We’re less than a month from the Winter Meetings and the Rule 5 Draft, which means it’s a good time to evaluate every team’s 40-man roster situation. This is the time of year when teams have one final chance to protect Rule 5 eligible players by placing them on the 40-man. Eligibility is determined by a mix of how long a player has been with their parent organization and how young they were when they signed: Players who signed at 18 or younger must be added to the 40-man within five seasons, while everyone else must be added within four. RosterResource monitors Rule 5 eligibility, if you’re curious to see the lay of the land.
During the season, teams can free up roster space by placing an injured player on the 60-day IL. In the offseason, teams don’t get extra slots for injured players, which tends to put pressure on the back of the roster. The Diamondbacks are a good example of how space can tighten quickly, as they’ve currently got six pitchers battling long-term injuries occupying a spot. You may have noticed a flurry of moves immediately following the World Series, with many teams outrighting players off the 40-man in order to make room for all the guys who were on the IL.
Below, I’ve assessed every National League team’s 40-man roster situation (Eric will sort through the American League tomorrow). Some teams, like the Braves, have plenty of roster space, and thus a lot of flexibility in adding whoever they like. Others, like the Cardinals and Marlins, will face some tough choices as they seek to balance protecting interesting prospects with retaining players already on the roster, as well as finding room for prospective additions via trade or free agency. Some clubs don’t have many impact players to add, while others may need to protect a half-dozen or so guys. I’ve tried to identify which players are most likely to be added, which guys on the 40-man are vulnerable to getting lopped off in a roster crunch, and who could be moved in a deal to free up roster space. Let’s dig in. Read the rest of this entry »
The General Managers Meetings are currently taking place in Las Vegas, and as always, FanGraphs is on hand to report on what the executives have to say. We’ll hear from a number of them this week, beginning with a trio of National League execs, Matt Arnold of the Brewers, Paul DePodesta of the Rockies, and Chaim Bloom of the Cardinals.
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MATT ARNOLD — MILWAUKEE BREWERS
Brewers hitters had both a low strikeout rate and a relatively high walk rate this season; they ranked top five in both metrics. How was that achieved, and to what extent was it a focus?
“I think it was achieved by Murph letting people know, ‘You better put the ball in play and you better not chase,’” Arnold replied, crediting National League Manager of the Year Pat Murphy. “He’s relentless about that. Those are good things that we were able to execute this year, and it’s easier said than done. It starts with the players buying in and Murph enforcing that in the dugout, making sure our guys have that as a focus: the ball-strike, the ball in play. Having those types of skills in your pocket can lead to better at-bats and better outcomes.”
Needless to say, it’s not all Murphy. Milwaukee’s hitting coaches play a role as well.
“It’s a combination of all of them,” Arnold agreed. “Our coaches do a really good job of that. They want our guys to focus on getting a good pitch to hit, and again, while it’s easier said than done, we’ve done a good job of that. We try to focus on it as much as we can in our [minor league system] Marrying your scouting and player development is also super important. We try to communicate it with both of them.”
Jackson Chourio had a perfectly acceptable 20.5% strikeout rate, but also a 5.1% walk rate that ranked lowest on the team. How does he take the next steps to better fit that mold?
“He’s so young, and so athletic, and so talented,” Arnold said of the team’s 21-year-old phenom. “He’s got every ingredient to do it. He’s already doing it at a pretty high level. Whatever he does beyond this is even more special. The sky is the limit for this kid.”
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PAUL DEPODESTA — COLORADO ROCKIES
Colorado’s new top executive is inheriting a team whose hitters had both a high strikeout rate (second-worst in the majors) and a low slugging percentage (tied for sixth worst). If he had to pick one or the other, which is more in need of improvement?
“I would say it’s not the combo we want,” said DePodesta, stating the obvious. “And it won’t ultimately be one or the other. I said earlier what we want our identity to be, in Colorado especially, but… put it this way: If that’s a dial from one to the other, it’s not necessarily going to be one or the other. We need to find the right combination for us.”
Following up, I asked the well-traveled exec if he has an idea of which direction that combination might trend.
