With Ranger Suarez now a Red Sock, Zack Wheeler rehabbing from thoracic outlet surgery, and Aaron Nola trying to rebound from a career-worst season, the Phillies rotation has its share of uncertainty as the 2026 regular season approaches. On Monday, the team did its best to bolster that unit for the longer term, agreeing to a five-year, $135 million extension with lefty Jesús Luzardo.

The 28-year-old Luzardo is coming off an impressive first season with the Phillies, who acquired him (along with catching prospect Paul McIntosh) from the Marlins in December 2024 in exchange for two prospects, shortstop Starlyn Caba and outfielder Emaarion Boyd. After making just 12 starts for Miami in 2024 due to elbow tightness and a stress reaction in his lower back, Luzardo made a full complement of 32 starts last year while setting career highs with 183.2 innings and 5.3 WAR, both second on the team behind Cristopher Sánchez. Both his 2.90 FIP and 3.33 xERA — each of which ranked fourth in the National League — make better cases for the quality of his pitching than his 3.92 ERA; in fact, the gap between his ERA and FIP was the third-highest among all qualifiers:

Strangely enough, all 10 of those pitchers hail from the NL; José Soriano, who had the largest gap in the American League at 0.53 runs (4.26 ERA, 3.73 FIP), ranked 11th among qualifiers, just below the cutoff in the table above. Read the rest of this entry »

A pitcher goes to the mound hoping to record outs without allowing runs. Unfortunately, a lot goes on between the ball leaving the pitcher’s hand and the scoreboard changing. You can’t just toe the rubber, chuck the ball, and say, “God’s will be done,” as you stare glassy-eyed into the distance like Martin Sheen as Robert E. Lee in Gettysburg.

I mean, you could, but you wouldn’t like the results.

A modern pitcher goes to the mound with a plan to influence events much further up the causal chain. Every pitcher is special in his own way, but every plan boils down to this: By changing speed, movement, or location, trick the hitter into swinging somewhere other than where the ball will be. Read the rest of this entry »

If there’s something even more satisfying than spending your hard-earned money, it’s spending someone else’s money that you didn’t earn. When we’re talking baseball, unless you’re an extremely high-net-worth individual who can casually spend hundreds of millions of dollars — if this describes you, call me and we can totally hang out or something — you only have the option to spend other people’s cash. I mean, I haven’t technically asked American Express to up my credit limit to $300 million, but I’m guessing the answer would be no. Every year around this time, I make a whole piece out of it, naming seven players I think teams should attempt to sign to long-term contracts now, rather than waiting until later. There are some additional complications, of course, with a lockout likely coming after this season, but teams and players could be willing to act with more urgency to sign contracts now before all the uncertainty ahead of them.

I’ve (hopefully) chosen seven players whose possible extensions would benefit both the player and the team, as all good contracts ought to do. I’ve included the up-to-date ZiPS projections for each player, as well as the contract that ZiPS thinks each player should get, though that doesn’t necessarily mean I think the player will end up with that figure or even sign an extension. Read the rest of this entry »

In 2024, 11 years after he was the consensus no. 1 prospect in the game, Jurickson Profar finally broke out, setting career highs in home runs (24), wRC+ (139) and WAR (4.3), making his first All-Star team, and helping the Padres to an NL Wild Card berth. He cashed in that winter; after never making more than $7.75 million in a season, Profar signed a three-year, $42 million deal with the Braves. Four games into his tenure with his new team, however, he drew an 80-game suspension for violating the Joint Drug Agreement. While he was productive upon returning and figured prominently in the plans of a team expected to contend for the NL East title this season, on Tuesday, the 33-year-old outfielder drew a second PED suspension, this one for the entire 2026 season.

Profar wasn’t the only player reported to be facing a PED suspension on Tuesday, or even the only NL East outfielder who had run afoul of the game’s drug policy. According to multiple sources, the Phillies’ Johan Rojas has an 80-game suspension looming for a first-time offense. While MLB officially announced Profar’s suspension in a press release sent at 6:47 p.m. ET on Tuesday — over six hours after ESPN’s Jeff Passan first broke the news — Rojas’ is not yet official.

