If you’re a Cleveland Guardians fan, the ritual is surely getting old at this point. The team develops an All-Star middle infielder, and times are good. Then, inevitably, that player leaves and is replaced by a new and unproven middle infielder. Can the team make it work? Tune in next season to find out.

The latest intriguing replacement is Gabriel Arias, who, like seemingly every recent Guardians hitting prospect, is a shortstop by trade. He looked like the heir apparent to the job in 2023, backing up at short before Amed Rosario’s departure. But Arias scuffled, then broke his wrist at the tail end of the season. That injury might have lingered into last year, and whatever the reason, he struggled mightily, ceding the shortstop job to Brayan Rocchio. Luckily, in Cleveland, a contributing role is only one trade away, and now that second baseman Andrés Giménez is a Blue Jay, Arias heads into 2025 as a key part of the Guardians’ infield plans.

Plenty of the particulars of Arias’ 563 major league plate appearances are ripped right out of his last prospect report. Intermittent contact issues? Yeah, he strikes out a third of the time. Potential for power? He launched 10 homers in half a season in 2023. Defensive versatility? He’s logged time at every position other than pitcher and catcher. But the relative weights of each of those features of his game matter, and so far in his career, the contact issues have dominated.

It’s possible to succeed despite a high-strikeout game, and honestly, Arias is the right kind of player to do so. Teams will tolerate a player with a bad contact rate if he hits for power and contributes with his glove. The defensive component is already there, especially because of his versatility, but the power hasn’t arrived; his career .138 ISO is the domain of contact hitters, not boom-bust guys whose muscles have muscles.

Is that going to change this year? To be clear, I don’t know. Guys like Arias flame out all the time. It’s really hard to stick around and produce in the majors when you run even a 15% swinging strike rate – and he’s up near 20%. But if things work out, it’s fairly easy to see how they would. Really, one video is all I need to show you:

Read the rest of this entry »

Cody Bellinger enters the 2025 season as the starting center fielder of the New York Yankees, after they acquired him from the Chicago Cubs over the offseason in a trade that was essentially a salary dump. A former MVP and Gold Glove winner who spent two seasons in Chicago after six with the Dodgers, Bellinger is coming off a 2024 campaign that saw him swat 18 home runs, log a 109 wRC+, and put up 2.2 WAR in 130 games.

In November 2016, Bellinger was a 21-year-old first baseman who’d spent the lion’s share of that year raking in Double-A. The Scottsdale native ranked second on our Dodgers Top Prospects list, which was published that month.

What did his FanGraphs scouting report look like at that time? Moreover, what does he think of it all these years later? Curious to find out, I shared some of what Eric Longenhagen wrote back in 2016 and asked Bellinger to respond to it. Read the rest of this entry »

One way to tell the difference between a baseball fan who has a life and a true sicko is whether they have strong opinions on players who sign minor league contracts and attend spring training on a non-roster invite. The person in a Cubs hat who’s stoked about the Kyle Tucker trade and knows all sorts of intimate biographical details about Shota Imanaga? That’s your friend. If they start talking to you about Travis Jankowski, they might be in a little too deep.

We sickos know that while championships can be won and glory earned on the major league free agent market, NRIs are nonetheless a meaningful collection of useful roster players. Sometimes more. I’d argue that these fringe hopefuls are the only players who truly stand to gain by their performance in camp.

Moreover, these players are by definition underdogs. They include former top prospects, guys recovering from injury, and itinerant Quad-A players hoping for one last spin of the wheel. If you weren’t interested in their progress on a competitive level, surely we can interest you in an underdog story. Read the rest of this entry »

Expecting the worst only takes out so much of the sting when it happens. As if the baseball world needed any reminder, the Yankees announced on Monday evening that Gerrit Cole is bound for Tommy John surgery.

