I’m of the opinion that you usually don’t learn much from watching spring training. It’s glorified practice, with inconsistent quality of competition even before you consider the fact that some guys are going all-out while others are working on a specific issue rather than trying to win the game. This is especially true for position players who came into camp with at least an inside track on a starting job. It’s why I pay more attention to college baseball during February and March. Hell, the new season of Love Is Blind is out and I need to catch up so I can see if there are any ex-college ballplayers in the cast.
We know the steps to the annual spring dance by now: Pitcher appears for spring training, pitcher suffers minor injury or discomfort during practice, America holds its collective breath and hopes that barking elbow will just resolve itself.
Unfortunately, that hope is all too rarely vindicated, as imaging quickly confirms said pitcher has torn an essential bit of connective tissue.
The Twins speed-ran this dance this week with their no. 1 starter, Pablo López. The veteran right-hander cut short a bullpen session on Monday after feeling soreness in his elbow. Minnesota GM Jeremy Zoll announced Tuesday that López had torn an elbow ligament and that season-ending surgery was “very much on the table.” Read the rest of this entry »
On Tuesday morning, it was reported by The Athletic’s Evan Drellich, Ken Rosenthal and Andy McCullough that Tony Clark was resigning as executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association, a post he’d held since 2013. The news came the very morning MLBPA leadership was due to start its annual whistle-stop tour through all 30 major league spring training clubhouses. The MLBPA is also preparing for negotiations on a new CBA; all indications are that we’re a little over nine months from a lockout of some length.
While the timing of the announcement was bad, Clark’s ouster was not itself unforeseen. For about a year, federal agents have been investigating both the MLBPA and the NFLPA over financial dealings related to the group licensing firm OneTeam Partners. Clark was also the subject of a November 2024 whistleblower complaint alleging self-dealing and abuse of power regarding the MLBPA-owned youth baseball company Players Way. Surely Clark’s resignation came in advance of another shoe dropping in one or both of those cases.
No, it turns out. On Tuesday afternoon, Jeff Passan and Don Van Natta Jr. of ESPN reported that Clark had resigned in disgrace for a hitherto undiscovered reason: An internal investigation had revealed that he had an “inappropriate relationship” with his sister-in-law, who had been hired to work at the MLBPA in 2023.
Gregory Fisher, Kelley L Cox, Kyle Ross, Denis Poroy-Imagn Images
I try to be humble and open-minded as an analyst; there’s so much we don’t or can’t know at the time a player signs with a team. And the future? She is as capricious as she is mean-spirited. Nothing is guaranteed.
If Preller can retrieve previous versions of these players from the ethers of subspace, we’ll look back on this weekend (or forward, considering we have the ability to move through time in this hypothetical) as a definitive one in the 2026 NL West race.
The pros are still moseying on down to Florida and Arizona for training camp, but the college baseball regular season starts today. I’ve long been an evangelist for the college game, and it’s hard to overstate how much more accessible it has become just in the past 15 to 20 years. Basically every power conference game gets aired either on cable or streamed on ESPN+ or a similarly accessible provider. I remember having to calculate OPS by hand from the press box in the mid-teens; now FanGraphs has wRC+ for every Division I player, while D1Baseball puts out batted ball stats.
And the quality of play is better now than it’s ever been. That’s true in most sports; societal standards of nutrition and fitness only tend to go up over time, as does the human understanding of science. And the past decade has seen not one revolution in college baseball but several. Professional-quality, data-driven coaching techniques have hit the amateur game. The truncation of the draft to 20 rounds and the imposition of bonus caps have led more elite prospects to college baseball, and the loosening of transfer policy has led more players to find programs where they can flourish.
In every way that matters, Division I baseball is more like the professional game than it’s ever been. So the statistical environments of the two forms of baseball should be pretty similar, right? Read the rest of this entry »
If you’re not already into college baseball, I’ll give you the briefest possible form of my annual elevator pitch. It comes in three parts. First: The regional round of the NCAA Tournament isn’t for another four months, but it’s one of the best weekends of TV in all of sports. That’s true even if you drop in cold, but it’s better if you know some of the characters involved. The time to start one’s homework is now.
Second: If you watch college baseball, you can have opinions about the draft that’ll make you look smart in front of your friends. If you’re wrong, no one will remember who you were even talking about, but if you’re right, you can dine out on that prediction forever.
