Jarren Duran enjoyed a breakout season in 2024, making the AL All-Star team, receiving down-ballot support in the MVP voting, and leading the league in several key categories while ranking fifth with 6.8 WAR. Though he remained an above-average player last year, his season didn’t go quite so well, and as the 2026 campaign dawns, his role is among the many questions the Red Sox face this spring.

At a time when the Red Sox are trying to figure out their primary infield alignment — Will newly acquired Caleb Durbin play second or third? Will Marcelo Mayer man the other spot from the start, or begin the year in the minors after an injury-shortened rookie season? — they’re also sorting through their outfield options. The situation is more or less the same as it’s been since last June, when Roman Anthony, the no. 2 prospect on our preseason Top 100 Prospects list, was called up to squeeze into an outfield capably manned by Duran, Ceddanne Rafaela, and Wilyer Abreu, with platoon assistance for the last of those from Rob Refsnyder. The trade deadline came and went without either Abreu or Duran being moved despite numerous rumors, and injuries to Abreu, Refsnyder and then Anthony (who suffered a season-ending oblique strain in early September) simplified manager Alex Cora’s juggling, though not for the betterment of the team. Boston won 89 games and claimed a Wild Card spot, but without Anthony and enough healthy starting pitchers, the Red Sox were bounced out of the first round by the Yankees.

Refsnyder departed for the Mariners in free agency, but the other four outfielders are back and healthy. The Red Sox also have an expensive platoon designated hitter, Masataka Yoshida, further crowding the picture, and last year’s Opening Day second baseman Kristian Campbell — who entered the 2025 season seventh on our Top 100 and inked an eight-year, $60 million extension just a week into his big league career — is working out in center field, as well. Having too many good players isn’t a bad problem to have, but it can become one when questions about playing time, contract statuses, and trade rumors get relentless. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about a player with legs like a centaur, a knuckleballer’s sore subject, Arte Moreno’s thoughts on whether winning matters to fans, a response from the barback who gave free drinks to a fellow listener, and a new perspective on Tony Clark’s reportedly inappropriate relationship with his sister-in-law. Then (45:17) they talk to Maxfield Lane and Owen Riley of Oyster Analytics about the challenge system’s tactical considerations and when it does and doesn’t make sense to second-guess the ump (and also, some slightly scary mascots).

Audio intro: Jonathan Crymes, “Effectively Wild Theme 2”
Audio outro: Jimmy Kramer, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to story about Sloan
Link to Sloan headshot
Link to A-Rod centaur story
Link to horse anatomy info
Link to They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?
Link to Kapler/calves post 1
Link to Kapler/calves post 2
Link to tweets about Waldron
Link to MLBTR on Waldron
Link to info on bidets and hemorrhoids
Link to Breaking Bad scene
Link to Hill EW interview
Link to Moreno comments
Link to MLBPA response
Link to team attendance data
Link to “Macavity”
Link to Reddit comment
Link to Obi-Wan quote
Link to Wells video
Link to post on Wells 1
Link to post on Wells 2
Link to Down on the Farm
Link to Oyster Analytics on Bluesky
Link to Oyster rankings
Link to Oyster challenge dashboard
Link to Oyster challenge explainer
Link to 2016 article on Yankees challenges
Link to BP on replay reviews
Link to Tango on challenges
Link to Tango on challenges 2
Link to Tango on challenges 3
Link to Stark on challenges
Link to Blum/Lin on challenges
Link to Sale on challenging
Link to Sale on calling pitches
Link to Sale jersey story
Link to Bull Durham quote
Link to Baysox story 1
Link to Baysox story 2
Link to Archie info
Link to Archie/Truckee photo

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Well, Chris Sale no longer has to do what he does under the cloud of a one-year contract. On Tuesday, the Braves announced they’d signed their soon-to-be 37-year-old ace to a one-year contract extension with a team option for 2028. The deal represents a huge raise. Sale is making $18 million this year – the team option year at the end of the two-year extension he signed back in 2024 – and the new extension will pay him $27 million in 2027. If the Braves pick up the 2028 option, they’ll pay him $30 million. No word of a buyout for that final year has been reported, and the announcement included no mention of a 1% donation to the Atlanta Braves Foundation.

