Some rough edges need to be smoothed out, but Cam Collier could be contributing to the Cincinnati Reds offense in the not-too-distant future. Assigned a 45 FV by Eric Longenhagen, the 21-year-old corner infielder is coming off of a 2025 campaign in which he put up a 123 wRC+ over 396 plate appearances across three levels (primarily Double-A). Among the few downsides was a dearth of dingers — he went yard just four times — but that presents as a blip as opposed to a barometer. Our lead prospect analyst grades Collier’s raw power as above average.

I broached the power outage when I talked to Collier during his stint in the Arizona Fall League, where he concluded his campaign with the Peoria Javelinas. He’d hammered 20 homers with the High-A Dayton Dragons in 2024, so why so few of them in his third full professional season?

“I’ve tried to not think about it too much,” replied Collier, whom the Reds drafted 18th overall in 2022 out of Chipola College. “This year, I wanted to really get back to being a hitter. I wanted to have consistent good at-bats, and while that didn’t produce as many homers, it produced a lot more base hits. I was happy with that.”

The stat sheet reflects some of his targeted strides. After batting .248 with a 25.0% strikeout rate in 2024, Collier improved to .279 with an only-incrementally-higher 26.3% K-rate against a higher level of competition. Moreover, the exit velocities he produced when he squared up the baseball were impressive — which remained the case in the desert. At 113.1 mph, Collier had the hardest-hit ball in the Fall Stars Game.

I had read reports that his exit velos and hard-hit rates were plus, so I brought that up as well. Was it perhaps a little counterintuitive that his slugging percentage (.384) and home run totals were as low as they were? Read the rest of this entry »

World Baseball Classic managers were made available to the media during the Winter Meetings, and I took that opportunity to ask Chinese Taipei’s Hao-Jiu Tseng about some of the best arms in Taiwan. I had specific pitchers in mind, but opted to begin with an open-ended question rather than cite any names. The response I got was likewise non-specific.

“I hope all pitchers from our team can be known by all baseball fans,” Tseng told me via an interpreter. “There are so many young pitchers. Most of them are still playing at the minor league level, but this tournament can help them improve their skills and experience, and someday grow into great players at a top level.”

The first pitcher he mentioned when I followed up was Wei-En Lin, a 20-year-old left-hander in the Athletics system who was featured here at FanGraphs back in August. The second was the hurler I was most interested in hearing about
.
“Jo Hsi Hsu pitches in the [Chinese Professional Baseball League], ”Tseng said of the recently-turned-25-year-old right-hander, who had a 2.05 ERA and 120 strikeouts, with just 78 hits allowed, over 114 innings for the Wei Chuan Dragons. “He is a posted player this offseason. Right now he is eligible to negotiate with foreign clubs. He possibly will transfer his contract to Japan or America. He is the ace of the CPBL. Read the rest of this entry »

The Pirates, Rays, and Astros came together on a three-team trade on Friday. In the move, Pittsburgh acquired Brandon Lowe, Jake Mangum, and Mason Montgomery from Tampa Bay. The Bucs sent Mike Burrows to Houston, who in turn dealt Jacob Melton and Anderson Brito to the Rays. Multi-teamers are always complicated, and I find it most helpful to break these down team by team.

Pittsburgh Pirates

Acquires: 2B Brandon Lowe, OF Jake Mangum, LHP Mason Montgomery

Loses: RHP Mike Burrows

The motivation for the Pirates here is obvious, as they entered the offseason with a dire need to convert their pitching surplus into a few bats. The Pirates scored 583 runs this past season, the fewest in baseball, and only Colorado saved their collective 82 wRC+ from bringing up the rear in that category, as well. At the same time, the team’s pitching development pipeline is humming. Paul Skenes is the best pitcher in the NL, and Mitch Keller is a solid mid-rotation starter behind him.

From there, the Pirates have plenty of rotation candidates. Burrows, Braxton Ashcraft, Carmen Mlodzinski, Thomas Harrington, and Bubba Chandler all started games this year. Another potential starter, Hunter Barco, clambered ashore from the banks of the Allegheny late this season, and Jared Jones will presumably return from Tommy John surgery in 2026 and be in the mix, too. It’s enviable depth and ripe for a resource exchange. Pittsburgh started that process earlier this winter, flipping Johan Oviedo to the Red Sox for outfielder Jhostynxon Garcia, and really kicked things into gear with this move. Read the rest of this entry »

Orioles fans have had “Frontline Starter” on their Christmas list since the departure of Corbin Burnes, and though Friday’s acquisition of Shane Baz is perhaps the gift equivalent of asking for a Ferrari and getting an Acura, it adds a proven element to the middle of an Orioles rotation that still feels like it will be anchored by Kyle Bradish and Trevor Rogers.

