The Angels, who had been searching for help for their rotation all winter, finally picked up a pitcher on Tuesday night, agreeing to a one-year deal with left-hander Jose Quintana.
The deal, which has not been announced by the club, is reportedly for $8 million.
Quintana, 31, spent the past 3½ seasons pitching for the Chicago Cubs, much of that time under current Angels manager Joe Maddon.
Quintana has a career 3.73 ERA, including an All-Star appearance in 2016. He pitched just four games in 2020, missing most of the shortened season with a pair of injuries. He cut his pitching hand washing dishes during the sport’s shutdown last spring, and then he went down with lat inflammation at the beginning of September.
Although Quintana does not figure to slot toward the front of the Angels’ rotation, he does provide experience and depth to a rotation that was one of the team’s weakest areas last season.
Quintana likely fits somewhere in the middle with a rotation of Dylan Bundy, Andrew Heaney and Griffin Canning. The Angels are also hoping Shohei Ohtani can return from two seasons lost to arm injuries to be a productive starter.
The deal puts the Angels’ payroll, for luxury tax purposes, at around $184 million. The tax kicks in when the payroll exceeds $210 million. Unless the Angels are willing to exceed the threshold, that could make it difficult to afford the market’s top pitcher, Trevor Bauer. Other cheaper free agent options include Jake Odorizzi, Masahiro Tanaka and Taijuan Walker.
The Angels will be hoping that Quintana can break with the recent trend of the Angels coming up empty in their one-year deals for starters. In recent years, they got little production out of Trevor Cahill, Matt Harvey and Julio Teheran. All three had been much better a few years before joining the Angels, just like Quintana.
Quintana began his career with the Chicago White Sox as one of baseball’s more consistent and durable pitchers.
From 2012-16, Quintana posted a 3.41 ERA and he averaged 30 starts per season. In 2016 he had a 3.20 ERA and finished 10th in the Cy Young voting.
The following season, the White Sox traded him across town, to the Cubs. After posting a 4.49 ERA with the White Sox in the first part of the season, Quintana finished with a 3.74 ERA with the Cubs, helping them to the playoffs.
Over the next two seasons, pitching under Maddon, Quintana was a reliable innings eater, starting 63 games and pitching 345-1/3 innings.
His 2020 season didn’t amount to much, thanks to a fluke accident at home. Just days before players returned to action for summer camp in early July, Quintana suffered nerve damage to his pitching thumb when he cut his hand washing dishes. He needed surgery and did not pitch until Aug. 25.
Quintana then appeared in just two games before suffering the lat injury. He missed two weeks after that, then pitched in two more games before the end of the season.