Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Cal Raleigh, Randy Arozarena, and WBC handshake etiquette, whether a mercy-rule-inducing dinger qualifies as a walk-off, whether a winning home team could voluntarily play the bottom of the ninth, MLB’s ban of the Brewers’ challenge-system system, why the MLBPA should defend Jurickson Profar and other players with positive PED tests, and Joe Sewell’s indestructible bat, then preview the 2026 New York Mets (56:35) with The Athletic’s Tim Britton, and the 2026 Washington Nationals (1:40:27) with The Athletic’s Spencer Nusbaum, plus several postscript updates (2:27:10).

Audio intro: Luke Lillard, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio interstitial 1: Ian Philllips, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio interstitial 2: Josh Busman, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Gabriel-Ernest, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to espresso shots
Link to WBC standings
Link to Skubal update
Link to handshake beef summary
Link to handshake beef precedent
Link to video of failed handshake
Link to Arozarena’s comments
Link to translation
Link to De Rosa response
Link to Raleigh response
Link to Soto homer
Link to “walk-off” etymology
Link to baseball dictionary definition
Link to Albies homer (and call)
Link to A Game of Inches excerpt
Link to MLB rulebook
Link to 2023 ump-less half-inning
Link to Brewers signs article
Link to Brewers signs update
Link to Ghiroli column
Link to listener emails database
Link to Pages from Baseball’s Past
Link to Sewell article
Link to EW wiki on bat boning
Link to MLBTR on Luzardo
Link to MLBTR on Wentz
Link to MLBTR on Greene
Link to team payrolls page
Link to Mets offseason tracker
Link to Mets depth chart
Link to Lambert eggs article
Link to Tim on the Mets’ collapse
Link to Soto/Lindor discord update
Link to Ben on Mets turnover
Link to Alvarez resurgence article
Link to Tim’s author archive
Link to Nationals offseason tracker
Link to Nationals depth chart
Link to WaPo discussion on HUAL
Link to The Athletic’s WaPo hirings
Link to Rizzo mantra
Link to Littell on EW
Link to Spencer’s WaPo author archive
Link to Spencer’s The Athletic archive
Link to Italy/USA game story
Link to tiebreak scenarios
Link to Ben on Ellen’s podcast
Link to Ella Black series
Link to Ball’s post about mornings
Link to Schaeffer clip
Link to R.J.’s farewell thread
Link to R.J.’s last EW appearance
Link to Crizer’s breakout terminology
Link to Tarkin quote

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This is Ryan Blake’s first piece as a contributor for FanGraphs. He is a former newspaper reporter in the Inland Northwest and a current writer for Lookout Landing, where his work on the batter’s eye at T-Mobile Park was nominated for a 2026 SABR Analytics Conference Research Award.

A bottom-ranked pitching staff got a little deeper this weekend.

Zack Littell and the Nationals have agreed on a one-year contract, as several outlets reported Sunday. The price tag is currently unknown, though the deal includes a mutual option for 2027. Littell, 30, ranked next-to-last on our Top 50 Free Agents list this offseason. As it happens, he is also next-to-last to sign (only Lucas Giolito remains available).

Littell threw a career high 186.2 innings in 2025 across 32 starts for the Rays and Reds. Only 10 pitchers threw more innings last year. His 3.81 ERA was above average among qualified starters, and his 4.2% walk rate was the best in the majors. On the other hand, his 4.88 FIP, 17.1% strikeout rate, and 1.74 HR/9 each ranked in the bottom five. It was a mix of strengths and weaknesses that, taken together, made him the 88th-most valuable starting pitcher by WAR — useful depth for most organizations. Read the rest of this entry »

If there’s something even more satisfying than spending your hard-earned money, it’s spending someone else’s money that you didn’t earn. When we’re talking baseball, unless you’re an extremely high-net-worth individual who can casually spend hundreds of millions of dollars — if this describes you, call me and we can totally hang out or something — you only have the option to spend other people’s cash. I mean, I haven’t technically asked American Express to up my credit limit to $300 million, but I’m guessing the answer would be no. Every year around this time, I make a whole piece out of it, naming seven players I think teams should attempt to sign to long-term contracts now, rather than waiting until later. There are some additional complications, of course, with a lockout likely coming after this season, but teams and players could be willing to act with more urgency to sign contracts now before all the uncertainty ahead of them.

