The biggest name remaining in free agency is now off the board, as Framber Valdez agreed to a three-year, $115 million contract with the Detroit Tigers on Wednesday night. The 32-year-old lefty, who ranked fourth on our Top 50 Free Agents list, hit the open market for the first time in his major league career this winter after parts of eight seasons with the Astros. In his final season in Houston, Valdez put up a 3.66 ERA and a 3.37 FIP in 31 starts over 192 innings, good enough to reach the 4.0-WAR mark for the third time in his career. His new deal with the Tigers comes with an opt out after the 2027 season, $20 million of the deal in the form of a signing bonus, and some unknown amount of deferred money, which will reduce the overall value of his contract by, well, an unknown amount.

For the Tigers, the benefits of adding Valdez to the rotation are quite clear. Of course, he would improve any team, since having too many good pitchers has been an actual problem zero times in baseball history, but he fits Detroit’s needs like a glove. The Tigers have managed to get their rotation through the season successfully over the last two years despite a lack of depth, but come playoff time, they have basically gone with a starting staff of Tarik Skubal and a trio of shrug emojis. Don’t believe me? Detroit has played 15 games across the last two postseasons, and I will now run down the full list of five-inning starts by Tigers pitchers with last names that aren’t Skubal:

[…]

[…]

Oh, sorry, I was eating tacos. There aren’t any players on that list. Signing Valdez gives the Tigers a dependable no. 2 starter, one who is better and with a better health record than Jack Flaherty. While I’m chaotic-neutral enough to get a thrill out of A.J. Hinch’s admitting in press conferences that he and the front office were basically coming up with the pitcher assignments as they went along, I’m sure that’s not an ideal scenario for making decisions. Read the rest of this entry »

Carlos Santana is well into the immaculate grid portion of his 16-year career. After spending 10 of his first 11 seasons in Cleveland, Santana has played for seven teams over the past five seasons (including one last stint with the Guardians last year). On Tuesday, we learned that he will be joining his newest, and southernmost, franchise in 2026, as the veteran first baseman has agreed to a one-year, $2 million deal with the Diamondbacks.

With just 0.3 WAR and a wRC+ of 81, Santana is coming off the second-worst season of his storied career. He will turn 40 a week after the season starts. All of that makes him a perfect fit for a Diamondbacks team whose mantra was announced by owner Ken Kendrick back in September: “We will not be spending at the same level.” Kendrick has so far lived up to his word. RosterResource currently has Arizona projected for a payroll of $173 million, down from $188 million in 2025. Santana said last year that the Diamondbacks were interested in him before he decided to return to Cleveland, and he is a reasonable bounce-back candidate and a cheap option for a team that’s only interested in cheap options. Read the rest of this entry »

It took all the way until February, but the last few free agency dominos are starting to fall. The Reds were one of the first teams to dip their toes into the market this winter, signing Emilio Pagán to a two-year deal at the start of December. Now they’ve made it a bookend set – over the weekend, they signed Eugenio Suárez to a one-year, $15 million deal, as first reported by Jeff Passan.

I missed high on my contract estimate for Suárez. I had him down for two years at $25 million a year, while our crowdsourced projections thought he’d get three years at $20 million each. The lowest public-facing projection I found for him was two years at $22.5 million per. In other words, Suárez settled for less than predicted, and he signed late as a result. It’s a classic example of the fact that free agents who sign later sign for less.

At a top-line level, seeing Suárez sign for this little is surprising. He isn’t some flash in the pan seeking a 10-year deal. He’s been one of the best power hitters in baseball for quite a while now. The 2025 season was the fourth out of the last five where he’s topped 30 homers. He socked 49 while spending half the year in a home run graveyard in Seattle, though he did most of his damage before the trade; he posted a 91 wRC+ as a Mariner. Teams pay for projection, not performance, but Suárez’s wRC+ over the last three years is better than his career mark. But that power didn’t overwhelm a host of other question marks. Read the rest of this entry »

After getting what amounted to replacement level production at second base last season, the Giants have a new man for the keystone. The good news is that he’s a three-time batting champion, and he’s not outrageously expensive. The bad news is that lately he hasn’t been an incredibly productive hitter despite his high batting averages, and what’s more, second base could be a stretch. However it shakes out, on Saturday the Giants agreed to terms with free agent Luis Arraez on a one-year, $12 million deal.