To acquire the 26-year-old Baz, who is coming off a 2-WAR season, the Orioles had to part with a prospect potpourri made up of a pair of 2025 draftees (Coastal Carolina catcher Caden Bodine and high school outfielder Slater de Brun), a Competitive Balance Round A pick in next year’s draft, upper-level starting pitcher prospect Michael Forret, and speedy 22-year-old outfielder Austin Overn. It’s an enormous, high-volume return for one player and helps the roots of the Chris Archer trade tree anchor deeper into the game’s soil. I’ll talk more about each prospect, the comp pick, and the way this trade impacts both clubs’ farm systems later in the post. But let’s start with the most immediately consequential piece of the deal: Shane Baz.

Baz has been famous since his junior year of high school, when he emerged as one of the better pitching prospects in the 2017 draft. He was selected by Pittsburgh in the middle of the first round and traded as the Player to be Named in the Archer deal a little over a year later. The pandemic and persistent injuries (there were some near-misses as well) slowed Baz’s ascent through the minors and prevented him from working more than 81 innings in any single season until literally 2025. The Rays doggedly deployed him as a starter despite his injuries and early-career command woes, and they were rewarded with something of a breakout this year, as Baz ate 166.1 innings across 31 starts. He posted a 4.87 ERA, but hurricane damage to Tropicana Field meant that he pitched his home games in a minor league park with the hitter-friendly dimensions of Yankee Stadium; his xERA, which controls for defense, quality of contact, and the hitting environment, was 3.86. Read the rest of this entry »

Already an appealing addition based on cool name factor alone, Korean infielder Sung-mun Song put himself on the MLB radar with a late-20s breakout for the KBO’s Kiwoom Heroes. The 29-year-old was posted by Kiwoom last month on the heels of back-to-back .900+ OPS seasons that saw him crank 45 total home runs, and FanSided’s Robert Murray was the first to report that Song’s hard work has achieved the purest form of recognition our society can offer: money.

The Padres have reportedly reached an agreement with Song on a three-year deal, which The Athletic’s Dennis Lin says is for around $15 million total. Since San Diego is sort of pot-committed to this Manny Machado character as its everyday third baseman, Lin reports that Song is expected to bounce around the infield, filling in only occasionally at his primary position and appearing at second and first base more often. Read the rest of this entry »

The San Diego Padres have re-signed starting pitcher Michael King to a… let’s just call it a three-year deal worth $75 million for now, though the particulars are somewhat more complicated.

Good for the Padres, getting their Christmas shopping done on time; not all of us are so organized. I also can’t remember if I’ve already used the joke about how a reunion between King and the Friars is the opposite of Becket, the 1964 film starring Richard Burton and Peter O’Toole. These are confusing times.

Especially for the Padres, who have been one of baseball’s more chaotic teams in the 2020s, shipping massive talents in and out with little warning and little regard for the long-term future. King came to San Diego in one of the more famous examples of this behavior: the trade that sent Juan Soto to the Yankees in 2023.

That all-in attitude — even when the Padres were selling in the short term, it was to set up another major push in the medium term — was assumed to have a shelf life. Especially after the death of popular owner Peter Seidler, whose largesse enabled GM A.J. Preller to satisfy his inexhaustible thirst for making deals. Read the rest of this entry »

Is Luke Weaver good? I’m asking for a friend of mine who will remain anonymous, initials D.S. It’s a matter of some urgency, he told me. Perhaps – and I, of course, wouldn’t want to speculate – it might be related to a news item first reported by Will Sammon of The Athletic. Weaver and the New York Mets are in agreement on a two-year, $22 million deal that continues to overhaul their bullpen.

Eleven million a year for a quality reliever is a solid rate. Eleven million for a guy who is only a season removed from nearly carrying the Yankees to a World Series title? A screaming buy. Thus, the question in evaluating Weaver’s free agency is simple: Is he the guy who dominated in 2024, or the one whom Aaron Boone launched down the bullpen hierarchy and eventually gave up on in the 2025 postseason?

When the Weaver experience is firing on all cylinders, you watch him pitch and wonder why everyone can’t do it like this. He starts things off with a model-friendly four-seam fastball, 94-95 mph and with prototypical backspinning movement. The combination of velocity, movement, and command turn what might seem like an ordinary pitch into a great primary option. As a starter, Weaver’s fastball was plus but not unhittable. It was held back by subpar velocity, but that was the only shortcoming of an otherwise solid offering. His star turn in 2024 was driven largely by that pitch, with a few ticks of velocity making it a monster instead of merely good.

