MIAMI — It was the most anticipated, cacophonous World Baseball Classic game of the week, a raucous rivalry featuring the national teams of two baseball-obsessed cultures playing in front of some of the loudest fanbases in professional sports. With air horns blaring, drums pounding, and more than 36,000 people shouting for the entirety of the game’s three-hour run time, the Dominican Republic outslugged and outlasted Venezuela, 7-5, on Wednesday night at loanDepot park.
All that for a game that didn’t matter much. Sure, the winner would finish first in Pool D and not have to face reigning WBC champion Japan in the quarterfinals, but South Korea is also a formidable foe. And yes, the winner would also have a better opportunity to secure one of the two spots in the 2028 Olympics reserved for non-United States teams from the Americas. But no matter the result of Wednesday night’s game, both teams would still have a chance to earn both the WBC title and an Olympic berth.
And yet, from another perspective, the game meant everything, because for the fans of these two countries, baseball means everything. Read the rest of this entry »
MIAMI — Through the first two games of the World Baseball Classic, the Dominican Republic had scored 24 runs, recorded 22 hits, and drawn 18 walks. Fifteen of those 24 runs had come on the team’s seven home runs. Collectively, the Dominican hitters were slashing .361/.506/.754; their 1.260 OPS was two points better than Babe Ruth’s was in 1927. They couldn’t possibly keep this up.
They cooled off some in Monday afternoon’s 10-1 win over Israel, lowering that slash line to a pedestrian .319/.488/.692. Those slackers.
Obviously, these numbers are staggering. Across three games, the Dominican squad has scored 34 runs and tallied 29 hits, nine home runs, and 29 walks; they’ve struck out just 13 times. Their OPS is now 1.180, slightly better than Ruth’s career mark of 1.164.
MIAMI — Mere seconds after the ball left his bat in the bottom of the sixth inning, Junior Caminero was booking it around the bases, euphoria smothering all sense of reason. You see, he’d just tattooed a two-run homer to straightaway center field to give the Dominican Republic the lead in its opening game of the World Baseball Classic, and even though nobody could possibly get him out, the 22-year-old slugger couldn’t contain himself.
He sprinted so fast toward second base that his helmet flew off. He skipped to third, where he seemed to finally realize that he didn’t have to run. He paused and gestured toward the Dominican fans behind the dugout, then pranced home.
It was one of the most electric home run celebrations in the history of the World Baseball Classic, a moment of catharsis after five and a half bewildering innings. The blast snapped the Dominican squad out of its temporary daze, as one of the most lethal lineups ever assembled pummeled Nicaragua’s pitchers for the remainder of the game. The final score of 12-3 didn’t reflect the chaos of what could have been. Up until that point, the Dominicans were getting outplayed by a vastly inferior Nicaragua team, whose leadoff batter, Chase Dawson, is from Northern Indiana and has never played affiliated baseball; it was only last year that he established residency in the country while playing winter ball there. Read the rest of this entry »
Hello from loanDepot Park in Miami, where I am covering Pool D of the World Baseball Classic. In the two games here Friday, Venezuela beat the Netherlands, 6-2, and the Dominican Republic defeated Nicaragua, 12-3. I am writing about those two games in a separate piece that will go live later today. You can find all of our WBC preview stories, as well as our coverage throughout the tournament, on the blog roll here.
Of course, those were just two of the eight games that took place on Friday. (Well, Friday in the United States, anyway.) Elsewhere in the WBC, Team Japan was every bit as dominant as expected in the first game of its title defense, blowing out Taiwan 13-0 in seven innings. Shohei Ohtani went 3-for-4, with his grand slam getting Japan on the board and kicking off a 10-run second inning. Cuba opened the action from Pool A in San Juan, Puerto Rico, with a 3-1 win over Panama. Puerto Rico, despite being without many of its best players because of insurance issues, shut out Colombia, 5-0, in the second game of that pool. Over in Houston for Pool B, Great Britain kept things tight with a superior Mexican team for the first seven innings before Mexico exploded for three runs in the eighth and four more in the ninth to win, 8-2. Then, in the second game at Daikin Park, Team USA routed Brazil, 15-5, in one of the oddest-looking blowout box scores that I can recall. The leadoff batter for Brazil, Lucas Ramirez, son of Manny, hit more home runs (2) than the entire United States team. The lone U.S. homer came when Aaron Judge a two-run shot in the first inning. The key difference in the game was the Americans drew 17 walks while issuing only one. Later, back in Tokyo for the final game of the night, a matchup of 0-2 teams, Taiwan trounced Czechia, 14-0, in seven innings.
