Erik Tolman has a remarkable backstory. Currently playing for the Triple-A Rochester Red Wings, the 26-year-old left-hander threw to one of baseball’s most prolific pitchers as a prep, and that is a comparatively insignificant part of his past. His level of perseverance is nothing short of remarkable. Tolman has overcome debilitating injuries on his journey to the doorstep of the big leagues.

His travails began in 2021, the year the Washington Nationals drafted him in the 14th round out of Arizona State University. He had the first of two Tommy John surgeries, costing him all but three games in his final collegiate campaign — and his bad fortune was only just beginning.

“I tore my UCL again at the end of my rehab,” Tolman explained. “Fourteen months after having surgery, in my last live ABs, I felt my elbow go again. It was a sad moment, honestly. But I talked to my family, and I believed in myself — I thought I could still be a big-leaguer — so I kept at it. Unfortunately, on my fifth start back, in August 2023, I dislocated my knee. That made for a whole new mountain that I’ve had to climb.

“The injuries have driven me to have a work ethic, and a mental fortitude, of just going balls to the wall,” he added. “I figured I could either struggle coming back from the injuries, playing baseball, or struggle out in the real world. At the end of the day, we’re the ones responsible for our lives and careers. If you get hurt, are you going to cave, or are you going to overcome?”

Tolman did far more than simply dislocate a knee after returning from the second TJ. What happened was not only catastrophic: it was hard to fathom. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Boston Red Sox. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as our 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 »

Tyler Samaniego isn’t perfect anymore. After throwing 15 scoreless innings over his first 13 big league appearances, the left-hander was taken deep by Kyle Schwarber with a runner aboard in the eighth inning this past Thursday night as the Boston Red Sox fell to the Philadelphia Phillies, 3-1. The inevitable imperfection was followed by a double whammy. On Friday, Samaniego surrendered a 10th-inning walk-off two-bagger to Mike Yastrzemski — the only batter he faced — in a 3-2 loss to the Atlanta Braves. Flawless no more, he now has a still-stellar 1.17 ERA and a pair of losses over his first 15 outings.

His initial level of success was somewhat surprising, and the same could be said of the 27-year-old rookie having earned an opportunity to show his mettle in high-leverage situations. He was anything but a proven commodity at season’s start. As for his presence in the Red Sox bullpen, that wasn’t wholly unexpected. When he came to Boston as part of the five-player December deal that shipped “The Password” to the Pirates, Eric Longenhagen wrote that Samaniego was “fairly likely to play a role on Boston’s pitching staff in 2026… occupying a lefty specialist spot.”

Shortly before he suffered his first big league adversity, I approached the 2021 15th-round pick out of the University of South Alabama to learn more about him. I’d perused his stat sheet, seen him pitch a handful of times, and knew that he had undergone an internal brace procedure while in the minors, but that was about it. As such, I began by asking how he has progressed as a pitcher over the years. Read the rest of this entry »

Things could be going better for Brayan Bello. I guess that’s true of most Red Sox players these days, but the right-hander is having an especially rough go of things. On Sunday, Bello took the decision in an 8-1 loss to the Braves, allowing seven earned runs in five innings pitched.

That kind of line doesn’t necessarily signal a terrible outing; sometimes a starter trudges along in quality-start territory before running into trouble late. A couple quick walks, then the bullpen lets a couple inherited runners score… three runs allowed over four innings can turn into seven runs in five innings in a flash.

That wasn’t the case here. Seven of the first 10 Braves hitters reached base; five of them scored. Manager Chad Tracy let Bello wear it until he’d reached five innings and 98 pitches. And it was Bello’s 27th birthday on Sunday, too. Usually you only hear “wear it” on a guy’s birthday in the context of a party hat or a new shirt. Read the rest of this entry »

Kai-Wei Teng had a limited repertoire when he signed with the Minnesota Twins out of Taiwan in 2017. The right-hander from Taichung possessed just a fastball and a curveball. A lot has changed since that time. Now 27 years old and pitching for the Houston Astros, Teng attacks hitters with a five-pitch mix that includes a sweeper that is not only hard to hit, it is no fun to be on the receiving end of in catch-play.

“It’s insanely good,” Spencer Arrighetti told me last weekend at Fenway Park. “I throw a sweeper. Lance [McCullers] throws a sweeper. We have a couple of other guys who toy around with it. But Teng’s is incredible. Truly. I played catch with him, and it looks like a fastball for 48 feet, then takes a 90-degree left turn. Not all sweepers are created equal. Some of them are a little loopier and bigger, but his is 85 mph. I mean, it’s gross. It really is a great pitch.”

