Trey Yesavage profiles as a strong Rookie of the Year candidate, but he won’t have a chance to begin building his case in the near term. The 22-year-old Toronto Blue Jays right-hander landed on the injured list due to shoulder impingement and won’t be ready when the season gets underway later this week. His return is expected to come sooner rather than later — fingers are crossed throughout Canada — but for now, Yesavage is on the shelf.

Five months ago he was turning heads in the World Series. With just six MLB outings under his belt — three in the regular season, and three across the ALDS and ALCS — Yesavage bedeviled LA batters with an array of high-riding heaters and diving splitters. He was especially dominant in Game 5, fanning a dozen Dodgers while allowing three baserunners and a lone run over seven frames.

His meteoric rise and eye-popping postseason performances raised his public persona, but the Pottstown, Pennsylvania native hasn’t otherwise changed since being drafted 22nd overall in 2024 out of East Carolina University. He’s still polite and unassuming, and his overpowering arsenal has remained in place.

“I’m pretty much the same dude,” Yesavage told me at Blue Jays camp last week. “The pitches are the same. The velocity and movement are the same. I also don’t look at [the metrics] all that much. Whenever Trackman is up on the board, all I really look at is the vert on my heater, and the velo. The only questions I’ll ask my pitching coach are to make sure that my most-used pitch is in line.”

That would be his four-seam fastball, which averaged 94.7 mph and 19.5 inches of induced vertical break across his smattering of regular season outings. Thrown at a 45.2% clip, the offering was augmenting by a slider (28.4%) and a splitter (26.4%), the last of those offerings being the righty’s most lethal weapon. A quintessential complement to his well-elevated heaters, Yesavage’s splitter induced a 57.1% whiff rate and a .111 BAA against big-league hitters.

He began tinkering with his signature pitch in the middle of his three collegiate seasons, but it wasn’t until his draft year that the efforts bore fruit. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been playing around with the new FanGraphs Lab tools a lot recently. At first, it was bug testing, but it pretty quickly turned into fun. One minute, you’re making sure that sliders show up correctly. Next minute, you’re wondering about Logan Webb’s backwards slider. See, Webb throws a big-bending sweeper instead of a gyro slider, but it doesn’t behave at all how you’d expect: It’s good against lefties and bad against righties.

In 2025, Webb put up 5.5 WAR, a career-high mark and his fifth straight season of four or more wins. He used his sweeper a lot to get there. Webb was one of the most frequent right-on-left sweeper users in the majors, and also one of the best. Measured by run value added per 100 pitches, he was 11th in baseball among all righties who threw even 100 such sweepers – and he threw 400 of them. He was 15th in whiff rate for good measure. He was as effective as Paul Skenes was in this situation while going to the pitch three times as often.

But while he was lights out with the pitch against lefties, it fared quite poorly against righties. He was below average, and by a lot. Ninety-one pitchers threw 100 or more right-right sweepers; Webb finished 75th in run value added (or lost, in this case) per 100 pitches. While the league gets about 25% more whiffs with the platoon advantage, his whiff rate with his sweeper was the same against righties and lefties. This all sounds very strange. But when I dug into it, I got some answers. 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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After getting what amounted to replacement level production at second base last season, the Giants have a new man for the keystone. The good news is that he’s a three-time batting champion, and he’s not outrageously expensive. The bad news is that lately he hasn’t been an incredibly productive hitter despite his high batting averages, and what’s more, second base could be a stretch. However it shakes out, on Saturday the Giants agreed to terms with free agent Luis Arraez on a one-year, $12 million deal.

Arraez, who will turn 29 on April 9, spent last season and most of the previous one with the Padres after being acquired from the Marlins in a May 4, 2024 trade. While he won his third straight batting title in 2024 and made his third consecutive All-Star team, his time with San Diego was one of diminishing returns on both sides of the ball. Last year again he led the NL with 181 hits, but his .292/.327/.392 slash line only amounted to a 104 wRC+, the lowest mark of his career and down from a 109 wRC+ (on .314/.346/.392 hitting) in 2024. By comparison, he hit for a 130 wRC+ (.316/.375/.420) when he won the AL batting title with the Twins in 2022 and a 131 wRC+ (.354/.393/.469) when he won the NL batting title in ’23. He slipped from being more or less a three-win player (6.1 WAR in 2022–23) to a one-win player (2.0 WAR in 2024–25).

Arraez is an odd duck, an anachronism in that the things he’s best at don’t fit this historical moment particularly well. At a time when home run and strikeout rates are near their all-time highs and batting averages closer to an all-time low, he’s the game’s most contact-oriented hitter, as well as the active leader in batting average (.317). That makes him a fun player to theorize about, as colleague Davy Andrews did when he recently pondered the possibility of Arraez signing with the Rockies, whose spacious ballpark would’ve provided him with the most room to run up his batting average on balls in play by dumping single after single in front of outfielders playing deep. Read the rest of this entry »

The San Francisco Giants, with their unique front office leadership and unconventional manager, have gone the traditional route. “Acquire Harrison Bader” is a tried-and-true team-building strategy for a would-be contender; the former Florida Gator is on his way to his seventh organization in the past four-and-a-half years.