We’ll be talking more about the World Baseball Classic in today’s mailbag, when we answer your questions about the future Hall of Famers playing in this year’s tournament, as well as the Dominican Republic’s chances of contending for the title with Japan, the United States, and Pool D rival, Venezuela. Also in today’s mailbag, we’ll look at the best baseball birthdays and honor Bill Mazeroski with the all-time Az team. But first, 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 »
Happy last day of February, everyone. By this time next week, the World Baseball Classic will have begun, allowing us to experience the best of what our global game has to offer. Earlier this month, Kiri Oler previewed the WBC with four team-by-team breakdown pieces, oneforeachpool, and we’ll have more coverage next week leading into the tournament. Also, I’ll be in Miami covering Pool D, which features Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, the Netherlands, Israel, and Nicaragua, so if you have any questions related to the first-round action at loanDepot park, you know how to reach me.
Of course, the World Baseball Classic isn’t the only baseball we have to look forward to in March. We are less than four weeks away from Opening Day! This year marks the earliest traditional Opening Day in MLB history, with 14 games scheduled for Thursday, March 26. The night before, the Giants will host the Yankees for the first game of the season. That standalone primetime matchup will air on Netflix of all places, because we all needed another streaming service subscription.
Anyway, in this week’s mailbag, we’ll be answering your questions about the NL Central, the value of a foul ball, a hypothetical Hall of Fame election in which every player regained eligibility for one year, and the most and least valuable baseball last names. 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 »
The most consequential transaction (if you can call it that) in baseball this week was the resignation of Tony Clark as the executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association. Clark, who had been the head of the union since 2013, stepped down after an internal investigation revealed that he’d had an “inappropriate relationship” with his sister-in-law, who had been hired to work for the union in 2023. The MLBPA elevated deputy executive director and lead negotiator Bruce Meyer into the top spot on an interim basis. The timing of the move is far from ideal, coming less than 10 months before the current collective bargaining agreement expires at 11:59 p.m. ET on December 1, at which point the owners are expected to promptly lock out the players for the second time this decade. Still, as Michael Baumann wrote on Tuesday, it’s an even worse time for the union to have leadership that its membership doesn’t trust. Beyond the “inappropriate relationship,” Clark is one of the subjects of a broader ongoing federal probe into both the MLBPA and the NFLPA over financial dealings related to the group licensing firm OneTeam Partners, and was the subject of a November 2024 whistleblower complaint alleging him of misusing union resources, self-dealing, and abuse of power. His departure allows the players to better coalesce around their shared priorities.
In lighter news, 12 teams played their first spring training games on Friday, providing us with a perfect opportunity to watch some of the players we covered during Prospect Week. If you tuned in to the Mariners-Padres game, for example, you would’ve seen four of our Top 100 Prospects — including shortstop Colt Emerson (no. 11), center fielder Jonny Farmelo (no. 51), right fielder Lazaro Montes (no. 66), and second baseman Michael Arroyo (no. 78) — in action, all playing for Seattle. The 21-year-old Arroyo (a 50-FV prospect) smoked a two-run homer to right center field on an 0-2 changeup that caught way too much of the plate. He doubled his next time up and finished the day 2-for-2. There are 16 games slated for this afternoon.
We have more labor talk to come in this mailbag, but that’s the last we’ll say about the start of spring training games. Instead, we’ll be answering your questions about quantifying the pitcher-catcher relationship, the looming lockout, how teams perform after significant roster turnover, and more. 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 »
Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone, and welcome to the first mailbag of spring training. It’s fitting that this annual day of love coincides with the return of baseball, because all of us are madly in love with this sport. If you weren’t, you wouldn’t be spending part of your Saturday reading a Members-only mailbag on a website dedicated exclusively to covering our game. Really, baseball is the game of love. Our fandom begins as passionate affair, and then like any lasting relationship, it requires daily commitment, growing stronger over time. It rewards patience, hard work, and finding joy in both the mundane and the extraordinary. It isn’t always easy, but it’s always worth it. How can you not be romantic about baseball?
That’s the last you’ll read about love and Prospect Week in this week’s mailbag. Instead, we’ll be answering your questions about the cost of 1.0 WAR, the legality of a dog playing first base, the number of balls players hit in their careers, and whether a full team of free agents could beat the Rockies. 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 »
It’s the Saturday before the Super Bowl, which means it’s the last Saturday before the unofficial start of baseball season! Well, unless you subscribe to Davy Andrews’ philosophy that the baseball season begins when the first grainy cellphone footage of pitchers at their team’s spring training facility hits social media.
