Corbin Carroll is the best left-on-left hitter in baseball right now.
It’s been a tremendous year for Carroll, however you want to split up the data. He has a 152 wRC+. He has 2.6 WAR. It’s looking like his best-ever season — a perfect follow-up to his best-ever season last year.
That Carroll appears to be taking another step forward in 2026 isn’t quite newsworthy. But the way he’s doing it certainly is:
Carroll is all of a sudden crushing lefties. He was just average against them the first few years of his career. Last year, he was fairly good in left-on-left matchups, though that improvement seems to stem more from his overall growth at the plate rather than a specific step forward against lefties. Read the rest of this entry »
You’re forgiven if you’re not exactly familiar with Diamondbacks utilityman Ildemaro Vargas. Though he’s spent parts of 10 seasons in the majors, the switch-hitting 34-year-old has been designated for assignment seven times, suited up for five different teams, and has never played more than 97 major league games in a season. From 2017–25, he netted a grand total of 1.5 WAR in 460 games, reaching 1.0 WAR in a season just once, in 2022. Yet Vargas just finished the hot streak of his life, one that made a bit of history. His 4-for-4 performance against the Cubs on Friday afternoon pushed his batting average to .404 and marked his 27th consecutive game with a hit dating back to last season, the longest in the majors in seven years and the longest ever by a Venezuela-born player; meanwhile, his 24-game streak to start the season is the second longest of the integration era. Vargas was finally held hitless on Saturday, but maintained a lofty perch on the batting leaderboards after a 1-for-4 performance on Sunday.
Vargas ended the weekend hitting .382/.406/.657, good enough to lead the majors in batting average and the National League in slugging percentage, thanks in part to his six home runs — a total that’s already matched his career high, set with the Diamondbacks in 2019. His 195 wRC+ leads the NL as well, while his on-base percentage ranks fourth in the league and his 1.5 WAR is virtually tied for seventh. Small sample though it may be, that’s a remarkable performance coming from a player who did not figure to be central to the plans of the Diamondbacks after hitting a meager .270/.292/.383 (85 wRC+) in 38 games and 121 plate appearances for the team last year.
Vargas was originally signed by the Cardinals out of Venezuela in 2008, so this is his 19th season of professional baseball. He’s now on his fourth stint with Arizona, which first signed him out of the independent Atlantic League in 2015, after he had been released by St. Louis. He reached the majors for a couple sips of coffee in 2017, and continued to shuffle between the minors and the majors until being DFA’d and traded to the Twins in August 2020. From there, in rapid succession, he bounced to the Cubs (2020), and then to the Pirates and back to the Diamondbacks (both 2021). He split 2022 between the Cubs and Nationals, the latter of whom kept him around through the ’24 season and gave him more regular play than any other team. The Diamondbacks signed him to a minor league deal in late January 2025; he exercised an opt-out in late May but quickly re-signed with the team. Four weeks later — after just 10 games in the majors — he was hit on the right foot by a curveball, fracturing his fifth metatarsal and sidelining him for about eight weeks. Read the rest of this entry »
Joe Rondone/The Republic-USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images
“Gee, Michael Soroka has been pretty good,” is the kind of statement that tells you more about the calendar than Soroka himself, but the point remains: Michael Soroka has been pretty good. The big Canadian steamrolled the Tigers (my pick for the AL pennant) with 10 strikeouts in five scoreless innings in his first start of the year. He followed that up with a solitary earned run over five innings against his former team, the Atlanta Braves.
The total bill, so far, is 13 strikeouts and 13 baserunners allowed (eight hits, four walks, one hit batter) in 10 innings, with a 0.90 ERA and 2.10 FIP. And against reasonably tough competition. So do the Diamondbacks, currently in dire need of pitching with seven big league arms currently on the IL, have something here? Read the rest of this entry »
Xander Bogaerts is on the verge of multiple milestones. Barring injury, the 33-year-old San Diego Padres shortstop will reach and surpass 400 doubles, 200 home runs, and 1,000 runs scored this season. He also has a shot at 2,000 hits, needing 178 more to arrive at that mark. And then there is the defensive side of the equation. Defying most expectations, Bogaerts is on the doorstep of having started 1,500 games at his middle-of-the-infield position.
As you may recall, Bogaerts’s bat was his calling card when he ranked as the top prospect in the Boston Red Sox system. Few doubted his ability to hit, but the likelihood that he would remain a shortstop was another story. Echoing the opinion of many throughout the industry, our December 2011 writeup of the then-19-year-old Oranjestad, Aruba native included the following:
“Defensively he plays a solid shortstop but he’s expected to slow down and shift over to third base before he reaches the majors.”
I’ve addressed that possibility with Bogaerts multiple times over the years, initially for a print-publication story I wrote when he was in Double-A. Quoting a scout, I titled the piece, “Looks Like a Shortstop to Me.”
All these years later, Bogaerts recalls the conjecture surrounding his future in the field. When I caught up to him at Padres camp last weekend, it was the first thing he mentioned when I posed this question: Had you been told at age 20 that your career would follow the path it has, would anything have surprised you? Read the rest of this entry »
Rob Schumacher/The Republic-USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images
Time waits for no man, except Jordan Lawlar, who’s been on the cusp of major league stardom for about four years.