This had seemed inevitable since Cole felt discomfort after leaving his start against the Twins on Thursday and went for an MRI. The Yankees and their ace received a second opinion from Dr. Neal ElAttrache, obviously hoping for something along the lines of “Oh wait, that other doctor was reading this upside-down, he’s fine.” What they got was an appointment for surgery on Tuesday in Los Angeles. Read the rest of this entry »

As I’ve often said when evaluating the prospects of various controversial candidates for election to the National Baseball Hall of Fame, “forever” and “never” are very long times. Two reports from the last week could put that assertion to the test. According to ESPN’s Don Van Natta Jr., commissioner Rob Manfred is considering a petition from the family of the late Pete Rose requesting that he be removed from the permanently ineligible list, which would clear the way for his consideration for election to the Hall. Separately, on Wednesday the institution announced that its board of directors has adjusted the requirements for Era Committee candidates in a way that could eventually strip some of them of eligibility for future consideration — and could be subject to abuse.

Before addressing the Rose matter, which became politically charged after president Donald Trump posted to social media in support of him on February 28, it’s worth unpacking the ramifications of the Hall’s announcement. On February 26 in Orlando, Florida, chairman Jane Forbes Clark met with the 16-member board of directors (which includes Manfred) to address several matters, including the Era Committee process. Starting with the 2026 Contemporary Baseball Era Committee ballot for players, which will be voted on at the Winter Meetings in Orlando in December, candidates who don’t receive at least five out of 16 possible votes will be ineligible to appear on the next ballot three years later, when that particular pool of candidates is considered again. Candidates who don’t receive at least five of 16 votes on multiple Era Committee ballots will no longer be eligible for future consideration, period. To these eyes, the first part of that change is reasonable, but the second is unnecessarily heavy-handed and smacks of punishment — punishment merely for landing on a ballot at the wrong time. Read the rest of this entry »

Stop me if you’ve heard this before: This was supposed to be the year for Francisco Alvarez. He had an electric rookie season for the Mets in 2023, putting up 3.0 WAR thanks to excellent framing numbers and a power-heavy approach that balanced 25 home runs with a .209 batting average for a 97 wRC+. Coming into the 2024 season, he was poised to go from breakout rookie to full-blown star, but he got off to a slow start and suffered a torn UCL in his left thumb in April. Alvarez returned in June and took a few days to get going, but put up a 112 wRC+ over his last 78 games and finished the season with 1.9 WAR. He’s now 23 years old, and once again, 2025 was supposed to be the year that he put it all together. Instead, Mets manager Carlos Mendoza told reporters on Sunday that Alvarez fractured the hamate bone in that same left hand during live batting practice on Saturday. He’ll have surgery today and be out for six to eight weeks, missing the first month or so of the season.

As the injury affects the meat of Alvarez’s catching hand, it would be reasonable to expect the absence to fall on the longer side of that range. However, Baseball Prospectus’ Recovery Dashboard lists two catchers who fractured their hamate bones early in the season – Francisco Cervelli in 2016 and James McCann in 2022, when he was playing for the Mets – and neither missed more than 44 days. Just to muddle our expectations even more, hamate injuries are thought sap a hitter’s power upon their return, but a 2022 study from Jason Collette reveals no such pattern. As power is the cornerstone of Alvarez’s game, losing it would pretty much crush his offensive profile, but it’s worth noting that, despite the thumb surgery, he actually put up higher max and 90th percentile exit velocities in 2024 than he did in 2023. The injury is obviously unwelcome news, and the last thing Alvarez needs is yet another surgery on his catching hand. Moreover, he’ll lose half of his spring training ramp up and have to jump into major league action after a rehab assignment. Still, this is not normally a major injury and there’s a decent chance that he won’t return in notably diminished form. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve ever lived in a cold climate and had a car that you’re trying to nurse through one more winter because you can’t quite afford to replace it, you know the startup noise. Sort of a squeal on a rumble on a cough. You’re waking your old Ford Explorer from hibernation, and it would rather go back to bed.

Throwing arms are like that to some extent. As much as pitchers stay loose and work out all offseason — we no longer live in an age when a pitcher could spend all winter inside a bottle of whiskey, dry out on the train ride to Sarasota, and throw 250 innings without breathing hard — sometimes the body just does not ramp up to game fitness the way you’d expect.