“I do, but I probably won’t share it,” he replied. “For us, it’s how we go about scouting and developing, or even setting up a major league roster. So yeah, ultimately it will be proprietary, what we feel is going to work well for us.”
And then there is the organization’s longest-standing question: What is the best way to pitch effectively in Colorado? Is there an actual answer to be found?
“We’ll find out,” DePodesta said. “I’m encouraged. There have been plenty of successful teams in Colorado. When I was in San Diego in 2007, 2008, 2009, and obviously the teams that Buddy [Black] had in 2017 and 2018, those teams were very successful. There were teams that had winning records on the road.
“My approach, at least as of today, is that I know it’s not impossible,” he added. “It’s been done. Are there things we have to consider that other teams don’t? Probably so. Are there adjustments we’re going to have to make that will look a little different than everybody else? Probably yes, but I’m confident that it’s not impossible. We’re going to figure something out.”
One more follow-up seemed in order. Given the Rockies’ reputation of lagging behind other organizations in terms of analytics, are there maybe things that have been overlooked?
“That I don’t know,” said DePodesta, who has spent the last decade working in the NFL as the chief strategy officer of the Cleveland Browns. “I’m looking forward to diving in deeper to the organization and figuring out all the things they have tried. I have a handful of ideas right now, but I would imagine they’re pretty naïve. Coors Field has been around since 1995 [and] they’ve tried a lot of things. I don’t have to reinvent the wheel. I want to understand what all of those things were and what they felt worked, and what didn’t. I don’t want to try things a second time if they’ve already tried them.”
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CHAIM BLOOM — ST. LOUIS CARDINALS
Cardinals pitchers didn’t strike out a lot of batters this year; they were second worst in the majors. How much of a concern is that?
“It’s definitely a concern,” replied Bloom, who succeeded John Mozeliak as St. Louis’ president of baseball operations at the conclusion of the regular season. “It’s not the only thing that matters, but it does matter. Having stuff that can beat people in the strike zone, that can miss bats — both in and out of the strike zone — is really important. It’s hard to have an elite staff without being able to do that. It’s not something you want to chase at the expense of throwing strikes — you’re not trying to put people in positions where they can’t succeed, or stay healthy — but it’s super important.”
How close is Liam Doyle to helping out in that respect?
“He’ll tell us that as the season unfolds,” Bloom said of the 21-year-old southpaw whom the Cardinals drafted fifth overall this year out of the University of Tennessee. “We gave him a little taste of [pro ball] at the end; he got his feet wet a little bit. Obviously, a first full season will tell you a lot. A first full season in and of itself is a big developmental step for guys, because they haven’t been asked to pitch that regularly for that long. But he came in and showed everything you want to see. He got after his work. He showed openness, a desire to get better, a willingness to listen. There is obviously some work to do before we can call him a big leaguer, but we’re really happy with the pitcher we got.
“The player will move himself,” added Bloom. “The player tells you where he should be. If you try to force something that’s not there, you usually end up paying a price. You might end up picking the pieces up from that for quite some time. When a player is ready and you give him that opportunity, he can carry it. It’s really just what the game is telling us, letting the player’s performance and his progress on the mound carry the day.”
Balls in play are less of an issue when you have a strong defense, which St. Louis largely had in 2025. Just how strong depends on the numbers you favor. I asked Bloom if he could explain how the Cardinals led all teams in Outs Above Average, yet were well below average in Defensive Runs Saved.
“That is a bigger conversation than one we could have here today,” Bloom said. “There are some differences between those metrics, some differences in [how they] get calculated that might disproportionally help or hurt certain types of players. Sometimes those things… they usually will even out year over year. I’ve seen specific players where that might not be the case, because of certain things that the player does or doesn’t do well that some metrics favor — or don’t — but typically over the course of time, they tend to [even out].”
What does it say about the 2025 Cardinals specifically?
“I’d be hesitant to draw too much of a big picture about specific players or player seasons,” Bloom responded. “If it persists over two or three years, then we can look at it as a trend and see if there is something underlying.”