Arraez, who will turn 29 on April 9, spent last season and most of the previous one with the Padres after being acquired from the Marlins in a May 4, 2024 trade. While he won his third straight batting title in 2024 and made his third consecutive All-Star team, his time with San Diego was one of diminishing returns on both sides of the ball. Last year again he led the NL with 181 hits, but his .292/.327/.392 slash line only amounted to a 104 wRC+, the lowest mark of his career and down from a 109 wRC+ (on .314/.346/.392 hitting) in 2024. By comparison, he hit for a 130 wRC+ (.316/.375/.420) when he won the AL batting title with the Twins in 2022 and a 131 wRC+ (.354/.393/.469) when he won the NL batting title in ’23. He slipped from being more or less a three-win player (6.1 WAR in 2022–23) to a one-win player (2.0 WAR in 2024–25).

Arraez is an odd duck, an anachronism in that the things he’s best at don’t fit this historical moment particularly well. At a time when home run and strikeout rates are near their all-time highs and batting averages closer to an all-time low, he’s the game’s most contact-oriented hitter, as well as the active leader in batting average (.317). That makes him a fun player to theorize about, as colleague Davy Andrews did when he recently pondered the possibility of Arraez signing with the Rockies, whose spacious ballpark would’ve provided him with the most room to run up his batting average on balls in play by dumping single after single in front of outfielders playing deep. Read the rest of this entry »

Not every team shows up for spring training with a reasonable hope of winning the World Series, but there is a grand, overarching narrative to follow in every camp. For the Chicago White Sox, it’s whether they can achieve an all-Sean-and-Shane starting rotation — they’re currently 60% of the way there.

That might sound like a modest goal, but it’s a lot more ambitious than what they set out to achieve just last year: Avoid losing 120 games. Again. The White Sox will sink or swim (or at least sink more slowly) based on how their young homegrown players perform, but Chicago’s supporting cast is looking relatively OK.

All the more so after this weekend, when the White Sox made two moves: signing free agent outfielder Austin Hays to a one-year contract, and trading for Red Sox pitchers Jordan Hicks and David Sandlin. Read the rest of this entry »

The San Francisco Giants, with their unique front office leadership and unconventional manager, have gone the traditional route. “Acquire Harrison Bader” is a tried-and-true team-building strategy for a would-be contender; the former Florida Gator is on his way to his seventh organization in the past four-and-a-half years.

The Giants, unlike Bader’s previous employers, seem interested in keeping him around long enough to unpack all his furniture: Bader’s new contract is for two years and $20.5 million.

Regardless of any analysis to follow, this move makes the Giants stronger in 2026. Bader is a legitimate center fielder who’ll relieve the defensive pressure on the freshly emancipated Jung Hoo Lee (who’s stretched in center) and Heliot Ramos (who’s stretched at any position that requires him to wield a glove). Guys who can play center field comfortably and have a clue at the plate are harder to find than you’d think — especially in free agency — and the Giants got one. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, the White Sox admitted defeat in their handling of Luis Robert Jr.’s contract, shipping him out to the Mets for two lottery tickets and salary relief. That salary relief must have been burning a hole in their pocket, though. Or perhaps someone looked at their books, said “Guys, we play in Chicago but we’re projected for the lowest payroll in baseball and people are going to talk,” and handed GM Chris Getz a list of players who hadn’t yet signed. In any case, Seranthony Domínguez and the White Sox have agreed to terms on a two-year deal worth $20 million, as ESPN’s Jeff Passan first reported.

The right-handed Domínguez is no stranger to high-pressure relief work. In both the 2022 and 2023 postseasons, he appeared in mid- and high-leverage situations for the Phillies, and he handled them quite well (1.13 ERA, 0.78 FIP in 16 innings). In 2024, Philadelphia didn’t have much use for his services after his slow start, and so they sent him and Cristian Pache to the Orioles for platoon bat Austin Hays (whom they promptly non-tendered after the season). The O’s employed Domínguez for a year (he made two appearances for them in the playoffs), then dealt him and cash to the Blue Jays in exchange for Juaron Watts-Brown, a 40-FV relief prospect. He pitched for the Jays in October, and memorably had some ups and downs in their long run.

