Fairbanks, 32 next month, is a player-president of baseball operations who knows Peter Bendix well from his years in the Rays’ front office. He was a ninth-round pick by the Rangers in 2015 and made his big league debut with Texas in 2019, but was traded to the Rays in exchange for a prospect. Nick Solak after just eight performances. At 25, Fairbanks capped an uneven rookie year with a 6.86 ERA and 5.07 FIP over 21 innings of work, but emerged as one of the league’s most exciting emerging relievers in the abbreviated 2020, as he turned in a 2.70 ERA while striking out 33.3% of his opponents in 27 appearances.
That strong 2020 campaign kicked off a stretch that saw Fairbanks become 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, collecting 13 saves along the way before being more firmly installed as the Rays’ closer for the 2023 campaign. In his three years as Tampa’s full-time closer, Fairbanks has put up stellar results with a 2.98 ERA and 3.31 FIP in 151 innings of work while recording 75 saves. collected. That said, his peripheral numbers are starting to dip somewhat.
Over the past three years, Fairbanks has taken a step back from shutting down a third of his opponents and instead striking out 27.9% against a 9.0% walk rate. That’s dropped even further when looking at the past two years, as his strikeout rate has dropped to 24.0%, while his average fastball velocity has dropped from a peak of 99 mph to just 97.3 this year. That’s still top speed, of course, but the drop in velocity and declining strikeouts heading into Fairbanks’ age-32 season leaves some questions in his profile that weren’t there even two years ago. All of these red flags led the Rays to decline their $11 million team option on Fairbanks’ services for the 2026 season, although it’s reasonable to expect a team with a bigger budget would have happily picked up that option given the relatively low price tag for a one-year contract.
Since becoming a free agent, Fairbanks has received attention from teams like the Dodgers and Blue Jays as they look to strengthen their bullpens. That certainly doesn’t come close to an extensive list of teams interested in his services, as teams like the Cubs, Mets, Mariners and Yankees are all heavily involved in the bullpen market as well. That’s a lot of big market teams the Marlins are competing with, but the good news for the club is that some top utility weapons like Edwin Diaz, Robert SuarezAnd Ryan Helsley seem likely to catch the attention of some of those big market teams.
That could leave someone like Fairbanks, who can’t get a deal close to that of someone like Diaz, to the Marlins. He could very likely get a much cheaper deal than Williams, who is already explicitly linked to eight different teams and is still likely to land a hefty deal because of that interest, even after a poor season in New York. While the Marlins are known to be active in that market as well, MLBTR predicted Williams would land a four-year contract worth $68 million this winter. It would be a shock to see Fish spend at that level on a reliever, and the two-year, $18 million deal projected for Fairbanks is certainly much more attractive, even if the team apparently wants to spend money on it.
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