Even though the Braves are not getting the kind of discount you associate with a contract extension, this seems like a no-brainer for them. Yes, they’re paying ace prices for the age-37 (and possibly age-38) season of a pitcher whose injury history includes a Tommy John surgery and five variations on the word “fracture.” But Sale really is an ace, and his performance has showed no signs of dropping off. Since he arrived in Atlanta in 2024 (and for the sake of Red Sox fans, I won’t mention how he got there), Sale has a 25-8 record with a 2.46 ERA and 2.33 FIP. He’s struck out nearly a third of the batters he’s faced, and he won the Cy Young award in his first season with the team. In 2025, his four-seamer averaged 94.8 mph. That’s above average, especially for a left-handed starter, and especially for someone with a funky sidearm delivery, and especially when you factor in the bump in effective velocity due to the above-average extension from his 6-foot-6 frame. That’s a lot of especiallys making Sale’s velocity play up, and it’s reassuring to know that it has looked pretty stable in recent years.

Read the rest of this entry »

Alek Manoah was emerging as one of the best young pitchers in baseball when I first talked to him for FanGraphs in April 2022. Pitching for the Toronto Blue Jays at the time, he boasted a record of 12-2 and 3.05 ERA across 23 starts dating back to his major league debut the previous May. And he was only getting better. By season’s end, the burly right-hander not only was 25-9 with a 2.60 ERA, but he also had allowed just 221 hits over 308 1/3 innings across 51 career starts. A star in the making at age 24, he finished third in that year’s American League Cy Young Award voting.

As Blue Jays fans know all too well, things proceeded to go south. The Homestead, Florida native stumbled through a tumultuous 2023 in which his command and velocity dipped, and things got even worse the following year. Burdened by shoulder and elbow woes, Manoah ended up having surgery to repair his ulnar collateral ligament in June 2024. Recovery wasn’t exactly smooth. He tossed just 38 1/3 innings last season, none of them in the majors.

His once-prosperous Toronto tenure also came to an end, as did a brief stint with another organization. Claimed off waivers by the Atlanta Braves in late September, Manoah subsequently signed a free-agent deal with the Los Angeles Angels in December. He is now in the early stages of what might be deemed the Alek Manoah Reclamation Project. Read the rest of this entry »

As baseball, like a bear, emerges from hibernation, the Milwaukee Brewers graced us with a delightful little token:

Would you let The Miz throw a fastball at your head? pic.twitter.com/5Ekr848IdD

— Milwaukee Brewers (@Brewers) February 24, 2026

That’s Brewers right-hander Jacob Misiorowski knocking an apple off a teammate’s head from 60 feet, six inches away. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

12:01

Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks! Greetings from Brooklyn, where we got buried in snow yesterday, with over 18″ in my neck of the woods.

12:02

Jay Jaffe: The snow seems to have followed me from Salt Lake City, where I went last week to visit my parents and ski with my daughter. A massive two-day storm cut short our skiing — the kiddo isn’t ready for powder yet and canyon travel wasn’t so great. Anyway, it’s back to baseball here.

12:03

Jay Jaffe: yesterday I wrote about Bill Mazeroski, the Hall of Fame second baseman who passed away over the weekend. He was a genuine defensive whiz who’s best known for his 1960 World Series-winning walk-off homer, which propelled him into Cooperstown https://blogs.fangraphs.com/the-defense-rests-a-tribute-to-bill-mazero…

12:07

Jay Jaffe: Since JAWS is driven by WAR which up until the early part of this millennium, I do put some stock in Total Zone. It’s hardly perfect, and yes, there are wide error bars, but if you go around the diamond and check out who it rates the highest — guys like Mark Belanger, Ozzie Smith, Brooks Robinson, Andruw Jones, Willie Mays, Roberto Clemente — for stuff like that, it’s not out of line with expectations. Sure, you do get the occasional wide gap between perception and measure — Roberto Alomar and Jim Edmonds come to mind — but you can often work backwards to get a sense as to why certain players don’t fare well by the system

12:09

Jay Jaffe: And it’s worth remembering that positional scarcity and overall defensive value are important factors, too. A good-hitting right fielder isn’t as valuable as a good-hitting shortstop, etc.

