The Athletics have added a pretty intriguing bullpen piece for 2026
The Athletics have made their first signing of the offseason, and it comes in an area of need for the club. On Wednesday, Jon Morosi reported that the A’s had come to terms on a minor-league deal with veteran right-hander Nick Anderson. Per Morosi, his MLB salary will be $1M if he’s added to the 40-man roster.
Basically what that means is that if he makes the 40-man roster, he’s pitching well enough to be a member of the A’s bullpen, or at least is seen as a quality depth option. If he’s pitching well, then he gets paid $1 million, which isn’t much higher than league minimum of $780,000. If he doesn’t make the 40-man, then the A’s gave it a shot and don’t lose much.
It’s a win-win for the A’s, and Anderson gets an invite to camp from a team that is expecting to make a push for the postseason in 2026, so he wins a little too.
Anderson burst onto the scene with the Tampa Bay Rays in 2020, holding a 0.55 ERA in 16 1/3 innings during the regular season. The following season he was on the IL until September while trying to rehab an arm injury. He’d make six appearances in the season’s final month, and then would undergo elbow surgery, which kept him out for the entirety of 2022.
From there, Anderson has bounced around between the Atlanta Braves (2023), Kansas City Royals (2024), Los Angeles Dodgers (’24), Baltimore Orioles (’24), St. Louis Cardinals (2025), Colorado Rockies (’25) and Seattle Mariners (’25).
Over the past three seasons he’s racked up a total of 85 2/3 innings of work while holding a 110 ERA+ (100 is league average) and a 3.99 ERA. Back in 2020, he struck out 44.8% of the batters he faced in an insane run for the Rays. Since returning from injury, that has gone from 25.5% in 2023 to 19% in 2024 and then just 16.4% this past season.
On the bright side, his walk rate has also shrunk, sitting at just 3.3% in his 14 2/3 innings with the Rockies this past season.
One small plus for Anderson is that his four-seamer velocity returned to where it had been in 2020, sitting at 95.2 miles per hour, though it wasn’t missing as many bats at it previously had. One added feature to keep an eye on is that his sinker, which has never been a main pitch for him, but it held a spin rate of 2,320, or 200 more rpm than it held the previous season.
It could be that he threw just three of them, or something to do with the altitude in Colorado, but that’s a pretty big difference.
In his six minor-league games with the Mariners to finish out the 2025 campaign, Anderson held a 3.18 ERA across 5 2/3 innings of work, walking four and striking out ten. That’s good for a 43.5% strikeout rate. While it’s over just six-ish innings, this could be the start of something for the 35-year-old righty.
Anohter takeaway from his time with the Mariners is that they seemed to have him throwing his curveball a little harder, which led to some decent results. In 2020, he was hitting 84.3 mph with the curve, and in his final game of 2025, he was hitting 84.5 with it, a full mile-per-hour above where he’d been with the Rockies.
This is basically a no-risk signing for the A’s, and could end up paying pretty decent dividends for them as either a depth piece of a solid veteran reliever.