I’ve (hopefully) chosen seven players whose possible extensions would benefit both the player and the team, as all good contracts ought to do. I’ve included the up-to-date ZiPS projections for each player, as well as the contract that ZiPS thinks each player should get, though that doesn’t necessarily mean I think the player will end up with that figure or even sign an extension. Read the rest of this entry »

The burners of the hot stove have been simmering across baseball since Kyle Tucker’s signing, and on Thursday, the Washington Nationals added their ingredients to the pot, trading two years of MacKenzie Gore’s services to the Texas Rangers for a five-player prospect package (Ben Clemens wrote about Gore’s fit with the Rangers here). This marks the second significant trade of the Paul Toboni era in Washington (Harry Ford for Jose A. Ferrer was the other) as he and the new members of the front office look to put their fingerprints on the org. The deal includes Texas’ 2025 first rounder Gavin Fien, injured former top pitching prospect Alejandro Rosario, 2025 rookie-level breakout bat Devin Fitz-Gerald, 23-year-old 1B/RF masher Abimelec Ortiz, and 20-year-old outfielder Yeremy Cabrera.

In contrast with yesterday’s Freddy Peralta trade, the Gore return is about a combination of depth and potential ceiling, rather than the proximity and more concrete upside of the two-player Peralta package. Reasonable minds could consider any of Fien, Rosario, or Fitz-Gerald as the headliner of this deal. Each of those guys has the physical talent to be an everyday big leaguer, though each also comes with a measure of uncertainty too great to consider any of them a Top 100 prospect right now. I’ll walk you through the players who are joining Washington’s farm system, then we’ll take a step back and examine the state of the organization’s direction under new leadership.

There are folks in baseball who love Fien, the 12th overall pick in last year’s draft who signed for nearly $5 million to eschew a commitment to the University of Texas. Fien swings hard, he has impressive power for his age, and he was one of the top performers on the high school showcase circuit, with a 1.045 OPS in events tracked by Synergy Sports from 2023 to 2024. The scouts and clubs who liked Fien the most before the draft considered him a mid-first round prospect, and one of the best couple of high school hitters in the class. I was (and am) personally a fair bit lower on Fien, and had him ranked 34th. The length and awkward look of his swing gave me pre-draft pause about his ability to match pro velocity, and I think Fien’s infield actions will at least force him to third base, if not to right field (where his arm would be weapon). The combination of strikeout risk and a corner fit, at least in my eyes, relegated him more to the comp round despite his power. His look in pro ball after the draft — a 10-game sample at Low-A Hickory plus Instructional League activity in Arizona — reinforced these notions. This is the player in the deal where you’re likely to get the widest range of opinions, and my personal take happens to be on the lower end of that continuum.

Before he got hurt, the opposite was true of Rosario, who I thought had become one of the best couple of pitching prospects in baseball in 2024. But that was before he blew out and things got (and remain) complicated. A very famous prospect since his high school underclass days, Rosario’s mid-to-upper-90s fastball used to miss frustratingly few bats because of its shape. He ran an ERA over 7.00 during both his sophomore and junior years at the University of Miami despite sitting 95-96 mph with a plus slider and splitter. The Rangers quickly overhauled Rosario’s delivery, most notably his arm slot, which became much more vertical than when he was an amateur. It totally changed the way his fastball played without sacrificing his arm strength or the quality of either secondary pitch, and it also improved his command, as his line to the plate became much more direct and comfortable-looking than when he was in college. In a 2024 split evenly between Low- and High-A, he posted a 36.9% strikeout rate, a 3.7% (!) walk rate, and a 2.24 ERA across 88.1 innings. Read the rest of this entry »

