Chase DeLauter got an odd start to his major league career last fall — and an inauspicious one, at that — when he became the sixth player to debut in a postseason game before playing in a regular season one. The Guardians’ rookie right fielder has fared much better in the early stages of his first regular season in the majors, going on a home run binge that made a bit of history.

Facing the Mariners in Seattle on Opening Day last Thursday, the 24-year-old DeLauter started things off by homering in his first plate appearance, launching a towering 358-foot solo shot off Logan Gilbert. It was the first Cleveland run of the season, and though at least 140 players in AL/NL history have homered in their first career at-bat, in the ninth inning he joined a much more exclusive club. With the Guardians ahead 5-4, DeLauter hammered a 422-foot solo home run off Cooper Criswell, helping to seal the victory and becoming just the sixth player to homer twice in his regular season debut:

Read the rest of this entry »

We did it everyone! We made it through the long offseason. Regular season baseball is back, and it has already delivered the goods. I attended Mets-Pirates at Citi Field on Opening Day to witness the highly anticipated pitching matchup between reigning NL Cy Young winner Paul Skenes and new New York ace Freddy Peralta. Naturally, Skenes had the worst game of his career thus far, failing to make it through the first inning, and Peralta didn’t pitch well either. The two teams combined for 18 runs in the 8 1/2 innings of play. I wrote about the Skenes start, the two defensive blunders by Oneil Cruz in center field that contributed to Pittsburgh’s first-inning fiasco, and the lineup’s surprisingly strong showing. You can read that here.

Because I was covering that contest, I didn’t get a chance to watch any of the other early games and saw only a portion of the later ones. That means I missed White Sox catcher Edgar Quero successfully challenge three ball calls in the first two innings before finally getting one wrong in the sixth inning. In that same game, which the Brewers won 14-2, Jacob Misiorowski struck out 11 Chicago batters. I also didn’t catch the pitcher’s duel between Orioles lefty Trevor Rogers and Twins righty Joe Ryan; Baltimore won, 2-1, and Adley Rutschman, not to be confused with Badley, went 2-for-4, though Tyler O’Neill’s Opening Day home run streak was snapped at six. In the later afternoon games, the Cardinals scored eight runs in the bottom of the sixth inning to secure a comeback win over the Rays, after allowing Tampa Bay to plate six runs in the top of the frame. JJ Wetherholt, who went 1-for-4 with a home run and two RBI in that game, was one of a number of prospects who shined in their big league debuts. Kevin McGonigle had four hits in the Tigers’ 8-2 win over the Padres, and Justin Crawford went 2-for-4 in the Phillies’ win over the Rangers. I actually got to see Mets right fielder Carson Benge blast his first homer, this after a dead bird had fallen in front of him in right field. It wasn’t technically his first major league game because he debuted in the postseason last year, but Cleveland’s Chase DeLauter bopped two home runs in a 6-4 win over the Mariners.

I ran through all those games up top because that’s the last we’ll be covering the Opening Day action in this week’s mailbag. Instead, we’ll be answering your questions about Matt McLain’s strong spring, Aaron Judge’s low squared-up rate, players who might benefit the most from ABS, and Tony Vitello. But first, I’d like to remind you that this mailbag is exclusive to FanGraphs Members. If you aren’t yet a Member and would like to keep reading, you can sign up for a Membership here. It’s the best way to both experience the site and support our staff, and it comes with a bunch of other great benefits. Also, if you’d like to ask a question for an upcoming mailbag, send me an email at mailbag@fangraphs.com. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Mets pitching prospect Ryan Lambert’s consumption of copious quantities of raw eggs, then preview the 2026 Chicago Cubs (27:15) with The Athletic’s Sahadev Sharma, and the 2026 Cleveland Guardians (1:17:46) with The Athletic’s Zack Meisel, plus a postscript.

Audio intro: Grant Brisbee, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio interstitial 1: Guy Russo, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio interstitial 2: Philip Bergman, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Daniel Leckie, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to Lambert article
Link to Cool Hand Luke scene
Link to Beauty and the Beast scene
Link to Syndergaard “therapies”
Link to Syndergaard velo story 1
Link to Syndergaard velo story 2
Link to pasteurized eggs wiki
Link to eggs and cholesterol link
Link to Ben’s scrambled eggs pic
Link to Ron Swanson clip
Link to team payrolls page
Link to Cubs offseason tracker
Link to Cubs depth chart
Link to Sahadev on Bregman
Link to PCA profile
Link to Sahadev on PCA
Link to Sahadev’s spring questions
Link to Shaw absence article
Link to Sahadev’s author archive
Link to Sahadev’s podcast
Link to Guardians offseason tracker
Link to Guardians depth chart
Link to team wRC+
Link to team RP WAR
Link to team SP projections
Link to framing leaders
Link to Bregman/Aiken article
Link to Zack on Kwan in CF
Link to Vogt MotY article
Link to Zack’s author archive
Link to Zack’s podcast
Link to Skenes article 1
Link to Skenes article 2
Link to Ohtani/Judge article

