The Rangers had just 35 players on their 40-man roster at the end of the Winter Meetings, and they did their best to rectify the situation on Friday, signing catcher Danny Jansen to a two-year deal and relievers Alexis Díaz and Tyler Alexander to one-year deals. The three moves have not yet been officially announced by the club, but with the agreements, the roster is starting to look not just fuller, but much more settled. These moves may look underwhelming on the surface, but Jansen fills the team’s biggest hole, and the relievers give the Rangers the kind of upside play they’ll need to find their way back into the playoff picture in 2026.

We’ll start with Jansen, who has agreed to a two-year, $14.5 million contract, according to Robert Murray of FanSided. He is the youngest of the three catchers who made our Top 50 Free Agents list, slotting in at 38th between J.T. Realmuto (30th) and Victor Caratini (39th). Jansen beat Ben Clemens’ estimated one year and $9 million contract, and the Rangers got an extra year at a lower AAV. You may be inclined to chalk that up the relative weakness of the catcher market, but keep in mind that last year, Jansen was the only catcher to make the top 50, and the Rays gave him one year and $8.5 million. Read the rest of this entry »

The remaking of the Mets continues apace. After losing fan favorites Edwin Díaz and Pete Alonso to other teams in free agency last week, the Mets took a step towards replacing the latter by signing switch-hitting infielder Jorge Polanco to a two-year, $40 million deal on Saturday. Though he has almost no experience at first base, the Mets believe he can learn the position well enough for it to be his primary position.

The 32-year-old Polanco probably isn’t the first player anyone thought of as an Alonso replacement, particularly given the bigger-ticket free agents out there and the Mets’ spending power, but he’s coming off a strong season at the plate (.265/.326/.495/, 132 wRC+ with 26 homers) for the Mariners as well as a memorable October. Though he hit just .208/.269/.417 (95 wRC+) in 52 plate appearances during the postseason, his two homers off the Tigers’ Tarik Skubal powered Seattle to a 3-2 win in Game 2 of the Division Series, and his bases-loaded single off Tommy Kahnle in the 15th inning of Game 5 gave the team its first postseason series victory in 24 years. In the ALCS opener against the Blue Jays, he drove in the Mariners’ last two runs with RBI singles in their 3-1 win, then hit a three-run homer off Louis Varland that gave Seattle the lead for good in Game 2. Alas, he went just 2-for-17 the rest of the way as the Mariners fell to the Blue Jays in seven games.

Polanco, who spent the past two seasons with the Mariners and before that parts of 10 seasons with the Twins, has played mainly second base and shortstop during his major league career, though he hasn’t played the latter position since 2022, and the defensive metrics attest that it’s not a good idea anymore. Even at second base, his metrics have descended into the red, to the point that he was primarily a designated hitter last season following an October 2024 surgery to repair his left patellar tendon. He accumulated -2 DRS and -3 FRV in just 287.1 innings at second in 2024, and -1 DRS and -8 FRV in 925.1 innings there the year before. Read the rest of this entry »

The Royals had themselves a productive weekend. The kind where you re-organize the garage and get your meal prep done for the week before the Sunday Scaries set in. On Friday, news broke that the team was finalizing a deal to extend third baseman Maikel Garcia. The contract spans five years, including all four of Garcia’s arbitration-eligible seasons, with a guaranteed value of $57.5 million that could reach $85 million with options and escalators. He will make $4 million in 2026, $7 million in 2027, $10 million in 2028, $13 million in 2029, and $19 million in 2030, and the team holds a $21 million club option for 2031, with a $3.2 million buyout. Then, following the news of the Garcia signing, ESPN’s Jeff Passan reported on Saturday that the Brewers were sending outfielder Isaac Collins and right-handed reliever Nick Mears to the Royals in exchange for left-handed reliever Angel Zerpa. We’ll get into a more detailed discussion of both moves in a minute, but first let’s put this in the larger context of the Royals as an organization.