In other words, playoff teams have been employing Domínguez for years, but they haven’t been placing particularly high importance on his performance. He’s twice been traded to contenders in deadline deals, and at no point did his suitors offer much to get him. Those teams considered him a mid-leverage option; even the Blue Jays had him as a second-tier option out of their weak-link bullpen that flailed its way through October. Read the rest of this entry »

Our long national nightmare is over. After weeks of back and forth between Cody Bellinger and the New York Yankees, it’s official: He’s staying in the Bronx. The two sides have agreed to a five-year, $162.5 million deal with opt outs after the second and third seasons, a $20 million signing bonus, and a full no-trade clause, as first reported by Jeff Passan.

This fit was so obvious that it almost had to happen. The Yankees need offense, and they’d prefer it to come in the form of a left-handed outfielder who can cover center field in a pinch. They’re already familiar with Bellinger, who just put up a 5-WAR season in pinstripes. No other teams needed this exact type of player as much, at this current moment, as they did. Likewise, Bellinger was probably going to have to sign with the Yankees to get the deal he wanted. Now that that foregone conclusion has been reached, let’s unpack how this all fits together.

This contract is the culmination of a long, decorated career that was conspicuously lacking in free agency appeal. Bellinger burst onto the scene in 2017 with 39 homers for the Dodgers, taking Rookie of the Year honors in the process. He then went fully supersonic in the homer-happy 2019 season, with the rocket ball propelling him to 47 homers, a 161 wRC+, and NL MVP honors. Disaster struck in the 2020 World Series, however. Bellinger dislocated his shoulder celebrating a home run, and his performance fell off a cliff immediately after. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the weekend, Ha-Seong Kim’s whirlwind offseason took a jarring tumble. After opting out of his contract with the Braves (really his contract with the Rays, which the Braves assumed after they claimed him off waivers), he turned around and signed a one-year, $20 million deal to remain in Atlanta. But disaster struck when he slipped on a sheet of ice and tore a tendon in his right middle finger. That injury required surgery that will sideline Kim for four to five months, including roughly the first two months of the regular season.

This will be the second straight season where Kim misses significant time due to injury. In late 2024, he tore his labrum on a pickoff throw, then injured his hamstring and later his calf while rehabbing, costing him the first half of 2025. He then hit the IL twice with back injuries last year. In all, he managed just 191 plate appearances and looked understandably rusty.

That star-crossed sequence has to raise questions about the future course of Kim’s career. How could it not? It’s not so much that any of these injuries are devastating on their own, but this much missed playing time over two-plus years of his prime is no laughing matter. Last year, he never hit his stride after a late start. This year, it’s fair to expect more of the same. Even without knowing how Kim’s injured finger might affect him upon his return, our projection systems have him down for a below-average offensive line. Read the rest of this entry »

“I’ve talked to Byron [Buxton] and other players through this offseason already about ways we can get better as a team,” Twins President of Baseball Operations Derek Falvey told reporters back in November at the GM meetings. The answer was in response to a report that Buxton’s loyalty to the Twins may waiver if he felt they were entering a rebuild, as Minnesota’s behavior during last season’s trade deadline suggested. Falvey went on to insist that the team intends to add, not subtract, and it seems the term rebuild is taboo among Twins spokespeople.

Falvey is lying. I say this with no inside information, malice, or even judgement. MLB organizations operate within a system where this particular lie is not only acceptable, but also encouraged. Because “we’re not rebuilding; we’re trying to get better” is a corollary to a larger lie — that all teams are trying their hardest to win.

What is the truth, but a lie agreed upon? — Friedrich Nietzsche

Though this quote is often attributed to him, Nietzsche never actually said it. However, it does seem to offer a reasonably accurate distillation of his beliefs. And if we all agree that he did say it, then by his own logic, it must be true. Likewise, teams have decided to hold to the line that they’re all trying to win, and since they’ve all agreed, it falls to fans to take the lie as truth, along with all the subsequent lies necessary to support the original lie. Read the rest of this entry »