With Dylan Cease off the market, one of the best free-agent starting pitchers you can still get is Framber Valdez . But it's for a very different reason.

When you look at what got Cease his seven-year, $210 million deal with the Blue Jays, it's strikeouts. He's a strikeout machine. Cease gets 200 K's a year, like clockwork, and that high-strikeout skill set made him a top-tier free-agent starter.

For Valdez, it's not quite that. Yes, the former Astros ace gets a lot of strikeouts, too -- 187 a year from 2022-25 -- but the 32-year-old left-hander doesn't get them at the rate Cease gets them. The No. 1 standout skill Valdez has, the one that makes him a top-tier free agent starter, too, is that he's a ground ball machine.

Valdez is the most consistent ground ball pitcher in baseball

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