The introduction to last year’s center field rankings highlighted a changing of the guard at the position, initiated by Mike Trout’s departure from the top of the heap in 2024 and continuing with Aaron Judge vacating the no. 2 spot in the rankings in 2025. This year, Trout might be headed back to center field (👀👀👀), but this isn’t a return of the old guard. He no longer sits atop the hierarchy (spoiler alert: the Angels check in at 23rd); the transition is complete.

But the new guard isn’t just new; they’re also young. Which, duh. That’s how lifecycles work. Something gets old or ineffective, and we replace it with a newer, younger model. Perhaps this changing of the guard is enough to explain the simultaneous youth movement happening at the position. Because this is a very young crop of center fielders. This year, the average age of the player at the top of each team’s depth chart is 26.9. Is this data point merely a momentary dip before the average age of center fielders begins its gradual ascent once more? Or is it part of a larger trend? Has center field become a young person’s position? Is the middle pasture strictly playable by folks speedmaxxing and rangemogging their opponents? Will all center fielders soon be wearing JNCOs in their tunnel fits and dressing their Labubus in Gucci?

As it turns out, yes. Read the rest of this entry »

The rosters for the 2026 World Baseball Classic were announced earlier this month, 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 in early March. 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 on that here. The post covering Pool B is right over here, and for Pool C click here.

The five teams competing in Pool D — Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, the Netherlands, Israel, and Nicaragua — will play their games in Miami 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 »

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 on that here. And the post covering Pool B is right over here.

The five teams competing in Pool C — Japan, South Korea, Australia, Czechia, and Chinese Taipei — will play their games in Tokyo from March 5 to March 10. 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 »

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 »

Final rosters for the 2026 World Baseball Classic were announced late last week, so aside from small changes due to injuries or insurance eligibility decisions, we now know who will be suiting up for each nation 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.

First, a quick refresher on how the WBC works and all the important details for this year’s edition. Twenty nations qualify for the tournament based on performance either in pool play during the previous WBC or during qualifying events last spring. The 20 teams are divided into four pools of five teams for the first stage of the tournament, which runs from March 5 to March 11. Team pool assignments were made last April and attempted to prioritize competitive balance (understanding that final rosters were not yet known), with host nations assigned to pools playing in their home countries. This year, pool play will be conducted at Hiram Bithorn Stadium in San Juan, Daikin Park in Houston, the Tokyo Dome in Tokyo, and LoanDepot Park in Miami.

During pool play, each team plays the other four teams in its assigned pool, and the two teams with the best record in each pool advance to the Knockout stage. During the Knockout stage, the remaining eight teams are placed into a single-elimination bracket that will determine the overall winner. The first round of bracket play will take place on March 13 and 14, with the semifinals on March 15 and 16, and the championship game on March 17.

Read the rest of this entry »

“I’ve talked to Byron [Buxton] and other players through this offseason already about ways we can get better as a team,” Twins President of Baseball Operations Derek Falvey told reporters back in November at the GM meetings. The answer was in response to a report that Buxton’s loyalty to the Twins may waiver if he felt they were entering a rebuild, as Minnesota’s behavior during last season’s trade deadline suggested. Falvey went on to insist that the team intends to add, not subtract, and it seems the term rebuild is taboo among Twins spokespeople.

Falvey is lying. I say this with no inside information, malice, or even judgement. MLB organizations operate within a system where this particular lie is not only acceptable, but also encouraged. Because “we’re not rebuilding; we’re trying to get better” is a corollary to a larger lie — that all teams are trying their hardest to win.

What is the truth, but a lie agreed upon? — Friedrich Nietzsche

Though this quote is often attributed to him, Nietzsche never actually said it. However, it does seem to offer a reasonably accurate distillation of his beliefs. And if we all agree that he did say it, then by his own logic, it must be true. Likewise, teams have decided to hold to the line that they’re all trying to win, and since they’ve all agreed, it falls to fans to take the lie as truth, along with all the subsequent lies necessary to support the original lie. Read the rest of this entry »

Though they may have failed in their reported pursuit of former Miami starter Edward Cabrera, who was ultimately dealt to the Cubs last week, the Yankees still managed to complete a trade with the Marlins for a starting pitcher. As Jack Curry of YES Network reported on Tuesday night, Ryan Weathers is on the move from Miami to New York. In return, the Marlins will receive a group of four minor leaguers from the Yankees: outfielders Dillon Lewis and Brendan Jones, along with infielders Dylan Jasso and Juan Matheus.

Frankly, it’s impressive that Yankees general manager Brian Cashman can get anything done while locked in a staring contest with agent Scott Boras over the terms necessary to re-sign outfielder Cody Bellinger. As for Miami’s side, I deeply respect the Marlins pro scouting department for looking at all the work they did scouring New York’s farm system for potential targets during the Cabrera talks and refusing to let all that effort go to waste.