A lot of sitcoms have that one oddball character that doesn’t quite fit with the rest of the cast. The person that requires viewers to suspend their disbelief, because in real life, there’s no way the other main characters would associate with this weirdo. Your Phoebes, your Kramers, your Kimmy Gibblers, etc. These characters are a part of the main cast or have regularly recurring roles, and though they frequently find themselves integrated into the show’s primary conflicts, they’re typically situated off to the side doing their own thing. Writers insist on including these characters because they provide interesting narrative texture to group dynamics. In real life, we tend to gravitate toward like-minded people with common interests, which is great for forming meaningful connections but makes for boring TV.

Fortunately, MLB teams behave more like TV characters than real life besties, which makes for better entertainment. And with 30 teams, the league doesn’t limit itself to just one Phoebe. Several squads are singing about fetid felines and boycotting Pottery Barn, and among them we have the Royals. Kansas City has never seemed tempted to jump on the latest trends in roster construction or follow the crowd as it attempts to implement whatever the “new Moneyball” is at any given point in time. No, the Royals tend to stay true to themselves, even if that means zigging while everyone else zags or using unorthodox tactics to make sure everyone in the organization stays focused on baseball. Read the rest of this entry »

Two months ago, the Blue Jays marauded their way through the playoffs despite a bullpen they preferred not to touch with a thirty-nine-and-a-half-foot pole. They started the offseason by adding to the rotation, with Dylan Cease the big name acquisition and KBO MVP Cody Ponce an interesting flier. Now, they’ve turned their attention to relief pitching, and they’re working every angle there. They selected hard-throwing relief option Spencer Miles in the Rule 5 draft, traded for sidearmer Chase Lee, and late last week added the piece de resistance, the weirdest reliever in baseball. That’s right: Tyler Rogers and Toronto agreed to terms on a three-year, $37 million deal with a vesting option that could push it to four years and $48 million.

I’m legally obligated to lead any article about Rogers by mentioning his unconventional delivery. He throws upside down, it’s true. He throws in the low-to-mid-80s as a result, with movement that resembles nothing else in baseball. It’s hard to wrap your head around how his pitches move. His slider has huge positive vertical break; it’s a regular slider turned upside down. His fastball, naturally enough, breaks downward, which results in some incredibly counter-intuitive at-bats; despite being about 10 miles an hour faster, it falls meaningfully more than the slider on its path homeward.

With that out of the way, forget what Rogers throws like for a while. I’m sure that’s interesting to the Blue Jays, but what actually matters at the end of the day is how effective he is. He’s very effective, as it turns out. His career 2.76 ERA is flattered slightly by all his years calling spacious Oracle Park home, but not as much as you’d think. His 67 ERA- is a top-15 mark among relievers since his 2019 debut, and I actually think ERA- punishes him, because his specific game doesn’t benefit as much as most pitchers from a big outfield. He gets a ton of grounders. He perennially runs a low BABIP allowed, and it’s no fluke; batters just can’t square him up. 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 »

The Baltimore Orioles will be different in 2026, and not just because of roster additions that already include Pete Alonso and Taylor Ward, with more almost certain to follow. They’ve hired a new manager (Craig Albernaz), replaced a few coaches, and done some reshuffling at the executive level. In a sport where remaining stagnant can be deleterious, the O’s are moving forward on the heels of a disappointing 2025 season.

A precipitous dip in the win column — 91 in 2024, just 75 last year — accentuated the need for changes, but that isn’t the only reason. According to Mike Elias, progress is an ongoing endeavor.

“We’re constantly evolving, having to respond to other teams’ getting better in areas,” Baltimore’s president of baseball operations told me during last month’s GM Meetings. “We make changes every year. We’re actually undergoing quite an overhaul at the major league level right now with our staff. We’ve done some reformatting in the front office, although certainly not to the degree we did when we came in.”

Things changed markedly after Elias arrived in November 2018 and began rebuilding the organization. Analytics — an area in which the Orioles had been well behind the times —- was of course a major focus. But while giant strides have been made, there is no finish line to reach. Moreover, an old Satchel Paige adage applies: “Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.” Read the rest of this entry »

Happy Friday (and Sad End of Winter Meetings Week), everyone. For those keeping score, my final coffee-consumed-to-transactions-completed ratio in Orlando (including airport coffee and transactions) was 132 ounces to eight transactions. In between kibitzing with my FanGraphs colleagues and the folks in the media who I only get to see once a year or had never met, the Matrix was humming along as always.

