Two weeks ago, Sunday Notes led with David Cone following in Mark Gubicza’s footsteps. Just as his fellow pitcher-turned-broadcaster had done, Cone tackled a challenging career quiz, augmenting his answers — some of them correct, others amiss — with entertaining anecdotes about batters he faced along the way. Today we’ll hear from another 1980s-1990s hurler who is now a broadcast analyst: Jeff Montgomery, who played with Gubicza in Kansas City, is the Royals’ franchise leader in both appearances (686) and saves 304).

I began by asking the 64-year-old Wellston, Ohio native which batter he faced the most times.

“I’m going to say either Chili Davis or Kirby Puckett,” guessed Montgomery, naming a pair of players who narrowly missed being the correct answer. Upon being informed that it was neither of the two, the erstwhile closer pondered for several seconds, only to throw up his hands. “You got me,” he admitted. “Who was it?”

I told Montgomery that it was Paul Molitor, whom he faced 30 times, allowing just seven hits, all of them singles.

“Oh, Molly. There you go,” responded Montgomery, “Molly was the type of hitter who was never going to be easy. He had the ability to really wait on pitches. He was basically bat-to-ball, and his bat-to-ball skills were incredible. There were honestly times when I thought the pitch was in the catcher’s mitt, and the next thing I knew I was watching our right fielder chasing the ball down the line. Molly’s bat was that fast.

“I think I did pretty well against him,“ Montgomery added. “But I do remember one game in the Metrodome. We were in extra innings, it was a bases-loaded situation, and I had him 0-2. I’d thrown Molly a couple of sliders away, and decided to come in with a fastball. He leaned into it for a walk-off hit-by-pitch.” Read the rest of this entry »

No two scouts or evaluators are going to agree on everything, and we’re no exception. We get asked all the time about who liked which player more, or who was more lukewarm on this guy versus that one — not to mention the steady stream of “Outlet A ranked Player B here, but you had him there, what gives?” questions that populate our chats. These are especially compelling and relevant inquiries this time of year, because inevitably we had to resolve a degree of disagreement as we compiled our list of the Top 100 prospects in baseball.

This year, we’ve decided to address those questions head on. Throughout our list-building process, we came to similar, or similar enough, conclusions about most players. Oftentimes Eric was a tick higher on one player here, or Brendan the high man there, and usually a quick back and forth was enough to bridge any gaps. In a couple cases though, we didn’t reach consensus. There were a handful of players that Brendan was happy to rank, but Eric would have preferred to leave off, and vice versa. We think offering a peek into those discussions will prove insightful for readers. These back and forths highlight the types of players who are generally more difficult to evaluate, as well as the metrics and scouting practices that guide decision-making when you have to make a call one way or the other. Through it all, we hope you’ll arrive at a conclusion that most scouts and analysts eventually reach: That spirited debate is a healthy part of the evaluative process, and disagreements without clean resolution are occasionally the cost of doing business in an uncertain world.

Kendry Chourio, RHP, Kansas City Royals

Brendan: Let’s start with a pitcher who ultimately didn’t make our list. I never caught Kendry Chourio live, but I adored his stuff when I put on the tape. He throws hard, I see a path to a plus curve and changeup, and he’s advanced for someone who played all of last season as a 17-year-old. The Royals rightly promoted him off of the Dominican complex, and then he dominated in Arizona to the point that he actually wound up in Low-A down the stretch. And you can see why: For his age, his ability to command the ball and execute his secondaries stands out immediately. His line – 51.1 innings, 63 strikeouts, 0.95 WHIP, just five walks – was incredible. I think we both agree that there are a lot of good things going on here. Can you elaborate on why you were still a little skeptical of him when it came time to build the list? Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the new, ESPN-ified process for signing up for MLB.TV, Stat Blast (12:28) about the long-sought, newfound pitching prowess of the WBC’s Team USA superteam, and then (34:31) preview the 2026 San Francisco Giants with The Athletic’s Grant Brisbee, and the 2026 Kansas City Royals (1:20:20) with MLB.com’s Anne Rogers.

