After Josh Naylor signed the first major free agent deal of the offseason over the weekend, four more big names came off the board Tuesday afternoon. Of the 13 free agents who were presented with qualifying offers, four accepted: Brandon Woodruff, Trent Grisham, Gleyber Torres, and Shota Imanaga will all return to their previous teams on one-year contracts worth $22.025 million.

Bo Bichette, Dylan Cease, Edwin Díaz, Framber Valdez, Kyle Schwarber, Kyle Tucker, Michael King, Ranger Suárez, and Zac Gallen all declined their qualifying offers and will hit the open market, carrying draft pick penalties to be determined by MLB’s inscrutable compensation system.

If you’re thinking this is a bumper crop of QO acceptance, you’d be right. In the first 14 years of the qualifying offer system, 144 offers were extended to pending free agents, and only 14 accepted. This year, nearly one in four qualified free agents decided to bank the offer and walk away, rather than face one more multiple-choice question from Regis Philbin. Read the rest of this entry »

Shortstop is one of the hardest positions on the diamond to fill, especially if you want anything resembling useful offensive production from the position. Nevertheless, it has been one place where help is usually available on the free agent market.

In the four full offseasons that either straddled or succeeded the last lockout, eight different teams have signed a free agent shortstop to a contract worth $140 million or more. This includes the Rangers, who did it twice in the same winter. Read the rest of this entry »

Dustin May is a free agent. And not because he got non-tendered; he’s passed six years of service this season, and hits the open market at the tender age of 28.

I admit this one snuck up on me. May, a highly touted Dodgers prospect, stormed into prominence when he joined the L.A. pitching staff in 2019 at the age of 21. He pitched for the Dodgers in the playoffs that October and started 2020 as the no. 14 prospect in all of baseball, and spent most of the year in the rotation, garnering a few Rookie of the Year votes and making seven appearances during the Dodgers’ run to the World Series. Read the rest of this entry »

Monday was a big day for baseball’s old-heads. Ken Rosenthal published a piece in The Athletic in which 41-year-old Max Scherzer declared his intention to keep pitching. Justin Turner’s agent told Jon Morosi that the soon-to-be-41-year-old plans on playing in 2026. Kyle Hendricks, 35, has had enough, however. The man who started Game 7 of the 2016 World Series for the Cubs is hanging ‘em up after 12 seasons in The Show.

As a geriatric Millennial myself, these decisions got me thinking. Clayton Kershaw has retired, Kenta Maeda is going back to Japan, and Adam Ottavino was just trying to talk his way into the Rockies’ president of baseball ops job. My generation is going extinct, at least on the baseball diamond. Read the rest of this entry »

Guardians pitchers Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz have been on non-disciplinary paid leave since July, as Major League Baseball investigated the two men’s involvement in a prop betting scandal. The allegation was that Ortiz had intentionally thrown at least two pitches outside the strike zone after tipping off bettors that he would do so. Armed with this advance knowledge, Ortiz’s confederates had profited in extremely specific prop bet markets.

Clase soon joined Ortiz on the sidelines, though the specifics of his supposed wrongdoing were not made public at the time. Both pitchers spent Cleveland’s terrific stretch run, and its playoff series against Detroit, in limbo.

Well, the other shoe dropped on Sunday, and what a shoe it is. The United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York indicted the two pitchers on four counts: wire fraud conspiracy, honest services wire fraud conspiracy, conspiracy to influence sporting contests by bribery, and money laundering conspiracy. The first three counts come with a maximum penalty of 20 years imprisonment, each. Money laundering conspiracy has a five-year maximum. Ortiz was arrested in Boston on Sunday morning, and his attorney maintained his client’s innocence in advance of a scheduled Monday court appearance. Clase is not in custody as of this writing, but his attorney says he “is innocent of all charges and looks forward to clearing his name in court.” Read the rest of this entry »

Most major league baseball organizations think more or less the same way. They vary on tactics and strategy, in competency, in resources, and in culture, but for the most part everyone agrees on how to win a baseball game. This leads to some groupthink and a lot of same-y executive hires.