When Weaver isn’t pounding the strike zone with his fastball, he’s snapping off one of the best changeups in baseball. The superlative cambio has always been his top offering. He broke into the majors as a starter and used the change to survive, throwing it more than a quarter of the time without any other solid secondaries to speak of. It’s so good that it’s no mere platoon pitch, and it’s gotten better since his transition to the bullpen. The same few ticks of extra juice that turned his fastball unhittable also gave batters nightmares with his offspeed offerings. Read the rest of this entry »

The Giants have one thing so many other teams covet: a genuine ace to lead their starting rotation. Only one other starting pitcher has accumulated more WAR than Logan Webb over the last five years, and he’s eighth in baseball in park- and league-adjusted FIP over that same period. After posting the best season of his career in 2025, Webb will continue to lead the rotation in ‘26. The rest of the pitching staff, though, is rife with question marks. San Francisco took its first steps toward addressing some of those issues this week, signing Adrian Houser, Jason Foley, and Gregory Santos to bolster the depth across the staff.

On Tuesday, Houser agreed to a two-year, $22 million contract with a club option for a third year. He made a name for himself as a reliable backend starter and swingman for the Brewers across his first seven seasons in the big leagues, before bouncing around six different organizations over the last two years. Traded to the Mets during the 2023-24 offseason, Houser struggled to a 5.84 ERA and 4.93 FIP across seven starts and 16 relief appearances. He made a handful of minor league appearances in the Orioles and Cubs organizations during the remainder of 2024, then signed a minor league deal with Rangers last offseason. Texas never called him up, and so he opted out of that deal and signed a major league contract with the White Sox in May.

I don’t think anyone was expecting a big breakout once Houser joined Chicago’s starting rotation. For most of his career, both of his fastballs averaged around 93-94 mph, but his velocity had dipped a few ticks by the time he was 32 and pitching for the Mets. It was a surprise, then, to see him firing 95-mph four-seamers as a member of the White Sox.

Read the rest of this entry »

Of the many haunted residences in New Orleans, one in particular comes with a very specific warning: Don’t walk under the gallery. (As a brief architectural aside, a gallery is like a balcony, but it’s held up by posts or columns that go all the way to the ground, as opposed to L-shaped supports attached to the side of the building. The posts allow galleries to extend farther out from the building, typically spanning the sidewalk below. Having a gallery rather than a balcony was, and to some extent still is, seen as a status symbol in New Orleans.) This home sits in the French Quarter, and without getting too far into it because the details are pretty horrific, and this article is ostensibly about the Phillies’ signing free agent reliever Brad Keller to a two-year $22 million contract, the place is said to be haunted by the torture victims of an exceedingly cruel socialite who owned the mansion in the early 1830s.

The spirits who linger remain very unhappy (deservedly so!), and they seem especially offended by the thrill-seekers looking to exploit their suffering in the hope of experiencing some sort of supernatural activity. Many who have sought to prove themselves unbothered by the notion of tangling with a few disgruntled ghosts have marched proudly down the sidewalk under the mansion’s gallery. They did not just find themselves temporarily spooked by a burst of cold air or the smell of rotting flesh. Rather, they found themselves cursed with long-term bouts of bad luck and, for years after the fact, continued to report disturbing encounters with other worldly forces.

Now, is this story exaggerated and sensationalized by the ghost tour industrial complex that exists in New Orleans? Probably. But nevertheless, as a former ghost tour attendee, I’m left wondering if at some point early in his career Dave Dombrowski wandered through a heavily haunted bullpen. Read the rest of this entry »

Since the release of Statcast’s bat tracking metrics, I’ve been on a journey to try to marry the old school concept of reading swings with the new school insight that comes from swing data. I peruse leaderboards, oftentimes looking to the extreme leaders and laggards, to understand how my perception of a hitter’s swing aligns with his metrics. Starting at the extremes is fascinating because sometimes a hitter’s swing is extreme in a risky way, while at others, its outlier characteristics are part of what makes it effective. Sometimes, both are true!

For instance, Eugenio Suárez has the steepest attack angle in baseball, leaving him vulnerable at the top of the zone, but also propelling his power profile. Brice Turang has the most inside-out attack direction in the majors, which helps him make consistent contact against any type of pitcher, but also limits his ability to pull. Isaac Paredes makes contact farther out in front of the plate than anybody else, leading to the most aggressive pull swing in the game. And I could keep going! Vladimir Guerrero Jr.’s bottom-of-the-league attack angle allows him to pair contact with a gap-to-gap approach unlike any other hitter. Meanwhile, Freddie Freeman’s steep shoulders and chicken wing arms allow him to get his bat on plane for optimal contact at any height in the zone.

And then there’s Nick Kurtz. His entire swing profile is unique. For most hitters, it’s easy to see how their individual attributes and swing components lead to their overall output. With Kurtz, though, it takes much more digging to understand how his traits harmonize with one another to create the Rookie of the Year-winning performance we saw this year. So how does he do it? Let’s find out. Read the rest of this entry »