Well, Chris Sale no longer has to do what he does under the cloud of a one-year contract. On Tuesday, the Braves announced they’d signed their soon-to-be 37-year-old ace to a one-year contract extension with a team option for 2028. The deal represents a huge raise. Sale is making $18 million this year – the team option year at the end of the two-year extension he signed back in 2024 – and the new extension will pay him $27 million in 2027. If the Braves pick up the 2028 option, they’ll pay him $30 million. No word of a buyout for that final year has been reported, and the announcement included no mention of a 1% donation to the Atlanta Braves Foundation.

Even though the Braves are not getting the kind of discount you associate with a contract extension, this seems like a no-brainer for them. Yes, they’re paying ace prices for the age-37 (and possibly age-38) season of a pitcher whose injury history includes a Tommy John surgery and five variations on the word “fracture.” But Sale really is an ace, and his performance has showed no signs of dropping off. Since he arrived in Atlanta in 2024 (and for the sake of Red Sox fans, I won’t mention how he got there), Sale has a 25-8 record with a 2.46 ERA and 2.33 FIP. He’s struck out nearly a third of the batters he’s faced, and he won the Cy Young award in his first season with the team. In 2025, his four-seamer averaged 94.8 mph. That’s above average, especially for a left-handed starter, and especially for someone with a funky sidearm delivery, and especially when you factor in the bump in effective velocity due to the above-average extension from his 6-foot-6 frame. That’s a lot of especiallys making Sale’s velocity play up, and it’s reassuring to know that it has looked pretty stable in recent years.

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Alek Manoah was emerging as one of the best young pitchers in baseball when I first talked to him for FanGraphs in April 2022. Pitching for the Toronto Blue Jays at the time, he boasted a record of 12-2 and 3.05 ERA across 23 starts dating back to his major league debut the previous May. And he was only getting better. By season’s end, the burly right-hander not only was 25-9 with a 2.60 ERA, but he also had allowed just 221 hits over 308 1/3 innings across 51 career starts. A star in the making at age 24, he finished third in that year’s American League Cy Young Award voting.

As Blue Jays fans know all too well, things proceeded to go south. The Homestead, Florida native stumbled through a tumultuous 2023 in which his command and velocity dipped, and things got even worse the following year. Burdened by shoulder and elbow woes, Manoah ended up having surgery to repair his ulnar collateral ligament in June 2024. Recovery wasn’t exactly smooth. He tossed just 38 1/3 innings last season, none of them in the majors.

His once-prosperous Toronto tenure also came to an end, as did a brief stint with another organization. Claimed off waivers by the Atlanta Braves in late September, Manoah subsequently signed a free-agent deal with the Los Angeles Angels in December. He is now in the early stages of what might be deemed the Alek Manoah Reclamation Project. Read the rest of this entry »

As baseball, like a bear, emerges from hibernation, the Milwaukee Brewers graced us with a delightful little token:

Would you let The Miz throw a fastball at your head? pic.twitter.com/5Ekr848IdD

— Milwaukee Brewers (@Brewers) February 24, 2026

That’s Brewers right-hander Jacob Misiorowski knocking an apple off a teammate’s head from 60 feet, six inches away. Read the rest of this entry »

Spring training is underway and rosters are getting filled up. We’re now down to the part of the offseason where veterans whose recent performances have left them unable to find a guaranteed spot sign minor league deals with non-roster invites. Today we’ll break down the signings of Rhys Hoskins with the Guardians, Michael Conforto with the Cubs, and Thairo Estrada with the Orioles. All three have seen their production drop off over the past two years, but all three have a viable path toward sticking on the roster or even landing a starting spot.

We’ll start in Cleveland, where Hoskins will receive $1.5 million if he makes the roster. This move makes plenty of sense, but it’s important to note that the Guardians aren’t as desperate for a player like him as they would have been in years past. From 2021 to 2023, the only team with fewer than their 454 home runs was the Pirates (441). Cleveland’s 82 wRC+ against left-handed pitching was also the second-worst mark in baseball over that period. Back then, adding a big right-handed slugger who strikes out and hits homers would have been just what the doctor ordered. However, the Guardians are in a different spot right now. Over the past two years, they’ve ranked right around the middle of the league in home runs overall and in wRC+ against left-handed pitching. This is still a good fit, but Hoskins is no longer the slam dunk he would have been a couple years ago. Read the rest of this entry »

Time waits for no man, except Jordan Lawlar, who’s been on the cusp of major league stardom for about four years.