Both players are reportedly appealing their suspensions. An hour after Passan’s tweet, The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal reported that the Major League Baseball Players Association is filing a grievance on Profar’s behalf. It’s not clear yet on what grounds the union is challenging the suspension, but such a case would be heard by MLB’s independent arbitrator, Martin F. Scheinman. Later that afternoon, The Athletic’s Charlotte Varnes and Matt Gelb reported that Rojas is appealing his suspension, as well. He is starting in center field and batting seventh in Philadelphia’s exhibition game on Wednesday against Team Canada. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m of the opinion that you usually don’t learn much from watching spring training. It’s glorified practice, with inconsistent quality of competition even before you consider the fact that some guys are going all-out while others are working on a specific issue rather than trying to win the game. This is especially true for position players who came into camp with at least an inside track on a starting job. It’s why I pay more attention to college baseball during February and March. Hell, the new season of Love Is Blind is out and I need to catch up so I can see if there are any ex-college ballplayers in the cast.

One exception to the rule that you don’t learn much from spring training: Justin Crawford. 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.

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 »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Philadelphia Phillies. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the sixth 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 »

This year’s Hall of Fame ballot included three former Philadelphia Phillies position players, none of whom received the necessary 319 votes (out of 425 cast) to gain election. Chase Utley fared best with 251 votes (59.1%), while Bobby Abreu got 131 (30.8%), and Jimmy Rollins received 108 (25.4%). As did my colleagues Jay Jaffe and Dan Szymborski, I put checkmarks next to Abreu’s and Utley’s names, but not Rollins’s.

How did other BBWAA voters choose among the Phillies trio? A comprehensive answer isn’t possible — not everyone makes their ballots public — but we do know about the 260 voters whose selections were shared on Ryan Thibodaux’s Ballot Tracker. Here is the breakdown as of yesterday afternoon courtesy of the Tracker’s Anthony Calamis:

66 voted for none of the three.
25 had all three.
52 had only Utley.
9 had only Abreu.
3 had only Rollins.
63 had Utley and Abreu, but not Rollins.
42 had Utley and Rollins, but not Abreu.

As for the players’ relative merit, that is in the eye of the beholder. Reasonable arguments, both for and against, can be made for all three former Phillies by prioritizing specific statistics and accolades — or even reputations (none of Abreu, Rollins, or Utley have been tainted by scandal). Read the rest of this entry »

Well, that’s a relief. On Friday afternoon, the Phillies, spurned by Bo Bichette, got swept up in the tidal wave of hot stove transactions, agreeing to a three-year, $45 million deal (plus $15 million in incentives) to keep J.T. Realmuto in Philadelphia, according to Ken Rosenthal and Matt Gelb of The Athletic. You may have your qualms about rebounding from a rejection by signing a catcher three years into his decline phase for another three years, but consider what other options the Phillies had, and then consider how weird it would have felt to watch Realmuto playing in another uniform after all this time. It’s probably too many years, and that’s not great, but look at everything else that’s going on in the world right now and realize how much nicer it is to spend a moment thinking about something that’s merely not great.

Before we dive into the here and now, let’s take this chance to remind ourselves just how special a career Realmuto has had. He debuted with the Marlins in 2014 and blossomed into a star in 2017, combining excellent defense with a great bat and an exquisite baserunning prowess unbefitting a backstop. (He currently ranks 23rd all-time among catchers with 104 stolen bases. If we limit ourselves to 1901 and later, he moves up to 11th.) Such things were never meant for Miami. In February 2019, after he’d put up two four-win seasons and earned an All-Star nod and a Silver Slugger, the Marlins traded him to Philadelphia for a blockbuster package that netted them 2.0 total WAR and $250,000 in international bonus pool money. Realmuto got even better the next season.

From 2017 to 2022, Realmuto wasn’t just the best catcher in baseball; there was an ocean between him and the rest of the competition. He led all catchers with 28.2 WAR. Yasmani Grandal, in second place, had just 19.6. Of the 207 catchers who played during that stretch, Grandal and future Hall of Famer Buster Posey were the only ones whose WAR total Realmuto didn’t double. Over that stretch, he tops our leaderboards at the plate, on the basepaths, and on defense, and nobody else is even close. Realmuto has earned two Gold Gloves, two Silver Sluggers, three All-Star nods, and MVP votes in two seasons. He has a career 104 wRC+ in the playoffs. It’s great that the Phillies have held onto him. He’ll reach 200 career home runs in Philadelphia. He’s the team’s longest-tenured position player, ahead of Bryce Harper by roughly a month and trailing only Aaron Nola on the pitching side. He’s a grinder, the heart of a Phillies team that has been at the top of the league for years now. Still, you know the problem as well as I do.

