Drew Gagnon, Eric Stout Sign With CPBL Teams

Former big league pitchers Drew Gagnon and Eric Stout have both signed on with teams in Taiwan’s Chinese Professional Baseball League. Gagnon, the reigning CPBL MVP, re-signed with the Wei Chuan Dragons, per a team announcement. It’s a two-year deal for the former Mets righty, who’s repped by GSI. The left-handed Stout, who’s previously pitched in the big leagues for the Royals, Cubs and Pirates, has signed with the CPBL’s CTBC Brothers, MLBTR’s Tim Dierkes reports. The 30-year-old Stout, a client of NPG Sports, finished out the 2023 season with the Brothers as well after beginning last year with the Mariners’ Triple-A affiliate.

Gagnon, 33, has spent the past three seasons pitching with the Dragons and cemented himself as one of the top starters in the CPBL. Since debuting there in 2021, he’s pitched 451 1/3 innings of 3.07 ERA ball with a 20.5% strikeout rate and 6.4% walk rate. The 183 innings Gagnon pitched this past season were a personal-high at any level in his 13-year professional career, and he turned in a sharp 3.00 ERA with a 20.8% strikeout rate and 5.9% walk rate.

Gagnon hasn’t pitched in the big leagues since a 2018-19 run with the Mets that saw him record a 7.32 ERA in a small sample of 35 2/3 innings. He spent the 2020 season with the KBO’s Kia Tigers, pitching to a 4.34 ERA in 159 2/3 frames, and his new two-year pact — one of the most lucrative for a foreign player in CPBL history — will keep him in Taiwan for his fourth and fifth CPBL campaigns.

For a former third-rounder who’d become something of a minor league journeyman before making his first jump to the professional ball in Asia, Gagnon has carved out a nice career with better compensation and job security than he’d have had jumping from Triple-A club to Triple-A club in hopes of a perhaps brief MLB return. Present-day CPBL salaries for first-year foreign players can range from $300-400K, and with Gagnon coming off an MVP season and a strong three-year run, he’s quite likely priced himself north of those figures.

As for Stout, he’d been pitching in the bullpen with the Mariners’ Triple-A affiliate but stretched out as a starter in Taiwan, ultimately taking the ball a dozen times and pitching to a 3.28 ERA with a 27.9% strikeout rate and 4.6% walk rate in 68 2/3 frames. He’ll head back to the Brothers’ rotation for the upcoming season. It’s not uncommon for former big leaguers pitching in the CPBL to draw interest from larger Asian professional leagues as the season wears on, but even if he spends the whole year in the CPBL, Stout could parlay a strong showing there into interest from KBO, NPB and/or MLB teams.

In the majors, Stout has just 24 2/3 innings under his belt. He’s been tagged for an unsightly 7.30 ERA in that time.  In parts of six Triple-A seasons, he carries a 4.63 ERA in 286 innings, with particularly solid results over the past two years between the affiliates for the Pirates, Cubs and Mariners. Stout drew some interest from big league clubs early in the offseason, though that was presumably on minor league arrangements. He’ll instead head back to Taiwan and hope that continued success there can either lead to a multi-year deal like the one signed by Gagnon or perhaps a larger guarantee with a team in the KBO, NPB or even back in MLB at some point.