Seldom, if ever, has the baseball world waited on tenterhooks to hear the result of a salary arbitration case, but most arbitration-eligible players are not Tarik Skubal. On this point, the arbitrator seems to have agreed, granting the Tigers left-hander a record $32 million salary for his final year of team control.
Arbitration cases themselves are usually back-page news. The question is not whether a player will return to his previous team, but how much he’ll be paid. Only people who work in baseball and unrecoverable RosterResource addicts care about such things, especially because the club’s offer and the player’s request usually only differ by a small amount. Read the rest of this entry »
Lucas Elissalt is an under-the-radar prospect in one of the game’s top farm systems. A 21-year-old right-hander whom the Detroit Tigers tabbed in the 13th round of the 2024 draft out of Chipola College, Elissalt is coming off of a first full professional season in which he put up a 2.51 ERA and 3.23 FIP over 89 2/3 innings split between Low-A Lakeland and High-A West Michigan. Moreover, his 26.9% strikeout rate was the highest among Detroit farmhands who tossed 80 or more frames.
Elissalt’s fastball wouldn’t be described as high octane. The 6-foot-4, 190-pound hurler’s heater sat 90-93 mph last year, occasionally ticking up to 94 (but also down to 89). Adding good weight to his lanky frame — “maybe 15 or 20 pounds” — could contribute to increased velocity, arguably the key to his developing into a major league starter.
Regardless of any velo gains that might be forthcoming, the ABS system could work in his favor. Elissalt’s 9.4% walk rate wasn’t exactly Maddux-esque, but command nonetheless profiles as one of his strengths going forward. At a time when some organizations are reassessing their views of power versus pitchability, the young righty may be ascending the minor league ladder at an opportune moment. What Elissalt lacks in gas, he makes up for with guile. Read the rest of this entry »
The biggest name remaining in free agency is now off the board, as Framber Valdez agreed to a three-year, $115 million contract with the Detroit Tigers on Wednesday night. The 32-year-old lefty, who ranked fourth on our Top 50 Free Agents list, hit the open market for the first time in his major league career this winter after parts of eight seasons with the Astros. In his final season in Houston, Valdez put up a 3.66 ERA and a 3.37 FIP in 31 starts over 192 innings, good enough to reach the 4.0-WAR mark for the third time in his career. His new deal with the Tigers comes with an opt out after the 2027 season, $20 million of the deal in the form of a signing bonus, and some unknown amount of deferred money, which will reduce the overall value of his contract by, well, an unknown amount.
For the Tigers, the benefits of adding Valdez to the rotation are quite clear. Of course, he would improve any team, since having too many good pitchers has been an actual problem zero times in baseball history, but he fits Detroit’s needs like a glove. The Tigers have managed to get their rotation through the season successfully over the last two years despite a lack of depth, but come playoff time, they have basically gone with a starting staff of Tarik Skubal and a trio of shrug emojis. Don’t believe me? Detroit has played 15 games across the last two postseasons, and I will now run down the full list of five-inning starts by Tigers pitchers with last names that aren’t Skubal:
[…]
[…]
Oh, sorry, I was eating tacos. There aren’t any players on that list. Signing Valdez gives the Tigers a dependable no. 2 starter, one who is better and with a better health record than Jack Flaherty. While I’m chaotic-neutral enough to get a thrill out of A.J. Hinch’s admitting in press conferences that he and the front office were basically coming up with the pitcher assignments as they went along, I’m sure that’s not an ideal scenario for making decisions. Read the rest of this entry »
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 »
Brayden Taylor had a disappointing season. Ranked seventh when our Tampa Bay Rays Top 56 Prospects list was published last February, the 23-year-old infielder went on to slash .173/.289/.286 with eight home runs and a 77 wRC+ over 437 plate appearances with Double-A Montgomery. It was a precipitous fall from the previous summer, when Taylor homered 20 times with a 143 wRC+ between High-A Bowling Green and the Double-A Biscuits.
I asked Taylor, a 2023 first-round pick out of Texas Christian University, about his lackluster performance in the early weeks of the Arizona Fall League season, where he was suiting up with the Mesa Solar Sox.
“Sometimes in baseball you just get a little bit out of sync,” said Taylor, who rallied to the tune of a .264/.400/.472 line in the hitter-friendly AFL. “Your sequence doesn’t feel good. Your body doesn’t feel good. Your mentality isn’t the greatest. I just didn’t have my best year at the plate.” Read the rest of this entry »
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.