The following article is part of my ongoing look at the candidates on the 2026 Contemporary Baseball Era Committee ballot. Originally written for the 2015 election at SI.com, it has been updated to reflect recent voting results as well as additional research. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, use the navigation tool above. An introduction to JAWS can be found here.
Wherever Gary Sheffield went, he made noise, both with his bat and his voice. For the better part of two decades, he ranked among the game’s most dangerous hitters, a slugger with a keen batting eye and a penchant for contact that belied his quick, violent swing. For even longer than that, he was one of the game’s most outspoken players, unafraid to speak up when he felt he was being wronged and unwilling to endure a situation that wasn’t to his liking. He was a polarizing player, and hardly one for the faint of heart.
At the plate, Sheffield was viscerally impressive like few others. With his bat twitching back and forth like the tail of a tiger waiting to pounce, he was pure menace in the batter’s box. He won a batting title, launched over 500 home runs — he had 14 seasons with at least 20 and eight with at least 30 — and put many a third base coach in peril with some of the most terrifying foul balls anyone has ever seen. For as violent as his swing may have been, it was hardly wild; not until his late 30s did he strike out more than 80 times in a season, and in his prime, he walked far more often than he struck out.
Bill James wrote of Sheffield in the 2019 Bill James Handbook:
“In all the years that I have been with the Red Sox, 16 years now, there has never been a player the Red Sox were more concerned about, as an opponent, than Gary Sheffield. Sheffield was a dynamite hitter and a fierce competitor… When he was in the game, you knew exactly where he was from the first pitch to the last pitch. He conceded nothing; he was looking not only to beat you, but to embarrass you. He was on the highest level.”
Two decades before that, James referred to Sheffield as “an urban legend in his own mind,” referencing the slugger’s penchant for controversy. Sheffield found it before he ever reached the majors through his connection to his uncle, Dwight Gooden. He was drafted and developed by the Brewers, who had no idea how to handle such a volatile player and wound up doing far more harm than good. Small wonder then that from the time he was sent down midway through his rookie season after being accused of faking an injury, he was mistrustful of team management and wanted out. And when he wanted out — of Milwaukee, Los Angeles, or New York — he let everyone know it, and if a bridge had to burn, so be it; it was Festivus every day for Sheffield, who was always willing to air his grievances. Read the rest of this entry »
I’m going to preface this post with two important caveats. First: Complaining about the fairness of the officiating, in any sport, in any circumstance, is loser behavior. For better or worse, the calls usually even out. And even in the vanishingly rare circumstances where a single call genuinely costs a team a victory, harping on about it isn’t going to change anything.
Second: I’m more lukewarm about the oncoming challenge system, and ABS in general, than a lot of people are. I think the umpires usually do a good job calling balls and strikes, and calling the rulebook zone isn’t going to do much to placate fans who pore over umpire scorecards. They don’t want the rulebook zone; they want their team to get all the calls. Overall, I think it’ll be a positive for the game, I’m just less geeked about it than I was about the pitch clock, for instance.
With all that said, there’s one specific thing I’m looking forward to with the challenge system. It’s going to eliminate my least favorite play in baseball, one we saw with disastrous effect during Game 3 of the World Series, and with any luck for the last time on a major league diamond. Read the rest of this entry »
At last, we’ve got a World Series matchup to wrap our heads around. Representing the American League are the Blue Jays, who are back in the Fall Classic — making it a truly international World Series — for the first time since 1993. They’ll face the Dodgers, who are vying to become the first back-to-back champions since the 1999–2000 Yankees. They’re the first defending champions to repeat as pennant winners since the 2009 Phillies, who lost that World Series to the Yankees. If that matchup feels like a long time ago, consider that it’s been twice as long since the Blue Jays were here.
Though the core of the lineup is largely unchanged, this year’s Dodgers team differs from last year’s in that it has reached the World Series on the strength of its starting pitching rather than in spite of it. Due to a slew of injuries in the rotation last year, manager Dave Roberts resorted to using bullpen games four times to augment a rickety three-man staff consisting of Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Jack Flaherty, and Walker Buehler. Even as those starters (or “starters,” in some cases) put up a 5.25 ERA while averaging just 3.75 innings per turn, the bullpen and offense more than picked up the slack, and the Dodgers took home their second championship of the Roberts era.