The numbers back that up. Teng has relied on his most-used offering 36.3% of the time this season to the tune of a .118 BAA, a .118 SLG, and a 27.9% whiff rate. His other numbers are impressive, as well. Over 14 appearances, Teng has a 2.35 ERA, a 3.83 FIP, and a 24.7% strikeout rate over 23 innings.

I asked Teng for the story behind his best weapon. Read the rest of this entry »

The best team in baseball will be without its biggest star for a few weeks.

The Braves placed Ronald Acuña Jr. on the injured list Sunday with a strained left hamstring. Acuña exited Saturday’s game after pulling up in considerable pain while running out a groundout. Manager Walt Weiss told reporters that imaging revealed a Grade 1 strain, the least severe grade. According to MLB.com, Weiss said:

“It’s not going to be just a couple days. It’s gonna be more than that, so we need to put him on the IL, and hopefully it’ll be sooner than later. No idea with these soft tissue injuries how long they’re gonna take, but I think the silver lining is that the MRI showed it wasn’t too serious.”

While many players return from Grade 1 hamstring strains in just a couple weeks, or even following the 10-day minimum, this is an injury that can linger and delay a return.

This is, obviously, less than ideal for the Braves. Acuña is their best player and was projected in the preseason as the ninth-best position player in baseball with 5.4 WAR, according to our Depth Charts. Though his performance hasn’t been spectacular thus far, with a 111 wRC+ in 152 plate appearances, his .381 xwOBA and 12.2% barrel rate — along with strong strikeout and walk rates — suggest he hasn’t missed a beat this year, coming off his bounce-back 2025 season.

Of course, last year was a comeback campaign because Acuña missed most 2024 (and the early part of 2025) after tearing his ACL. He also missed chunks of 2021 and 2022 with a torn ACL in his other knee. In 2018, he missed about a month with a mild ACL sprain. That means Acuña’s hamstring strain is his fourth lower body injury requiring IL time in his career. Read the rest of this entry »

“Throw the bums out!” is a rich American tradition. While most used in the context of the messiness of that whole democracy thing, it’s also applicable to sports. When you’re a fan, especially a passionate one, and things are going horribly wrong for your favorite team, there’s a real sense of wanting the perpetrators of these crimes against excellence to be figuratively carted out in tumbrels and to meet their makers like Danton or Robespierre. And heads do roll in baseball when things are going badly, because someone has to take responsibility for a team’s crapitude, and it’s not going to be the team’s owner. Most often, it’s someone public-facing, as fans will not be appeased by the firing of some relatively anonymous staffer in operations. Since general managers and team presidents get first priority to hold the axe (but not always), and individual coaches don’t usually have wide-enough authority to take responsibility for the whole team, that leaves managers as the common sin eaters.

The moment of catharsis happens, and lo and behold, teams play a lot better, vindicating the demise of the ex-manager. It certainly feels that way, and it’s not the craziest idea in the world to think that there’s something to it. While you would expect teams in the midst of a spate of sucking to be underplaying their talent level rather than overplaying it, when you drive by an accident with a car that’s been unfortunately integrated into a telephone pole, it’s also quite likely that the driver had something to do with it.

Two managers have already been fired this season, after their large-payroll teams with championship aspirations got off to awful starts. Surprisingly, Alex Cora was first to go, as Red Sox chief baseball officer Craig Breslow canned not just Cora, but also anyone on the coaching staff considered to be one of Cora’s guys, on Saturday night after the team started the season 10-17. Then, on Tuesday, the Phillies fired Rob Thomson after they began the year 9-19, a woeful start that included a 10-game losing streak. Four years ago, Thomson became one of the most successful midseason replacement managers ever, as he steered a sinking Phillies ship back from a 22-29 start all the way to the World Series. Mets manager Carlos Mendoza can’t be comfortable about his job security right now, despite the team’s insistence that his job is safe. Read the rest of this entry »

They say that no news is good news. Google tells me that saying is attributed to James Howell, a 16th-century writer and politician, but I disagree. I attribute it to Sully and Murph, the two imaginary Red Sox fans whose lens I like to interpret Boston sports news through. I mean, COME ON. Last week, Sonny Gray hit the IL with a hamstring injury. Over the weekend, the Sox fired manager Alex Cora of his duties, along with a significant portion of his coaching staff. While the echoes of that momentous decision were still reverberating through the city, there’s now this: Boston placed staff ace Garrett Crochet on the 15-day IL with shoulder inflammation. Woof. The Sox can’t catch a break.