When the market is hot, it seems like it’ll never cool down. Forget the fact that we’re late into free agency and yet too early in the year for contract extensions. The last few marquee free agents to sign are starting to do so – hi, Cody – and that seems to have opened the floodgates for a series of trades. You’ve heard about all the noise the Mets have gotten up to, no doubt. They aren’t the only ones. The Rangers have jumped in on the action in a big way. On Thursday, they acquired MacKenzie Gore from the Nationals in exchange for prospects Gavin Fien, Devin Fitz-Gerald, Alejandro Rosario, Abimelec Ortiz, and Yeremy Cabrera, as Jon Heyman of the New York Post first reported.

In some ways, this trade has been a long time coming. Gore has been on the trade block for most of his major league career. First, he got sent from San Diego to Washington in the first Juan Soto trade. Almost immediately upon his arrival in the nation’s capital, however, he turned into a trade chip. The Nats were pretty obviously far away from competing, and Gore is the kind of arm that lots of teams dream about placing at the top of their rotation.

By 2024, Gore’s third year in the big leagues, the trade rumors were at full volume. Gore exploded out of the gate, with 98 strikeouts over 80 innings in his first 15 starts. He was a deadline target for many teams – but he slumped hard down the stretch, with a 4.48 ERA and 4.16 FIP the rest of the way, and no trade ever came to fruition. The Nats looked around that winter, didn’t move him, and then again held on after Gore came out of the gates hot, making his first All-Star appearance on the back of a 3.02 ERA (2.96 FIP) in the first half. He stayed put at the deadline – and once again slumped hard down the stretch.

That brings us to the present. Trading Gore always made sense, and the new Nationals front office finally did it. He still has two years of team control remaining, and the price for controllable starters has never been higher. His service time status lines up very well with the situation in Arlington. The Rangers have a roster that is built to contend now. Their lineup has five different hitters in their 30s (baseball-age wise, Jake Burger doesn’t celebrate his 30th until April), and only two who are 25 or younger. The rotation is led by Jacob deGrom and Nathan Eovaldi, two heroes of the 2010s who are in the twilight of their respective careers. 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 »

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.

Daniel Murphy was not a home run hitter. Over the course of a 12-year major league career that was interrupted by knee injuries, he reached double digits in just seven seasons, topping 20 homers just twice. Like Howie Kendrick — another Jacksonville-born second baseman debuting on this Hall of Fame ballot, one who even played on the same team as Murphy in 2017–18 — the lefty-swinging, righty-throwing Murphy was known for his exceptional bat-to-ball ability. And like Kendrick, he went on a memorable, power-driven October run and won NLCS MVP honors. In 2015, he set a record by homering in six straight postseason games, carrying the Mets to their first pennant in 15 years. While it didn’t culminate in a championship, it earned him an indelible spot in postseason history; without that run, he probably wouldn’t even be on this ballot.

…

Daniel Thomas Murphy was born on April 1, 1985 in Jacksonville, Florida, the oldest of three children of Tom and Sharon Murphy. Tom taught kindergarten while Sharon sold insurance (in one amusing anecdote, an 11-year-old Murphy declared he wanted to be “an insurance person” for his school yearbook). Younger brother Jonathan (b. 1990) was a 19th-round pick by the Twins in 2012 and spent three seasons as an outfielder in their minor league system. 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.

In their backyard baseball fantasies and daydreams, what kid hasn’t imagined hitting a late-inning home run to win a playoff game, or even Game 7 of the World Series? Howie Kendrick lived that dream not once but twice during the 2019 postseason, capped by a homer that sent the Washington Nationals on their way to their first championship in franchise history. What’s more, his October run (which also included NLCS MVP honors) topped off a storybook rise from humble beginnings that included a complicated family situation growing up and an amateur career that took place in almost complete obscurity.