It’s not 2022 anymore, and Realmuto has got so, so many miles on his knees. He has caught at least 125 games seven different times, and led the league in innings caught in three of the last four seasons. He ranks seventh in innings caught since 2002. Two of the guys ahead of him played through their age-39 seasons. One is a manager now.

Realmuto started looking human in 2023, and he missed a couple months due to a meniscectomy in 2024. Over the past three years, he’s run a perfectly average 100 wRC+. That’s still plenty good for a catcher, but it dropped to 94 in 2025, and advanced numbers like DRC+ have him even lower. Although he hit the ball just about as hard as ever, his bat speed took a very scary dive from the 70th percentile in 2024 to the 47th in 2025, and his barrel rate followed suit. Realmuto once feasted on four-seamers, but over the past three seasons, he’s put up negative run values against them. He started struggling with cutters in 2024 and sinkers in 2025, meaning he now struggles against any kind of fastball.

He has combined this weaker bat with poor framing numbers, and despite still possessing plenty of speed, he’s even started to take on water in the baserunning department. Put it together, and Realmuto has recorded almost exactly 2.0 WAR in each of the past three seasons. Despite all the doom and gloom I just laid on you, that’s not just a useful player, it’s an above-average catcher.

It makes Realmuto the best option behind the plate on the Phillies roster, ahead of Rafael Marchán and Garrett Stubbs. Likewise, it made Realmuto the top-ranked catcher on our Top 50 Free Agents list, where he came in at 30th overall. Wouldn’t you rather have him than Danny Jansen or Victor Caratini, who ranked 38th and 39th? In 2025, you definitely would, but projections pegged Realmuto for a two-year deal with an average annual value of $13 million. Instead, he’s making $15 million for an extra year, which will be, once again, the age-37 season of the guy who already ranks seventh in innings caught this century. Still, there was no better catcher on the trading block, and unless the Tyrell Corporation has started manufacturing them while I wasn’t paying attention, we’ve now exhausted all the ways by which a baseball team can get its hands on a baseball player.

Everything makes sense here. The Phillies are a win-now team that’s already above the highest luxury tax threshold. It’s hard to blame them for holding onto the best catcher available to them, especially when he’s a guy they love – a guy they and their fans are capable of appreciating far more deeply than anybody else is – for a year and a few million dollars more than would be ideal. Three years is not forever, and Realmuto now has an excellent chance at ending his career as a Phillie. It’ll be OK. Try to enjoy your weekend.

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.

In their backyard baseball fantasies and daydreams, what kid hasn’t imagined hitting a late-inning home run to win a playoff game, or even Game 7 of the World Series? Howie Kendrick lived that dream not once but twice during the 2019 postseason, capped by a homer that sent the Washington Nationals on their way to their first championship in franchise history. What’s more, his October run (which also included NLCS MVP honors) topped off a storybook rise from humble beginnings that included a complicated family situation growing up and an amateur career that took place in almost complete obscurity.

“The more I learned about him, he starts telling me about how no schools wanted him, how it was really hard to stay confident,” former Angels teammate Torii Hunter, who mentored Kendrick upon joining the Angels in 2008, recalled in ’19. “I just kept thinking: This guy could have really fallen through the cracks.”

What put Kendrick on the map was his legendary bat-to-ball ability. Though he never won the major league batting title that was expected of him while hitting for a .358 average during his time in the minors, he carved out an impressive 14-year career, earning All-Star honors and helping his teams make the playoffs eight times.

…

Howard Joseph Kendrick III was born on July 12, 1983 in Jacksonville, Florida. He never knew his father, and because his mother, Belinda Kendrick, was a staff sergeant serving overseas in the United States Army, he and his two sisters grew up in the care of his maternal grandmother, Ruth Woods, in Callahan, Florida, a two-stoplight town of less than 1,000 people near the Georgia border. All 12 of Woods’ children, and their children, lived in the area as well. Read the rest of this entry »