $30 million player option for 2025 he’s expected to decline."

At one point this season, it seemed like a certainty that Snell would opt back in with the Giants because he was either injured or pitching terribly for the first three months of the season. But lately, all that has changed.

Since the start of July, when he returned from his second stint on the injured list, Snell has been baseball's most dominant pitcher. In his last six starts, Snell boasts a 1.15 ERA, 49 strikeouts and a .096 opponent's batting average.

Plus, there's the matter of the no-hitter Snell threw against the Cincinnati Reds on August 2. It was the first time in Snell's career he threw a pitch in the ninth inning, and it happened to be the best outing any Giants pitcher has had in the last decade.

Though he is unlikely to win a second-straight Cy Young, Snell is proving of late that he's worth the risk of signing to a long-term deal. The question for Giants fans is whether or not there is interest between the two sides in reuniting for another season beyond 2024.

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