“Could be, like, where I’m at on the ball too, but…”
With that fragment, Nolan McLean kicked off the baseball season. Ask a dozen baseball fans when they think the season starts, and you’re likely to get five or six different answers. Maybe you think the season starts on Opening Day, or with the first showcase series before Opening Day, or when spring training games start, or when your local broadcast starts actually airing spring training games, or on the first day of spring training, or when pitchers and catchers report, or on truck day. Or maybe you just think that all of these milestones deserve to be celebrated in their own right as we creep out of the cold toward actual, meaningful baseball. Nobody’s wrong, but some of us believe that baseball begins when grainy cellphone footage of players performing baseball-related activities on the backfields in Florida and Arizona starts trickling into our social media feeds. If you count yourself among that cohort, then congratulations. Baseball season has started.
First sight of Nolan McLean ????? atmlb.com/4qDlxyw
McLean was on the mound at Clover Park, the Mets’ spring training facility in Port St. Lucie, Florida to throw some sort of bullpen session alongside fellow prospect Jonah Tong. Someone on staff captured footage of the two young players pitching, and bothvideos went up on social media in the early afternoon on Monday. The videos were taken vertically, then cropped down to an awkward 672×768 pixel ratio, but they featured the loud pop of ball meeting glove, and that’s enough. By virtue of being posted first, McLean’s kicked off the season. Read the rest of this entry »
One of my favorite sports movie tropes is the Scrappy Underdogs Who Discover the Power of Friendship. While there are myriad variations on the theme, the basic template involves a group of lovable losers facing off against some big baddie and initially being humiliated. As the movie goes on, the various underdogs unite against their common foe, and through determination, grit, moxie, and typically some shenanigans, they meet their antagonists again, only on more even footing. Ideally, our ragtag band emerges victorious, but even if they don’t, they’ve at least learned something about themselves and friendship, often earning the grudging respect of their rivals along the way.
The Yankees were once baseball’s Evil Empire, but these days, the Dodgers reign supreme. They’re rich, they’re smart, they play in a ritzy city, and they would definitely look down on the kids at the ramshackle summer camp across the lake. As it has in most recent seasons, ZiPS projects the Dodgers to be the best team in baseball, and the newly-released FanGraphs Playoff Odds agree. But baseball needn’t accept its projected fate. It’s time to fight back! It’s time to unite some scrappy underdogs — at least on a spreadsheet. And so, with a tip of the hat to Tom Tango, whose theoretical inspired me to put together this piece, to the computer!
To construct our ragtag squad, we’ll start with the worst projected team in baseball, the Rockies, and ask ZiPS to build the best 26-man roster it can to square off against the Dodgers in a fictional seven-game World Series. I’m looking for two probability thresholds here: A Fighting Chance (a one-in-three shot of winning the series) and the Hunter Becomes the Hunted (the underdogs pass the 50% mark). If a roster made entirely of Rockies fails to meet these thresholds, then the players from the next-worst projected team will join the pool. We’ll keep repeating the process until our heroes emerge victorious. Read the rest of this entry »
I’m not going to pretend that you should care about, or even have heard of, Carmen Mlodzinski before now. He’s a spot starter and medium-leverage reliever on a bad team that gets 90% of its national attention when a specific other pitcher is on the mound. And if you’re not watching the Pirates for Paul Skenes, you’re probably watching them for Bubba Chandler or Mitch Keller or (before he got hurt) Jared Jones, and changing the channel when the bullpen comes in.
It’s fine. Life, unlike Skenes, is short. There are many more important players out there than Mlodzinski.
The first thing Chaim Bloom did after taking over baseball operations in St. Louis was trade away everything that wasn’t nailed down. Sonny Gray? Thanks for your contributions, now go try to win a ring in Boston. Willson Contreras? Gone, and to the same team. Nolan Arenado? Thanks for the memories, enjoy the desert. With those trades sorted, he’s moved on to step two: prying up some of those aforementioned nails to make more deals. The most recent shoe to drop in the Cardinals retooling might be the biggest one, though. Brendan Donovan is now a Seattle Mariner, the key piece in a three-team trade that sends Ben Williamson to Tampa Bay and a heaping helping of prospects and draft picks to the Cardinals.
Donovan isn’t a household name like many of the best Cardinals of recent years, but that has far more to do with the team’s middling success of late than any lack of talent. His combination of versatility and offensive firepower calls to mind Ben Zobrist, and unlike almost every other flexible defender who gets compared to Zobrist, this one actually makes sense. Zobrist ran a 121 wRC+ during his seven-year peak. Donovan’s career mark is 119, the same as his 2025 total. He’s under team control for two more years at a reasonable rate, too: $5.8 million this year, with his last trip through arbitration set for 2027.
“A plus bat who can play defense everywhere” generally isn’t a good title to have applied to you. That’s because most of the hitters who receive that label either aren’t plus bats, don’t play good defense, or both. But as I mentioned, that’s not Donovan, and we might as well examine each of those two skills, as he’s the entire reason this trade happened, the best player going to any of the three clubs by a mile. Read the rest of this entry »