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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 »

Davy Andrews recently wrote about Steven Kwan’s defense, which, as my colleague chronicled, has been demonstrably stellar. Not only has the 28-year-old Cleveland Guardians left fielder been awarded a Gold Glove in each of his four MLB seasons, the metrics back up the accolades. There hasn’t been a better defender at his position, and that goes for the senior circuit as well as the American League.

And then there is Kwan’s bat. The 2018 fifth-round pick out of Oregon State University isn’t a basher, but he is a solid contributor to the Guardians offense. Since debuting in 2022, the erstwhile Beaver has slashed .281/.351/.390 with a 112 wRC+. Moreover — this is no secret for most FanGraphs readers — he seldom goes down by way of the K. Kwan’s 9.5% strikeout rate over the past four campaigns is the lowest among qualified hitters not named Luis Arraez.

Grant Fink knows his left-handed stroke as well as anyone. Cleveland’s hitting coach tutored Kwan in the minors before moving into his current role, and they work together in the offseason. I asked Fink about two-time All-Star when the Guardians visited Fenway Park last September.

“If you look at his profile as a hitter in the major leagues, it is based on accuracy and ball flight,” Fink told me. “His key is making sure that his body is moving in a way where he can get his barrel to the ball in multiple places in the zone, and that he is making contact in the right windows to produce that consistent ball flight. Read the rest of this entry »

One day, José Ramírez will get old. One day, he’ll dodder out to the grass in front of the pitcher’s mound on the arm of an adorable grandchild and lollipop the ball into the dirt in front of home plate to the warm cheers of the Cleveland faithful. That’s sure to happen at some indeterminate point in the future. This weekend, however, the Guardians expressed their belief that Ramírez’s inevitable decline is a long way off, inking the 33-year-old future Hall of Famer to a seven-year contract extension that will keep him in the fold through the 2032 season. When the extension expires, Ramírez will be 40.

We’ll break down all the numbers and the dollars, but the biggest story here is the most obvious one. This is great news for anybody who loves Ramírez, the Guardians, or baseball. Ramírez has full no-trade rights, and there’s every reason to expect him to stay for the rest of his career. It’s time to talk about statues and plaques and how nice it is that we’ll never have to know just how wrong it would feel to see him in a jersey that doesn’t say Cleveland on it. This is the third extension Ramírez has signed. The first came in 2016, and it bought out his arbitration years plus two option years. The second came in 2022, and, like this one, it bought out the final three years of the previous extension. Ramírez wanted to stay in Cleveland, and with those first two extensions, he forfeited tens of millions of dollars on the open market to do so.

This extension is slightly more complicated, and the details matter quite a bit. Ramírez was already signed though the 2028 season as part of the previous seven-year extension, so it’s not as if there was a pressing need to get this done. He was owed $69 million over the next three years. This deal reworks his compensation over that period and adds four more years. Over the next seven seasons, Ramírez will earn $25 million per year, with $10 million per year deferred. (Each of those deferrals lasts 10 years, and then pays out $1 million per year for 10 years. So he’ll get $1 million in 2036, $2 million in 2037, and so on until he gets his final $1 million payment in 2051.) The deal also came with perks like increased bonuses for awards and high finishes in the MVP voting, an extra hotel room on road trips, and use of a private jet to and from the All-Star Game plus one extra time per year. Read the rest of this entry »

Franklin Arias has a bright future in Boston. Signed out of Venezuela in 2023, the 20-year-old shortstop is the top position-player prospect in the Red Sox system thanks to plus tools on both sides of the ball. A slick-fielder — Eric Longenhagen has described him as an incredibly polished defender for his age” — Arias possesses a line-drive stroke that produced a 109 wRC+ across three levels last season. And while that number may not jump off the page, it stands out when put into context: the Caracas native not only played the entire year as a teenager, he finished it in Double-A.

The degree to which he can boost his power profile will go a long way toward determining his ceiling. Currently more contact than pop, Arias went deep just eight times in 526 plate appearances. At a listed 5-foot-11, 170 pounds, he is by no means built like a bopper.

Red Sox farm director Brian Abraham brought up that aspect of Arias’s game when I asked him about the young infielder earlier this week.

