Five MLB Veterans Who Are Still Free Agents on Opening Day

Folks, it’s finally here. Opening Day (for most teams…) of the 2025 MLB season has arrived, and there’s just something so refreshing and exciting about a brand new year of baseball commencing.

Free agency dominated the headlines of this past offseason, especially the landing spots of some of the top talents in the game like Juan Soto, Corbin Burnes, Roki Sasaki, Willy Adames, Alex Bregman, and Max Fried. While each of them easily found their new long-term homes, there were still a relatively large amount of players that weren’t so lucky.

Before the first pitches are thrown later today, we’re going to take one last look at a group of players that surprisingly never signed a contract for this season. There are always a handful of them in each offseason, but this year’s list has former All-Stars, closers, and serviceable starting pitchers like we don’t typically see around this time of year.

Let’s jump in.

Five Veterans Who Still Are Free Agents on Opening Day

Yasmani Grandal

2024 stats: 72 G, 243 PA, 9 HR, 27 RBI, .228/.304/.400, .704 OPS, 95 wRC+, 1.4 fWAR

This past offseason, the free agent catching market was extremely weak. This is mind, Grandal was certainly viewed as one of the better options out there, yet he remains unsigned. The switch-hitter posted 1.4 fWAR in 2024 – the most he’s had in a season since 2021 – while showing an improvement on offense basically all across the board.

Last year, the average wRC+ for catchers was 91, which puts Grandal just a hair above the rest of the bunch. His OPS was also 26 points higher than your average backstops was. Oh, and he also posted his lowest strikeout rate since 2013 (H/T to Leo Morgenstern for the factoids).

Grandal remains a rock solid pitcher-framer and he’s still got some offensive chops despite the fact that he’s turning 37 later this year. Two-time All-Stars with a lengthy track record like his typically don’t get left behind on the open market, but he remains jobless.

Unless he turns down another offer (sorry, Braves) and simply decides to hang it up, it shouldn’t take long for more injuries to surface around the league, and Grandal should land on his feet.

Lance Lynn

2024 stats: 23 GS, 3.84 ERA, 4.31 FIP, .244 BAA, 8.36 K/9, 3.38 BB/9, 1.3 fWAR

Similarly to Grandal, Lynn also posted his best season since 2021 last year. The burly right-hander missed a little bit of time, which is becoming a common theme for him, but his numbers fell right in line with where he’s been at as his career has marched on.

At one point during the offseason, it sounded like Lynn’s market may be heating up, but not as a starting pitcher. The 13-year veteran was said to be garnering interest as a closer, but it’s clear that those talks didn’t end up going anywhere.

There are plenty of teams that still need help out of their rotations and their bullpens, so it’s admittedly quite surprising to see Lynn still sitting at home. The most recent update on him was that the Cubs were discussing a one-year contract with him as starting-pitching depth, but this is another example of nothing coming to fruition.

At this point, Lynn’s old enough to sail off into the sunset on the heels of a successful big league career. However, he put a lot of work into his conditioning this past winter in an effort to prolong his playing days, so a back-marker team in need of a veteran arm can (and should) come calling any minute now.

J.D. Martinez

2024 stats: 120 G, 495 PA, 16 HR, 69 RBI, .235/.320/.406, .725 OPS, 108 wRC+, 0.6 fWAR

For over a decade, Martinez was one of the game’s most prolific and fearsome designated hitters. He’s topped the 30-homer mark five times in his career and isn’t far removed from hitting 33 big flies with 103 RBI for the 2023 Dodgers.

The six-time All-Star made it into 120 games for the New York Mets last year, hitting 16 home runs with 69 RBI, a .725 OPS, and a 108 wRC+. This still puts him as an above-average hitter, but it’s hard to deny that his numbers dipped a bit from where they’d been in the recent past.

Martinez will be 38 years young in August, but he’s still got quite a bit of thump left in his stick. If anything, you can’t overlook the fact that he had an .836 OPS and 139 wRC+ against left-handed pitching last year.

Even as rosters are finalized and regular-season games get underway, there’s no doubt that a team like the New York Yankees, Seattle Mariners, or Kansas City Royals should swoop in and snag Martinez on a single-year pact. He showed last year that there’s still some life left in that bat, so why not?

David Robertson

2024 stats: 68 G, 3.00 ERA, 2.65 FIP, .201 BAA, 12.38 K/9, 3.38 BB/9, 1.9 fWAR

I’ve been riding the Robertson Train for a while now, but I am baffled that he didn’t land a job this winter. The right-hander is going to be 40 years old in early April, but he remained steady as they come last year with the defending champions, the Texas Rangers.

Robertson made it into 68 games (his most since 2018) and while he wasn’t used as a closer, he was on the mound constantly, and to really encouraging results. He struck out 12.4 batters per nine innings while sporting a H/9 rate that was nearly three full hits less than it was the year prior.

It’s hard to believe that his age is deterring teams from signing him, especially because of how he looked on the mound in 2024. Amongst relievers that were 37 or older this past season (there were more than you think!), Robertson topped the leaderboards in games and innings and was just behind ex-teammate Kirby Yates in K/9m H/9, ERA, and FIP.

Even if he’s not used as a primary closer anymore, Robertson is a consistent and durable veteran presence that would shore up the back-end of virtually any team’s bullpen.

Spencer Turnbull

2024 stats: 17 G (7 GS), 2.65 ERA, 3.85 FIP, .188 BAA, 9.61 K/9, 3.31 BB/9, 0.7 fWAR

Turnbull had a much smaller sample size than anybody else on this list last year, but he showed a ton of potential in his 54-inning showing. The right-hander has struggled with injuries and overall underperformance over the course of his big league career, but he seemed to turn a corner on the Philadelphia Phillies in 2024.

What makes a pitcher like Turnbull so efficient is that he can fill multiple roles on a team’s pitching staff. He’s not strictly a starter or a reliever, but he can go every fifth day for you if you need him to, and he can also pitch multiple times a week in a multi-inning relief role. Versatility is so heavily valued in baseball these days, and not just on the position player side.

Turnbull, 32, introduced a sweeper last year and promptly saw his strikeout rate easily rise to a new career-high for him. He’s not ever going to be a 200-strikeout arm, and he’s also something of a risk to even reach the 100-inning mark, but a few brief glimpses of hope (2021, 2024) show that when he’s “on”, he’s damn good.