The rosters for the 2026 World Baseball Classic were announced late last week, so aside from changes due to injuries or insurance eligibility decisions, we now know who will be suiting up for each country when the tournament begins early next month. In this series of posts, you’ll find a team-by-team breakdown, with notable players, storylines to monitor, and speculation on the serious stuff, such as how the squad will fare on the field, as well as commentary on some of the less serious stuff, like uniforms and team aura.

If you missed the post covering Pool A, or you need a quick refresher on how the WBC works, you can catch up here.

The five teams competing in Pool B — the United States, Mexico, Italy, Great Britain, and Brazil — will play their games at Daikin Park in Houston from March 6 to March 11. The two clubs with the best records after playing each of the other four will advance to the Knockout stage, where they will compete in a single-elimination bracket against the six teams that advance from the other pools. Read the rest of this entry »

Jordan Montgomery helped the Rangers win their first World Series in 2023, but since then, things haven’t gone so well for him. First, he had a rough trip through free agency, then pitched poorly after signing a one-year deal with Arizona, left Scott Boras’ agency, publicly blasted Boras, got blasted by Diamondbacks managing partner Ken Kendrick… and underwent his second Tommy John surgery, which cost him all of the 2025 season. While rehabbing, he was even traded to the Brewers in a salary dump. After all that drama, now he’s a Ranger again.

On Wednesday morning, the day after Rangers pitchers and catchers reported to the team’s spring training facility in Surprise, Arizona, the Dallas Morning News’ Evan Grant reported that the 33-year-old lefty will join Texas on a one-year deal with a $1.25 million base salary and as-yet-unreported incentives. Montgomery had his surgery last April 1, so he won’t be ready until sometime in midseason, but the hope is that he can help the Rangers down the stretch.

With camps opening this week, Montgomery isn’t the only free agent who’s found a new home. On Tuesday, fellow starter Aaron Civale signed a one-year contract with the A’s, while Montgomery’s former Rangers batterymate Jonah Heim inked a one-year deal with the Braves. I’ll round all of these up below. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

The Orioles have signed Chris Bassitt to a one-year, $18.5 million contract. That number includes a $3 million signing bonus, and Bassitt can earn another half a million if he reaches 27 starts, a feat he last failed to accomplish in the shortened 2020 season. That dependability is a major part of what the Orioles are paying for. Bassitt, who came in at no. 35 on our Top 50 Free Agents list, will turn 37 in 10 days, and at this stage of his career, he’s a player who raises your floor rather than your ceiling. With this signing, Orioles continue their recent strategy of coming into the season expecting their pitching staff to outperform middling projections. ESPN’s Jeff Passan broke the news first, because of course he did.

It’s easy to draw a dividing line in Bassitt’s career, starting in 2024. From his debut in 2014 through 2023, he owned a 62-42 record with a 3.49 ERA and 3.91 FIP. Over the past two years, he’s 21-23 with a 4.06 ERA and 4.04 FIP. However, the advanced numbers say he actually started faltering in 2023, when he ran a 3.60 ERA in spite of a 4.28 FIP. Knowing that, it’s important to note that despite similar top-line numbers, some advanced stats saw Bassitt as bouncing back a bit in 2025. The difference is especially apparent in the expected stats. His xERA dropped from 4.52 in 2024 to 4.16 in 2025, and his xFIP dropped from 4.28 to 3.84. He continued to drop his arm angle, which helped him induce a hair more soft contact and raise his groundball rate. That kind of change often comes with a reduction in a pitcher’s walk and strikeout rates, but Bassitt was able to lower his walk rate while keeping his strikeout rate roughly the same. That’s a neat trick if you can pull it off, but it’s by no means a sure thing that Bassitt will be able to keep it going in his age-37 season.

