Last night, the Boston Red Sox and the Washington Nationals swapped pitching prospects in a one-for-one challenge trade that will likely have an impact on both clubs in 2026. Hard-throwing 22-year-old righty Luis Perales heads to Washington, while changeup-oriented lefty Jake Bennett goes to Boston. Both pitchers participated in the 2025 Arizona Fall League, starting a game against each other on November 1.

Of the two, I slightly prefer the 25-year-old Bennett, who I have evaluated as a near-ready starter and a potential Top 100 prospect this offseason due to his floor and proximity to the majors. Bennett entered pro ball much more fully formed than most pitching prospects from a stamina standpoint, as he worked 117 innings as a junior at Oklahoma. He had Tommy John at the very end of his first pro season, in September of 2023, which cost him all of 2024. He returned to action this past May, and his stuff was up about two ticks compared to when he was last healthy, while his feel for location was intact. He posted a 2.27 ERA across 75.1 innings while reaching Double-A, then picked up 20 more innings in Arizona and was added to the Nationals 40-man roster after the season. Read the rest of this entry »

Every winter, the shiniest free agents on the market capture the attention of baseball fans everywhere. “Ooh, could you imagine Kyle Tucker in my team’s colors?” That’s a fun conversation regardless of which team you root for. But most teams aren’t going to sign Kyle Tucker. Most teams aren’t going to sign a top 10 free agent, period. Indeed, come June and July, there’s a good chance that the free agent signing you’re going to either laud or rue will involve some reliever you’d never heard of six months prior. So let’s meet a batch of pitchers who are going to make fans remember their name, one way or another, in 2026: Hoby Milner, Mark Leiter Jr., and Colin Holderman.

I used to think of Hoby Milner as one of the unending wave of Brewers who looked unbeatable in navy and gold and unspectacular elsewhere, but as it turns out, that was unfair to him. He departed the upper Midwest for the first time since 2020 last winter, signing a $3 million deal with the Texas Rangers after Milwaukee non-tendered him. Far from crashing out, though, he spun another solid season, his fourth in a row, while handling 70.1 innings of the highest-leverage work of his career. He finished the season with a 3.84 ERA and a 3.39 FIP, pretty much a dead ringer for his career numbers.

Why, then, is his deal with the Chicago Cubs for just one year and $3.75 million? It’s because he’s an extreme lefty specialist, and that skill set generally comes with a limited market. Milner isn’t a traditional late-inning reliever, a matchup-proof flamethrower. He has enormous platoon splits, triple the league average for lefty pitchers over a fairly substantial sample. It’s for exactly the reason you’d expect: Milner throws sidearm and with little velocity, relying on a sweeper that he throws nearly half the time against lefties to tie them into knots. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »