The Chicago White Sox hit the board in free agency Wednesday morning with a left-handed pitcher Antonius Kaij to a two-year, $12 million contract with a $10 million mutual option through 2028. Kay will make $5 million in each of the next two seasons, with a $2 million buyout if the mutual option is not exercised.
It’s been a huge week for the Trans-Pacific starting pitching exchange, with Matt Manning go to the KBO and Cody Ponce back in the other direction. Kay spent the last two seasons pitching for NPB’s Yokohama DeNA BayStars – and he pitched quite well, it’s fair to say: in 24 starts and 155 innings last season, Kay posted a 1.74 ERA and a 2.55 FIP. That ERA is a few tenths better than anything Tatsuya Imaithis season’s popular Japanese pitching import, was posted this season.
The White Sox have shopped the expat pitching market before; at the risk of having to make an appeal Erik Fedde in a third blog post in as many days, Chicago signed the former Nationals righty to a two-year, $15 million contract in the wake of a dominant 2023 season in the KBO. Fedde was stellar when he first returned to North America, posting a 3.11 ERA in 21 starts for the Sox, who dealt him to St. Louis at the 2024 trade deadline. Fedde went completely broke in 2025, but by the time that happened he wasn’t Chicago’s problem anymore, making his signing one of the biggest issues. Chris Getz’s greatest successes as GM.
It’s easy to see, then, why Getz would want to revisit that particular spot on the craps table. And while Kay was even less effective than Fedde in his first Major League stint, there is a lot to like about the way he developed during his time in Japan.
Kay, 30, is a stocky, 6-foot-1 left-handed man with a low three-quarter delivery. He has a kind of compact Travis Wood-y throw that generates little extension, but an interesting horizontal movement on his breaking ball.
The Mets were interested in the local boy, drafting him first out of high school in Long Island, and then again after a stellar career at UConn. Before he could make it to the majors, Kay was shipped off to Toronto in the United States Marcus Stroman trade, and struggled to gain a foothold in the major leagues. He played in every Major League season from 2019 to 2023, but he topped out at 33 2/3 innings in 2021, which is about 40% of his career total. Kay was waived and then non-tendered twice in the space of about eight weeks in late 2023, after which he (reasonably) decided to try his luck in Japan.
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It was there that Kay really started to make some changes. During his first stint in American pro ball, Kay had above-average fastball velocity for a lefty – consistently in the 94 to 95 mph range – but with movement in the dead zone and no flashy secondary pitches. He tinkered with his slider, tried a cutter and a changeup, and… honestly, you can tell how well that worked by the fact that he went to Japan in the first place.
Last month, Kay went on Robert Murray’s podcast and explained how his repertoire has evolved after two seasons abroad. He said throwing four-sealers at the top of the zone didn’t work because Japanese hitters, who tend to have flatter swings than American-trained hitters, would foul that pitch all day. That forced Kay to develop a sinker, and then everything clicked.
Kay’s current portfolio includes three fastballs – four-sieve, sinker, cutter – along with a sweeper, a changer and a show-me curveball. By mixing up the fastballs, Kay turned himself into a soft contact monster. He actually had a slightly lower K% in Japan than during his short MLB career, but he combined that with groundball rates well above 50% and HR/9 ratios near 0.4. At the NPB he did what boys like Framber Valdez And Christopher Sanchez have done here.
There are obvious reasons not to expect Kay to come back to the US and pitch as a first Brandon Webb right from the jump. Kay primarily looked for a sinker because Japanese hitters attack pitchers differently than hitters from America. In the entire NPB season, only two players hit more than 23 home runs.
And if you look at the individual rankings, you can see evidence that the quality of play is lower there too. We know what Tyler Nevin, Yoshi TsutsugoAnd Trey Kool can do against Major League pitching, and it’s not “finish in the top 10 of the league in home runs.”
While the White Sox would throw a parade if Kay came back here and pitched like Valdez or Sánchez, I suspect even their expectations for him are a bit more modest. That’s fine; Kay doesn’t even have to be good to be worth $6 million a year to a team projected to finish last in a bad division. He just needs to record enough innings to get Chicago’s defense off the field.
He can do that much. Kay tore his UCL in his draft year, but he has been in good standing since then. He made at least 23 starts and threw at least 120 innings in each of his first two full minor league seasons. Then came the pandemic and then a move to the bullpen, but once he got back into the rotation for Yokohama he was completely healthy in both of his seasons with a workload of 24 starts.
Kay joins a White Sox rotation currently occupied by Shane Smith, Sean Burke, David MartinAnd Jonathan Cannon. All five of these guys threw 100 or more innings last season. It did Mike Vasilwho worked almost exclusively out of the bullpen. None had more strikeouts than innings pitched. None of the five returning White Sox innings eaters had an xERA or FIP below 4.00.
Look, the White Sox aren’t in the missing part of their rebuilding cycle yet. That will come when Noa Schultz And Hagen Smith get promoted, or maybe later, or not at all.
The utter vacancy of Chicago’s Major League project can be demonstrated with the following bit of trivia: If Kay’s 2028 mutual option is declined (which it will be, like all mutual options), he will be owed a $2 million buyout. That buyout is further in the future than any other salary obligation for players the White Sox have. In fact, Kay and Andreas Benintendi are the only current White Sox players with a guaranteed contract through 2027.
Kay probably won’t follow Merrill Kelly career path, which will see him reinvent himself abroad so he can return to nearly a decade of lucrative mid-rotation excellence. (To the extent such a pitcher existed in this free agent class, it was probably Ponce.) But he’ll soak up innings, keep the ball on the ground and generally avoid the kind of blowout that turns a forgettable 100-loss team into a hopeless 110-loss team. For a club like the White Sox, there are much worse ways to spend $6 million.
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