As ever, I’ll get into the big happenings of the last seven days, starting with bigger signings and funneling down to the smallest ones, and then going over trades. Read the rest of this entry »

How many outfielders does one team need? It really, really depends on who you ask. On Thursday, the Royals and Brewers decided that they needed to add at least one more each to their very differently sized stores. Kansas City signed Lane Thomas to a one-year deal for $5.2 million, with up to another million in incentives, according to Will Sammon of The Athletic and Mark Feinsand of MLB.com, while Milwaukee agreed to a major league deal with Akil Baddoo, the terms of which are not yet known, according to Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic. It’s safe to assume it’s a split contract, as Baddoo still has one minor league option left.

Thomas is by far the bigger addition, but we’re going to start in Milwaukee in order to highlight two very different approaches to building an outfield. Read the rest of this entry »

The Winter Meetings historically mark the beginning of the signing period for marquee free agents, and this week has seen several stars agreeing to big contracts. But there were also plenty of little deals among the titans, and one of them in particular fascinates me. That deal: The Braves signed Mike Yastrzemski to a two-year, $23 million contract, with a club option for a third year, as Jon Heyman first reported.

There’s a lot to unpack with this one, but we might as well start with Yastrzemski. The 35-year-old outfielder is nothing if not consistent. In a 2025 split between the Giants and the Royals after a deadline deal, he logged his seventh straight season with a WAR total between 1.5 and 2.5. It was his fifth straight year with a wRC+ between 99 and 111, and the third of those five years where it was exactly 106. He played his usual solid outfield defense, and the Royals even felt confident enough in him to occasionally use him in center field. If he’s your best outfielder, your outfield probably isn’t all that good. If he’s your third-best guy, it’s probably great.

But while Yastrzemski’s season looked like the others in terms of his overall line, it was a tale of two halves. In San Francisco, he started slowly and never really got going. He posted the worst contact quality marks of his career while struggling to a below-average line. Then he went to Kansas City and went on a huge heater, for lack of a better way to describe it. Everything got better all at once. Yastrzemski’s barrel rate increased from 7.1% to 10.9% at the same time that his swinging strike rate declined from 8.0% to 5.4%. That’s a neat trick if you can pull it off, and as a result, he hit more homers in KC than in SF in half the plate appearances, all while cutting his strikeout rate to an otherworldly 11.8% and also walking 13.4% of the time. Read the rest of this entry »

For the 22nd consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction, as well as MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the next team up is the Kansas City Royals.

Batters

For the Royals, 2025 was about the season that was expected. Bobby Witt Jr. was amazing and the starting rotation was very good, but the team was held back as a result of getting pretty much no production out of the second base, outfield, and designated hitter positions. ZiPS projected the Royals for 83 wins, and they won 82. Normally, that would make a team a real contender in the AL Central, but the Tigers played like an elite team in the first half and the Guardians did the same in the second half, leaving the division always too far out of reach for the Royals.

While Kansas City had some serious problems, especially in those trouble spots mentioned above, it was generally encouraging how the team dealt with it. I stand by every word I said about the outfield back in February. The idea to just roll with Hunter Renfroe and MJ Melendez after their terrible 2024 seasons was a massive missed opportunity. But the good thing is that the Royals were quick to jettison both and get looks at other players who showed a lot of promise (Jac Caglianone) or at least had some upside (Drew Waters). Now, these moves didn’t actually pan out in the short term, but it’s always better to try something that might work over something that almost definitely won’t.

ZiPS doesn’t really like the outfield this time around either, but it does think that there are enough defense and platoon advantages in the various players slated to man the grass that the Royals could eke out respectable production from the group, certainly quite a lot more than they got last year. And this is important, because every win for a team with a projected total in the low-to-mid-80s, especially a team in a Central division, has tremendous value. Even better would be a much bigger acquisition to boost at least one of the positions, but failing that, ZiPS doesn’t see either left or right field as unmitigated disasters this time around (though Steamer is less optimistic).