The skinny on Lawlar as a prospect — where he topped out at a 60-FV grade in 2024 and 2025 — is that he carries the potential for plus power and plus shortstop defense with a plus-plus run tool. That’s a lot of pluses for an up-the-middle position, which is why the Diamondbacks spent a top-10 pick on him out of high school in 2021.
He played well enough to make Arizona’s playoff roster on the run to the 2023 NL pennant (though he didn’t play much, going 0-for-2 with a walk), and the two full seasons since have seen Lawlar’s path blocked both by his own injuries and the emergence of Geraldo Perdomo as a bona fide star. Read the rest of this entry »
Ryan Waldschmidt is ranked 35th on our newly-released 2026 Top 100 Prospects list, and his right-handed stroke is a big reason why. Along with assigning him a 50 FV, our prospect team wrote that the 23-year-old outfielder in the Arizona Diamondbacks system “does just about everything you want at the plate and he looks the part of a bat-first future regular in the box.” Drafted 31st overall in 2024 out of the University of Kentucky, Waldschmidt is coming off of a 2025 season in which he put up a .289/.419/.473 slash line with 18 home runs and a 142 wRC+ between High-A Hillsboro and Double-A Amarillo.
The way he goes about his craft differs somewhat from his contemporaries. Waldschmidt’s setup is unorthodox, and his swing isn’t exactly what you would draw up in the lab. When it comes to mechanics, the 6-foot-2, 215-pound Sarasota native isn’t a poster child for the science of hitting, but rather an advocate of the art of hitting. Fitting a paint-by-numbers mold isn’t his goal, squaring up baseballs is — and that’s precisely what he does. As evidenced by his track record and presence in the top half of our Top 100, Waldschmidt’s way works just fine.
Waldschmidt discussed his atypical hitting profile earlier this month.
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David Laurila: Your hitting mechanics have been described as “low maintenance.” What does that mean to you, and how long have your mechanics been in place?
Ryan Waldschmidt: “Throughout my whole entire life, I’ve had a pretty similar variation of what I do now. I mean, there was a time when I was younger that I had a little bit of a pick-it-up, put-it-back-down stride. Once I got to college… my freshman year, I even had a stride at Charleston Southern. Then once I got to Kentucky [as a sophomore] is when I kind of tapped into the no-stride from my setup. Read the rest of this entry »
After a long, quiet offseason, Zac Gallen is back where he started. In November, he turned down a qualifying offer, a one-year deal from the Diamondbacks worth $22.025 million. On Friday, Gallen and the Diamondbacks agreed to terms on a new contract. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before – it’s for one year and $22.025 million (with deferrals that drop the net present value to $18.75 million). Arizona’s ace is once again at the top of the rotation in the desert.
Gallen was my no. 19 free agent this winter, and I’ll just reproduce the first line of my write-up here: “After looking at Gallen’s résumé for about an hour, I came to an obvious conclusion: I’m glad I’m not a major league GM.” He had a severe case of pumpkinization in 2025. He missed fewer bats, drew fewer chases, walked more batters and struck out fewer, gave up louder contact, didn’t keep the ball on the ground, and lost a bit of velocity. It was the worst season of his career by a large margin; his 4.83 ERA might have been a caricature of his performance, but all of his advanced run prevention estimators surged to career-worst marks, too.
As a platform year, it left something to be desired. But I still think Gallen was right to turn down his QO and survey the landscape. After that didn’t work out, however, he made the obvious choice: Run it back in the same place and try again. Given that he put up a 3.20 ERA (3.22 FIP, 3.47 xFIP) from 2022 through 2024, worth a whopping 12.2 WAR (14.9 rWAR), betting on at least a little bit of bounce-back before a second trip to free agency surely felt very appealing. 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.
Andy Kostka
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 »
Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about MLB player chatbots, an Addison Barger giveaway, Tarik Skubal’s big arbitration win, the Tigers signing Framber Valdez, and a rough week for sports media, then (36:29) begin the 14th annual EW season preview series by discussing the 2026 Houston Astros with The Athletic’s Chandler Rome, and the 2026 Arizona Diamondbacks (1:25:35) with The Arizona Republic’s Nick Piecoro, followed (1:54:53) by a postscript.
Carlos Santana is well into the immaculate grid portion of his 16-year career. After spending 10 of his first 11 seasons in Cleveland, Santana has played for seven teams over the past five seasons (including one last stint with the Guardians last year). On Tuesday, we learned that he will be joining his newest, and southernmost, franchise in 2026, as the veteran first baseman has agreed to a one-year, $2 million deal with the Diamondbacks.
With just 0.3 WAR and a wRC+ of 81, Santana is coming off the second-worst season of his storied career. He will turn 40 a week after the season starts. All of that makes him a perfect fit for a Diamondbacks team whose mantra was announced by owner Ken Kendrick back in September: “We will not be spending at the same level.” Kendrick has so far lived up to his word. RosterResource currently has Arizona projected for a payroll of $173 million, down from $188 million in 2025. Santana said last year that the Diamondbacks were interested in him before he decided to return to Cleveland, and he is a reasonable bounce-back candidate and a cheap option for a team that’s only interested in cheap options. Read the rest of this entry »
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