Bassitt throws the kitchen sink, boasting an eight-pitch repertoire that includes both a traditional changeup and a splitter, but that belies the fact that he is, for the most part, a sinkerballer. He throws the pitch nearly half the time against righties and 30% of the time against lefties, with his seven other pitches all playing off it. The sinker averaged just 91.6 mph in 2025, the lowest mark of his career. There’s a velocity floor for just about every pitcher, below which it doesn’t matter how many pitches you throw or how well you can place the ball. We don’t know what Bassitt’s is, but it stands to reason that it can’t be all that far below 91 mph. From here on out, the projections won’t trust him too much because they’ll always bake in a year of age-related decline. Still, the vast repertoire, the veteran savvy, and the long track record of success with below-average velocity make it easy to view Bassitt as one of those players who deserves the benefit of the doubt until he finally puts up a true clunker of a season. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the things that happens when pitchers and catchers report to camp is that managers update everyone on any unreported offseason developments. Unfortunately, few of those updates are about fun new cocktails they tried or animals they saw on vacation. It brings me no pleasure to tell you I have yet to see one single beat reporter file a story about a manager who saw a really cool sea turtle while snorkeling. Most of those developments are injuries, which meant that Tuesday was at once a glorious rite of the coming spring and an unbearably heavy dump of unpleasant injury news. Today we’re going to focus on the depressing dump, so courtesy of Andy Kostka of The Baltimore Banner, here’s a gorgeous picture that captures the eternal hope of spring training as a little pre-casualty report treat to soften the blow.

Wow. That was beautiful. Thank you, Andy. Now we’ll get miserable, but please remember that it could always be worse. We could be back in the 1880s, when the unpleasant health updates weren’t about who broke their hamate bone, but about who died of consumption. (The preceding sentence was originally intended to be a joke, but guess what.) Read the rest of this entry »

12:03

Dan Szymborski: Greetings all!

12:05

Dan Szymborski: I’m OK with it!

12:05

Dan Szymborski: I mean, I would have preferred Valdez

12:05

Dan Szymborski: but given no Valdez, I’d rather have additional starter depth than not

Read the rest of this entry »

One of the things that people like to ask me about when it comes to the ZiPS projections is how they change over time. While knowing what the projections are now is, of course, highly useful, it’s also interesting to see who has changed the most in the algorithms, since they basically represent the players who we should feel differently about compared to how we did before. Knowing how changes in a player affect performance models can also reveal an interesting fact or two about how players develop and age.

After running through the hitters who have gained and declined the most in my piece yesterday, today I’ll look at the pitchers who have done the same. The methodology I’ve chosen here is a simple one: I’m ranking the difference in 2026 WAR as it’s projected now compared to what it was as of Opening Day 2025. For the decliners, I didn’t include the off-the-radar types. While it’s good to know if a fringe High-A prospect hit a wall at Double-A, it’s more impactful to see the declines among the more roster-relevant players than the poor fellow who saw his -1.0 WAR projection slip to -2.5 WAR. Also left out were guys whose decline in WAR is mostly the result of a major arm injury. It’s worth noting that there will be slight differences between ZiPS WAR and the WAR recorded here on FanGraphs. There are a few methodological differences that can move a few runs here or there, with the most notable being that ZiPS doesn’t purely use FIP, but rather estimates how much of an ERA-FIP discrepancy is attributable to the pitcher based on their history of outperforming or underperforming their defenses.

I’ll start with the gainers, diving deeper on a few of the standouts:

In 2024, I included Hunter Brown in my annual Booms and Busts column, and while he did break out that season, he has basically experienced a second breakout last year, going from a good pitcher to a legitimate Cy Young contender. There’s a lot to love about Brown — he misses bats, he doesn’t walk guys, and he’s difficult to hit hard — and nothing really to dislike. There are no hidden spiders lurking in the Statcast data to give you a jump scare, either. At this point, Brown is probably the most irreplaceable member of the Houston Astros, and if he doesn’t fit your definition of a legitimate ace, then there might only be one or two of them in baseball:

