Another day, another Met out the door. Jeff McNeil, who to this point had spent his entire 13-year professional career in the Mets organization, is now an Athletic. The 33-year-old second baseman and outfielder is headed to Sacramento (or, to use the Athletics’ official branding, Parts Unknown), in exchange for 17-year-old pitching prospect Yordan Rodriguez. The Mets will pay down $5.75 million of the $15.75 million due to McNeil in 2026, and if the A’s decline McNeil’s club option for 2027, Steve Cohen will cover the $2 million buyout.

At the time of the trade, McNeil was the Mets’ active leader in games played, plate appearances, and hits. If you want a sense of how the Mets’ offseason is going, here’s a fun fact. In the past 30 days, the franchise has had four active leaders in those categories: Brandon Nimmo, who was traded to Texas just before Thanksgiving; then Pete Alonso, who signed with the Orioles during Winter Meetings; then McNeil; and now Francisco Lindor. All that upheaval without playing a single game.

All told, 16 of the 63 players who suited up for the Mets in 2025 have departed since the end of the season. Come February, “Meet the Mets” might be more than a song. They’re going to have to spend the first week of camp wearing name tags and doing icebreakers. Read the rest of this entry »

A new day dawned in Major League Baseball on Sunday, as the top international player in this free agent class has signed with — that’s right — someone other than the Dodgers!

The White Sox, yes, believe it or not, the White Sox, have landed Munetaka Murakami. Per Jeff Passan, the 25-year-old corner infielder, late of the Tokyo Yakult Swallows of NPB, will make $34 million over the next two seasons. We had him ranked 12th on our Top 50 Free Agents list, with an estimated contract AAV of $22 million. Ben Clemens predicted he’d get seven years, our readers six.

It’s one of the biggest discrepancies you’re likely to see, and for good reason. Murakami is, in my opinion, the no. 1 most interesting player in this class, and while I’m shocked his contract dropped this far below expectations, I’m not at all surprised by the extent to which he’s divided popular opinion. Read the rest of this entry »

The San Diego Padres have re-signed starting pitcher Michael King to a… let’s just call it a three-year deal worth $75 million for now, though the particulars are somewhat more complicated.

Good for the Padres, getting their Christmas shopping done on time; not all of us are so organized. I also can’t remember if I’ve already used the joke about how a reunion between King and the Friars is the opposite of Becket, the 1964 film starring Richard Burton and Peter O’Toole. These are confusing times.

Especially for the Padres, who have been one of baseball’s more chaotic teams in the 2020s, shipping massive talents in and out with little warning and little regard for the long-term future. King came to San Diego in one of the more famous examples of this behavior: the trade that sent Juan Soto to the Yankees in 2023.

That all-in attitude — even when the Padres were selling in the short term, it was to set up another major push in the medium term — was assumed to have a shelf life. Especially after the death of popular owner Peter Seidler, whose largesse enabled GM A.J. Preller to satisfy his inexhaustible thirst for making deals. Read the rest of this entry »

Bob Dylan can’t get no relief, but the Los Angeles Angels don’t have that problem. They just signed two veteran pitchers, Drew Pomeranz and Jordan Romano, to one-year deals worth $4 million and $2 million, respectively.

I’m starting to get worried that the Angels are becoming orthodox. For most of this decade, there have been two teams — the Angels and Rockies — that you could count on to be truly iconoclastic. The other 28 clubs differed from each other mostly due to flavor of ownership: How many resources their boss was willing to commit to the cause, and what time pressure, if any, was being placed on the executives to win. (It’s probably more like 27 other teams now, with the Buster Posey Era underway in San Francisco, though that’s another story.)

But for the most part, the way you run a baseball team is you hire some business school goon, give him a budget and a list of goals, and let him cook. He then goes out and hires as many quants and biomechanics experts as he can, and let the chips fall where they may. Read the rest of this entry »

On Monday morning, the Twins signed Josh Bell to a one-year contract with a mutual option for 2027. Between salary, signing bonus, and option buyout, the deal guarantees Bell $7 million. A couple hours later, the Phillies and outfielder Adolis García agreed to terms on a one-year, $10 million contract.