The Giants have bucked the trend, turning back the clock to hand the reins to an ex-player who’s long on cultural cachet and short on expertise. He, in turn, made a delightfully unorthodox choice for field manager. I look forward to seeing if these iconoclasts can hold their own.

Not to be outdone, the Colorado Rockies have gone even further off the board for their new head of baseball operations, as they are reportedly nearing a deal to hire Paul DePodesta for the position. I’ll be as blunt as I can be: It’s one of the weirdest executive hires in decades, from an organization that’s at least a full step behind its rivals to start. With all the best will in the world, unless DePodesta’s appointment heralds a complete change in organizational structure and philosophy, it is almost certainly doomed to fail. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve been assiduously following the managerial report card series, you’ve no doubt been waiting for this one. I apologize for keeping you in suspense. I’ve been dragooned into service here because Ben Clemens, the normal custodian of this series, is also an inveterate overachiever and saddled himself with the Top 50 Free Agent list at the same time. Even he is only one man.

You can find a précis of Ben’s philosophy on grading managers at the top of any of his report card posts, and I’ll try to follow that blueprint as best I’m able. (You can also find, at the top of Dan Szymborski’s Pat Murphy report card, the substitute teacher gag I wanted to use for this post.)

Why the five-day delay on this final installment in the series? Well, this being my first time writing a managerial report card, I wanted to do right by Ben and his creation. But also, the guy I was tasked with grading — Dodgers manager Dave Roberts — managed a lot, man. There’s just so much to unpack. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m still coming down from the high of what I think we can all agree was a terrific World Series. It’ll go down as one of the best of the 21st century; it had star power, shocking twists, unlikely heroes, the whole nine yards. The guys who plotted out the ludicrously dramatic football depicted in Friday Night Lights are probably like, “Guys, cool it, you’re pouring it on too thick.”

The last game and a half especially, I was genuinely stressed out over the outcome, which is not something that usually happens when I have neither a partisan dog in the fight nor the obligation to write off the game. Read the rest of this entry »

In the aftermath of Monday’s Game 3 loss (well, really it ended up being almost as much Tuesday’s Game 3 loss, at least on the East Coast), I encountered an unexpected sentiment floating around on the internet, and I’d like to unpack it.

Somewhere around the 32nd inning of that game, I noted that Toronto’s lineup had been shortened quite dramatically by a series of in-game substitutions.

I am amazed the Jays have lasted this long after taking out their second-, third-, fourth- and fifth-best hitters, in two cases for guys who absolutely cannot hit even a little. The Dodgers should've been walking Guerrero every time up too

— Michael Baumann (@baumann.bsky.social) October 28, 2025 at 2:35 AM

I meant this as nothing more than a statement of fact; George Springer got hurt mid-game, and Bo Bichette had to be removed because he came pre-injured and is currently running like the “before” clip in a commercial for a physical therapy practice. Toronto manager John Schneider’s options were quite limited. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m going to preface this post with two important caveats. First: Complaining about the fairness of the officiating, in any sport, in any circumstance, is loser behavior. For better or worse, the calls usually even out. And even in the vanishingly rare circumstances where a single call genuinely costs a team a victory, harping on about it isn’t going to change anything.

Second: I’m more lukewarm about the oncoming challenge system, and ABS in general, than a lot of people are. I think the umpires usually do a good job calling balls and strikes, and calling the rulebook zone isn’t going to do much to placate fans who pore over umpire scorecards. They don’t want the rulebook zone; they want their team to get all the calls. Overall, I think it’ll be a positive for the game, I’m just less geeked about it than I was about the pitch clock, for instance.

With all that said, there’s one specific thing I’m looking forward to with the challenge system. It’s going to eliminate my least favorite play in baseball, one we saw with disastrous effect during Game 3 of the World Series, and with any luck for the last time on a major league diamond. Read the rest of this entry »