Veteran left-hander Joey Lucchesi is headed to Japan. The Chiba Lotte Marines of Nippon Professional Baseball announced this week that they’ve signed the 33-year-old CAA client for the remainder of the 2026 season (via Yuri Karasawa of Yakyu Cosmopolitan). Marines skipper Saburo Omura indicated in a statement that Lucchesi will work out of his rotation.
Lucchesi has pitched in eight of the past nine major league seasons, with the lone exception being a 2022 campaign lost to injury. He was a solid rotation piece with the Padres for his first two big league seasons in 2018-19 (293 2/3 innings, 4.14 ERA, 24.6 K%, 8.0 BB%) and had some decent stints as a swingman following a trade to the Mets. More recently, he’s begun to bounce around the league, pitching with three different organizations (Mets, Giants, Angels) in the past three seasons.
The Halos only gave Lucchesi 3 1/3 innings in the majors this year. Opponents tagged him for five earned runs. It wasn’t a great showing, but there’s not much to be gleaned from such a small sample. Lucchesi has been much sharper in Triple-A Salt Lake, where he’s tossed 33 1/3 innings in an extremely hitter-friendly setting but nonetheless notched a tidy 3.24 earned run average. He fanned 31.9% of his opponents there against a 9.2% walk rate and kept 46.2% of the batted balls against him on the ground. The Angels granted him his release earlier this month, which now clearly seems to have been due to foreign opportunity language in his minor league contract.
All told, Lucchesi has pitched 416 2/3 innings in the majors. His career 4.15 ERA is a near identical match to the 4.14 mark he posted in his first two seasons as a member of San Diego’s rotation. Lucchesi doesn’t throw particularly hard or miss bats at a high level, but his sinker and curveball/changeup hybrid (“churve”) have both generally graded out as effective pitches in the majors. He’ll spend the remainder of the season in Japan — likely earning more than he’d have secured on a minor league deal in North America — and reassess his market in the offseason. A strong performance could set him up for a seven-figure guarantee overseas in 2027 or catch the attention of major league clubs in free agency this winter.