This has been an eventful week for the Tigers, who signed Framber Valdez to a three-year, $115 million contract on Wednesday night and then on Thursday were ordered by an arbitrator to pay two-time Cy Young winner Tarik Skubal a $32 million salary for the 2026 season, his final year under club control. That’s a lot of money for Detroit to dole out, but for that price, the Tigers have perhaps the best 1-2 rotation combo in the American League. For one year, I’d say that’s more than worth it. Michael Baumann broke down all the implications of the Skubal decision on Thursday afternoon.
That’s the last we’ll be talking about Skubal and Valdez today. Instead, we’ll be answering your questions about the all-time non-Hall of Famers teams, minor league payrolls, and which players we’d want to see pull a Philip Rivers. Before we do, 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 »
Hello everyone, and welcome to the final mailbag of January! We’re now less than two months from Opening Day. I, for one, can’t wait.
It was mostly a slow week on the transaction front, with the most notable move being Harrison Bader’s two-year, $20.5 million deal with the Giants. As soon as the news broke, I texted Connor Grossman, who writes the Giants Postcards newsletter, saying: “Is Harrison Bader the most Giants player who has never played for the Giants?” In response, Connor called Bader Kevin Pillar 2.0. Anyway, this week we also learned that two core players from small-market clubs have signed seven-year extensions. First, José Ramírez and the Guardians agreed to a $175 million contract that will keep him in Cleveland through his age-39 season; by the time the deal is done, he could very well be the best Cleveland player that any of us have ever seen — unless some FanGraphs reader was alive to watch Tris Speaker. Then, on Friday afternoon, ESPN’s Jeff Passan reported that Jacob Wilson signed a $70 million extension with the A’s. Davy Andrews wrote up the Ramírez deal, and he’ll do the same for Wilson in a piece that will run on Monday.
We won’t be covering Bader, J-Ram, or Wilson for the rest of this mailbag. Instead, we’ll be answering your questions on players hitting the same number of home runs in four different seasons, ties in baseball, park effects, and more. But first, 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 »
At this time last week, the Mets were celebrating their signing of Bo Bichette. Up until that point, though, their offseason was largely being viewed as a letdown as they assembled an oddly shaped roster. Earlier this winter, they watched as Edwin Díaz spurned them for the Dodgers, let Pete Alonso walk and then signed Jorge Polanco to play first base, and missed out on Kyle Tucker. Sure, they upgraded at second base with the Marcus Semien trade, but doing so required them to part with Brandon Nimmo, who was coming off a year in which he hit a career-high 25 home runs and posted 3.0 WAR. They decided to replace that production with 23-year-old Top 100 prospect Carson Benge, who had a 53 wRC+ in 103 Triple-A plate appearances last season, as the big spoon of a platoon in left field. They also reinforced their bullpen with two of the more inconsistent members of the 2025 Yankees’ relief corps, Devin Williams and Luke Weaver. These weren’t bad moves, to be clear. Williams especially is a strong bounce-back candidate; Polanco is a quality player, though his entire experience at first base consists of one defensive plate appearance; and Semien fulfills the team’s desire to get better defensively. But they were a bit puzzling given that the Mets’ greatest areas of need were another impact bat, a center fielder, and a frontline starting pitcher.
As it turns out, adding Bichette was just the first in a trio of acquisitions to address those major roster holes. Late Tuesday night, the Mets traded for center fielder Luis Robert Jr., who is coming off two straight seasons of injuries and poor performance but is still a tantalizing talent and just 28 years old. “If you made an outfielder in a lab, he’d look a lot like this,” wrote Ben Clemens about Robert after the trade. Then, on Wednesday, they swung a swap with the Brewers for All-Star right-hander Freddy Peralta to anchor their rotation. They had to give up two of their top prospects to get him, but as Davy Andrews noted in his column on the trade, “the Mets are trying to win this season, and now that he’s not in Milwaukee, David Stearns has the luxury of leaving tomorrow’s problems for tomorrow.”
We won’t be answering any questions about the Mets or any of the other big recent transactions, such as Cody Bellinger’s re-signing with the Yankees or the Rangers’ trade forMacKenzie Gore, but we will be talking about the other big baseball topic of the week: the Hall of Fame. We’ll also discuss the best left-on-left hitters of all time, the aesthetic potential of the Colorado Rockies, and what to expect from Foster Griffin with the Nationals. But first, 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 »