Third: What are you going to do, watch spring training? Davy Andrews wrote last week about a blurry photo of a white guy with a goatee in a blue uniform. He says that was Nolan McLean, but for all I know, it was Civil War General Daniel Sickles. You can watch meaningful regular season baseball tomorrow, or you can delude yourself into thinking there’s anything to be learned from watching Carlos Correa get walked by a minor league pitcher with a uniform number in the 80s.
An actual exhaustive college baseball preview takes months of research and dozens of articles, even for specialist publications that can devote a full staff to the undertaking. Me? I’m one guy with about 3,000 words to play with, so I’m giving you a brief rundown of seven teams I’m interested in. These seven teams include national championship contenders — specifically the two heavy preseason College World Series favorites — but this is not a ranking. I tried to pick good, talented teams from a few conferences that could end up having interesting seasons. Make of it what you will. Read the rest of this entry »
A lot of people think this job is about immersing oneself in the glorious, vibrant culture of baseball. Feeling the sun on your face, schmoozing with athletes, learning the finest intricacies of a children’s game. And it is, to some extent. Some people think this job is about the craft of writing, and ingesting and disseminating knowledge. It is, to some extent. Some people think this job —at least how we do it here at FanGraphs — is about math, the unforgiving exactitude of numbers. And again, it is, but only to an extent.
The more time I spend doing this job, the more I’ve come to believe it’s about the rules. Sometimes literally — once a week I answer a question for our Members Only mailbag, and it usually has something to do with “Why hasn’t anyone thought to do X?” The answer, more often than not: Because they’re not allowed.
So I’ve found myself spending lots of time with two documents: The major league rulebook and the collective bargaining agreement. The latter document is of interest to most fans because of the ways in which it governs transactions. This is where the minimum salary is established, along with the competitive balance tax and rules about arbitration — the minutiae of which made headline news just last week.
Those are the headline details — the big-money sections, literally — that will likely capture the public’s imagination over the next several months. But the CBA is first and foremost a covenant between labor and capital to govern workplace conditions, and it is herein that you’ll find all manner of fascinating tidbits that fans would never notice or care about, but are important to the everyday lives of the players. Read the rest of this entry »
Seldom, if ever, has the baseball world waited on tenterhooks to hear the result of a salary arbitration case, but most arbitration-eligible players are not Tarik Skubal. On this point, the arbitrator seems to have agreed, granting the Tigers left-hander a record $32 million salary for his final year of team control.
Arbitration cases themselves are usually back-page news. The question is not whether a player will return to his previous team, but how much he’ll be paid. Only people who work in baseball and unrecoverable RosterResource addicts care about such things, especially because the club’s offer and the player’s request usually only differ by a small amount. Read the rest of this entry »
The Kansas City Royals are my dark horse team for 2026. They managed not only to make the playoffs in 2024 but also to win a round despite not having anything resembling a playoff-quality offense, and then went a respectable 82-80 in 2025 even after losing ace Cole Ragans to a rotator cuff strain and watching no. 2 starter Seth Lugo start to suffer the effects of age.
Heading into 2026, the Royals have a deep pitching staff and more good position players than they’ve had at one time in at least 10 years. Maikel Garcia and Bobby Witt Jr. are baseball’s best left-side-of-the-infield duo, and Vinnie Pasquantino is pretty good too. If not for the giant sucking maw at second base, the Royals infield would be among the best in the majors.
Still, they could, as ever, use another thumper. Witt is the team’s only truly transformative offensive player, and while Kansas City has bolstered the lineup with the addition of Isaac Collins, it had only four players last season with double-digit home runs. That’s the lowest total in baseball; 27 teams had at least six such players, 16 had eight, and four had 10.
I’m not going to pretend that you should care about, or even have heard of, Carmen Mlodzinski before now. He’s a spot starter and medium-leverage reliever on a bad team that gets 90% of its national attention when a specific other pitcher is on the mound. And if you’re not watching the Pirates for Paul Skenes, you’re probably watching them for Bubba Chandler or Mitch Keller or (before he got hurt) Jared Jones, and changing the channel when the bullpen comes in.
It’s fine. Life, unlike Skenes, is short. There are many more important players out there than Mlodzinski.