Audio intro: El Warren, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio interstitial 1: Grant Brisbee, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio interstitial 2: Kite Person, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Guy Russo, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to Labuza Bluesky post
Link to resulting Reddit thread
Link to Labuza web post
Link to Ben on the WBC
Link to team payrolls
Link to Giants offseason tracker
Link to Giants depth chart
Link to Grant on Vitello
Link to Grant on the Giants offseason
Link to Grant’s records account
Link to Grant on the “Posey Rule”
Link to last year’s Giants preview
Link to Bonds curses article
Link to Flores call article
Link to Bogaerts call article
Link to Grant’s author archive
Link to Omnibus podcast
Link to Royals offseason tracker
Link to Royals depth chart
Link to Vinnie on EW
Link to Anne on outfield fences
Link to team OF WAR
Link to Anne on Garcia’s extension
Link to Anne on Quatraro’s extension
Link to Anne on hitting coach changes
Link to Chiefs stadium move
Link to Royals move article
Link to Anne on Royals TV distribution

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The Kansas City Royals are my dark horse team for 2026. They managed not only to make the playoffs in 2024 but also to win a round despite not having anything resembling a playoff-quality offense, and then went a respectable 82-80 in 2025 even after losing ace Cole Ragans to a rotator cuff strain and watching no. 2 starter Seth Lugo start to suffer the effects of age.

Heading into 2026, the Royals have a deep pitching staff and more good position players than they’ve had at one time in at least 10 years. Maikel Garcia and Bobby Witt Jr. are baseball’s best left-side-of-the-infield duo, and Vinnie Pasquantino is pretty good too. If not for the giant sucking maw at second base, the Royals infield would be among the best in the majors.

Still, they could, as ever, use another thumper. Witt is the team’s only truly transformative offensive player, and while Kansas City has bolstered the lineup with the addition of Isaac Collins, it had only four players last season with double-digit home runs. That’s the lowest total in baseball; 27 teams had at least six such players, 16 had eight, and four had 10.

Seems like a team that could really use a gigantic Floridian with 80-grade power. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, the Royals made a big announcement. Kauffman Stadium, long one of the most cavernous venues in the majors, is going to be a little less warehouse-like this year. The walls are moving in nine or 10 feet more or less across the board, and getting shorter by a foot and a half to boot. That’s a meaningful change for a stadium where home runs generally go to die. How massive? Time to crank up the old computer and find out.

I plugged the new dimensions from Kansas City’s press release into an equation describing a rough arc. I fit those points to a cubic spline so that it could more closely resemble the actual stadium, with its pinched-in corners. I made a few approximations as well; for instance, the wall is moving to a height of eight and a half feet “in most places,” so I just applied that across the board. I also modeled the old dimensions the same way. That way, I had two different virtual walls built to compare some batted ball data against.

Notably, my approximation isn’t a perfect replica of the stadium. I don’t have a millimeter-scale, or even a yard-scale, map of the place. I can’t account for outfielders robbing home runs, which is definitely going to be more common with the lowered walls, though still quite rare overall. But by running it through both the old and new wall dimensions, I think that this unavoidable error can be minimized. It’s pretty clear that no balls that were home runs with the old outfield parameters will suddenly not be home runs with the new ones, so the thing we’re looking for is the difference, assuming that my approximation is close enough to reality. And it is: My modeling says that over the last three years respectively, 205, 162, and 159 batted balls hit in Kansas City should have turned into homers. In reality, it’s been 186, 147, and 151. Read the rest of this entry »

The Phillies made the playoffs in 2025. The Royals nearly did, and certainly hope to play in October in 2026. Teams like that rarely line up on trades, what with both sides aiming to do the same thing and all. But rarely isn’t the same as never. Philadelphia and Kansas City found something they agree on other than their taste in Super Bowl matchups (last year’s every year, naturally), coming together on Friday to swap relievers: Matt Strahm is heading to Kansas City in exchange for Jonathan Bowlan, as Robert Murray first reported.

Trades are all about two teams with mismatched goals. Who would trade a superstar? A team that isn’t competing at the moment and isn’t one or two players away from changing that. Who would let go of a promising outfield prospect? A team that’s set in the outfield and light on the mound. This trade is two playoff contenders trading relievers, so most of those considerations don’t apply. But there’s still a mismatch in goals and resources here; you just have to look a little more closely.

The Phillies bullpen boasts an embarrassment of riches. Jhoan Duran, the closer, is one of the best in the business, a lockdown reliever you can set and forget in the ninth inning. José Alvarado missed most of the 2025 season thanks to a suspension and injury, but he’s an excellent late-inning option in his own right when available, and he should be back at full strength in the upcoming year. It doesn’t stop there; the team recently signed Brad Keller, who broke out as a dominant single-inning option in 2025. Even without Strahm, that’s a fearsome top trio of relievers, perhaps the best in the majors. 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 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.

