Buyer Beware on These 8 Potential MLB Free Agent Busts

Teams are caught between a rock and a hard place with this winter's free-agent market. It's a very weak class, yet the time to spend is now before the lockout hits.

Our advice? Go ahead and spend, but at least know what kind of risk you're taking on with certain players.

There are eight free agents in particular who set off alarm bells, for one reason or another. Some just don't seem especially likely to carry over the success they've had with one team to another. Others have red flags that just can't be ignored.

Let's take a deeper dive into each one of them, going in order of the contracts that B/R's Tim Kelly projected this week.

2026 Stats: 92 G, 14 HR, 1 SB, .256 AVG, .353 OBP, .461 SLG

Ryan Jeffers is a good right-handed hitter at a time when good right-handed hitters are increasingly hard to find . More than that, he's a good right-handed-hitting catcher . He's basically a unicorn.

At the very least, though, teams must understand that Jeffers is more of a warm body behind the plate than a skilled catcher.

His Fielding Run Value for the last four seasons comes out to -24, placing him sixth from the bottom of the list for qualified backstops. He especially struggles to control the running game, which is kind of a problem in today's MLB.

Jeffers' bat was his saving grace this year, yet it comes with the caveat that his -10 Run Value against four-seam fastballs was one of the worst in the league. It was an issue even before he broke his hamate bone in May, as he hit just .229 with a single homer against four-seamers before the injury.

It's not necessarily a bat speed problem, which is the good news. It's nonetheless a weakness that could beexploited more than it was in 2026. Jeffers saw 31.8 percent four-seamers, only a touch above the league average of 30.8.

2026 Stats: 64 G, 69.1 IP, 52 H (4 HR), 76 K, 20 BB, 2.47 ERA

David Bednar got lost in the wilderness in 2024, but he's otherwise been an All-Star-caliber closer for most of the 2020s. He held hitters to a .563 OPS this year, well below his career mark of .623.

The catch is that he lost 7.2 percentage points off his strikeout rate from 2025. That makes it hard to ignore a 0.9 mph drop in his average fastball velocity, as well as a Stuff+ score that went from 108 to 103.

Bednar's adjustment was to double the usage of his splitter, which became a sort of co-go-to pitch with his four-seamer. It worked, specifically in the sense that his chase rate skyrocketed into the 99th percentile.

Yet since Bednar only found the strike zone with 46.0 percent of his pitches, "Don't swing" is now a viable strategy against him. If hitters make that adjustment, his 2026 season could prove to have been built upon a foundation of wet tissue paper.

After all, his splitter carried his repertoire a bit too much this year. It had a +14 Run Value, compared to +2 for his fastball and -1 for his curveball.

2026 Stats: 156 G, 636 PA, 24 HR, 4 SB, .218 AVG, .326 OBP, .412 SLG

Ian Happ is going to hit you between 20 and 25 home runs. He's also going to play a terrific left field. Even if there's no more than this, it's still useful stuff.

However, Happ's Gold Glove-winning defense requires appropriate context. The bar to clear for that position is quite low, and his thing isn't catching fly balls. He has -4 Outs Above Average as a left fielder since 2017.

It's his am that gets the job done, as he's a regular atop the outfield leaderboard for assists. Nothing wrong with that, though he is at an age (32) where it's fair game to worry about wear and tear.

Happ's offense, meanwhile, took an alarming turn toward volatility in 2026. He basically stopped hitting from the right side of the plate, posting a .484 OPS compared to a .816 OPS from the left side. Moreover, his strikeout rate increased by 6.9 percentage points, the third-largest among all hitters.

Hiding in there is trouble with the fastball, as Happ's average against four-seamers has been around or below .200 in three of the last four seasons. This is already something of an open secret for pitchers, so don't expect them to let up as Happ continues to age.

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2026 Stats: 137 G, 532 PA, 19 HR, 41 SB, .231 AVG, .312 OBP, .399 SLG

Pretty much by universal order of decree, there's no avoiding putting Jazz Chisholm Jr. on lists like this. Indeed, he's been boom or bust his whole career.

For a guy who's been a video game cover model and a two-time All-Star, it's surreal that he's topped 4 rWAR just once in seven seasons. That his personality rubs some people the wrong way is a "whatever" thing for the most part, but times when his head doesn't seem to be in the game are harder to forgive.

What really matters right now, of course, is that Chisholm just didn't have a good year in 2026, and least of all at the plate.

It's his .399 slugging percentage that stands out, as it's well below his career mark of .444. It's also hard to wave off. He lost 1 mph in average bat speed from 2025 to 2026, and it mainly manifested in struggles versus heat. Against four-seam fastballs, specifically, he hit .214 with a -10 Run Value.