Look around whatever room you’re sitting in as you read this. Consider the material of the walls, the furniture, whatever appliances (if any) are in view. The carpet, or wood or laminate or tile of the floor. Pens and pencils, soap, hand lotion, power cables, books, magazines, children’s toys… whatever you can see, you know what it’d feel like and taste like if you licked it.

That’s from experience. At some point in your life, you put everything you encountered in your mouth, just to see what would happen. If you’ve ever raised a child, or met a child, or been a child, you know kids are always putting stuff in their mouths. You know equally well that kids aren’t supposed to do that. They could choke, or get sick, or otherwise come to harm by licking the sidewalk.

But they do it anyway, no matter how forcefully their parents remind them not to. There’s only one way to know for sure what the TV remote tastes like, and it’s too important an issue to take anyone else’s word for it. Read the rest of this entry »

Throughout history, the Miami Marlins have only produced four kinds of season: The star-studded World Series team of 1997, the star-studded last place team of 2012, unwatchable detritus, and a feisty .500ish club with some fun talent. (The 2003 World Series-winning Marlins were the latter group, plus a one-year cameo by Ivan Rodriguez.)

The 2025 Marlins were expected to be unwatchable detritus, but turned out to be feisty and competitive. I don’t think anyone would accuse these Marlins of being as talented as previous feisty-competitive Miami squads. I’m thinking of the 2014 squad that won 77 games with a roster that featured Giancarlo Stanton, Christian Yelich, Marcell Ozuna, Nathan Eovaldi, as well as (very briefly) Enrique Hernández, J.T. Realmuto, Andrew Heaney, and José Fernández.

That team looked like a juggernaut in the making, because it had a roster full of guys who would spend most of the next decade starting for playoff teams. Just, you know, other playoff teams, and not the Marlins. Read the rest of this entry »

If the Tigers make the postseason for a third consecutive year in 2026, they’ll have a closer with plenty of experience. Kenley Jansen is bound for Detroit on a one-year, $11 million contract with a club option for 2027.

Jansen, 38, is just about the most experienced relief pitcher on the market. He leads all active relief pitchers in regular-season appearances, innings, strikeouts, and saves; in the postseason, he’s second all-time, behind Mariano Rivera, in all of those categories as well. At his peak, Jansen was the Dodgers’ late-inning enforcer, posting sub-2.00 ERAs and pairing strikeout rates in the 40s with walk rates under 5%. And just like Rivera, he did it all using a cutter and little else. Read the rest of this entry »

After a somnambulant first day of the Winter Meetings, one of the buzzier rumors involved free agent first baseman Pete Alonso getting in his car, driving up I-4 from his home in Tampa to Orlando, and pitching himself in person to the Red Sox and Orioles.

Apparently, those meetings went well. The drive from New York to Baltimore mostly takes place on expensive toll roads, but Alonso now has an extra $155 million to put on his EZ Pass account. Big Pete, the Polar Bear, the face of the Mets’ franchise, is bound for Baltimore on a five-year contract. Read the rest of this entry »

The Pittsburgh Pirates, rebuffed in their totally-serious, no, we-mean-it courtship of Kyle Schwarber, have found another way to spend in the free agent market. Gregory Soto is the lucky recipient of a one-year, $7.75 million contract.

Soto missed the cut for our Top 50 free agent list, which included 14 relief pitchers, including lefty specialist Hoby Milner. But before you go and say, “Yikes,” and run away, give me an opportunity to explain. Read the rest of this entry »

In the last competitive major league baseball game of 2025, the Dodgers used six pitchers, five of whom had spent most or all of their careers as starters. They used all four pitchers from their playoff rotation, most notably getting eight outs from Yoshinobu Yamamoto on zero days’ rest to close out the 11-inning contest. Manager Dave Roberts had run out of patience with his high-leverage bullpen, a group that had already been reinforced with starter Roki Sasaki late in the regular season.

The Dodgers, the best team in baseball, a force so immutable it got the American public to turn on capitalism, had a crappy bullpen.

On the second day of baseball’s Winter Meetings, the Dodgers signed Edwin Díaz to a three-year, $69 million contract.

There’s great beauty in the simplest solution. Read the rest of this entry »