Witt Jr. is the straw that stirs the drink, of course, but beyond that, this was the season I think Maikel Garcia clearly established himself as an All-Star level third baseman. He finally turned that good plate discipline and hard-hit numbers into real production, and he’s Gold Glove-worthy at the hot corner. Expect both players on the left side of the infield to keep things up in 2026. Another positive: The Royals could see some improvement at second base. ZiPS thinks that Michael Massey is better than his 2025 performance indicates. My inclination might be to use Massey as a super-sub type, and just stick Jonathan India at second and leave him there; there’s no reason to pretend India’s a corner outfielder, as the team did at times this past season.

I was a big advocate for the Royals’ being aggressive with Caglianone’s promotion, and I still think it was the right thing to do. It remains to be seen if he can contribute defensively anywhere, but he ought to hit better than he did in his debut campaign; it’s hard to imagine he could do worse than his horrifying 46 wRC+. The problem is the Royals can’t afford to just stick Cags at DH every day. They need to leave that open for Salvador Perez to get spot starts when he’s not wearing a glove in some sort of timeshare with Carter Jensen behind the plate and Vinnie Pasquantino at first. You shouldn’t be alarmed by the top comp for Caglianone. Costen Shockley didn’t hit for the Angels initially, and after a dispute about whether or not they told him they weren’t going to demote him, they sent him to the minors; in response, after having just moved his family out to California, he peaced out from baseball at age 23.

And you better not be upset about the Witt top comp. Dickie Thon was absolutely terrific until a Mike Torrez fastball shattered his face; he was never the same after that. Don’t worry, ZiPS isn’t forecasting Witt to suffer the same fate!

Pitchers

In the projection table, the rotation tops out at 2.2 WAR, from Cole Ragans. However, this understates the quality of this group of starters, as ZiPS is understandably squeamish about projecting big innings totals from Ragans and Kris Bubic. A full season for Ragans would put his WAR safely over three. The same is true for Bubic, though rotator cuff injuries always make me a bit worried.

The rest of the rotation, Seth Lugo, Noah Cameron, and Michael Wacha projects out as comfortably average-plus, and I don’t think it’s a stretch to put Kansas City’s starting staff at the back of the top 10 in baseball. Ryan Bergert and Stephen Kolek won’t scare anyone, but they’re perfectly reasonable emergency replacements, and both Bailey Falter and Daniel Lynch IV are at least plausible options if injuries plague the starting five.

The bullpen projects as a middle-of-the-pack unit at the moment. ZiPS remains a fan of Hunter Harvey, but injuries ruined his 2025 season, and he’s currently a free agent. Otherwise, ZiPS pegs the Royals as having a quintet of B+ relievers in Carlos Estévez, Lucas Erceg, John Schreiber, Angel Zerpa, and Alex Lange, but doesn’t think they have a true lights-out closer. Overall, this pen comes out aggressively mid, and a depth addition or two would be welcome.

Right now, ZiPS projects the Royals to finish with somewhere between 82-86 wins or so, depending on the assumptions. That makes them relevant in the AL Central and a second-tier wild card contender. There’s still time for them to do more to get over the hump.

Ballpark graphic courtesy Eephus League. Depth charts constructed by way of those listed here. Size of player names is very roughly proportional to Depth Chart playing time. The final team projections may differ considerably from our Depth Chart playing time.

Players are listed with their most recent teams wherever possible. This includes players who are unsigned or have retired, players who will miss 2026 due to injury, and players who were released in 2025. So yes, if you see Joe Schmoe, who quit baseball back in August to form a Ambient Math-Rock Trip-Hop Yacht Metal band that only performs in abandoned malls, he’s still listed here intentionally. ZiPS is assuming a league with an ERA of 4.16.

Hitters are ranked by zWAR, which is to say, WAR values as calculated by me, Dan Szymborski, whose surname is spelled with a z. WAR values might differ slightly from those that appear in the full release of ZiPS. Finally, I will advise anyone against — and might karate chop anyone guilty of — merely adding up WAR totals on a depth chart to produce projected team WAR. It is important to remember that ZiPS is agnostic about playing time, and has no information about, for example, how quickly a team will call up a prospect or what veteran has fallen into disfavor.

As always, incorrect projections are either caused by misinformation, a non-pragmatic reality, or by the skillful sabotage of our friend and former editor. You can, however, still get mad at me on Twitter or on Bluesky. This last is, however, not an actual requirement.