Chisholm remains a gifted athlete, and that still has value in the field and on the basepaths. Yet this is ultimately a case where a team will have to go all-in on upside, with a very real threat of getting the downside instead.

2026 Teams: New York Mets, Tampa Bay Rays

2026 Stats: 32 GS, 169.0 IP, 161 H (23 HR), 156 K, 63 BB, 4.42 ERA

When he was a Met, you could have said "What a year for Freddy Peralta!" and meant it in a derogatory sense. A 4.99 ERA in 22 starts? That's not great.

His work with the Rays redeemed him, perhaps even more than his results let on. And that's saying something, given that he ended his run in Tampa Bay with a 1.82 ERA in September and October.

Peralta somehow added both to his extension (6.7 feet) and to his fastball velocity (94.8 mph) upon joining the Rays. He also won over FanGraphs' Pitching+ metric, going from a score of 101 as a Met to 110 as a Ray. Only five pitchers did better after the trade deadline.

After all that, his strikeout rate… somehow dropped? Or rather, dropped even further. It got as high as 30.9 percent in 2023. It was 22.1 percent as a Met, and then 19.7 percent as a Ray. Only 11 qualified starters did worse than the latter all year.

It's not an ideal trajectory for a 30-year-old pitcher, and it's not as if substantially better contact quality was his trade-off at the end of the year. So even if he does carry over what worked as a Ray, sustainability will be a question.

2026 Stats: 150 G, 656 PA, 35 HR, 2 SB, .260 AVG, .331 OBP, .493 SLG

Brandon Lowe picked a heck of a year to post a career-best 5.3 rWAR, and we'd be remiss if we didn't acknowledge how big of a role his defense played.

Before 2026, Lowe was known as a bad defensive second baseman. Not so this year, including to the tune of a +29 swing in Outs Above Average. All it took was the right coaching , so we'll roll with it as something that could be sustainable.

Otherwise, two of this three 30-homer seasons have come in the last two years. He had his best year ever for pulling the ball in the air , which is still another revolution that passes the smell test.

The bad stuff concerns what happened when Lowe didn't make contact. His 28.8 K% marked his highest strikeout rate since 2019, and it might undersell how much he swung and missed. He had a 66.9 contact percentage, third-lowest among qualified hitters.

That would be easy to forgive if Lowe had good plate discipline, but his 33.6 chase percentage was a career high and in the 27th percentile to boot. That's never ideal, and least of all for a 32-year-old whose "old man skills" should be getting sharper.

2026 Stats: 30 GS, 169.2 IP, 162 H (19 HR), 157 K, 39 BB, 4.03 ERA

A 2.64 ERA over 25 starts made Trevor Rogers an All-Star and Rookie of the Year contender in 2021. In 2025, he made 18 starts and pitched to a 1.81 ERA. This year, he had a 6.84 ERA at the end of May before ripping off a 2.90 ERA in his last 20 starts.

There's a difference between a good run and a good season, however, and Rogers has yet to prove he can handle the latter. That is, at least if you consider a good season from a starter to consist of 30-plus starts' worth of consistency.

Optimistically, his free agency is a chance to get in on the ground floor of a late-blooming ace, a la Zack Wheeler in 2019. There is support for the idea, including how Pitching+ rated Rogers (106) higher than Paul Skenes (105) this year.

Even setting aside the inconsistency, though, there's still a broader lack of swing-and-miss stuff (46th percentile Whiff% this year) and one heck of a platoon disadvantage. Righties had a .759 OPS against Rogers this year, compared to a .515 OPS for lefties.

Normally, a good changeup can solve a problem like that. But the change is already Rogers' primary offering, and righties hit .338 with a .303 xBA against it this season. Per its -11 Run Value, it was the worst changeup in baseball.

2026 Stats: 32 GS, 185.0 IP, 148 H (20 HR), 159 K, 70 BB, 3.21 ERA

This is just no fun at all, precisely because watching Michael King pitch is all sorts of fun. The movement on his stuff is devilish in the best way, and there just aren't many who can work the east-west sides of the plate like he can.

However, seen his Baseball Savant page lately? It's shockingly not impressive.

He was average or worse for a bunch of key indicators this year, most notably including a strikeout rate that fell into the 38th percentile. His walk rate wasn't much better, landing in the 40th percentile. Overall, he had the sixth-lowest Pitching+ score among qualified starters.

It was his capacity for limiting hard contact (i.e., hard-hit rate in the 89th percentile) that sustained him, but some of the credit goes to the defenders he had behind him in San Diego. Per Outs Above Average , no pitcher benefited more from his defense this season.

The best thing for King, then, might be to re-up with the Padres. With any other team, he'll be at risk.

Stats courtesy of Baseball Reference , FanGraphs and Baseball Savant .