Marlins Interested In Pete Fairbanks

The Marlins are interested in right-hander Pete Fairbanks, according to a report from Kevin Barral and Isaac Azout of Fish on First. Barral and Azout add that the Marlins continue to show interest in Devin Williams, who Barral previously linked to Miami last month.

Fairbanks, 32 next month, is a player president of baseball operations Peter Bendix is very familiar with from his years in the Rays’ front office. A ninth-round pick by the Rangers back in 2015, he made his big league debut with Texas back in 2019 but was traded to the Rays in exchange for prospect Nick Solak after just eight appearances. Then 25, Fairbanks finished an uneven rookie year with a 6.86 ERA and 5.07 FIP across 21 innings of work but emerged in the shortened 2020 as one of the league’s most exciting up-and-coming relievers, as he turned in a 2.70 ERA while striking out 33.3% of his opponents in across 27 appearances.

That strong 2020 campaign kicked off a stretch where Fairbanks became one of the Rays’ most reliable relief arms. From 2021 to ’22, he pitched to a 2.70 ERA with a 35.2% strikeout rate and picked up 13 saves along the way before being installed more firmly as the Rays’ closer for the 2023 campaign. In his three years as Tampa’s full-time closer, Fairbanks has turned in brilliant results with a 2.98 ERA and 3.31 FIP in 151 innings of work while collecting 75 saves. With that said, his peripheral numbers have begun to flag somewhat.

Over the past three years, Fairbanks has taken a step back from striking out a third of his opponents and instead punched out 27.9% against a 9.0% walk rate. That’s fallen even further when looking at the last two years, when his strikeout rate has fallen to 24.0% as his average fastball velocity has dipped from its 99 mph peak to just 97.3 this year. That’s still premium velocity, of course, but the dip in velocity and declining strikeout rate headed into Fairbanks’s age-32 season leave some questions in his profile that weren’t present even two years ago. All those red flags led the Rays to decline their $11MM team option on Fairbanks’s services for the 2026 season, though it’s fair to expect that a team with a larger budget might have happily picked up that option given the relatively low price tag on a one-year commitment.

Since he became a free agent, Fairbanks has gotten attention from teams like the Dodgers and Blue Jays as they seek to fortify their bullpens. That’s surely not anything close to a comprehensive list of the teams interested in his services, as teams like the Cubs, Mets, Mariners, and Yankees all figure to be heavily involved in the bullpen market as well. That’s a lot of big market teams for the Marlins to be doing battle with, but the good news for the club is that some top-flight relief arms like Edwin Diaz, Robert Suarez, and Ryan Helsley seem likely to draw the attention of some of those big market teams.

That could leave someone like Fairbanks, who doesn’t figure to get a deal close to that of someone like Diaz, for the Marlins to scoop up. He’d be very likely to come much more cheaply than Williams, who has already been explicitly connected to eight different teams and remains likely to command a hefty deal due to that interest even after a down season in New York. While the Marlins are known to be involved in that market too, MLBTR predicted Williams to land a four-year, $68MM contract this winter. It would be a shock to see Fish spend at that level on a reliever, and the two-year, $18MM deal predicted for Fairbanks is surely much more appealing even as the team is apparently looking to spend.