This time around, with Flaherty and Buehler elsewhere and Blake Snell, Tyler Glasnow, and Shohei Ohtani joining Yamamoto, Dodgers starters have been absolutely dominant, posting a microscopic 1.40 ERA while averaging 6.43 innings per turn through the first three rounds, helping the team to paper over a shaky bullpen. After Snell utterly dominated the Brewers, holding them to just one hit over eight innings while facing the minimum number of batters in Game 1 of the NLCS, Yamamoto followed with a three-hit, one-run masterpiece — the first complete game in the postseason since the Astros’ Justin Verlander went the distance against the Yankees in Game 2 of the 2017 ALCS. Glasnow, who began the postseason in the bullpen, allowed one run across 5 2/3 innings in Game 3 of the NLCS, while Ohtani backed his 10 strikeouts over six shutout innings in Game 4 with a three-homer game in what for my money stands as the greatest single-game postseason performance in baseball history. Read the rest of this entry »
Hey kids, there’s a substitute teacher today! But I’ve been given the lesson plan, so we’re going to go ahead and talk about Milwaukee Brewers manager Pat Murphy — no spending the day watching old episodes of The Simpsons that I have on VHS, even though this classroom still has a functioning VCR for some reason. As your normal teacher, Mr. Clemens, would do, I’m going to grade Murphy based on his overall performance in the playoffs, rather than scrutinize every single micro decision made. If you’d like to see Mr. Clemens’ reports on the managers who lost in the various Division Series, you can find the American League write-up here, and the National League write-up here.
I find the Brewers fascinating, both because I’ve always appreciated them having the best logo in sports, and because I’m really bad at projecting them. While I had a better time of it than some others did this year, and at least only had them two wins short of the Cubs, the preseason ZiPS standings have repeatedly underestimated the Brew Crew. I’d love to be able to directly blame the computer for this phenomena, but ZiPS has actually done a solid job of projecting individual Milwaukee players. The problem is that when it comes time to guess exactly who will see the field, I’ve been giving them short shrift. In each of the last five seasons, if I had known precisely who would end up getting playing time, the preseason projections would have gone up by an average of just under four wins per year. It’s not simply that they’ve been healthier than expected, either; the Brewers tend to promote interesting players at a much faster pace than I expect them to, are very quick to understand what’s not working, and deploy role players extremely effectively.
The Dodgers beat the Brewers by a final score of 5-1 on Friday night, securing a sweep of the NLCS and advancing to the World Series for the second consecutive year. If you just look at the scoreline and the sweep, you might think that this game was devoid of interest. I won’t lie to you – it was definitely not as dramatic as the wild Mariners-Blue Jays game from earlier in the night, and that series has had far more twists and turns than this one. But forget the lopsided final score, and forget the lopsided series. Friday night was a show – or, I should say, a Sho.
Shohei Ohtani made his second start on the mound of the playoffs, and after a leadoff walk to Brice Turang, he looked every bit the impossible, ace-plus-slugger hybrid we’ve come to expect. His stuff was sharp tonight, with his fastball scraping triple digits and his vicious sweeper up several ticks but maintaining its ludicrous movement. That leadoff walk didn’t even phase him; he took a deep breath, a few paces on the mound, and then turned Jackson Chourio into a cardboard cutout. Biting sweeper, two increasingly diving sliders, with Chourio taking an emergency hack to stay alive, and then a 100.3 mph fastball, pumped right through the zone, to remind everyone that, yeah, this Ohtani guy can spin it.
