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 »

Last week, after Angels owner Arte Moreno finished his annual state of the team discussion with reporters, Jeff Fletcher of the Orange County Register and Rhett Bollinger of MLB.com published several quotes from the conversation. Between settling with Tyler Skaggs’ family over the wrongful death suit, not having a television partner for the upcoming season, and cutting payroll after eight straight losing seasons, there was a lot to cover. Several of Moreno’s quotes raised eyebrows, but the one that caught the most headlines concerned his description of a fan survey. He was simply trying to explain that he is focused on making sure the fan experience is a good one, but it came out very wrong.

“The number one thing fans want is affordability,” Moreno said. “They want affordability. They want safety, and they want a good experience when they come to the ballpark. Believe it or not, winning is not in their top five… The moms want to be able to afford to bring the kids. Moms make about 80% of the decisions. They want to be able to bring their kids and be affordable and they want safety and they want to have a good experience, so they get all the entertainment stuff or whatever. The purists, you know, it’s just straight winning.”

It wasn’t exactly inspiring to hear the owner of a baseball team come dangerously close to accusing fans of zealotry for just wanting their team to finish above .500 for the first time since 2015. After avoiding local media for years, Moreno started giving these spring training state of the team appearances in 2023. His answers are not always well received, and time tends not to do them any favors. In 2023, Moreno said, “You can’t start losing $50 to $100 million a year and keep the business,” then two years later, he said the team was doing just that, claiming it would “probably lose $50 million to $60 million, minimum.” In 2023, he said, “I always look at the fans. What are we doing to make sure the fans have a great experience and the fans are proud of the team that we put on the field?” Now he says winning is not even a top-five priority for the fans. Read the rest of this entry »

On Wednesday, catcher Mitch Garver agreed to a minor league deal to remain with the Mariners in 2026. He reported to camp for a physical on Thursday, and should he make the major league roster, he’ll earn a prorated $2.55 million for any time he spends with the big club. Because of his veteran status, Garver will have the ability to opt out and look for a job elsewhere, in late March, on May 1, or June 1 if he remains in the minors. We don’t often devote entire articles to minor league deals, but I wanted to highlight this one, because the 35-year-old Garver has had such an interesting career and such a dramatic turnaround over the past two years.

A bit over two years ago, Garver signed a very different contract with Seattle. It was a two-year deal for $24 million, nearly five times as much per year as his new one. He was coming off a 2023 season in which he launched 19 home runs and finished with a 142 wRC+ despite an April knee sprain that knocked him out for more than two months. It was just the 18th time this century a catcher that had put up such a good offensive line over at least 300 plate appearances, and it wasn’t even Garver’s best season. He debuted at age 26 in 2017, and over the first seven years of his career, he ran a 124 wRC+. If you go to our leaderboards and rank catchers through their age-32 seasons, that mark ties him with Hall of Famer Gary Carter and Mickey Tettleton for 32nd all-time (just behind his teammate Cal Raleigh’s 126).

That’s not to say that Garver was on pace to be one of the best catchers ever. Thanks to a wide variety of injuries, he’d only reached 80 games played in a season three times. And because of both the injuries and his very poor defense, he’d spent more than 40% of his time at first base or DH. Despite being one of the best hitting catchers in the game, he had just 8.3 WAR to his name. Still, the bat was so undeniable that he became the first non-pitcher Jerry Dipoto had ever signed to a multi-year contract while leading the Mariners. The move carried risk, but that risk was about whether Garver would stay healthy, about whether his bat would play up enough if, as expected, he spent the vast majority of his time as a DH. Read the rest of this entry »

This winter, I’ve really gotten into the Olympic spirit. It turns out that cheering for wholesome, fresh-faced athletes who represent the idea of the United States is a decent balm for the psychic wounds inflicted by watching the actual United States speed-run a collapse into kleptocratic authoritarianism. Also, I’m already a Peacock subscriber because I love Parks & Recreation. So I’m watching the curling. I’m watching the hockey. I’m watching the long-track speed skating and the short-track speed skating, even though short-track speed skating is basically just a cross between demolition derby and cockfighting. And if you told me two weeks ago how much cross-country skiing I would be watching this week, I would have asked you whether I was about to suffer some sort of brain injury.