“He’s a guy who makes really good swing decisions,” Abraham said of Arias, who posted a 10.1% strikeout rate and a 5.3% swinging-strike rate in 2025. “He puts the bat on the ball and can drive it to all fields. We’re looking to see him add size and strength so that he can really impact the ball pull-side in the air.

“It’s definitely in there,” added Abraham. “We’ve seen flashes of it, it’s just a matter of him being able to do that on a consistent basis. As a young player who is continuing to grow and get bigger, I think it will come out the more he is able to hit the ball out front and drive it to the pull side. Right now I would say that he is a contact hitter with occasional power, and that the power can be more consistent than it has been.”

Not surprisingly, Arias echoed Abraham’s thoughts when addressing his near-term development goals. Read the rest of this entry »

Steven Kwan looks like the kind of guy who gets underestimated. He’s undersized. He doesn’t hit the ball particularly hard. He plays for a franchise that’s most famous for refusing to spend money. Still, I don’t think many people are underestimating Kwan these days. He’s the undisputed second-best player on the Guardians, behind only future Hall of Famer José Ramírez. He’s a two-time All-Star. He’s never put up fewer than 3.0 WAR in a season. He’s never not won a Gold Glove. Everybody knows that he’s a great player, but I’d like to highlight a couple specific parts of his game that we tend to take for granted.

Kwan’s defense certainly receives plenty of appreciation. In two of his four major league seasons (2023 and 2025), he has swept the three advanced defensive metrics, finishing first among all left fielders in Defensive Runs Saved, Deserved Runs Prevented, and Fielding Run Value. In 2022, he finished first in both DRS and FRV, but didn’t lead in DRP. In 2024, he finished in second in FRV and fourth in DRS (but because of the arguably arcane innings minimum of 900, he did lead all Gold Glove-eligible left fielders in both metrics). The point of this complicated litany is that all of the major defensive metrics love Kwan, and that’s important because they use very different methods, methods don’t always line up. DRS detests Oneil Cruz, but FRV thinks he’s great. DRP loves Randy Arozarena even though the other two systems hate his guts. All the systems can agree on Kwan. Whether you’re breaking down video with human eyes or analyzing catch probability through the lens of a high-speed Statcast camera, when you look at Kwan, you’ll see the best left fielder in the game. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Cleveland Guardians. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as our own observations. This is the sixth year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers. The ETAs listed generally correspond to the year a player has to be added to the 40-man roster to avoid being made eligible for the Rule 5 draft. Manual adjustments are made where they seem appropriate, but we use that as a rule of thumb.

A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.

All of the ranked prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details (and updated TrackMan data from various sources) than this article and integrates every team’s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2026 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

By the time Shin-Soo Choo reached the majors with the Mariners in 2005, nine South Korea-born pitchers had followed in the wake of Chan Ho Park, who debuted with the Dodgers in 1994, but just one position player preceded him, namely Hee-Seop Choi. It took a few years and a lopsided trade before Choo’s major league career got off the ground, and he lost significant time to a variety of injuries, but over the course of his 16 seasons with Seattle, Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Texas, he established himself as an on-base machine with considerable pop. He set a number of firsts, including becoming the first South Korean position player to make an All-Star team and now, the first such player to make a Hall of Fame ballot.

To these eyes, that latter distinction is a big deal. Most of the 12 newcomers on this year’s Hall of Fame ballot don’t have the numbers to merit election or even much debate. Their appearance on the ballot after spending at least 10 seasons in the majors with some distinction is its own reward, and with the deadline for voting now past, we’re in the part of the cycle where we can take the time to celebrate these players’ fine careers in their own right. A decade ago, I raised a bit of an international stink when Park — who spent 17 seasons in the majors (1994–2010), won 124 games (still the major league record for a player born in Asia, one ahead of former teammate Hideo Nomo), and became the first South Korea-born player to make an All-Star team — was left off. It felt like a needless snub. “Like Hideo Nomo, who blazed a trail for modern Japanese players to come to the majors, Park deserves the recognition that comes with a spot on the ballot,” I wrote for SI.com. I’ve made noise about other slights since then, and I think the situation has improved over time, so I’m particularly glad to see Choo here.

…

Shin-Soo Choo was born on July 13, 1982 in the Nam district of Busan, South Korea, a coastal city that is the country’s second-largest, behind Seoul. He’s the oldest son of father So-min Choo and mother Yu-jeon Park. He was born into a baseball family, as his mother’s brother, Jeong-Tae Park, starred as a second baseman for the KBO’s Lotte Giants from 1991–2004, winning five Gold Gloves (given to the best all-around player at each position, not just the best defender) and sealing the Giants’ 1992 championship by recording the final out in their Korean Series victory over the Binggrae Eagles. Read the rest of this entry »