The Giants might have bought themselves a present to be opened six months from now.
The San Francisco Giants have announced the signing of RHP Jason Foley to a 1-year major league deal. He missed all of 2025 recovering from right shoulder capsule surgery and will miss probably half of the 2026 season, too. Previously, the four-year veteran was the Detroit Tigers’ closer, registering 28 saves in 2024.
He’s thrown 199.2 major league innings in 210 games and carries a 3.16 ERA (3.22 FIP) for his career. He went undrafted in 2015 and didn’t sign with the Tigers until August 2016. He’s a great case in the study of perseverance and the mental qualities necessary for physical competition, but he’s also an outlier in the realm of major league baseball.
His fastball has consistenly been in the upper percentiles of Statcast ratings (since 2021: 84th, 87th, 92nd, and 91st in 2024) and yet his career strikeouts per 9 of 6.8 is not what you’d expect from that velocity. To put it in perspective, that’s the same K/9 that Barry Zito had in 2010. With a sinker that averages 97 mph, you’d think that would be higher. Instead, he’s more of a groundball/home run-limiting righty who is still a work in progress even at 30 years old.
This story from a couple of years ago reveals the process that moved him from a four-seam guy to a two-seam guy:
[…] Foley did not throw a sinker at all until 2020.
The story behind what is now one of the best pitches in baseball goes like this: That spring, the Tigers — still evolving in their analytic advancements — brought in a Driveline consultant to work with a select group of minor leaguers on pitch design.
Foley estimates he threw three bullpens in front of the consultant. And the early takeaway was stark. That hard four-seamer Foley threw? It wasn’t any good. That helps explain why the pitcher with great extension and high-end velocity ever went undrafted in the first place. […]
“I knew I threw hard, but (the fastball) would just kind of get hit around a little bit,” Foley said. “That was due to the lack of very good metrics on that pitch, whether it was spin, vertical break, all that stuff.”
The solution: Throw a sinker instead.
“That was a super important moment in my career,” Foley said. “Kind of changed the path of my career, in my opinion.”
The Tigers had optioned him to Triple-A out of Spring Training because they were very disappointed with his development. The injury might explain some of that, but it’s interesting to note that his slider spin rate has been consistently below 2,500 rpm (averaging ~2,200 for his career), which I’ve determined the Giants have set as the minimum threshold for their slider-throwing relievers.
Is he John Brebbia 3.0? Plausibly. And, it’s a little cute that the Giants have continued the Farhan Zaidi tradition of housing shelter animals to see if Oracle Park becomes their forever home. We had Brebbia, then Luke Jackson, now Jason Foley, all pitchers whose pitch mix/profiles seem to align with a core organizational philosophy high velocity sinker, high spin slider guys. All this to say that the major league deal component all but guarantees that the Giants’ pitching lab is certain they can tweak Foley’s slider.
We’ll find out several months from now. A full recovery from surgery is not guaranteed and the downside is that the team gets no performance out of the signing. We saw the Giants add JT Brubaker midway through last season and this seems like a move on that wavelength. The Giants know they need depth and figure they’ll need dependable late inning options down the stretch and Foley satisfies both conditions — at least in theory.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed at the time of this writing. MLB Trade Rumors had projected his first year arbitration number at $3.15 million, so figure this might come in a little under with incentives. He’s a cheaper alternative to, say, Pete Fairbanks and he should be coming back online just when the Giants will need all the help they can get. He’s almost like a deadline acquisition!
Category: General Sports