The Giants, unlike Bader’s previous employers, seem interested in keeping him around long enough to unpack all his furniture: Bader’s new contract is for two years and $20.5 million.

Regardless of any analysis to follow, this move makes the Giants stronger in 2026. Bader is a legitimate center fielder who’ll relieve the defensive pressure on the freshly emancipated Jung Hoo Lee (who’s stretched in center) and Heliot Ramos (who’s stretched at any position that requires him to wield a glove). Guys who can play center field comfortably and have a clue at the plate are harder to find than you’d think — especially in free agency — and the Giants got one. Read the rest of this entry »

New Year’s Eve is a great time to agree to an eight-figure contract; you’ve already got champagne handy to celebrate. Congratulations, then, to Tyler Mahle and the San Francisco Giants on killing two birds with one stone.

Mahle is one of baseball’s great “I can fix him guys,” a status reflected in his contract structure: $10 million guaranteed over a single year, with an additional $3 million available in performance incentives. In 2020, the right-hander struck out 29.9% of the batters he faced over the pandemic-shortened season. The following year, he made 33 starts, threw 180 innings, and posted 3.9 WAR. 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 great Vin Scully often described Hunter Pence as “all elbows and kneecaps,” and if you never understood the meaning of that colorful phrase, one look at the gangly 6-foot-4 right fielder, with his unorthodox swing, gait, and throwing mechanics, would explain a whole lot. Amplified by his high socks and what more than one writer termed his “bug-eyed intensity,” Pence’s on-field style was anything but textbook. As it turns out, there was a reason for that: In 2013, he was diagnosed with a condition called Scheuermann’s Disease, which caused his vertebrae to grow at different rates, deprived him of flexibility in his thoracic spine, and led him to find ways to compensate. Despite that significant disadvantage, Pence carved out an impressive 14-year major league career, making four All-Star teams and helping the Giants win the 2012 and ’14 World Series. 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 »

The Giants have one thing so many other teams covet: a genuine ace to lead their starting rotation. Only one other starting pitcher has accumulated more WAR than Logan Webb over the last five years, and he’s eighth in baseball in park- and league-adjusted FIP over that same period. After posting the best season of his career in 2025, Webb will continue to lead the rotation in ‘26. The rest of the pitching staff, though, is rife with question marks. San Francisco took its first steps toward addressing some of those issues this week, signing Adrian Houser, Jason Foley, and Gregory Santos to bolster the depth across the staff.

On Tuesday, Houser agreed to a two-year, $22 million contract with a club option for a third year. He made a name for himself as a reliable backend starter and swingman for the Brewers across his first seven seasons in the big leagues, before bouncing around six different organizations over the last two years. Traded to the Mets during the 2023-24 offseason, Houser struggled to a 5.84 ERA and 4.93 FIP across seven starts and 16 relief appearances. He made a handful of minor league appearances in the Orioles and Cubs organizations during the remainder of 2024, then signed a minor league deal with Rangers last offseason. Texas never called him up, and so he opted out of that deal and signed a major league contract with the White Sox in May.

I don’t think anyone was expecting a big breakout once Houser joined Chicago’s starting rotation. For most of his career, both of his fastballs averaged around 93-94 mph, but his velocity had dipped a few ticks by the time he was 32 and pitching for the Mets. It was a surprise, then, to see him firing 95-mph four-seamers as a member of the White Sox.

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 next team up is the San Francisco Giants.

Batters

The 2025 season was an odd one for the Giants, as they lurched in and out of playoff contention at various points. A solid start kept San Francisco in the mix in the early months, lurking just a few games out in the NL West for a surprisingly long time. The team’s high water mark came in mid-June, when a victory over the Dodgers briefly got them into a first place tie, but just a few weeks later, they found themselves nine games out and falling to .500 faster than Bitcoin prices in 2014. It only took a week to trim that deficit down to four games, but a couple of significant losing streaks wiped out that work going into the trade deadline. The Giants traded Camilo Doval, Tyler Rogers, and Mike Yastrzemski at the deadline, and the team treaded water just enough to find themselves in the Wild Card race at the very end of the season thanks to the New York Mets really Metsing it.

After that kind of season, finishing at .500 feels like the universe getting the exact right result for a change. ZiPS does see a lot of sources of optimism in the offense, and thinks the Giants likely underperformed their actual talent level in 2025. Both Matt Chapman and Willy Adames finished the season with All-Star-caliber numbers, especially impressive for Adames considering how much he struggled in the early going. ZiPS actually thought both of them underperformed their peripheral statistics, a pretty decent divergence from Statcast, which wasn’t quite as optimistic. ZiPS has been high on Chapman and Adames in recent years anyway, and sees both as leading All-Star contenders next season. Read the rest of this entry »