The one sport I haven’t watched much of is figure skating. I wish I could watch it more often, but unfortunately, I suffer from a debilitating sequin allergy. I can make it through a short routine with nothing more than some acute rhinitis, but after even a few seconds of exposure to Tara Lapinski and Johnny Weir, I have to sit on a whole case of EpiPens. Still, one night last week, I pregamed with a dangerous amount of Benadryl and Allegra (or as the kids call it, Ballegradyl) and watched the ice dancing with my charming wife. Like so many people across the globe, we came away with a newfound appreciation for Twizzles. The Twizzle is the most difficult maneuver in ice dancing. It involves collecting a great deal of speed and then spinning across the ice on one skate, close to your partner, in perfect synchronization. Here’s the greatest Twizzle sequence ever performed, according to a YouTube user who is an owl.

In this article, we will capitalize the word Twizzle, partly out of respect for the extremely capricious linguistic conventions of the International Skating Union rulebook, but mostly because it’s fun. A Level 4 Twizzle, the highest degree of Twizzle, involves two sets of at least four rotations. In the second set, you have to rotate in the opposite direction and on a different edge of your skate.

During your Twizzles, you also have to include at least 4 Additional Features from 3 different Groups (I told you the capitalization was wild). Those additional features are movements that make Twizzling more difficult, such as continuous arm movement (Group A, upper body), holding the blade of your skate (Group B, skating leg and free leg), or starting your Twizzle with a Dance Jump (Group C, pattern, entry, exit). Was that enough to set your head to Twizzling? Maybe it would help to watch a quick instructional video with a voiceover that sounds like it was recorded in a particularly narrow crawlspace:

So that’s Twizzling. What’s it got to do with baseball? Sadly, not as much as one might hope. The competitors do boast bulging quadriceps, and they do move gracefully across a pristine surface while wearing shoes that have knives attached to the bottoms, and they do put all of their effort into generating maximum rotational energy, but as it’s rare to see baseball players spin more than once, and it’s even rarer to see them start those spins with a Dance Jump. The closest baseball equivalent to a Twizzle is when the center fielder chases down a ball in the gap and then has to fire the ball back in to the infield. Because all their momentum is pushing them toward their glove side and away from the infield, the only way they can get anything on the throw is to use that momentum to execute a neat little spin. It’s sort of the baseball equivalent of the gravity assist.

I’ve always been fascinated by this particular move. I still remember the first time I ever saw it. I was a junior in high school, and during batting practice before a game, this enormous guy from Strasburg just did it as nonchalantly as you’d scoop up a routine grounder at first. I was flabbergasted. His name was Joe Bauserman. Later that night, I would throw him a fastball that just missed the corner low and outside, and he would reach out and swat it over the right field fence, which is not generally a thing that happens when you’re a junior in high school. A couple years after that, he’d get drafted by the Pirates and spend a few months playing alongside Andrew McCutchen. I like to think they still keep in touch.

I usually play in the infield, so I’ve only had one occasion to try the Baseball Twizzle. I was playing in an adult league in Queens, and somebody smoked a line drive into the right field gap with a runner on third. I lit after it and made one of my better running catches, then swung around to fire the ball home. But I didn’t Twizzle. I wasn’t an outfielder, and, unlike Andrew McCutchen, I’d forgotten all about Joe Bauserman. Instead of turning away from the infield and executing a full spin, I fought against momentum and turned toward the infield. It was a mistake. I was no match for the momentum, which slammed me backwards into the ground. Luckily, our pitcher was a doctor, and he declared me concussion-free (though I do recall that for the next few days, I experienced an unusual urge to watch cross-country skiing).

In the interest of international cooperation, we’re going to award medals to the best Twizzlers in the major leagues. I spent much of Wednesday watching clips of center fielders making plays in the gaps and taking note of all the Twizzles I could find. We’re now going to count down the top three Twizzlers. To maintain the spirit of the ice dancing at the actual Olympics, the judging will meander from opaque to capricious to arbitrary to downright corrupt. (As such, should any big league center fielder want to move into medal contention, hit me up on Venmo and we’ll work something out.) I will say, however, that I did not intend to recognize players from three different countries, or that all three are participating in the World Baseball Classic. That honestly was a pure case of Olympic serendipity. Here we go. Get yourself a big old dose of Ballegardyl and let’s hand out some Twizzling medals. (Editor’s Note: Do not under any circumstances take Ballegradyl. We’re still writing settlement checks for the Percoviagranax debacle.)