Crochet’s IL placement follows a frustrating start to his season. Through six starts, he’s had three spectacular outings and three clunkers. His last time out, he put together one of his best starts of the year: six innings, seven strikeouts, and no earned runs against the Orioles. But toward the end of that outing, his velocity dipped sharply. Despite sitting 95-96 mph in the early innings, he was down in the 91-93 range by the end of his start.

Crochet told Christopher Smith of MassLive that he felt some fatigue in his shoulder during that start, and that he doesn’t think this is a serious injury. “Was able to grind through (the fatigue) there at the end. It just makes more sense to get ahead of it now so I’m not playing catch-up the rest of the season,” he said. Read the rest of this entry »

Though spring training concluded several weeks ago, it’s still spring on the solar calendar, and this year, spring cleaning in Boston involved the Red Sox clearing out some dirty laundry. On Saturday night, ESPN reported the firings of manager Alex Cora, bench coach Ramón Vázquez, third base and outfield coach Kyle Hudson, hitting coach Peter Fatse, assistant hitting coach Dillon Lawson, and major league hitting strategist Joe Cronin. Further, game planning and run prevention coach Jason Varitek has been offered a different role within the organization.

The Red Sox began the season projected to win 85 games, with 60.8% odds to make the playoffs. Of the 25 writers who contributed to the FanGraphs 2026 Staff Predictions, 21 picked the Red Sox to make the postseason and nine had them winning the division, which tied Boston with Toronto as the most popular pick to take the AL East. Heading into Sunday’s games, the Red Sox had a projected win total of 80, and their odds of making the playoffs were down to 31.4%. Their drop of 29.4 percentage points in playoff odds was the largest in the AL, while in the NL, the Mets and Phillies saw their playoff odds decline by 41.0 points and 33.0 points, respectively.

At just 27 games into the season, Boston’s dismissal of Cora is the earliest manager firing since 2018, when the Reds fired Bryan Price after the club started the year 3-15. Cincinnati entered the season looking to complete the transition from rebuilding to contention, but instead finished in last place in the NL Central with a 67-95 record. The Reds simultaneously cut ties with pitching coach Mack Jenkins, which is representative of a common pattern with coaching changes. When a team’s struggle is particularly acute on one side of the ball, the coach leading that effort is often held accountable along with the manager. But rarely does an organization remove seven members of its major league coaching staff in one fell swoop. Boston’s overhaul was so dramatic, the team had to bring in what appears to be a party bus to transport the deposed coaches away from the team hotel. Read the rest of this entry »

Led by American League Cy Young runner-up Garrett Crochet, free agent signee Ranger Suarez, and trade acquisition Sonny Gray, the Red Sox were projected to have the majors’ top rotation in our preseason Positional Power Rankings. Four weeks in, the unit has been one of the majors’ worst, with Crochet getting pummeled and Gray underperforming before landing on the injured list earlier this week with a right hamstring strain. The bullpen has been shaky, the offense weak, and after losing the first two games of a three-game series against the Yankees at Fenway Park, the Red Sox now sit 9-15, last in the AL East.

Through 24 games, this is the Red Sox’s worst start since 2020, when they went 6-18 en route to a 24-36 record and a last-place finish. In terms of full-season futility, in 2019 the Red Sox — defending champions at the time — started 9-15 before rallying to finish at 84-78, third in the division but outside the playoff picture. After winning 89 games last season and making their first postseason appearance since 2021, this year was supposed to be different, but since Opening Day, the team’s seasonal win projection has fallen from 85 to 80.5, the fourth-largest drop in the majors ahead of only the Mets (-7.1), Phillies (-5.7) and Royals (-4.5). Only those three teams have larger drops in their Playoff Odds:

The driver of Boston’s success was supposed to be the rotation, headed by Crochet. After making his first All-Star team with the White Sox in 2024, he emerged as a true ace last year, leading the majors in both innings (205.1) and strikeouts (255) while ranking second in the AL in strikeout rate (31.3%), xERA (2.88), FIP (2.89), and WAR (5.8) — behind Cy Young winner Tarik Skubal in all of those categories — and third in ERA (2.59). Read the rest of this entry »