As routine as injury announcements are this time of year, the end of last week was a bloodbath. Three pitchers who were going to end up on a lot of AL Cy Young shortlists — Gerrit Cole, George Kirby, and Grayson Rodriguez — all came down with some flavor of arm ickiness. Any kind of layoff at this point in the calendar can disrupt a pitcher’s ramp-up to the point that it imperils an Opening Day start, and three contenders are now praying that worse news isn’t coming. Read the rest of this entry »

Something might be brewing in Sacramento. The 2024 A’s beat expectations by a mile, though expectations were admittedly muted coming off of a disastrous 2023, and this offseason has seen the club be quite busy. The team’s best player, Brent Rooker, signed an extension that will keep him around through at least 2029, well past when the A’s are scheduled to move to Las Vegas. The pitching staff looks much improved, thanks to the surprise signing of Luis Severino and a trade for Jeffrey Springs. And now last year’s second-best player, Lawrence Butler, has signed a contract extension too:

BREAKING: Outfielder Lawrence Butler and the A’s are in agreement on a seven-year, $66.5 million contract extension with one club option, sources tell ESPN. Butler, 24, broke out as a rookie last year and is seen as a foundational player for the A’s moving forward.

— Jeff Passan (@jeffpasan.bsky.social) 2025-03-07T04:22:52.566Z

A year ago, this contract would have been mind-boggling. Butler debuted in the bigs in 2023 with an uneven two months of work. His minor league track record suggested intriguing upside – he flashed excellent power while climbing the ranks and was only in a position to struggle in the majors because he’d reached Triple-A at age 22 – but like so many A’s, he was a question mark, a talented youngster with some good signs and some red flags.

The A’s started 2024 hot, at least by their standards, but Butler didn’t. After breaking camp with the team, he ran into a huge power outage. Over 121 plate appearances, he managed just two homers en route to a .179/.281/.274 slash line, so the A’s sent him back down to Triple-A. What can you do? Sometimes your 23-year-old who never played above A-ball until a year ago needs a bit of extra seasoning. Read the rest of this entry »

Quinn Priester is poised to take that next step and live up to his first-round pedigree. Opportunity paired with increased octane are among the reasons why. Drafted 18th overall by the Pittsburgh Pirates in 2019 out of Cary-Grove High School, the erstwhile Illinois prep stands a good chance of breaking camp in the Red Sox starting rotation. With Brayan Bello (shoulder) and Kutter Crawford (knee) likely to begin the season the injured list, Priester is well positioned to help fill the void.

The enhanced heater factors heavily into his hoped-for emergence as an established big-league hurler. The 24-year-old right-hander’s two-seamer averaged 93.1 mph last year, and this spring it has consistently been a few ticks higher. In his last outing, Priester topped out at 97.

“The cutter is getting better, but more than anything it’s been the velocity piece,” Priester said of his recent developmental strides. “We’re trying to see that trend upwards, and hold throughout games. I want to be 96-plus with the sinker, and then let everything else complement that pitch.”

Added muscle has contributed to the additional oomph. Acquired by Boston at last summer’s trade deadline in exchange for Nick Yorke, Priester currently carries 220 pounds on his 6-foot-3 frame, 10 more than a year ago. He’s evolving in other ways, as well. Increasingly mature, he’s learning the nuances of his craft. Read the rest of this entry »

The offseason isn’t done until the season starts, but updates to the Offseason Matrices are fewer and farther between with each successive day. There’s just not that much left to happen: A few more players should sign MLB deals, and a few dozen others who were non-roster invitees this spring will find their way onto the main page of the FA Matrix after they make Opening Day rosters. There’ll be a few waiver claims as teams finalize rosters, and maybe some trades of larger significance, but perhaps not. Largely, what you see with teams right now is what you get. So, I figured now is a great time to recap what happened and give you a ridiculous amount of data in sortable tables.

As a reminder, the offseason document currently includes only free agency and trades, meaning that all of the dollar figures in the below tables correspond to free agent spending only, not payroll added via trades or extensions. For example, the extensions that Lawrence Butler (seven years, $65.5 million) and Brent Rooker (five years, $60 million) signed with the A’s this offseason aren’t included. If you’re curious about how these deals impact their full financial picture, head on over to the RosterResource payroll pages, where you’ll find that the two extensions bring the team’s luxury tax payroll to about $115 million for 2025. As extensions are the Offseason Matrices’ one big blind spot, I plan on including those next offseason!

Before diving in, here are the notable players still on the free agent market who have at least decent odds of securing last-minute MLB contracts: Read the rest of this entry »