Bronze Medal: Jung Hoo Lee

The first medal goes to South Korea’s Jung Hoo Lee, an excellent showing for a player in his first full season here in the states. Lee is about to represent South Korea in the World Baseball Classic, so keep an eye out for Twizzles in Pool C. Still, Lee reached the podium more due to quantity than quality, which is why he’s down here with a bronze. He just barely beat out Rockies fly-chaser Brenton Doyle, whose Twizzles were smoother, but less frequent. Lee’s Twizzles were often lackadaisical, and he rarely included Additional Features – would it kill the guy to lift his cleat over his head every once in a while? – but the judges appreciated that he sometimes seemed to go out of his way to execute a twirl. He just needs to string together a couple in a row and he’ll be in business.

Silver Medal: Pete Crow-Armstrong

Pete Crow-Armstrong is a fitting recipient for a silver medal here. Like Lee, he’s about to represent his home country in the World Baseball Classic, when he mans center field for Team USA in Pool B. More importantly, he’s is one of the best defenders in baseball. As with so much of his game, PCA’s Twizzles erupt in a frothy blend of ebullient puppy-dog energy and athletic grace. It’s worth noting that he overcame a slight hurdle to get here. Lefties get fewer chances to Twizzle than righties, because when they’re moving toward their glove side, they’re moving toward third base, so a spin isn’t always required for that particular throw. That didn’t stop Crow-Armstrong, who executed multiple Twizzles to third, and even Twizzled out of a dive once, an Additional Feature that won over even the cynical (and definitely corrupt) French judge.

Gold Medal: Julio Rodríguez

Our gold medal Twizzler is representing the Dominican Republic in the WBC. Julio Rodríguez’s Twizzles aren’t always as flashy as Crow-Armstrong’s, but no player Twizzled more than J-Rod. His Twizzles weren’t just an affectation, either. Rodríguez always Twizzled with purpose. He broke down his steps. He pivoted hard. He came up firing. He sent the ball toward the base on a hop to make sure that he never overthrew anybody. All of this results in Twizzles so fundamentally sound that they brought a tear to the eye of even the curmudgeonly Ukrainian judge, and let me tell you, that guy has seen some stuff.

Rodríguez’s Twizzles kept runners from advancing multiple times. He often looked like a twirling ballet dancer, whipping his head around to locate his target as quickly as possible in order to ensure an accurate throw. On one play, he was just backing up the right fielder. It didn’t look like there was much chance the ball would even get to him, but not only was he ready, he was ready to execute a textbook Twizzle, and it might have even been scored a Level 2 Twizzle if he’d just Dance Jumped into it.

Congratulations to all of our medalists, and please join us tomorrow as we break down which ballplayers would be best at doubles luge.

“I will start with the easy answer:” wrote Jeff Zimmerman back in 2014. The next part was bolded: “No, first and second half stats are not as important as the entire season for pitchers and hitters.” Jeff was talking about fantasy baseball, and whether you should consider a particularly strong or weak second half more relevant to a player’s future performance, but the lesson was clear. Overall stats tell you a lot more about a player than half a season of stats.

The same lesson is true over the course of a career. Since 1933, the year of the first All-Star Game, Stathead says that 2,146 players have made at least 900 career plate appearances in both the first half and the second half. Just under 93% of those players have a second half OPS that’s within 10% of their first half OPS. (We’re using percentages here rather than raw points in order to create a level playing field for players of varying skill levels. I calculated them by subtracting each player’s first half OPS from their second half OPS, then dividing the difference by their first half OPS.) Only 15 players – again, that’s 15 players out of a sample of 2,146 – saw their second half OPS differ from their first half OPS by more than 20%.

All of this makes sense. There’s no reason that a batter should be consistently better at the beginning or end of the season. As Eno Sarris once reminded us, seasons themselves are arbitrary endpoints. Most of the 15 outliers I mentioned in the previous paragraph are the results of short, noisy samples, either because they had short careers or they’re still in the early stages of their career right now. The longer your career, the more likely that your true talent level will shine through, regardless of the date on the calendar. Read the rest of this entry »

If all goes well, Corbin Carroll’s broken hamate bone won’t affect either his career or the Diamondbacks’ season too much. He will miss spring training and likely some time at the beginning of the season, but it’s not out of the question that when he returns, he’ll look like the perennial MVP candidate we know and love. On the other hand (Fun fact about the English language: When you use the phrase “On the other hand,” the hand you’re referring to is recovering from hamate bone surgery), the injury will very much change the look of Team USA at the World Baseball Classic. Carroll is out, and manager Mark DeRosa has found an exciting replacement in Roman Anthony. Team USA’s outfield is a mix of youth and experience, with Anthony joining Pete Crow-Armstrong and veterans Byron Buxton and Aaron Judge.