Read the rest of this entry »

Spring training is underway and rosters are getting filled up. We’re now down to the part of the offseason where veterans whose recent performances have left them unable to find a guaranteed spot sign minor league deals with non-roster invites. Today we’ll break down the signings of Rhys Hoskins with the Guardians, Michael Conforto with the Cubs, and Thairo Estrada with the Orioles. All three have seen their production drop off over the past two years, but all three have a viable path toward sticking on the roster or even landing a starting spot.

We’ll start in Cleveland, where Hoskins will receive $1.5 million if he makes the roster. This move makes plenty of sense, but it’s important to note that the Guardians aren’t as desperate for a player like him as they would have been in years past. From 2021 to 2023, the only team with fewer than their 454 home runs was the Pirates (441). Cleveland’s 82 wRC+ against left-handed pitching was also the second-worst mark in baseball over that period. Back then, adding a big right-handed slugger who strikes out and hits homers would have been just what the doctor ordered. However, the Guardians are in a different spot right now. Over the past two years, they’ve ranked right around the middle of the league in home runs overall and in wRC+ against left-handed pitching. This is still a good fit, but Hoskins is no longer the slam dunk he would have been a couple years ago. Read the rest of this entry »

Time waits for no man, except Jordan Lawlar, who’s been on the cusp of major league stardom for about four years.

The skinny on Lawlar as a prospect — where he topped out at a 60-FV grade in 2024 and 2025 — is that he carries the potential for plus power and plus shortstop defense with a plus-plus run tool. That’s a lot of pluses for an up-the-middle position, which is why the Diamondbacks spent a top-10 pick on him out of high school in 2021.

He played well enough to make Arizona’s playoff roster on the run to the 2023 NL pennant (though he didn’t play much, going 0-for-2 with a walk), and the two full seasons since have seen Lawlar’s path blocked both by his own injuries and the emergence of Geraldo Perdomo as a bona fide star. Read the rest of this entry »

What are teams paying for a win in free agency? Earlier this month, I answered a FanGraphs Weekly Mailbag question about that very issue, outlining a rule I’ve been using in formulating my contract predictions. I left my explanation loose and vague because it was one of four questions in a mailbag, but to give you the general gist, I think about free agent salaries on a graduated scale, with role players being paid less per win above replacement than superstars. Today, I’d like to back up my argument with a bit more mathematical rigor.

One of the benefits of writing for FanGraphs is that smart baseball thinkers read the site. I woke up last Monday to a direct message from Tom Tango, MLB’s chief data architect. Tango had a few suggestions for further research, a method for adjusting past years of data for current payroll situations, and even a link to a discussion of the cost of a win with Sean Smith. Smith, better known as Rally Monkey, is the creator of Baseball Reference’s calculation of WAR – when you see rWAR, that actually stands for Rally WAR, not Reference WAR. In other words, I got help from some heavy hitters.

With Smith’s excellent article on free agency as a guide, I built my own methodology for examining the deals that free agents receive and turning them into a mathematical rule. I took every starting pitcher and position player (relievers are weird and should be modeled differently due to leverage concerns) and noted their projected WAR in the subsequent season, as well as the length and terms of their contract. I excluded players who signed minor league deals, were projected for negative WAR, or whose contract details were undisclosed. To give you a sense, applying this approach to the 2025-26 offseason leaves us with 89 players, from Kyle Tucker all the way down to Jorge Mateo. Read the rest of this entry »