Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about a surprising amount of Mo Vaughn content, a rash of spring injuries (including Gerrit Cole‘s Tommy John surgery and other Yankees ailments), the latest A’s and Rays woes, and more. Then they preview the 2025 Los Angeles Dodgers (26:11) with The Athletic’s Fabian Ardaya, and the 2025 Colorado Rockies (1:34:00) with The Rockies Insider’s Patrick Lyons.

Audio intro: Luke Lillard, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio interstitial 1: El Warren, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio interstitial 2: Liz Panella, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Jonathan Crymes 2, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to Vaughn story 1
Link to Vaughn story 2
Link to Enhanced Games wiki
Link to Hang Up episode
Link to FG post on Cole
Link to Ben on spring injuries
Link to Rays report
Link to A’s report
Link to A’s report 2
Link to A’s feature
Link to Russell on rep. level
Link to offseason spending
Link to FG payrolls page
Link to Dodgers depth chart
Link to Dodgers offseason tracker
Link to Sasaki signing info
Link to “Lettuce” digital short
Link to EW TJ research
Link to “Are We the Baddies?”
Link to cherry blossoms info
Link to prank war article
Link to prank war video
Link to Fabian’s author archive
Link to Rockies depth chart
Link to Rockies offseason tracker
Link to Rock Talk 1
Link to Rock Talk 2
Link to Colorado pronunciation
Link to hangover effect info
Link to Freeland on EW
Link to Ben on Freeland in 2018
Link to Sheehan on Bud Black
Link to Monfort prediction
Link to Patrick’s work
Link to Patrick’s podcast
Link to trademark article 1
Link to trademark article 2
Link to trademark article 3
Link to trademark renewal
Link to EW gift subscriptions

 Sponsor Us on Patreon
 Email Us: podcast@fangraphs.com
 EW Subreddit
 Effectively Wild Wiki
 iTunes Feed (Please rate and review us!)
 Spotify Feed
 Facebook Group
 Bluesky Account
 Twitter Account
 Get Our Merch!

Podcast (effectively-wild): Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Jacob deGrom made his Cactus League debut on Saturday, tossing two perfect innings against the Royals and looking dominant while doing so. The 36-year-old righty, who returned from his second Tommy John surgery to make three abbreviated starts last September, projects to be the team’s most valuable starter, even while pitching at the back of the rotation in order to limit his innings. He’s the most substantial “addition” to a team that succumbed to a championship hangover last year but is forecast (barely) to have the upper hand in a three-way race in the AL West.

After winning the 2023 World Series in manager Bruce Bochy’s return to the dugout, so much went wrong for the Rangers in terms of injury and underperformance last season that they slipped to 78 wins and third place in the AL West. But while the Astros traded Kyle Tucker and lost Alex Bregman this winter, and the Mariners mostly sat on their hands, the Rangers had a comparatively productive winter, with general manager Chris Young making a couple key trades and adding a handful of free agents to augment their lineup and overhaul their bullpen. Our Playoff Odds currently project Texas for 84.8 wins and a 32.8% chance of winning the division, compared to 84.4 wins for the other two teams, with Seattle’s odds at 30.6% and Houston’s at 29.4%. Obviously, that’s a true toss-up, but things look better for the Rangers than at the start of last year, when even as reigning champs, they projected for 81.8 wins (and 10.7% odds) to the Astros’ 90.5.

Unlike Jake Burger, Kyle Higashioka, Chris Martin and Joc Pederson — the most prominent outside additions to this roster — deGrom was already a Ranger, having signed a five-year, $185 million deal in December 2022. Yet his contribution since putting pen to paper has been minimal. He made just six starts before needing another repair of his torn ulnar collateral ligament on June 12, 2023 (his first was in 2010). Fifteen months and one day later, he returned to throw 10.2 innings spread over three starts, enough to provide some peace of mind heading into the offseason. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re a Cleveland Guardians fan, the ritual is surely getting old at this point. The team develops an All-Star middle infielder, and times are good. Then, inevitably, that player leaves and is replaced by a new and unproven middle infielder. Can the team make it work? Tune in next season to find out.