The next batter, Christian Yelich, got ahead in the count 2-0; Ohtani regrouped with an outrageous flotilla of sliders (90 mph), cutters (95), and fastballs (100) on the low-and-away corner that eventually flummoxed Yelich into a called strikeout. William Contreras? Thanks for entering the batter’s box, sir, better luck next time. Ohtani struck him out on three pitches, the last two of which were demonically breaking sweepers that weren’t even in the same zip code as Contreras’ bat. Then Ohtani sprinted off the mound and disappeared into the dugout. Read the rest of this entry »
Home-field advantage has been a bit of a booby prize this postseason, with the home team losing all five LCS games heading into Thursday evening’s action. The Dodgers’ Game 3 starter, Tyler Glasnow, is arguably the closest thing this rotation has to a weak link. So maybe the Brewers weren’t as dead as the series standings made it seem. Win one and you’re back in it.
Unfortunately for the Brewers, and for neutrals hoping for this series to go six or seven exciting games, that wasn’t in the cards. The Dodgers put a run on the board within their first two batters of the game, and while Milwaukee tied it the next inning, Glasnow shut the door afterward. A couple singles, a walk, and a throwing error in the sixth inning were all the Dodgers needed to win the game, 3-1, and take a 3-0 lead in the series. You already know what the odds are at this point. Read the rest of this entry »
It could not have started worse. Yoshinobu Yamamoto’s first pitch of NLCS Game 2 was a 97-mph four-seam fastball to Jackson Chourio, the Brewers’ powerful leadoff hitter. Chourio promptly hammered it 389 feet into the Dodgers’ bullpen. It landed like a signal to the relievers milling out on the berm: Be alert, you might be needed sooner than you thought.
They would not be necessary. It’s hard to imagine a better pitching performance than that of Yamamoto’s teammate, Blake Snell, who delivered 10 strikeouts over eight innings the previous night. But Yamamoto managed to one-up him.
Over 111 magnificent pitches, Yamamoto rendered the Brewers’ bats rudderless, holding them to that single run over a three-hit complete game. It was the first in the playoffs in eight years, and it certainly offered one possible solution to the Dodgers’ bullpen woes: What if you just didn’t need those guys? Read the rest of this entry »
Say what you want about Blake Snell. You may not find his Only Use Strike Zone in Case of Emergency pitching style fun to watch, but in Game 1 of the National League Championship Series, the Brewers found it even less pleasant to hit against. Snell carved through a Milwaukee lineup that scored 22 runs in the NLDS like a knife through nothing at all, ending his night by retiring 17 straight. He faced the minimum over eight innings in an absolutely dominant performance as the Dodgers beat the Brewers, 2-1, to take a 1-0 lead in the NLCS.
A prolonged bout of shoulder inflammation limited Snell to just 11 starts and 61 1/3 innings this season, but over those 11 starts, he was excellent, running a 2.35 ERA and 2.69 FIP. He’d been even better in the playoffs, earning wins against the Reds and Phillies and allowing just two runs, five hits, and five walks while striking out 18. On Monday night, he made those performances look like warmup outings. Snell went eight innings for just the second time in his entire career, and finished with 10 strikeouts, no walks, and one hit. That one hit was a weak line drive that third baseman Caleb Durbin dumped into center field in the third inning. Durbin then broke for second way too early, allowing Snell to throw over to first and catch him easily at second. “You gotta disrupt it,” said Milwaukee manager Pat Murphy between innings. “You gotta do something. He looks really sharp.” The Brewers didn’t do anything.
It wasn’t surprising to see Snell dealing, but it was surprising to see him not walking anyone. The game plan for the Brewers was simple, if difficult to execute. They had the lowest chase rate and the sixth-highest walk rate in baseball this season. They needed to be patient and force Snell to throw the ball in the zone. The Dodgers wanted the same thing. “I can’t have him nibble,” said Los Angeles manager Dave Roberts before the game. Snell didn’t nibble. He hit the zone 50% of the time, well above his regular season rate of 44%, and only a hair under the major league average of 51%. It was just the third time in the past two seasons that he’d gone without a base on balls. His changeup was particularly devastating, and he threw it 37% of the time, the second-highest rate of his entire career. Between innings, he sat on the bench and flipped through a half-inch three-ring binder that held either scouting reports or notes for an AP chemistry midterm. Read the rest of this entry »
