The Baltimore Orioles continued filling out their rotation last weekend, signing right-hander Zach Eflin to a one-year contract worth $10 million with a mutual option for the 2027 season. Traded to the Orioles from the Rays in 2024, Eflin struggled with injuries last year, throwing only 71 1/3 over 14 starts while putting up a 5.93 ERA and -0.3 WAR.

A first-round pick by the Padres out of a Florida high school in 2012, Eflin finally established himself as a solid mid-rotation starter with the Phillies at the end of the decade after being a part of trades for Matt Kemp and Jimmy Rollins. COVID and recurring patella issues in his right knee plagued him in 2021, resulting in season-ending surgery, and he missed another three months in 2022 with more problems with the same knee. Despite the setbacks, the Rays saw enough to sign him to a three-year, $40 million deal entering the 2023 season. Eflin experienced a minor back injury and tendinitis in his other knee, but that only cost him a handful of innings, and the result was his best and most durable campaign. He set career highs in starts (31), innings (177 2/3 innings), ERA (3.50), FIP (3.01), and WAR (4.9). While his numbers sagged a bit in 2024, Eflin was still a quality pitcher whose name bandied in trade rumors before the deadline. Read the rest of this entry »

One can’t help but imagine the chagrin of Pete Fairbanks’ dermatologist. The fair-haired closer has spent nearly his entire major league career with the Rays, racking up at least 23 saves in each of the past three seasons. And now, instead of leaving the Sunshine State, he’s traveling even farther south to Miami. The 32-year-old Fairbanks has signed a one-year, $13 million deal with the Marlins. He was the last closer available in free agency, and with Ronny Henriquez out for the season due to a torn UCL, Fairbanks will play a crucial role for a Miami bullpen that finished in the bottom 10 in just about any category you can think of. Will Sammon of The Athletic broke the news, while Jeff Passan of ESPN reported the terms, and Mark Feinsand of MLB.com reported that the contract included a $1 million signing bonus and another $1 million in incentives. According to AJ Eustace of MLB Trade Rumors, Fairbanks would also get a $500,000 bonus if he’s traded.

The move represents a reunion with president of baseball operations Peter Bendix, who previously served as Tampa Bay’s general manager. Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, Fairbanks made it clear that Bendix’s role with the Marlins was part of their appeal. “To hear all the things that he’s been doing over his tenure down in Miami, from what I’ve heard previously to what I have now, how much things are changing and how much he has been attempting to put his stamp on things. I felt like that made it a pretty easy choice, and I am excited to see the direction that he takes.” (Hat tip to Kevin Barral of Fish on First, who published this quote and the others you’ll read in this article.) Fairbanks also noted that moving just a four-hour drive away from Tampa is a boon because he and his wife are expecting their third child “basically on Opening Day.” This is the first All-Star break baby we write in 2026, but I can assure you that it won’t be the last. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Seattle Mariners. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the sixth year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers. The ETAs listed generally correspond to the year a player has to be added to the 40-man roster to avoid being made eligible for the Rule 5 draft. Manual adjustments are made where they seem appropriate, but we use that as a rule of thumb.

A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.

All of the ranked prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details (and updated TrackMan data from various sources) than this article and integrates every team’s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »

In 2025, I once again had an opportunity to interview numerous people within the game. Many of their words were shared in my Sunday Notes column, while others came via an assortment of Q&As, feature stories, and my Old Scouting Reports Revisited series. Here is a selection of the best quotes from this year’s conversations, with the bolded lines linking to the pieces they were excerpted from.

———

“Guys are thinking about the game in totally different ways now, and sometimes we lack the art. We lack focusing on the art. We’re thinking like robots instead of thinking like a human, and trying to make decisions based on another human being in a box. That’s the challenge of pitching.” — Max Scherzer, Toronto Blue Jays pitcher

“You see a lot of guys trying to chase that perfect swing. That’s hard to do when you have a guy throwing 99 and it’s running 20 inches, or sinking 20 inches. My thought is just, ‘Go up there and get the bat to the ball.’ Keep it that simple. Don’t try to chase the perfect swing.” — Kevin McGonigle, Detroit Tigers infield prospect

“We can measure the swing — most, if not all of it — and because we can measure it, we can track it. We can see if it is changing. What we can’t measure… actually, we can, but we’re not allowed to put eye-tracking glasses on players in-game. You don’t know what’s actually happening in the brain when it comes to decision-making.” — Dillon Lawson, Boston Red Sox hitting coach

“I remember Bill James saying that a player’s value is in his uniqueness. How unique is he to the pool of players? The decision-making process in today’s game, with the variety of different tools we have, allows us to better identify that uniqueness. Instead of looking at a pitcher and simply saying, ‘He’s a small righty,’ we can know why he is so effective. We can identify the valuable qualities within that uniqueness.” — Jerry Dipoto, Seattle Mariners, president of baseball operations Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the potential risk to sports prediction markets pose and then (24:00) discuss at least one listener-nominated topic about each American League team that wasn’t previously covered on the show in 2025.

Audio intro: Justin Peters, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Ted O., “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to MLBTR on Rendon
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Link to Royals stadium story
Link to 1922 article on Fowler
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The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2026 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

There’s no getting around the fact that the 2026 BBWAA Hall of Fame is a lean one. With three candidates elected by the writers in both 2024 and ’25 — following a mini-drought in which just two were elected over the previous three years — the top newcomers didn’t linger, while some long-lasting holdovers were finally elected. That left the cupboard comparatively bare, and when it came to restocking, the best of this year’s first-year candidates bowed out after their age-36 seasons without accumulating massive career totals.