Jacob deGrom is the only pitcher who made this list primarily due to improved health, but I’m going to allow it, as we shouldn’t ignore what a few good late-career seasons would to do to buttress his Hall of Fame chances. Honestly, just adding some bulk to his stats and innings would do a lot; while the electorate has changed greatly in the last decade and will continue to do so, I’m not sure 75% of the voters would want to induct a starting pitcher with fewer than 100 wins. I mean, I still would have voted for him, but I’m weird. deGrom has dialed things back slightly in order to stay healthy, and so far it has been a good tradeoff; plus, he’s still throwing harder than the vast majority of pitchers out there:

The 2025 season saw Cristopher Sánchez take over as the ace of the Phillies’ rotation. Sánchez’s improvement was fairly consistent across the board, and it was supported by Statcast data. Especially interesting was his contact rate, which could support an even higher K/9 rate than the career-high 9.45 he posted last year, and didn’t come at the expense of anything else:

Garrett Crochet put up a Cy Young-esque season in 2024, but naturally, a projection system is going to be a bigger believer in a pitcher when he does something like that twice. Pitchers always come with injury risk, but getting through two healthy seasons does have real predictive value for guys coming off of serious injuries. By the end of his Red Sox contract, ZiPS thinks that Crochet will be around the level of Jon Lester and Mel Parnell in the Red Sox southpaw pecking order:

After a phenomenal debut for the Pirates in 2024, Skenes basically did it again in 2025, in 50 more big league innings, and with basically no meaningful regression toward the mean. ZiPS never hated Skenes or anything, but now it loves him even more than it did a year ago. Add in his age and contract situation, and he’s the most valuable pitcher in baseball:

While ZiPS doesn’t think Andrew Abbott is a potential ace, it’s fairly confident that he’s a reasonable no. 2 starter, with some upside remaining in his strikeout rate. He has been the ninth-best pitcher in the majors the last two seasons (minimum 200 combined innings) in hard-hit percentage against, which has enabled him to survive in a very good home run-hitting park and without a great offspeed pitch to befuddle righties:

Before we turn to the decliners, some rapid fire thoughts on the remaining gainers. Nolan McLean probably won’t match the numbers he put up in his first eight starts with the Mets this year, but that’s no reason to be skeptical of him. He improved across a full season in the high minors, facing little resistance from opposing hitters at Triple-A. We could very well be talking about McLean as a Cy Young contender in short order, mirroring Hunter Brown’s trajectory. Shane Smith was one of the highlights on a White Sox team that you probably didn’t watch much otherwise. With his velocity ticking up another notch in his first professional season as a full-time starter, and a changeup that seems almost cruel when it’s working, he’s a legitimate no. 2 starter with room to improve even further. Jesus Lúzardo’s sinker has become a real weapon, and his stats bounced back after an injury-riddled 2024 season. He looks set to get a pretty sizable pay day a year from now, lockout willing.

A sudden dip in strikeout rate from an older pitcher frequently spells imminent misfortune, but Merrill Kelly arrested that decline a bit, and should have at least another year or two as a decent mid-rotation option. ZiPS would still like to see Jacob Misiorowski lose another walk per nine off his stat line, and he may do just that; his 42% first-strike percentage improved to 51% at Triple-A in 2025, and then averaged nearly 58% for the Brewers. ZiPS sees a command collapse as a lot less likely than it did a year ago. Matthew Boyd was shockingly good in eight starts for the Guardians at the end of 2024, and though he didn’t post 10 strikeouts per game again in 2025, he was still good enough be a phenomenal bargain for the Cubs on a two-year, $29.5 million deal. If you believe ZiPS, he’s also pretty important, as the computer sees the Cubs’ rotation depth as one of the things that could stop them in their attempt to knock off the Brewers in the NL Central.