The latest intriguing replacement is Gabriel Arias, who, like seemingly every recent Guardians hitting prospect, is a shortstop by trade. He looked like the heir apparent to the job in 2023, backing up at short before Amed Rosario’s departure. But Arias scuffled, then broke his wrist at the tail end of the season. That injury might have lingered into last year, and whatever the reason, he struggled mightily, ceding the shortstop job to Brayan Rocchio. Luckily, in Cleveland, a contributing role is only one trade away, and now that second baseman Andrés Giménez is a Blue Jay, Arias heads into 2025 as a key part of the Guardians’ infield plans.

Plenty of the particulars of Arias’ 563 major league plate appearances are ripped right out of his last prospect report. Intermittent contact issues? Yeah, he strikes out a third of the time. Potential for power? He launched 10 homers in half a season in 2023. Defensive versatility? He’s logged time at every position other than pitcher and catcher. But the relative weights of each of those features of his game matter, and so far in his career, the contact issues have dominated.

It’s possible to succeed despite a high-strikeout game, and honestly, Arias is the right kind of player to do so. Teams will tolerate a player with a bad contact rate if he hits for power and contributes with his glove. The defensive component is already there, especially because of his versatility, but the power hasn’t arrived; his career .138 ISO is the domain of contact hitters, not boom-bust guys whose muscles have muscles.

Is that going to change this year? To be clear, I don’t know. Guys like Arias flame out all the time. It’s really hard to stick around and produce in the majors when you run even a 15% swinging strike rate – and he’s up near 20%. But if things work out, it’s fairly easy to see how they would. Really, one video is all I need to show you:

Read the rest of this entry »

Cody Bellinger enters the 2025 season as the starting center fielder of the New York Yankees, after they acquired him from the Chicago Cubs over the offseason in a trade that was essentially a salary dump. A former MVP and Gold Glove winner who spent two seasons in Chicago after six with the Dodgers, Bellinger is coming off a 2024 campaign that saw him swat 18 home runs, log a 109 wRC+, and put up 2.2 WAR in 130 games.

In November 2016, Bellinger was a 21-year-old first baseman who’d spent the lion’s share of that year raking in Double-A. The Scottsdale native ranked second on our Dodgers Top Prospects list, which was published that month.

What did his FanGraphs scouting report look like at that time? Moreover, what does he think of it all these years later? Curious to find out, I shared some of what Eric Longenhagen wrote back in 2016 and asked Bellinger to respond to it. Read the rest of this entry »

One way to tell the difference between a baseball fan who has a life and a true sicko is whether they have strong opinions on players who sign minor league contracts and attend spring training on a non-roster invite. The person in a Cubs hat who’s stoked about the Kyle Tucker trade and knows all sorts of intimate biographical details about Shota Imanaga? That’s your friend. If they start talking to you about Travis Jankowski, they might be in a little too deep.

We sickos know that while championships can be won and glory earned on the major league free agent market, NRIs are nonetheless a meaningful collection of useful roster players. Sometimes more. I’d argue that these fringe hopefuls are the only players who truly stand to gain by their performance in camp.

Moreover, these players are by definition underdogs. They include former top prospects, guys recovering from injury, and itinerant Quad-A players hoping for one last spin of the wheel. If you weren’t interested in their progress on a competitive level, surely we can interest you in an underdog story. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Detroit Tigers. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as our own observations. This is the fifth year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers. The ETAs listed generally correspond to the year a player has to be added to the 40-man roster to avoid being made eligible for the Rule 5 draft. Manual adjustments are made where they seem appropriate, but we use that as a rule of thumb.

A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.

All of the ranked prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details (and updated TrackMan data from various sources) than this article and integrates every team’s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »

Expecting the worst only takes out so much of the sting when it happens. As if the baseball world needed any reminder, the Yankees announced on Monday evening that Gerrit Cole is bound for Tommy John surgery.