Weathers, like Cabrera, still has three seasons of team control remaining before he hits free agency. This is not a rebuilding team trading contracts set to expire before its next window of contention opens. Rather, the Marlins, who are in the early stages of transitioning from rebuilding to contending, have such a surplus of starting pitching that they feel comfortable trading not one, but two established starters in favor of stockpiling additional position player talent in the minors. When Michael Baumann wrote up the Cabrera trade, he speculated that we might see debuts this coming season from Thomas White and Robby Snelling, two of Miami’s top pitching prospects who both graduated to Triple-A last year. By trading Weathers in addition to Cabrera, the Marlins are all but committing to giving one or both of them meaningful innings in the majors in 2026. Read the rest of this entry »

Of the many haunted residences in New Orleans, one in particular comes with a very specific warning: Don’t walk under the gallery. (As a brief architectural aside, a gallery is like a balcony, but it’s held up by posts or columns that go all the way to the ground, as opposed to L-shaped supports attached to the side of the building. The posts allow galleries to extend farther out from the building, typically spanning the sidewalk below. Having a gallery rather than a balcony was, and to some extent still is, seen as a status symbol in New Orleans.) This home sits in the French Quarter, and without getting too far into it because the details are pretty horrific, and this article is ostensibly about the Phillies’ signing free agent reliever Brad Keller to a two-year $22 million contract, the place is said to be haunted by the torture victims of an exceedingly cruel socialite who owned the mansion in the early 1830s.

The spirits who linger remain very unhappy (deservedly so!), and they seem especially offended by the thrill-seekers looking to exploit their suffering in the hope of experiencing some sort of supernatural activity. Many who have sought to prove themselves unbothered by the notion of tangling with a few disgruntled ghosts have marched proudly down the sidewalk under the mansion’s gallery. They did not just find themselves temporarily spooked by a burst of cold air or the smell of rotting flesh. Rather, they found themselves cursed with long-term bouts of bad luck and, for years after the fact, continued to report disturbing encounters with other worldly forces.

Now, is this story exaggerated and sensationalized by the ghost tour industrial complex that exists in New Orleans? Probably. But nevertheless, as a former ghost tour attendee, I’m left wondering if at some point early in his career Dave Dombrowski wandered through a heavily haunted bullpen. Read the rest of this entry »

The Royals had themselves a productive weekend. The kind where you re-organize the garage and get your meal prep done for the week before the Sunday Scaries set in. On Friday, news broke that the team was finalizing a deal to extend third baseman Maikel Garcia. The contract spans five years, including all four of Garcia’s arbitration-eligible seasons, with a guaranteed value of $57.5 million that could reach $85 million with options and escalators. He will make $4 million in 2026, $7 million in 2027, $10 million in 2028, $13 million in 2029, and $19 million in 2030, and the team holds a $21 million club option for 2031, with a $3.2 million buyout. Then, following the news of the Garcia signing, ESPN’s Jeff Passan reported on Saturday that the Brewers were sending outfielder Isaac Collins and right-handed reliever Nick Mears to the Royals in exchange for left-handed reliever Angel Zerpa. We’ll get into a more detailed discussion of both moves in a minute, but first let’s put this in the larger context of the Royals as an organization.

A lot of sitcoms have that one oddball character that doesn’t quite fit with the rest of the cast. The person that requires viewers to suspend their disbelief, because in real life, there’s no way the other main characters would associate with this weirdo. Your Phoebes, your Kramers, your Kimmy Gibblers, etc. These characters are a part of the main cast or have regularly recurring roles, and though they frequently find themselves integrated into the show’s primary conflicts, they’re typically situated off to the side doing their own thing. Writers insist on including these characters because they provide interesting narrative texture to group dynamics. In real life, we tend to gravitate toward like-minded people with common interests, which is great for forming meaningful connections but makes for boring TV.

Fortunately, MLB teams behave more like TV characters than real life besties, which makes for better entertainment. And with 30 teams, the league doesn’t limit itself to just one Phoebe. Several squads are singing about fetid felines and boycotting Pottery Barn, and among them we have the Royals. Kansas City has never seemed tempted to jump on the latest trends in roster construction or follow the crowd as it attempts to implement whatever the “new Moneyball” is at any given point in time. No, the Royals tend to stay true to themselves, even if that means zigging while everyone else zags or using unorthodox tactics to make sure everyone in the organization stays focused on baseball. Read the rest of this entry »

The Women’s Pro Baseball League held its inaugural draft on Thursday night. For many of the players who heard their names called, getting to play professional baseball is a dream they’ve carried since childhood, one they knew might never come true. Play won’t get underway until next August, but with the WPBL draft now in the history books, the dreams of 120 women are meaningfully closer to being realized.

Thursday night’s draft was the culmination of a busy few months for the new league. Since I last wrote about the WPBL in January, the league has announced key logistical information, such as the number of teams that will play during its first season, where those teams will play, and how much the teams will pay the players, and has also provided an update on the WPBL’s media and broadcast strategy. But despite all the new intel on how the league will be run, a few key components are still unknown. So before recapping the draft and the open tryout that determined the pool of draft-eligible players, let’s get up to date on what we do and don’t know about the WPBL so far.

If this is the first you’re hearing of the WPBL, here’s a quick primer. It’s a professional baseball league for women, the first of its kind since the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL), which ran from 1943 to 1954. The WPBL was co-founded in October of 2024 by Justine Siegal — who is best known for founding Baseball For All, “[A] girls baseball nonprofit that builds gender equity by creating opportunities for girls to play, coach, and lead in the sport” — and Keith Stein, a businessman, lawyer, and member of the ownership group for a semiprofessional men’s baseball team in Toronto. Read the rest of this entry »