Alex Gordon spent nearly a decade and a half embodying the ups and downs of the 21st-century Kansas City Royals. His 14-year career began with unreasonably high hopes and then typical growing pains before culminating in one of the more unlikely championships in recent memory, followed by a steep decline.

After dominating at both the high school and college levels in Lincoln, Nebraska, Gordon was drafted as a third baseman by the Royals with the second pick in 2005, and touted as the Next George Brett, a nearly impossible bar to live up to in any era, let alone one in which his team was a perpetual doormat in need of a savior. He hadn’t even played a major league game before Brett himself claimed to be flattered by the comparisons. In the spring of 2007, as Gordon worked to make the jump from Double-A to the majors, the Hall of Fame third baseman with three batting titles, 3,154 career hits, and a rock-solid claim as the best player in franchise history told a reporter, “I take it as a compliment. When I watch him play, he makes the game look pretty easy. When I played the game, I knew how hard it was. He’s better than I was at (23). Much better.” Read the rest of this entry »

The Royals had themselves a productive weekend. The kind where you re-organize the garage and get your meal prep done for the week before the Sunday Scaries set in. On Friday, news broke that the team was finalizing a deal to extend third baseman Maikel Garcia. The contract spans five years, including all four of Garcia’s arbitration-eligible seasons, with a guaranteed value of $57.5 million that could reach $85 million with options and escalators. He will make $4 million in 2026, $7 million in 2027, $10 million in 2028, $13 million in 2029, and $19 million in 2030, and the team holds a $21 million club option for 2031, with a $3.2 million buyout. Then, following the news of the Garcia signing, ESPN’s Jeff Passan reported on Saturday that the Brewers were sending outfielder Isaac Collins and right-handed reliever Nick Mears to the Royals in exchange for left-handed reliever Angel Zerpa. We’ll get into a more detailed discussion of both moves in a minute, but first let’s put this in the larger context of the Royals as an organization.

A lot of sitcoms have that one oddball character that doesn’t quite fit with the rest of the cast. The person that requires viewers to suspend their disbelief, because in real life, there’s no way the other main characters would associate with this weirdo. Your Phoebes, your Kramers, your Kimmy Gibblers, etc. These characters are a part of the main cast or have regularly recurring roles, and though they frequently find themselves integrated into the show’s primary conflicts, they’re typically situated off to the side doing their own thing. Writers insist on including these characters because they provide interesting narrative texture to group dynamics. In real life, we tend to gravitate toward like-minded people with common interests, which is great for forming meaningful connections but makes for boring TV.

Fortunately, MLB teams behave more like TV characters than real life besties, which makes for better entertainment. And with 30 teams, the league doesn’t limit itself to just one Phoebe. Several squads are singing about fetid felines and boycotting Pottery Barn, and among them we have the Royals. Kansas City has never seemed tempted to jump on the latest trends in roster construction or follow the crowd as it attempts to implement whatever the “new Moneyball” is at any given point in time. No, the Royals tend to stay true to themselves, even if that means zigging while everyone else zags or using unorthodox tactics to make sure everyone in the organization stays focused on baseball. Read the rest of this entry »

The Baltimore Orioles will be different in 2026, and not just because of roster additions that already include Pete Alonso and Taylor Ward, with more almost certain to follow. They’ve hired a new manager (Craig Albernaz), replaced a few coaches, and done some reshuffling at the executive level. In a sport where remaining stagnant can be deleterious, the O’s are moving forward on the heels of a disappointing 2025 season.

A precipitous dip in the win column — 91 in 2024, just 75 last year — accentuated the need for changes, but that isn’t the only reason. According to Mike Elias, progress is an ongoing endeavor.

“We’re constantly evolving, having to respond to other teams’ getting better in areas,” Baltimore’s president of baseball operations told me during last month’s GM Meetings. “We make changes every year. We’re actually undergoing quite an overhaul at the major league level right now with our staff. We’ve done some reformatting in the front office, although certainly not to the degree we did when we came in.”

Things changed markedly after Elias arrived in November 2018 and began rebuilding the organization. Analytics — an area in which the Orioles had been well behind the times —- was of course a major focus. But while giant strides have been made, there is no finish line to reach. Moreover, an old Satchel Paige adage applies: “Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.” Read the rest of this entry »