The skinny on Lawlar as a prospect — where he topped out at a 60-FV grade in 2024 and 2025 — is that he carries the potential for plus power and plus shortstop defense with a plus-plus run tool. That’s a lot of pluses for an up-the-middle position, which is why the Diamondbacks spent a top-10 pick on him out of high school in 2021.

He played well enough to make Arizona’s playoff roster on the run to the 2023 NL pennant (though he didn’t play much, going 0-for-2 with a walk), and the two full seasons since have seen Lawlar’s path blocked both by his own injuries and the emergence of Geraldo Perdomo as a bona fide star. Read the rest of this entry »

What are teams paying for a win in free agency? Earlier this month, I answered a FanGraphs Weekly Mailbag question about that very issue, outlining a rule I’ve been using in formulating my contract predictions. I left my explanation loose and vague because it was one of four questions in a mailbag, but to give you the general gist, I think about free agent salaries on a graduated scale, with role players being paid less per win above replacement than superstars. Today, I’d like to back up my argument with a bit more mathematical rigor.

One of the benefits of writing for FanGraphs is that smart baseball thinkers read the site. I woke up last Monday to a direct message from Tom Tango, MLB’s chief data architect. Tango had a few suggestions for further research, a method for adjusting past years of data for current payroll situations, and even a link to a discussion of the cost of a win with Sean Smith. Smith, better known as Rally Monkey, is the creator of Baseball Reference’s calculation of WAR – when you see rWAR, that actually stands for Rally WAR, not Reference WAR. In other words, I got help from some heavy hitters.

With Smith’s excellent article on free agency as a guide, I built my own methodology for examining the deals that free agents receive and turning them into a mathematical rule. I took every starting pitcher and position player (relievers are weird and should be modeled differently due to leverage concerns) and noted their projected WAR in the subsequent season, as well as the length and terms of their contract. I excluded players who signed minor league deals, were projected for negative WAR, or whose contract details were undisclosed. To give you a sense, applying this approach to the 2025-26 offseason leaves us with 89 players, from Kyle Tucker all the way down to Jorge Mateo. Read the rest of this entry »

For the second time since the opening of spring training, the Baltimore Orioles lost one of their starting infielders to injury. On Friday, Baltimore announced that third baseman Jordan Westburg would miss significant time due to a partially torn UCL in his throwing elbow. Westburg received a platelet-rich plasma injection, commonly used for soft tissue and joint injuries, and will be out at least until the end of April, according to team president Mike Elias.

Jordan Westburg has a partial UCL tear in his right elbow and will be getting a PRP injection today, per Orioles POBO/GM Mike Elias.

Westburg will be out for all of April. Timeline TBD after that.

— Jake Rill (@JakeDRill) February 20, 2026

While there’s never an ideal time for an injury, the Orioles were already without second baseman Jackson Holliday, out with a broken hamate bone in his right hand. That puts half of their infield out of commission for Opening Day. Before Holliday and Westburg went down, there had been some turnover among the role players in Baltimore’s infield, adding to the uncertainty of what these injuries will mean for the team this spring and beyond. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, after Angels owner Arte Moreno finished his annual state of the team discussion with reporters, Jeff Fletcher of the Orange County Register and Rhett Bollinger of MLB.com published several quotes from the conversation. Between settling with Tyler Skaggs’ family over the wrongful death suit, not having a television partner for the upcoming season, and cutting payroll after eight straight losing seasons, there was a lot to cover. Several of Moreno’s quotes raised eyebrows, but the one that caught the most headlines concerned his description of a fan survey. He was simply trying to explain that he is focused on making sure the fan experience is a good one, but it came out very wrong.