ZiPS knows enough to look at a minor league command pitcher with a healthy dose of skepticism, but Mitch Bratt’s control is so good, and he does miss bats, so the computer thinks there’s a decent chance that he’ll be its next control pitcher obsession after Dean Kremer. Adrian Houser is probably the most puzzling guy on this list for me, as he seems to struggle with a lot of the things ZiPS cares about; he doesn’t throw hard or miss bats, and he can get hit pretty hard. But ZiPS is designed to be more accepting over time when players consistently outperform their peripheral data, as Houser has done in all but his 2024 season. Jack Leiter didn’t dominate last season by any means, but he showed he’s a reasonable mid-rotation option, and he’s still kind of raw, meaning there’s upside left here.

I’m going to talk more briefly about the decliners than the improvers. After all, spring should be about hope, not depression, and there really aren’t any big surprises on this list:

ZiPS was holding out hope for Walker Buehler after a so-so comeback in 2024, but after a 2025 season in which he lost another strikeout per game, added another walk, and saw another tick of velocity evaporate into the Jered Weaver great beyond, ZiPS has gotten to the point where it’s noping out of expecting big things from him in 2026. You know you’re not having a good season when your team cuts you loose in the middle of a hot postseason race. Buehler’s numbers were so poor that I’m not sure he’s going to even have an easy time getting a pillow contract for 2026:

Unlike a lot of the pitchers on this list, ZiPS still believes in Quinn Mathews’ future, and his higher percentile projections are still very good. He remained damned hard to make contact against in 2025, but it’s very difficult to survive walking nearly 20% of the batters you face. With a first-strike percentage down in the low 40s, that brutal walk rate wasn’t flukey, either:

ZiPS always had Roki Sasaki done for a less sterling forecast than fellow NPB transplants Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Shota Imanaga, but he turned out to be even more raw than the projections expected. There’s still a great deal of upside here, but it might take a while for the Dodgers to really find it:

After a successful initial return from Korea, the Cardinals hoped Erick Fedde would continue to be a solid no. 2/3 starter who could eat 160-180 innings. Instead, Fedde’s 2025 was an almost unmitigated disaster, with his strikeout rate plummeting and his walk rate nearly doubling. The Statcast data don’t offer any silver linings:

Sandy Alcantara has the privilege of being the best projected pitcher on the decliners list, as the computer still expects him to be league average in 2026. While he was a lot better than his 5.36 ERA indicated, Alcantara’s return from Tommy John surgery did not go smoothly, so there is significant risk here. I’m actually hopeful that he can comfortably beat his projections. He’s still a target to be traded, but I’m not sure a contender is the best fit for him, at least not one that would really need him to return to his form from a few years ago:

I’ll close with a few thoughts on a few of the more interesting remaining decliners. The computer was hoping that Davis Daniel would develop into a solid, back-of-the-rotation innings-eater given his decent history in the high minors, but he couldn’t even get Triple-A hitters out, which is kind of a useful prerequisite for big leauge success of any kind. Cal Quantrill leaving the Mile High City didn’t do anything to salvage him as an innings-eater, and he only landed a minor league deal this offseason. ZiPS was already projecting a big disappointment from Alexis Díaz in 2025, and he more than fulfilled those expectations, even walking seven batters a game in Triple-A. Neither the Dodgers or Braves had any success fixing him after the Reds threw in the towel, but he’s got at least one more chance remaining after signing a one-year deal with the Rangers.

Shane Drohan might be the least well-known of the three players the Milwaukee Brewers acquired in Monday’s six-player swap with the Boston Red Sox, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t talented, nor is it an indication that he lacks a big league future. Fully healthy and with a more diverse arsenal than he possessed prior to undergoing shoulder surgery 24 months ago, Drohan arguably profiles less as a long shot and more as a diamond in the rough. As my colleague Davy Andrews put it when assessing the deal, “The Brewers get the chance to work their magic on two young pitchers,” with the other being Kyle Harrison.

