The Boston Red Sox have acquired veteran right-hander Sonny Gray and cash from the St. Louis Cardinals, in exchange for pitchers Richard Fitts and Brandon Clarke, and either cash or a player to be named later. Seems straightforward enough.

After 13 seasons in the majors, you all know Gray by now: short guy out of Vanderbilt. Big, slow curveball, but not a ton of velo. Changes teams every two or three years. In those 13 seasons, Gray’s two best WAR seasons are 5.4 and 4.5, but he’s posted four additional seasons of between 3.5 and 3.9 WAR, and three others of between 2.4 and 2.7 WAR. This is the Toyota Sienna of pitchers: You don’t stay up nights dreaming about him, and he can be a little pricey, but he’ll get you and your family where they need to go with an absolute minimum of fuss.

The Red Sox made the playoffs in 2025. I don’t think I’m going out on a limb by assuming they’d like to make the playoffs again in 2026. If I were in the playoff-making business, I’d welcome the opportunity to add Sonny Gray to my team. Read the rest of this entry »

All relief pitchers are failed starters. In the future, everyone will be world famous for 15 minutes. All great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice… the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

Therefore: In the future, all relief pitchers will be starting pitchers for 15 minutes, twice: First as failure, then as tragedy.

This jumble of aphorisms is what plopped out of my head when I read a bit of surprising news: The Detroit Tigers are interested in Ryan Helsley — reasonable enough, since he’s been a good high-leverage reliever for several years — as a starting pitcher.

Whoa. Read the rest of this entry »

The New York Mets are trading outfielder Brandon Nimmo to the Texas Rangers in exchange for infielder Marcus Semien, ESPN’s Jeff Passan reported Sunday night. You don’t often see one-for-one trades involving two players with a combined 66.9 career WAR in their past, but this deal was made possible by the combined $173.5 million owed Nimmo and Semien in the future.

The Mets and Rangers are both top-10 payroll teams and recidivist whales in the free agent market (with the caveat that the Mets are somewhat more top-payroll than the Rangers are), so this is not a straight-up salary dump. Indeed, only a trivial amount of money — $5 million moving from New York to Texas, according to Jon Heyman — is changing hands. That greases the skids, but it’s only about 5% of what Nimmo’s owed, and less than 3% of the total remaining value of the contracts being moved.

Semien and Nimmo have both been excellent players in the recent past, as reflected in their compensation. Semien is on a seven-year, $175 million contract he signed with the Rangers before the 2022 season; Nimmo had a .385 career OBP, and was coming off a 5.5 WAR season, when he signed with the Mets a year later for $162 million over eight years. Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t want to overstate the value of raw financial power in baseball. The Mets spent more than $320 million on player salaries, not counting luxury tax penalties, and they finished four games over .500. Money can’t buy happiness, or even a spot in the playoffs.

It can, however, buy you a closer and a major upgrade to your bench. So the Braves demonstrated Wednesday, when they re-signed closer Raisel Iglesias for one year at $16 million, and swapped utility infielders with the Astros, sending Nick Allen west in a 1-for-1 trade for Mauricio Dubón.

The Braves went into last season as one of the favorites to win the NL pennant only to tumble to fourth place behind the Marlins (the Marlins!) after befalling a series of farces and calamities that recall A Serious Man. Jurickson Profar got popped for PEDs, Spencer Strider and Ozzie Albies lost their juice, half the roster got hurt, it was a huge mess. Read the rest of this entry »

“OK, but what if you could steal first base?” is surely a thought that’s occurred to just about every baseball fan. We’ve all seen players come up who look like absolute studs, except for one thing: They can’t hit. It’s only one skill, but it’s the most important skill for a position player.

I remember having a simply overpowering version of this thought in the press box at Camden Yards during the 2024 ALDS. Maikel Garcia’s tools sizzled and crackled with potential. He’s stolen 37 bases in 39 regular-season attempts. His defense at third base was very good, good enough to play shortstop on a team that had not been built around the best shortstop on the planet. Garcia played 157 regular-season games for the Royals in 2024, and he was about as good a player as you can be with a single-digit home run total and a .281 OBP.

Those two headline numbers do limit one’s potential, unfortunately.

In October, Garcia poked enough grounders through the infield to eke out a .318 batting average in Kansas City’s six playoff games, teasing us with the hope of what could have been if he just learned how to hit. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »