Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Konnor Griffin’s openness to an extension with the Pirates and a weird Wilyer Abreu check-swing broken bat, then preview the 2026 Boston Red Sox (20:00) with The Boston Globe’s Alex Speier, and the 2026 Cincinnati Reds (1:08:36) with The Athletic’s C. Trent Rosecrans.
Jarren Duran enjoyed a breakout season in 2024, making the AL All-Star team, receiving down-ballot support in the MVP voting, and leading the league in several key categories while ranking fifth with 6.8 WAR. Though he remained an above-average player last year, his season didn’t go quite so well, and as the 2026 campaign dawns, his role is among the many questions the Red Sox face this spring.
At a time when the Red Sox are trying to figure out their primary infield alignment — Will newly acquired Caleb Durbin play second or third? Will Marcelo Mayer man the other spot from the start, or begin the year in the minors after an injury-shortened rookie season? — they’re also sorting through their outfield options. The situation is more or less the same as it’s been since last June, when Roman Anthony, the no. 2 prospect on our preseason Top 100 Prospects list, was called up to squeeze into an outfield capably manned by Duran, Ceddanne Rafaela, and Wilyer Abreu, with platoon assistance for the last of those from Rob Refsnyder. The trade deadline came and went without either Abreu or Duran being moved despite numerous rumors, and injuries to Abreu, Refsnyder and then Anthony (who suffered a season-ending oblique strain in early September) simplified manager Alex Cora’s juggling, though not for the betterment of the team. Boston won 89 games and claimed a Wild Card spot, but without Anthony and enough healthy starting pitchers, the Red Sox were bounced out of the first round by the Yankees.
Refsnyder departed for the Mariners in free agency, but the other four outfielders are back and healthy. The Red Sox also have an expensive platoon designated hitter, Masataka Yoshida, further crowding the picture, and last year’s Opening Day second baseman Kristian Campbell — who entered the 2025 season seventh on our Top 100 and inked an eight-year, $60 million extension just a week into his big league career — is working out in center field, as well. Having too many good players isn’t a bad problem to have, but it can become one when questions about playing time, contract statuses, and trade rumors get relentless. Read the rest of this entry »
We’re putting a bow on Prospect Week with a post-hype look at one of last season’s top farmhands, Kristian Campbell. This time last year, Campbell was the biggest riser on prospect lists across the industry, a consensus top 10 player who had gone from relative obscurity to the cusp of the big leagues in just a year. Now, as we head into the spring’s first contests, he’s fallen out of the lineup and is likely to begin the 2026 season in Triple-A. His career path serves as a good reminder that growth isn’t linear, and that a player’s development path doesn’t conclude when he reaches the majors or exhausts his status as a rookie.
After playing just one season of college baseball, Boston selected Campbell in the fourth round of the 2023 draft as a toolsy player with contact skill but also a quirky, choppy swing. He put on 15-20 pounds of muscle that offseason, which helped spark an offensive explosion. His power shot from average to plus overnight, and he started lifting the ball more, both of which he managed without ballooning his whiff rates out of proportion. He posted a 178 wRC+ across three levels that season, with 20 homers and a sub-20% strikeout rate. Though little about his operation in the box looked conventional, plenty of evaluators — including, critically, the Red Sox brass — fully bought in. The Red Sox put Campbell on the Opening Day roster and then inked him to an eight-year, $60 million extension less than a week into the season.
Initially, all went well. Campbell won AL Rookie of the Month honors in April after hitting .301/.407/.495 with four homers. His strikeout rate crept north of 25%, which wasn’t itself alarming, as it came with power and a 15% walk rate; it’s perfectly normal for rookies to swing and miss a bunch as they adjust to the league anyway. Defensively, Campbell was primarily playing second base while also filling in left and center. He didn’t look great at the keystone, and the jury was still out on his long-term defensive home, but if nothing else, his versatility was itself a boost for the ballclub.
On April 30, Campbell went 0-4 in a game against the Blue Jays, and then missed the next three games with rib discomfort. We can’t know to what extent that injury bothered him. Campbell, for his part, said it wasn’t an issue by late May: “No. That’s all clear. There was just a little side discomfort, but it’s all good.” Regardless, it was a turning point in his season:
April Flowers and May Showers
BA
OBP
Slugging
K%
BB%
ISO
wRC+
March-April
.301
.407
.495
26%
15.4%
.194
150
May-June
.159
.243
.222
28.5%
7.1%
.063
30
By mid-June, the Red Sox had seen enough and sent Campbell to Triple-A for the remainder of the season. Critically, his dip in production coincided with a sudden and complete inability to pull the ball.
April:
May:
Campbell wasn’t mauling good velo over the Green Monster even in April, but he did hit some heaters hard to the left of second base and had no trouble driving spin out to left. He got back to that in Triple-A, though somewhat troublingly all of his pull-side damage came on hanging breaking balls. As Campbell gutted through an unspectacular summer in Worcester — 118 wRC+, 26.7% strikeout rate — the Red Sox lineup hummed without him. A mix of players capably filled in at second, Romy Gonzalez most notably among them, while Boston had more good outfielders than room to play them. All over the headlines in March and April, Campbell ended the 2025 campaign a forgotten man.
Even at his peak, Campbell was a somewhat divisive player. While some scouts were willing to overlook his unorthodox swing, others were apprehensive about his mechanics. He had a double toe tap and then a big front hip leak that worked in part because he has huge hip-shoulder separation and was able to keep from flying open even as his lower half crept toward third base. The upper half was also concerning for some evaluators, as Campbell’s violent and rotational hack came with a lot of head movement and often left him off balance. Plus bat speed and good hand-eye coordination helped, but not everybody loved what they saw.
Having literally bought the breakout, it’s fair to wonder if Boston is now taking the collapse at face value as well. There are signs, if you want to look at it that way. The Red Sox sent Campbell to winter ball this offseason, hoping that quieter movements in the box will again let him get to his power. Between those adjustments, the trade for Caleb Durbin, and unsettled defensive plans that initially seemed to focus on the outfield but then made room for him to take groundballs once back in camp (all of this just a few months removed from when he started working in at first base), you’d be forgiven for thinking that he’s not in the club’s immediate plans. Fair enough, given last season’s production and this season’s lineup.
But all of the tinkering raises more questions than it answers. Were Campbell’s struggles last May and June really the inevitable result of an unconventional swing? Is it possible that the league’s adjustments to the young upstart, possibly combined with a nagging rib issue, did a number on a rookie already shouldering a difficult defensive load after very little collegiate and minor-league seasoning? You can make arguments for, against, or in between on those questions; the guy is in limbo, after all.
Last year, just after Campbell’s demotion, Eric wrote, “I, like most everyone, entered 2025 convinced that this weirdo swing would work for Campbell even though it’s unconventional. Though he was demoted shortly before [list] publication, I still think it will… two years ago, this guy was playing in his lone college baseball season and now he’s facing the best pitchers in the world. He deserves time to adjust and hopefully get stronger so it doesn’t take his entire body winding up for him to swing hard.”
I’ll sign on to that idea, and the comment about increased strength in particular. It’s a long season, and all the moving parts in Campbell’s swing mean that a minor disruption to one area of the body might just throw off the whole operation; having the strength to withstand the rigors of the schedule is important for everyone, but perhaps him especially. And let’s not lose sight of the talent here. However unusual, Campbell’s bat speed, short swing, and good approach were, for a time, effective. The history of this sport is full of guys who went the other way with fastballs and tugged breaking balls, and for a month it looked like Campbell had found a way to follow those footsteps. I still think he can; whether or not he will is for us to find out.
If all goes well, Corbin Carroll’s broken hamate bone won’t affect either his career or the Diamondbacks’ season too much. He will miss spring training and likely some time at the beginning of the season, but it’s not out of the question that when he returns, he’ll look like the perennial MVP candidate we know and love. On the other hand (Fun fact about the English language: When you use the phrase “On the other hand,” the hand you’re referring to is recovering from hamate bone surgery), the injury will very much change the look of Team USA at the World Baseball Classic. Carroll is out, and manager Mark DeRosa has found an exciting replacement in Roman Anthony. Team USA’s outfield is a mix of youth and experience, with Anthony joining Pete Crow-Armstrong and veterans Byron Buxton and Aaron Judge.
The Red Sox selected Anthony out of high school with the 79th pick in the 2022 draft. Scouts started talking about him soon after, because while in Low-A, his poor offensive numbers belied a wild combination of underlying metrics. He was running shockingly low swing rates, walking more than he struck out, and absolutely pasting the ball when he did swing. The Red Sox promoted him aggressively, and with good reason. Despite his youth, he put up a combined 141 wRC+ in the minors, and he did so with the same impressive plate discipline and exit velocity, the kinds of tools that tend to translate to big league success.
Anthony arrived in Boston in June as the consensus top prospect in baseball, and after taking a week to get acclimated, he finished the season with a 140 wRC+ and excellent defensive numbers. He placed third in the Rookie of the Year voting. Despite getting into just 71 games, his 2.7 WAR ranked sixth on the team. Extended over a full season, it was a six-win pace. Among players with at least 300 plate appearances, that 140 wRC+ tied Anthony with Michael Busch as the 14th-best hitter in the game. Just to put that in context, in AL/NL history, 346 players have made at least 300 plate appearances in their age-21 season. Anthony became the 26th one of them to post a wRC+ of 140 or better. By my count, 15 of those 26 are Hall of Famers, and Mike Trout is well on his way to joining them. Read the rest of this entry »
A few weeks ago, I took a high-level look at the Mets’ offseason overhaul. I thought it came out well, and readers also seemed to like it, so I’m going to use that same rubric to take a look at the Red Sox today. As before, I’ll be focusing on wrapping all of the team’s decisions up together and evaluating across several axes. As I put it last time:
“How should we evaluate a front office, particularly in the offseason when we don’t have games to look at? I’ve never been able to arrive at a single framework. That’s only logical. If there were one simple tool we could use to evaluate the sport, baseball wouldn’t be as interesting to us as it is. The metrics we use to evaluate teams, and even players, are mere abstractions. The goal of baseball – winning games, or winning the World Series in a broad sense – can be achieved in a ton of different ways. We measure a select few of those in most of our attempts at estimating value, or at figuring out who “won” or “lost” a given transaction. So today, I thought I’d try something a little bit different.”
I’m not going to give Boston a single grade. Instead, I’m going to evaluate the decisions that Craig Breslow and the Red Sox made on three axes. The first is what I’m calling Coherence of Strategy. If you make a win-now trade but then head into the season with a gaping hole in your roster, that’s not coherent. If you find yourself on the borderline of the playoffs and then start subtracting, that’s not coherent. It’s never quite that simple in the real world, but good teams make sets of decisions that work toward the same goal.
Next, Liquidity and Optionality. One thing we know for sure about baseball is that the future rarely looks the way we expect it to in the present. Preserving an ability to change directions based on new information is important. Why do teams treat players with no options remaining so callously? It’s because that lack of optionality really stings. Why do teams prefer high-dollar, short-term contracts over lengthy pacts in general? It’s because you don’t know how good that guy is going to be in year six, and you certainly don’t know how good your team will be or whether you’ll have another player for the same position. All else equal, decisions that reduce future optionality are bad because they limit a team’s ability to make the right move in the future. One note on optionality: It’s not the same as not having any long contracts. Long contracts to key players actually improve flexibility, because “have a few stars” is a key part of building a championship team. Not having a star under contract when you need one is almost as much of a problem as having too many aging veterans, and I’ll consider both versions of flexibility.
Finally, maximizing the Championship Probability Distribution. We like to talk about teams as chasing wins, but that’s not exactly what’s going on. Teams are chasing the likelihood of winning a World Series, or some close proxy of that. That’s correlated with wins, but it’s not exactly the same. Building a team that outperforms opponents on the strength of its 15th-26th best players being far superior to their counterparts on other clubs might help in the dog days of August, when everyone’s playing their depth pieces and cobbling together a rotation, but that won’t fly in October. Likewise, high-variance players with decent backup options don’t show up as overly valuable in a point estimate of WAR, but they absolutely matter. Teams are both trying to get to the playoffs as often as possible and perform as well as they can after arriving there. That’s not an easy thing to quantify, but we can at least give it a shot.
The Sox came into the offseason with a pretty clear problem to solve. Alex Bregman opted out of his deal and returned to free agency, which left the roster in a particularly unbalanced state. Boston’s best four position players were all outfielders – Roman Anthony, Jarren Duran, Ceddanne Rafaela, and Wilyer Abreu. The infield was relatively barren. Trevor Story and Romy Gonzalez were the only two holdovers who notched even 250 plate appearances in the dirt. Rafaela played nearly as many games in the infield as Marcelo Mayer, the team’s top shortstop prospect, last year. Read the rest of this entry »
Clearly, none of those people who argues that the day after Super Bowl Sunday should be national holiday is in charge of the Brewers or the Red Sox. Things got complicated very early this week, as Milwaukee and Boston announced a six-player trade on Monday morning.
The Brewers received infielder David Hamilton and left-handed pitchers Kyle Harrison and Shane Drohan. The Red Sox received infielders Caleb Durbin, Andruw Monasterio, and Anthony Seigler, along with Milwaukee’s competitive balance Round B draft pick. The headliner of the deal is Durbin, who will slot in as Boston’s everyday second or third baseman. When you factor in that Boston also traded for Willson Contreras, signed Isiah Kiner-Falefa, and claimed Tsung-Che Cheng off waivers, the Red Sox have now added more than an entire infield this offseason. Don’t worry; their infield situation is still plenty complicated. Harrison headlines the package going to Milwaukee. The Brewers get the chance to work their magic on two young pitchers, and they get to add to their collection of speedy, scrappy, undersized infielders.
It was an odd trade in some ways. All six players were on 40-man rosters already. The Red Sox got the comp pick (as of now, the 67th pick in the draft) even though they were also getting the biggest name, a player who will go straight from Milwaukee’s starting lineup into their own. The left-handed Hamilton has a few more tools than the right-handed Monasterio, but the two are at least comparable; it’s likely that the handedness of the two players affected Boston’s willingness to part with him. You could argue that the Brewers gave up more than the Red Sox, but that they needed what they got much more. The Red Sox have one of the deepest rotations in the league, so Harrison is going from a team that would have struggled to find room for him to a team that will likely need him to hold down a rotation spot from day one. Read the rest of this entry »
All WAR figures refer to the Baseball Reference version unless otherwise indicated.
Denny McLain was the ace of the 1968 Tigers, going 31-6 with a 1.96 ERA en route to both the American League Cy Young and Most Valuable Player awards, but during that year’s World Series against the defending champion Cardinals, he was outshined by teammate Mickey Lolich. While McLain started and lost Games 1 and 4 before recovering to throw a complete-game victory in Game 6, Lolich went the distance in winning Games 2, 5, and 7, the last of which secured the Tigers’ first championship in 23 years. By outdueling Bob Gibson — the previous year’s World Series MVP and the author of a 1968 season to rival McLain’s — in Game 7, Lolich secured spots both in Fall Classic lore and the pantheon of Detroit sports heroes.
Lolich died last Wednesday at an assisted living facility in Sterling Heights, Michigan at the age of 85. Beyond his World Series heroics, he was a three-time All-Star with a pair of 20-win seasons and top-three Cy Young finishes. A power pitcher whose fastball was clocked as high as 96 mph, he struck out more than 200 hitters in a season seven times, with a high of 308 in 1971. Even today, he’s fifth in strikeouts by a lefty with 2,832, behind only Randy Johnson, Steve Carlton, CC Sabathia, and Clayton Kershaw, and 23rd among all pitchers.
