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 »

For the second time since the opening of spring training, the Baltimore Orioles lost one of their starting infielders to injury. On Friday, Baltimore announced that third baseman Jordan Westburg would miss significant time due to a partially torn UCL in his throwing elbow. Westburg received a platelet-rich plasma injection, commonly used for soft tissue and joint injuries, and will be out at least until the end of April, according to team president Mike Elias.

Jordan Westburg has a partial UCL tear in his right elbow and will be getting a PRP injection today, per Orioles POBO/GM Mike Elias.

Westburg will be out for all of April. Timeline TBD after that.

— Jake Rill (@JakeDRill) February 20, 2026

While there’s never an ideal time for an injury, the Orioles were already without second baseman Jackson Holliday, out with a broken hamate bone in his right hand. That puts half of their infield out of commission for Opening Day. Before Holliday and Westburg went down, there had been some turnover among the role players in Baltimore’s infield, adding to the uncertainty of what these injuries will mean for the team this spring and beyond. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about hamate fractures and other deflating spring training injury announcements, Zack Wheeler’s preserved rib, Chris Getz and Luisangel Acuña, a profusion of salary cap coverage, and more, and then preview the 2026 Baltimore Orioles (38:50) with The Baltimore Banner’s Andy Kostka, and the 2026 San Diego Padres (1:27:28) with MLB.com’s AJ Cassavell.

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The Orioles have signed Chris Bassitt to a one-year, $18.5 million contract. That number includes a $3 million signing bonus, and Bassitt can earn another half a million if he reaches 27 starts, a feat he last failed to accomplish in the shortened 2020 season. That dependability is a major part of what the Orioles are paying for. Bassitt, who came in at no. 35 on our Top 50 Free Agents list, will turn 37 in 10 days, and at this stage of his career, he’s a player who raises your floor rather than your ceiling. With this signing, Orioles continue their recent strategy of coming into the season expecting their pitching staff to outperform middling projections. ESPN’s Jeff Passan broke the news first, because of course he did.

It’s easy to draw a dividing line in Bassitt’s career, starting in 2024. From his debut in 2014 through 2023, he owned a 62-42 record with a 3.49 ERA and 3.91 FIP. Over the past two years, he’s 21-23 with a 4.06 ERA and 4.04 FIP. However, the advanced numbers say he actually started faltering in 2023, when he ran a 3.60 ERA in spite of a 4.28 FIP. Knowing that, it’s important to note that despite similar top-line numbers, some advanced stats saw Bassitt as bouncing back a bit in 2025. The difference is especially apparent in the expected stats. His xERA dropped from 4.52 in 2024 to 4.16 in 2025, and his xFIP dropped from 4.28 to 3.84. He continued to drop his arm angle, which helped him induce a hair more soft contact and raise his groundball rate. That kind of change often comes with a reduction in a pitcher’s walk and strikeout rates, but Bassitt was able to lower his walk rate while keeping his strikeout rate roughly the same. That’s a neat trick if you can pull it off, but it’s by no means a sure thing that Bassitt will be able to keep it going in his age-37 season.

Bassitt throws the kitchen sink, boasting an eight-pitch repertoire that includes both a traditional changeup and a splitter, but that belies the fact that he is, for the most part, a sinkerballer. He throws the pitch nearly half the time against righties and 30% of the time against lefties, with his seven other pitches all playing off it. The sinker averaged just 91.6 mph in 2025, the lowest mark of his career. There’s a velocity floor for just about every pitcher, below which it doesn’t matter how many pitches you throw or how well you can place the ball. We don’t know what Bassitt’s is, but it stands to reason that it can’t be all that far below 91 mph. From here on out, the projections won’t trust him too much because they’ll always bake in a year of age-related decline. Still, the vast repertoire, the veteran savvy, and the long track record of success with below-average velocity make it easy to view Bassitt as one of those players who deserves the benefit of the doubt until he finally puts up a true clunker of a season. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the things that happens when pitchers and catchers report to camp is that managers update everyone on any unreported offseason developments. Unfortunately, few of those updates are about fun new cocktails they tried or animals they saw on vacation. It brings me no pleasure to tell you I have yet to see one single beat reporter file a story about a manager who saw a really cool sea turtle while snorkeling. Most of those developments are injuries, which meant that Tuesday was at once a glorious rite of the coming spring and an unbearably heavy dump of unpleasant injury news. Today we’re going to focus on the depressing dump, so courtesy of Andy Kostka of The Baltimore Banner, here’s a gorgeous picture that captures the eternal hope of spring training as a little pre-casualty report treat to soften the blow.

