Last week, I wrote about the careers of the two former college baseball players who have been featured on this season of Love Is Blind, and don’t worry, I’m not going to follow up with a detailed breakdown of their performance on the episodes released this past weekend. (Though if anyone wants the short version: It’s been pretty dire. Ben is getting flamed on TikTok so bad his fiancée is thinking about pulling the plug, while Dave… I don’t know what you’re doing, man. Get it together. You’re in your mid-30s. You should be able to have a frank, productive conversation with your partner.)

I bring all this up because it’s been hard to shake something I mentioned in Friday’s article: Ben Mezzenga’s astonishingly high incidence of taking strike three. In his best years, only about half of his strikeouts came swinging. A typical big league hitter strikes out three times swinging for every time he strikes out looking. Last year, José Ramírez ran a ratio north of 15-to-1, the highest mark in baseball. Cavan Biggio was the only hitter who had 50 or more strikeouts with more than half of them coming with the bat on his shoulder. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the most exciting developments of 2025 is also one of the most surprising: Love Is Blind has its mojo back. After a white-hot start in 2020, Netflix’s reality dating show put out three consecutive snoozefest seasons in 2023 and 2024. (The entire D.C. season could’ve been an email.)

But the first six episodes of Season 8 debuted last Friday, covering the first phase of the show, and it’s been a hot minute since we saw this much drama in the pods. Far from the usual slate of boring couples playing along just to stay on TV, this season has had (I’ll try to avoid spoilers) a love quadrilateral, a shocking violation of show norms, and multiple contestants just packing it in and going home. It’s been a blast.

Here’s something else Season 8 has: Multiple former college baseball players. That’s right, it’s not a nightmare, we’re talking about reality. Read the rest of this entry »

The first deadline of the 2025 season has come and gone: February 17, the last day Vladimir Guerrero Jr. was open to signing an extension with the Blue Jays before he hits free agency this coming winter. While both Guerrero and Toronto GM Ross Atkins remain interested in continuing their partnership, it does not appear that the two sides were close to a deal. Guerrero has his price, and the Jays didn’t meet it. No hard feelings; we’ll talk again in November.

It seems like just last week that Guerrero brought his bonkers power and elite hit tool up to the majors, but time flies. Should Guerrero choose to play elsewhere next season, losing him would be a definitive moment in Blue Jays history. Not just because of his star power and the hype that accompanied him since he first signed with the team as an amateur free agent, but because he’s Toronto’s best player by far. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s one thing that unites almost all great center fielders: They end their careers somewhere else. Ty Cobb, Mickey Mantle, and Ken Griffey Jr. combined for zero defensive innings in center field in their last major league seasons. Even Willie Mays, the greatest of all time, who played 25% more innings at the position than anyone else, made 11 of his last 12 regular-season starts at first base. Maybe that’s how he knew it was time to retire.

So anyone with an iota of sense knew this was coming someday for Mike Trout. It’s been obvious since he arrived in the majors as a callow but wide teenager, looking more like Mike Alstott than Mike Cameron. And anyone who didn’t see the signs then surely got the hint as the injuries started to pile up. Trout last played more than 140 games in a season in 2016, last qualified for the batting title in 2020, and has missed an average of 96 games a season since 2021.

The Millville Meteor told reporters Monday that he’d recently met with GM Perry Minasian and manager Ron Washington to discuss — to borrow an idiom from basketball — load management. It would’ve been irresponsible not to. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s Valentine’s Day, and instead of being out on the town with your beloved, you’re sitting on the sofa bingewatching the latest installment of a streaming entertainment institution. Not the new season of Love is Blind; the new season of college baseball.

Baseball is like football and basketball, in that a large part of the appeal of the college game is its abundance. Not every game is worth watching, but with some 300 Division I schools to choose from, there’s a good chance that somewhere out there, there’s a close game in the bottom of the ninth, or a pitchers’ duel between top prospects, or a rivalry matchup with postseason implications. It’s borderline-impossible to remember the names of all 300 teams, much less any useful information about them. So in the interest of efficiency, here are seven schools I’ll have my eye on this season, because I think they’ll have an outsize influence on the shape of this season as a whole.