But for as much as anything, Lolich is remembered for piling up innings. In that 1971 season, he went 25-14 while making 45 starts, completing 29 of them and totaling 376 innings — leading the AL in all of those categories except losses — with a 2.92 ERA (124 ERA+). He also topped 300 innings in each of the next three seasons, including 327 1/3 in 1972, when he went 22-14 with a 2.50 ERA.
“No pitcher in 125 years of Tigers big-league life was so tied to durability, or so paired his seeming indestructibility with such excellence during his time in Detroit,” wrote the Detroit News’ Lynn Henning in his tribute to Lolich. “No pitcher in Tigers history quite matched his knack for taking on inhuman workloads that could forge even greater gallantry at big-game moments.” Read the rest of this entry »
Last summer, an article titled Mark Gubicza Tackles a Challenging Career Quiz ran here at FanGraphs. In it, the Los Angeles Angels broadcaster did his best to answer matchup-specific questions from his playing days —- he pitched in the big leagues from 1984-1996 — such as which batter he allowed the most hits to, and who took him deep the most times. Along with taking a stab at the answers, Gubicza shared entertaining anecdotes about some of the hitters that were mentioned.
He isn’t the only pitcher-turned-broadcaster I challenged with (a version of) the quiz. Later in the season, I sat down with David Cone who, much like his 1980s-1990s contemporary, had fun stories to share.
I first asked the New York Yankees broadcast analyst which batter he faced the most times. Cone failed to come up with the correct answer, first guessing Will Clark (76 plate appearances), and then Juan Gonzalez (57), to who he recalled surrendering several gophers.
The answer is Roberto Alomar, against whom he matched up 93 times. What does he remember about facing the Hall of Fame second baseman?
“The thing that stands out — and he was a teammate of mine, too — is that Robbie was one of the best at picking up tipped pitches,” Cone told me. “Maybe a pitcher was doing something with his glove, and you kind of knew that Robbie would see that. But a lot of times he was using it as a bluff. Alex Cora does it to this day. You want the pitcher to think you have something on him, which gets into his head. It’s psychological warfare, and Robbie was the best at that.”
Jayne Kamin-Oncea and David Butler II-Imagn Images
Not every team shows up for spring training with a reasonable hope of winning the World Series, but there is a grand, overarching narrative to follow in every camp. For the Chicago White Sox, it’s whether they can achieve an all-Sean-and-Shane starting rotation — they’re currently 60% of the way there.
That might sound like a modest goal, but it’s a lot more ambitious than what they set out to achieve just last year: Avoid losing 120 games. Again. The White Sox will sink or swim (or at least sink more slowly) based on how their young homegrown players perform, but Chicago’s supporting cast is looking relatively OK.
Davy Andrews recently wrote about Steven Kwan’s defense, which, as my colleague chronicled, has been demonstrably stellar. Not only has the 28-year-old Cleveland Guardians left fielder been awarded a Gold Glove in each of his four MLB seasons, the metrics back up the accolades. There hasn’t been a better defender at his position, and that goes for the senior circuit as well as the American League.
And then there is Kwan’s bat. The 2018 fifth-round pick out of Oregon State University isn’t a basher, but he is a solid contributor to the Guardians offense. Since debuting in 2022, the erstwhile Beaver has slashed .281/.351/.390 with a 112 wRC+. Moreover — this is no secret for most FanGraphs readers — he seldom goes down by way of the K. Kwan’s 9.5% strikeout rate over the past four campaigns is the lowest among qualified hitters not named Luis Arraez.
Grant Fink knows his left-handed stroke as well as anyone. Cleveland’s hitting coach tutored Kwan in the minors before moving into his current role, and they work together in the offseason. I asked Fink about two-time All-Star when the Guardians visited Fenway Park last September.
“If you look at his profile as a hitter in the major leagues, it is based on accuracy and ball flight,” Fink told me. “His key is making sure that his body is moving in a way where he can get his barrel to the ball in multiple places in the zone, and that he is making contact in the right windows to produce that consistent ball flight. Read the rest of this entry »
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