“The more I learned about him, he starts telling me about how no schools wanted him, how it was really hard to stay confident,” former Angels teammate Torii Hunter, who mentored Kendrick upon joining the Angels in 2008, recalled in ’19. “I just kept thinking: This guy could have really fallen through the cracks.”

What put Kendrick on the map was his legendary bat-to-ball ability. Though he never won the major league batting title that was expected of him while hitting for a .358 average during his time in the minors, he carved out an impressive 14-year career, earning All-Star honors and helping his teams make the playoffs eight times.

…

Howard Joseph Kendrick III was born on July 12, 1983 in Jacksonville, Florida. He never knew his father, and because his mother, Belinda Kendrick, was a staff sergeant serving overseas in the United States Army, he and his two sisters grew up in the care of his maternal grandmother, Ruth Woods, in Callahan, Florida, a two-stoplight town of less than 1,000 people near the Georgia border. All 12 of Woods’ children, and their children, lived in the area as well. Read the rest of this entry »

Seaver King will head into the 2026 season looking to improve on a 2025 campaign that saw him fail to impress at the plate. Across 551 plate appearances split between High-A Wilmington and Double-A Harrisburg, the 22-year-old shortstop slashed a lackluster .244/.294/.337 with six home runs and an 88 wRC+. There is certainly more in the tank. Drafted 10th overall by the Washington Nationals out of Wake Forest University in 2024, King has both the résumé and the raw tools to profile as a solid hitter at the big league level.

He flashed some of that promise in the admittedly hitter-friendly Arizona Fall League. As our lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen put it, King “rebounded in a big way,” raking to the tune of a 1.031 OPS and eight extra-base hits over 79 plate appearances with the Scottsdale Scorpions. Just as importantly, he displayed the smooth right-handed stroke that allows him to shoot balls to all parts of the field, which is what he does when he’s at the top of his game.

He isn’t lacking in confidence, nor is he afraid of some honest self-assessment. Reportedly selling out for power early last season, the Athens, Georgia native has come around to realizing that staying true to himself is what will produce the best results.

“I feel like I bring a lot to the table,” King told me early in his AFL stint. “Defense. Leadership. I am still finding my way in the box, obviously. It’s tough playing against elite competition, so I have to go out there and play my game. That’s hitting line drives. I’ll maybe mix in a couple of home runs with the right launch angle, but mostly I’m trying to get on base and move around them as fast as possible.” 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.

The baseball industry loves its pitching prospects — and sometimes seems to love dreaming on them by using them as trade chips almost as much as it does actually letting them pitch. Considered to have one of the best curveballs in the game from the outset of his professional career, Gio Gonzalez was traded three times before he’d thrown a major league pitch, and five times during a career that ended just after he turned 35. Along the way, the undersized southpaw made two All-Star teams, received Cy Young votes twice, and helped his teams reach the playoffs five times. While he wasn’t always easy to watch given his high walk rates, his ability to miss bats was a testament to the quality of his stuff.

…

Giovany Aramis Gonzalez was born on September 19, 1985 in Hialeah, Florida, a city in Miami-Dade County where roughly three-quarters of the population is of Cuban ancestry. He’s the oldest of six children of Max and Yolanda (Yoly) Gonzalez. Max, a first-generation Cuban-American, installed billboards and owned a scooter shop, while Yoly, an immigrant from Cuba, worked at various jobs to help the family make ends meet.

Gio was just four years old when his parents introduced him to baseball. Growing up, he played sandlot baseball with neighborhood kids in a narrow, rocky strip of land behind the family’s townhouse. “We broke so many windows that I found a guy who would replace them for 15 bucks apiece,” Yoly recalled in 2011.

“Max grew up tough, never got to play as much ball as he wanted and, when it rained on too-rare Sundays when he had a game as a child, he broke down in frustration and cried. But he never stopped studying the sport,” wrote the Washington Post’s Thomas Boswell in 2012. When his eldest son showed an aptitude for the game, Max taught him the curveball that would become his signature. Read the rest of this entry »