Wow. That was beautiful. Thank you, Andy. Now we’ll get miserable, but please remember that it could always be worse. We could be back in the 1880s, when the unpleasant health updates weren’t about who broke their hamate bone, but about who died of consumption. (The preceding sentence was originally intended to be a joke, but guess what.) 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.

Early in his career, Nick Markakis appeared to be a star in the making. In his second and third seasons in the majors (2007 and ’08), the former first-round pick topped 40 doubles, 20 homers, and a .300 batting average while slugging nearly .500. He led the AL in WAR in 2008, his age-24 campaign — not that anyone was aware of it at the time, which helps to explain his omission from that year’s AL All-Star team.

It would take another decade before Markakis finally became an All-Star, and during that stretch, his performances leveled off. He became better known for his durability, his defense (he won three Gold Gloves), and above all, the example he set for younger players while enduring lean years both in Baltimore and Atlanta. He stuck around long enough to help both teams’ rebuilding efforts come to fruition with playoff appearances, racking up so many hits that he generated discussion regarding his potential Hall-worthiness if he persisted long enough to reach the magic 3,000-hit milestone.

Markakis’ retirement after his age-36 season rendered that question moot. He didn’t generate a Hall-caliber résumé or gaudy statistics during his 15-year career, but he received considerable praise for his impact on his teammates. From Braves manager Brian Snitker, who managed him from 2016–20:

“One of the most consistent, professional pros that I’ve ever been around. I’m glad I had the honor to manage him in his last years, because he’s a special player… How consistent he was, how professional he was, the way he played the game, how he grinded every at-bat. He never took a pitch off. And to see what he did late in his career, winning that Gold Glove, and the stabilizing force that he was for our club while I was here. You don’t appreciate a guy like Nick until you manage him. What a great career he had.”

Read the rest of this entry »

For the 22nd consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction, as well as MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the preantepenultimate team is the Baltimore Orioles.

Batters

Baltimore’s pitching looked to be a problem entering the 2025 season, but the lackluster offense turned what was a good team with a run prevention problem into a losing club. After ranking second in the American League in runs scored in 2024, the O’s dropped to 11th in 2025, and suffice it to say, the pitching didn’t bail them out. A 75-87 record looks bad in a comparatively mild way given some of the clunkers the team has crafted since 1997, but it was one of the biggest O’s letdowns in at least my memory (I’m from Baltimore). But like the Blue Jays going into 2025 or the Yankees going into 2024, people tend to underrate good teams coming off of crappy seasons, sometimes horribly. There’s this belief that the lousy year is some baseline expectation and you have to start counting wins added from that point, which is a very poor way to make projections.

Have the O’s done enough with the offense? If the projections here are accurate, probably. With so many underperformances, some righting of the ship was always going to happen anyway, but the O’s didn’t just wait for the magic of regression to do the job for them. I don’t think the end of the Pete Alonso contract will be pretty, but he’s a legitimate big bat in a way the franchise tried to pretend Ryan Mountcastle was for a long time. Taylor Ward isn’t great, but you know who Taylor Ward is. The O’s are now in a position where they don’t need Coby Mayo or Heston Kjerstad to get back on track, though it would of course be nice. Read the rest of this entry »

The Baltimore Orioles continued filling out their rotation last weekend, signing right-hander Zach Eflin to a one-year contract worth $10 million with a mutual option for the 2027 season. Traded to the Orioles from the Rays in 2024, Eflin struggled with injuries last year, throwing only 71 1/3 over 14 starts while putting up a 5.93 ERA and -0.3 WAR.

A first-round pick by the Padres out of a Florida high school in 2012, Eflin finally established himself as a solid mid-rotation starter with the Phillies at the end of the decade after being a part of trades for Matt Kemp and Jimmy Rollins. COVID and recurring patella issues in his right knee plagued him in 2021, resulting in season-ending surgery, and he missed another three months in 2022 with more problems with the same knee. Despite the setbacks, the Rays saw enough to sign him to a three-year, $40 million deal entering the 2023 season. Eflin experienced a minor back injury and tendinitis in his other knee, but that only cost him a handful of innings, and the result was his best and most durable campaign. He set career highs in starts (31), innings (177 2/3 innings), ERA (3.50), FIP (3.01), and WAR (4.9). While his numbers sagged a bit in 2024, Eflin was still a quality pitcher whose name bandied in trade rumors before the deadline. 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 and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

The third and final multi-candidate pairing of this series is by far the heaviest, covering two candidates who have both been connected to multiple incidents of domestic violence. 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 »