This had seemed inevitable since Cole felt discomfort after leaving his start against the Twins on Thursday and went for an MRI. The Yankees and their ace received a second opinion from Dr. Neal ElAttrache, obviously hoping for something along the lines of “Oh wait, that other doctor was reading this upside-down, he’s fine.” What they got was an appointment for surgery on Tuesday in Los Angeles. Read the rest of this entry »

Stop me if you’ve heard this before: This was supposed to be the year for Francisco Alvarez. He had an electric rookie season for the Mets in 2023, putting up 3.0 WAR thanks to excellent framing numbers and a power-heavy approach that balanced 25 home runs with a .209 batting average for a 97 wRC+. Coming into the 2024 season, he was poised to go from breakout rookie to full-blown star, but he got off to a slow start and suffered a torn UCL in his left thumb in April. Alvarez returned in June and took a few days to get going, but put up a 112 wRC+ over his last 78 games and finished the season with 1.9 WAR. He’s now 23 years old, and once again, 2025 was supposed to be the year that he put it all together. Instead, Mets manager Carlos Mendoza told reporters on Sunday that Alvarez fractured the hamate bone in that same left hand during live batting practice on Saturday. He’ll have surgery today and be out for six to eight weeks, missing the first month or so of the season.

As the injury affects the meat of Alvarez’s catching hand, it would be reasonable to expect the absence to fall on the longer side of that range. However, Baseball Prospectus’ Recovery Dashboard lists two catchers who fractured their hamate bones early in the season – Francisco Cervelli in 2016 and James McCann in 2022, when he was playing for the Mets – and neither missed more than 44 days. Just to muddle our expectations even more, hamate injuries are thought sap a hitter’s power upon their return, but a 2022 study from Jason Collette reveals no such pattern. As power is the cornerstone of Alvarez’s game, losing it would pretty much crush his offensive profile, but it’s worth noting that, despite the thumb surgery, he actually put up higher max and 90th percentile exit velocities in 2024 than he did in 2023. The injury is obviously unwelcome news, and the last thing Alvarez needs is yet another surgery on his catching hand. Moreover, he’ll lose half of his spring training ramp up and have to jump into major league action after a rehab assignment. Still, this is not normally a major injury and there’s a decent chance that he won’t return in notably diminished form. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve ever lived in a cold climate and had a car that you’re trying to nurse through one more winter because you can’t quite afford to replace it, you know the startup noise. Sort of a squeal on a rumble on a cough. You’re waking your old Ford Explorer from hibernation, and it would rather go back to bed.

Throwing arms are like that to some extent. As much as pitchers stay loose and work out all offseason — we no longer live in an age when a pitcher could spend all winter inside a bottle of whiskey, dry out on the train ride to Sarasota, and throw 250 innings without breathing hard — sometimes the body just does not ramp up to game fitness the way you’d expect.

As routine as injury announcements are this time of year, the end of last week was a bloodbath. Three pitchers who were going to end up on a lot of AL Cy Young shortlists — Gerrit Cole, George Kirby, and Grayson Rodriguez — all came down with some flavor of arm ickiness. Any kind of layoff at this point in the calendar can disrupt a pitcher’s ramp-up to the point that it imperils an Opening Day start, and three contenders are now praying that worse news isn’t coming. Read the rest of this entry »

Something might be brewing in Sacramento. The 2024 A’s beat expectations by a mile, though expectations were admittedly muted coming off of a disastrous 2023, and this offseason has seen the club be quite busy. The team’s best player, Brent Rooker, signed an extension that will keep him around through at least 2029, well past when the A’s are scheduled to move to Las Vegas. The pitching staff looks much improved, thanks to the surprise signing of Luis Severino and a trade for Jeffrey Springs. And now last year’s second-best player, Lawrence Butler, has signed a contract extension too:

BREAKING: Outfielder Lawrence Butler and the A’s are in agreement on a seven-year, $66.5 million contract extension with one club option, sources tell ESPN. Butler, 24, broke out as a rookie last year and is seen as a foundational player for the A’s moving forward.

— Jeff Passan (@jeffpasan.bsky.social) 2025-03-07T04:22:52.566Z

A year ago, this contract would have been mind-boggling. Butler debuted in the bigs in 2023 with an uneven two months of work. His minor league track record suggested intriguing upside – he flashed excellent power while climbing the ranks and was only in a position to struggle in the majors because he’d reached Triple-A at age 22 – but like so many A’s, he was a question mark, a talented youngster with some good signs and some red flags.

The A’s started 2024 hot, at least by their standards, but Butler didn’t. After breaking camp with the team, he ran into a huge power outage. Over 121 plate appearances, he managed just two homers en route to a .179/.281/.274 slash line, so the A’s sent him back down to Triple-A. What can you do? Sometimes your 23-year-old who never played above A-ball until a year ago needs a bit of extra seasoning. Read the rest of this entry »