Dallas Keuchel is getting another shot. The 38-year-old left-hander has agreed to a minor league contract with the Athletics and will report to Triple-A, ESPN’s Jeff Passan reported. The deal carries no roster risk for the club — if Keuchel can’t recapture anything close to his peak form, the Athletics simply move on.
That peak was extraordinary. In 2015, Keuchel went 20-8 with a 2.48 ERA across 232 innings for the Houston Astros, striking out 216, walking 51, and racking up 6.6 bWAR. He won the American League Cy Young Award, a Gold Glove, and finished fifth in MVP voting. For a five-year stretch in Houston, he was worth 17.4 bWAR and posted a 3.66 ERA in the American League West, a division that spent most of that window stacking lineups.
What has happened since is a case study in how a pitcher survives — and then doesn’t — when the strikeouts evaporate. Keuchel’s career K/9 sits at 6.9, never elite, but in his Cy Young season he managed 8.4. By 2024, in a four-game cameo with the Milwaukee Brewers, that figure had fallen to 5.9. He allowed 23 hits and 3 home runs in 16⅔ innings. His ERA was 5.40. His bWAR was zero — not negative, but indistinguishable from a replacement-level arm.
The decline accelerated after he left Houston. Keuchel posted a 1.99 ERA in the shortened 2020 season with the White Sox, good for 2.1 bWAR and a fifth-place Cy Young finish. Then the floor gave way. In 2022, split across three organizations — the White Sox, Diamondbacks, and Rangers — he compiled a 9.20 ERA and -2.5 bWAR in 60⅔ innings. The Twins gave him 37⅔ innings in 2023; he produced a 5.97 ERA and -0.1 bWAR. The Brewers tried him last summer. Same story, smaller sample.
Over his last four major league seasons, Keuchel has accumulated -0.5 bWAR combined. His FIP in that span has hovered above 5.00 every year. The command that once made him a ground-ball machine — he led the AL in WHIP at 1.017 in 2015 — has degraded to the point where his 2024 WHIP was 1.860. There is no single injury or mechanical collapse to point to. The stuff simply aged.
What the Athletics are buying, then, is a lottery ticket with a familiar name. The organization is in its first season playing home games in Sacramento after departing Oakland, fielding one of the youngest and least expensive rosters in baseball. Rotation depth is a need, not a luxury. A minor league deal costs the franchise nothing but a Triple-A roster spot and the patience to see whether Keuchel’s sinker can still generate enough weak contact to matter.
Five Gold Gloves suggest the athleticism hasn’t entirely abandoned him. But fielding a position is a different proposition from retiring hitters, and the data on that front is unambiguous: Keuchel has not been a league-average starting pitcher since 2020. He will turn 39 in January. The Athletics will find out in Triple-A whether there is a final chapter left, or whether the book closed two seasons ago and nobody sent the memo.