Given all that, I suspected even before I received my favorite piece of annual mail that I wouldn’t max out my ballot by voting for 10 candidates. I only got to 10 in each of the past two years by using my last spot to include a pitcher whose S-JAWS is short of the standard but who offers other compelling reasons for inclusion. For the 2024 ballot, I tabbed Andy Pettitte due in part to his massive postseason contributions, while for ’25 I selected Félix Hernández due to his stellar early-career run and a concern that he could slip off the ballot without a longer discussion, à la two-time Cy Young winner Johan Santana on the 2018 ballot.

Both choices were a reaction to the dearth of starting pitchers elected in recent years and the reality that such a trend isn’t likely to change. BBWAA voters have elected just three starters born in 1969 or later, namely Pedro Martinez (1971), Roy Halladay (1977) and CC Sabathia (1980). While Zack Greinke, Clayton Kershaw, Max Scherzer, and Justin Verlander will likely join them someday, the industry’s trend towards smaller workloads — coupled with the greater injury risk that comes with chasing higher velocities and spin rates — has made the familiar milestones that virtually guarantee election even more remote. Voters need to rethink their standards for starters, and I believe that discussion is well served by keeping the candidacies of those on the ballot alive for further deliberation. With five of the 10 players I voted for last year not carrying over (Sabathia, Ichiro Suzuki, and Billy Wagner were elected, while Russell Martin and Brian McCann fell short of 5%), I suspected I’d be able to fit both Hernández and Pettitte as well as newcomer Cole Hamels and holdover Mark Buehrle.

I had all that in mind as I worked through this year’s top 19 candidates in my series over the past six weeks (I’ve still got eight one-and-done stragglers to cover in early January, none of whom were in serious consideration for space on my ballot). This is my sixth year with an actual ballot, but even with the heightened scrutiny that comes with it, filling one out remains a privilege and still feels like a novelty in the context of 25 years of analyzing Hall of Fame elections, and 23 of doing so while armed with the system that became JAWS (the official 20th anniversary of the metric’s introduction was in January 2024). Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about a smattering of recent transactions and then (20:17) discuss at least one listener-nominated topic about each National League team that wasn’t previously covered on the podcast in 2025.

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Hello, and a very happy holiday season, everyone! After skipping last week, it’s a special Monday edition of the Matrix Reloaded, and as a bonus, you’ll also get a Matrix Reloaded this Friday, the first of 2026. You can find the Offseason Matrices document here. You know the drill by now, so let’s get right into the rundown.

Significant Signings

White Sox Sign Munetaka Murakami for Two Years, $34 Million

• Michael Baumann’s Write-Up of the Deal
• Jordan Rosenblum’s Write-Up of Murakami’s Projections
• Updated Roster Projection
• Updated Payroll Projection

Effect on the White Sox

Does signing Murakami make the White Sox any likelier to make the playoffs in 2026 or 2027? Probably not. Does it make them way more entertaining to watch? Absolutely. This is the sort of move that a team like the White Sox should be making whenever it gets a chance — and those chances don’t come around often. In a free agent market full of talented players, two years and $34 million for Murakami’s 80-grade raw power should go down as the biggest upside play of the whole offseason, with boom or bust potential unlike any free agent I can recall. Read the rest of this entry »

The composition of the Minnesota Twins’ projected starting lineup caught my eye while I was perusing Roster Resource during the Winter Meetings. Not only were all but two of the nine position players homegrown: each of those seven was drafted in either the first or second round. Byron Buxton (first round in 2012) is the oldest of the bunch, while Luke Keaschall (second round in 2023) is the youngest and most recent.

Where do the Twins rank among MLB clubs in terms of homegrown position-player starters taken in the first two rounds? According to Jon Becker, who along with Jason Martinez keeps Roster Resource running like a well-oiled machine, the Minnesotans top the list. Moreover, while the Baltimore Orioles have six, and three other clubs have five, the rest have notably fewer. Fully half of the 30 teams have no more than three, including the Houston Astros, Miami Marlins, and Toronto Blue Jays, who have none.

My colleague provided me with some other roster-construction breakdowns as well, but before we get to those, let’s hear from Minnesota’s president of baseball operations. I asked Derek Falvey what the aforementioned seven-of-nine says about his organization. Read the rest of this entry »

Hello everyone, and welcome to the final mailbag of 2025! I hope you are all having a wonderful holiday season.

We are now officially in what my family refers to as the lobe of the year, the week between Christmas and New Year, when a lot of us wind down and spend time with friends and loved ones. It’s a time for relaxing and reflecting. You’ll notice that here at FanGraphs, aside from this mailbag and a few transaction reactions, we are mostly taking it slow. Instead, we’re republishing our favorite FanGraphs pieces of the year. You can check those out here, or as they populate the homepage from now through the end of next week.

In this week’s mailbag, we’ll cover the best players who never received a Hall of Fame vote, NPB posting rules, and Dillon Dingler’s breakout season. Before we do, though, I’d like to remind you that this mailbag is exclusive to FanGraphs Members. If you aren’t yet a Member and would like to keep reading, you can sign up for a Membership here. It’s the best way to both experience the site and support our staff, and it comes with a bunch of other great benefits. Also, if you’d like to ask a question for an upcoming mailbag, send me an email at mailbag@fangraphs.com. Read the rest of this entry »