A 27-year-old southpaw whom the Red Sox took in the fifth round of the 2020 draft out of Florida State University, Drohan is coming off a 2025 season that saw him log a 3.00 ERA, 3.11 FIP, and 34.5% strikeout rate over 54 innings, the bulk of which came at Triple-A Worcester. Health was once again an issue, though this time it wasn’t his shoulder: The Fort Lauderdale native was out of action from early May until mid-August due to forearm inflammation.

Drohan discussed his arsenal, including how it was impacted by having gone under the knife two years ago, when the Red Sox held their annual rookie development camp at Fenway Park in mid-January.

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David Laurila: I’ve seen your scouting profile, but how do you view yourself as a pitcher? What makes you effective?

Shane Drohan: “I think the biggest reason I’m effective is that I mix a lot. I have a large arsenal, five pitches, that I’m essentially comfortable throwing in any count. I’ll even throw curveballs, changeups, and sliders on 3-0. That puts a lot of pressure on the hitters, knowing that they can’t cancel out any pitch. I also attack both lefties and righties with my entire arsenal. I don’t limit myself against one side or the other.” Read the rest of this entry »

Scout long enough, and you’ll write every kind of report. Good ones, bad ones, accurate projections for the wrong reasons, misfires despite a good process. Like baseball itself, evaluating players is hard. You’ll be right plenty, but everyone has whiffs. While some reports miss the mark more than others, the ones that sting most are the ones you don’t learn from. Even the worst reports can turn into a positive if they change your thinking or provide a valuable lesson along the way.

Sometimes, these lessons are simple. Bet on the athletes. Be leery of the guy with a 55% contact rate. Others come in waves, sometimes over an extended period of time. Such was the case with Richy Valdez, a Royals pitcher with a live arm who was both the subject of the report with the greatest misalignment between the grade I submitted and what wound up happening, and the bridge between two lessons that made me a better evaluator than if I’d never come across him. We’ll come back to him in a second. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week was a huge one for the Tigers’ rotation. First, Framber Valdez agreed to terms on a three-year, $115 million deal, and then Tarik Skubal won a record-setting $32 million salary in arbitration. On Tuesday, the day before the team’s pitchers and catchers were scheduled to report to the Tigers’ spring training facilities in Lakeland, Florida, that rotation was in the news again, as Justin Verlander agreed to a reunion via a one-year deal. Shortly afterwards, the team revealed that Reese Olson, who was already reportedly behind schedule, recently underwent surgery for a torn labrum and will miss the season. Additionally, the Tigers added free agent outfielder Austin Slater on a minor league deal.

First and foremost, this is both a homecoming for Verlander, the best right-handed pitcher in team history by WAR (57.9), and potentially his last lap, as he’ll turn 43 on February 20, and will be the majors’ oldest player so long as Rich Hill doesn’t mount a comeback. Drafted out of Old Dominion with the second overall pick in 2004, Verlander debuted with a pair of starts for the Tigers in July 2005, then spent nearly 12 full seasons in Detroit (2006–17) before being traded to the Astros on August 31, 2017. During that time, he won the American League Rookie of the Year award (2006), as well as the AL MVP and the first of his three Cy Youngs (both 2011), while helping the Tigers to four division titles, a Wild Card berth, and two pennants (2006, ’12); he also threw the first two of his three no-hitters for them, in 2007 and ’11. He collected more hardware in Houston in the form of two Cy Youngs and two World Series rings, but while he may have cemented his Hall of Fame credentials elsewhere, odds are a Tigers cap will adorn his plaque.

According to USA Today’s Bob Nightengale, Verlander’s contract is for $13 million, though $11 million of that is deferred on a schedule that begins paying out in 2030. While that will bring the average annual value of the deal down a bit, the Tigers now project to pay the Competitive Balance Tax for the first time since 2017; according to RosterResource, their $256.3 million estimated luxury tax payroll is squarely over the first threshold of $244 million. Read the rest of this entry »