“The number one thing fans want is affordability,” Moreno said. “They want affordability. They want safety, and they want a good experience when they come to the ballpark. Believe it or not, winning is not in their top five… The moms want to be able to afford to bring the kids. Moms make about 80% of the decisions. They want to be able to bring their kids and be affordable and they want safety and they want to have a good experience, so they get all the entertainment stuff or whatever. The purists, you know, it’s just straight winning.”

It wasn’t exactly inspiring to hear the owner of a baseball team come dangerously close to accusing fans of zealotry for just wanting their team to finish above .500 for the first time since 2015. After avoiding local media for years, Moreno started giving these spring training state of the team appearances in 2023. His answers are not always well received, and time tends not to do them any favors. In 2023, Moreno said, “You can’t start losing $50 to $100 million a year and keep the business,” then two years later, he said the team was doing just that, claiming it would “probably lose $50 million to $60 million, minimum.” In 2023, he said, “I always look at the fans. What are we doing to make sure the fans have a great experience and the fans are proud of the team that we put on the field?” Now he says winning is not even a top-five priority for the fans. Read the rest of this entry »

Two weeks ago, Sunday Notes led with David Cone following in Mark Gubicza’s footsteps. Just as his fellow pitcher-turned-broadcaster had done, Cone tackled a challenging career quiz, augmenting his answers — some of them correct, others amiss — with entertaining anecdotes about batters he faced along the way. Today we’ll hear from another 1980s-1990s hurler who is now a broadcast analyst: Jeff Montgomery, who played with Gubicza in Kansas City, is the Royals’ franchise leader in both appearances (686) and saves 304).

I began by asking the 64-year-old Wellston, Ohio native which batter he faced the most times.

“I’m going to say either Chili Davis or Kirby Puckett,” guessed Montgomery, naming a pair of players who narrowly missed being the correct answer. Upon being informed that it was neither of the two, the erstwhile closer pondered for several seconds, only to throw up his hands. “You got me,” he admitted. “Who was it?”

I told Montgomery that it was Paul Molitor, whom he faced 30 times, allowing just seven hits, all of them singles.

“Oh, Molly. There you go,” responded Montgomery, “Molly was the type of hitter who was never going to be easy. He had the ability to really wait on pitches. He was basically bat-to-ball, and his bat-to-ball skills were incredible. There were honestly times when I thought the pitch was in the catcher’s mitt, and the next thing I knew I was watching our right fielder chasing the ball down the line. Molly’s bat was that fast.

“I think I did pretty well against him,“ Montgomery added. “But I do remember one game in the Metrodome. We were in extra innings, it was a bases-loaded situation, and I had him 0-2. I’d thrown Molly a couple of sliders away, and decided to come in with a fastball. He leaned into it for a walk-off hit-by-pitch.” Read the rest of this entry »

The Atlanta Braves opened spring training with the hopes of getting a healthier season out of their starting rotation this year. While it took a lot of things going wrong to drop the Braves to a 76-86 record in 2025, their worst record since 2017, the myriad injuries suffered by the starting pitching played an outsized role in their misfortune. Unfortunately, the Braves didn’t even get to the first exhibition game before the news broke that two of their starting pitchers, Spencer Schwellenbach and Hurston Waldrep, would have to undergo elbow surgery, with no estimated timeline for their returns.

If there’s a silver lining to manager Walt Weiss’s uncertainty about whether either Schwellenbach or Waldrep would pitch this year, it’s that neither surgery is of the Tommy John flavor, which would pretty much guarantee that both would miss the entire season. Instead, both surgeries are to remove loose bodies from their throwing elbows; Schwellenbach had his procedure on Wednesday, while Waldrep’s is scheduled for Monday. Yes, removing loose bodies sounds like the job description of a bouncer at a hot nightclub, but in this case it refers to the removal of small fragments of bone and cartilage present in the joint.

Regardless, both pitchers are bound to be out for an extended period of time, and their absences will surely be felt in Atlanta. Waldrep was solid for the Braves in 2025, putting up a 3.21 FIP in nine starts, and Schwellenbach looked well on target for a 4-WAR season before an elbow fracture ended his season in late June. Read the rest of this entry »