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 »

The Tampa Bay Rays have signed outfielder Cedric Mullins, late of the Mets and Orioles, to a one-year contract worth $7 million. This deal makes a lot of sense if you look at Mullins’ overall numbers from 2025: 17 home runs, a 10.0% walk rate, and a 94 wRC+ from a guy who can run well enough to play center.

That sounds like a pretty good player, and for just $7 million. Inflation’s so bad these days that $7 million is reliever money on the free agent market — not even good reliever money — and for that the Rays got themselves a fringe-average center fielder. Read the rest of this entry »

The Chicago White Sox got on the board in free agency on Wednesday morning, inking left-handed pitcher Anthony Kay to a two-year, $12 million contract with a $10 million mutual option for 2028. Kay will make $5 million in each of the next two seasons, with a $2 million buyout due if the mutual option isn’t exercised.

It’s been a huge week for the trans-Pacific starting pitching exchange, with Matt Manning going over to the KBO and Cody Ponce coming back in the other direction. Kay spent the past two seasons pitching for the Yokohama DeNA BayStars of NPB — and pitching quite well, it bears mentioning: In 24 starts and 155 innings this past season, Kay posted a 1.74 ERA and a 2.55 FIP. That ERA is a couple tenths better than what Tatsuya Imai, this offseason’s hot Japanese pitching import, posted this season. Read the rest of this entry »

While 29 American teams sit around twiddling their thumbs, the Toronto Blue Jays continue to run up their bill on the free agent market. After spending $210 million (with deferrals) to bring Dylan Cease in on Thanksgiving Eve, Toronto has now landed one of the top international free agents: right-handed pitcher Cody Ponce, late of the Hanwha Eagles of the KBO.

Even those of you who vaguely remember Ponce from his first stint in the majors might have trouble distinguishing him from any other of the dozens of big, replacement-level relievers the Pirates have thrown out there over the past decade. On some level, Ponce’s stint in Asia is just a chapter in a Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants-type deal he’s stuck in with John Holdzkom, Nick Kingham, and Colin Holderman.

If that guy is getting $30 million guaranteed over three years (to say nothing of his own blog post here to commemorate the signing), there must be quite a story. Read the rest of this entry »

The Samsung Lions of Daegu, South Korea, have entered the free agent market, scooping up former Detroit Tigers prospect Matt Manning on a one-year, $1 million deal. All Manning needs to do now is find a team called the Bears, and he’ll have the whole set.

Manning, 27, has a career 4.43 ERA in 50 starts in the majors, none since 2024. But he’s more famous than most players with those credentials, on account of being Detroit’s no. 1 pitching prospect for multiple years. Being a team’s no. 1 pitching prospect is not always as impressive as it sounds; at the moment, there are multiple teams without any minor league pitchers with a future value grade over 45 on The Board.

But for the Tigers, in the early 2020s, being no. 1 was a big deal. On the 2020 list, Manning was the no. 12 prospect in all of baseball, followed by Casey Mize, Riley Greene, Tarik Skubal, and Isaac Paredes in Detroit’s system. In 2021, Manning fell behind the previous year’s top draft pick, Spencer Torkelson, but still rated ahead of Skubal and Mize, in that order. Read the rest of this entry »