The Red Sox selected Anthony out of high school with the 79th pick in the 2022 draft. Scouts started talking about him soon after, because while in Low-A, his poor offensive numbers belied a wild combination of underlying metrics. He was running shockingly low swing rates, walking more than he struck out, and absolutely pasting the ball when he did swing. The Red Sox promoted him aggressively, and with good reason. Despite his youth, he put up a combined 141 wRC+ in the minors, and he did so with the same impressive plate discipline and exit velocity, the kinds of tools that tend to translate to big league success.

Anthony arrived in Boston in June as the consensus top prospect in baseball, and after taking a week to get acclimated, he finished the season with a 140 wRC+ and excellent defensive numbers. He placed third in the Rookie of the Year voting. Despite getting into just 71 games, his 2.7 WAR ranked sixth on the team. Extended over a full season, it was a six-win pace. Among players with at least 300 plate appearances, that 140 wRC+ tied Anthony with Michael Busch as the 14th-best hitter in the game. Just to put that in context, in AL/NL history, 346 players have made at least 300 plate appearances in their age-21 season. Anthony became the 26th one of them to post a wRC+ of 140 or better. By my count, 15 of those 26 are Hall of Famers, and Mike Trout is well on his way to joining them. Read the rest of this entry »

Most people have never been traded. Most people find a job and go there until they find a better one (or until they move or they get fired or they can’t take it anymore or they die). I don’t have any friends or relatives who showed up for work one day only to be told, “Oh, you don’t work here anymore. We’ve decided you work for the competition.” It must be even weirder for Joey Loperfido, who got traded from the Astros to the Blue Jays at the deadline in 2024 and is now getting traded back. Somewhere out there is an elephant who got pregnant the day the Astros traded Loperfido to the Jays, and that elephant won’t give birth until June.

The 26-year-old Loperfido is headed back to the Astros in a one-for-one lefty-hitting corner outfielder swap for Jesús Sánchez. Sánchez must be feeling like the subject of buyer’s remorse, too, as the Astros traded for him at the 2025 deadline, a mere 197 days ago. Any humans who got pregnant the day of that trade still have another month or so before they actually have to assemble the crib. As starkly as it outlines the differences between the life of a baseball player and the life of a human with a regular job, the trade makes its own sense. We’re going to start in Toronto, because although it involves a lot of platoon finagling, the situation there is simpler. 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 »

Clearly, none of those people who argues that the day after Super Bowl Sunday should be national holiday is in charge of the Brewers or the Red Sox. Things got complicated very early this week, as Milwaukee and Boston announced a six-player trade on Monday morning.

The Brewers received infielder David Hamilton and left-handed pitchers Kyle Harrison and Shane Drohan. The Red Sox received infielders Caleb Durbin, Andruw Monasterio, and Anthony Seigler, along with Milwaukee’s competitive balance Round B draft pick. The headliner of the deal is Durbin, who will slot in as Boston’s everyday second or third baseman. When you factor in that Boston also traded for Willson Contreras, signed Isiah Kiner-Falefa, and claimed Tsung-Che Cheng off waivers, the Red Sox have now added more than an entire infield this offseason. Don’t worry; their infield situation is still plenty complicated. Harrison headlines the package going to Milwaukee. The Brewers get the chance to work their magic on two young pitchers, and they get to add to their collection of speedy, scrappy, undersized infielders.

It was an odd trade in some ways. All six players were on 40-man rosters already. The Red Sox got the comp pick (as of now, the 67th pick in the draft) even though they were also getting the biggest name, a player who will go straight from Milwaukee’s starting lineup into their own. The left-handed Hamilton has a few more tools than the right-handed Monasterio, but the two are at least comparable; it’s likely that the handedness of the two players affected Boston’s willingness to part with him. You could argue that the Brewers gave up more than the Red Sox, but that they needed what they got much more. The Red Sox have one of the deepest rotations in the league, so Harrison is going from a team that would have struggled to find room for him to a team that will likely need him to hold down a rotation spot from day one. Read the rest of this entry »