Oregon State
I’m not going to say this is the most excited I’ve ever been for a college team, ever. But it’s the most excited I’ve been for a college team without multiple contenders for the no. 1 overall pick, like the Kumar Rocker/Jack Leiter Vandy team, or Paul Skenes and Dylan Crews at LSU. Read the rest of this entry »

Kenley Jansen his headed back to Los Angeles, if only in name, on a one-year, $10 million contract with the Angels.

The 37-year-old four-time All-Star currently sits fourth all-time on the career saves list and leads all active pitchers in the category. Jansen famously did most of that damage in Dodger blue, and now at the twilight of his career, he returns to his old stomping grounds… ish. Like 45 minutes down the freeway from his old stomping grounds. Close enough. Read the rest of this entry »

Imagine you’re stuck in a huge hole. A chasm, a pit, an oubliette.

You’re in this hole, and you have to get out. You’re not going to just jam your fingernails into the wall and start climbing straight up. Wouldn’t be much of a hole if getting out were so simple. You’d have to build stairs or carve handholds or piece together an improvised ladder. It takes time, with no guarantee of success, and progress is not necessarily linear.

The White Sox are in a metaphorical hole at the moment. (Wait, wasn’t the hole always a metaphor? Don’t worry about it.) They just finished 41-121, a record so poor it violates certain assumptions that underpin contemporary baseball analysis. For example: Replacement level — as in wins above — comes to a winning percentage of .294, which is a hair under 48 wins. That’s seven more than the White Sox managed last season. Read the rest of this entry »

Pete Alonso is going back to the Mets. It always felt like the most likely outcome, and to be honest, it would’ve been super weird to see him in any other uniform. Alonso has never been the best player on the Mets, but he does the coolest and most valuable thing you can do on a baseball diamond — hit home runs — with great frequency. That, and an affable attitude that’s endeared him to the fans, has made him an institution in Queens.

Unfortunately, there was something of a disagreement over what all those contributions were worth. Alonso returns to his team of origin on a front-loaded two-year, $54 million contract that features an opt-out. If Alonso does what he’s done his whole career, he can test free agency again next winter, having pocketed $30 million. That’s a handsome one-year salary for any player, but far, far short of Alonso’s expectations. Read the rest of this entry »

I went to the Pirates’ RosterResource page this morning and thought the following thought: “Man, is Isiah Kiner-Falefa really going to lead off for this team? God, that’s depressing.” Not that I have anything against IKF; it’s just symptomatic of a Pirates team that seems built to do little more than participate in the coming season.

The Pirates being an afterthought is nothing new; on the contrary, it’s been the default state of affairs for most of the past 45 years. But recent developments have made this a particularly frustrating time for Pirates fans.

At the risk of oversimplifying things, there are two kinds of good players: Players you can get and players you have to have drop out of the sky for you. Like Willy Adames is a really good player, and worth the monster contract the Giants just gave him. But if he’d signed elsewhere, the Giants could’ve found another player like him.

Not so Paul Skenes. Read the rest of this entry »

It was a bit of a weird assignment: “Hey, one of our most popular projections drops this week, would you mind telling everyone where you think it’s wrong?” Sure thing, bossman!

Joking aside, I get it. Playoff odds are probabilistic; if you asked me how many teams would miss their projected win total, I’d say half are going to come in high and the other half are going to come in low. They follow a set methodology that you can’t tweak if the results look off. That means the standings page is blind to factors human observers can see. It doesn’t know who’s getting divorced, who made a conditioning breakthrough over the winter, and who just really freaking hated the old pitching coach who got fired.

Nevertheless, these numbers are valuable because the projection system doesn’t mistake anecdotes for data and overrate the intangible. It’s a reminder to trust your gut, but only to an extent. Read the rest of this entry »