ORLANDO — Congratulations, everybody. We made it. It’s now Thursday, and the Winter Meetings have officially concluded. It’s time to reflect on the state of effort in Major League Baseball, and I am pleased to report that it is strong. At this time last year, we had seen 22 We Trieds (though a few more would be added retroactively due to a rule clarification). As of now, we’re sitting at 24, so let’s take a moment to congratulate all the agents, the anonymous sources, and the reporters who took us this far. As always, I invite you to peruse this vast bounty on the official We Tried Tracker.
Before we break down the last couple days, I should start with an important update on the most recent entry of this series. When news broke that the Giants asked for Tatsuya Imai’s medicals even though they didn’t plan on pursuing him, I gave it an intentionally cumbersome moniker: We’re Not Even Going To Try, So Don’t Bother Getting Your Hopes Up. This was a classic defense mechanism. I went with the big, long name to deflect from the fact that I couldn’t come up with a clever, pithy one. But the right name came to me this week. In the future, such a move will be known as a Pre-Tried. I have spoken.
Since that last update, Bob Nightengale took a new angle on this exercise, packaging the news that the Reds “were hoping to sign” Devin Williams with the news that they had actually re-signed Emilio Pagán. It’s a brilliant maneuver. You sign a lesser player while also announcing that you were also thinking even bigger. We Trieds are all about partial credit, but here are the Reds, breaking out the razzle dazzle and running an end-around in a bid for double credit!
This strategy is also something of a double-edged sword, though. Some fans might give the Reds the double credit they want, but it’s also easy to take the information in the other direction. The Reds held onto a good reliever, Reds fans! Let’s celebrate! Oh, also, they only got him because they tried and failed to get an even better reliever? Do you still want to celebrate? Try pulling that move with a child. Take them to an ice cream shop and get them a kid’s cone. Once they’ve given it a big lick and smiled their adorable little smile, lean over and say, “You know, I was hoping to get you a giant ice cream sundae, but you’ll have to settle for this little one because the New York Mets ordered it first.” Read the rest of this entry »
It’s been a busy December for free agent relievers. Ryan Helsley and Devin Williams, two of the most interesting names on the market, eachsigned with new clubs, and they each got multi-year guarantees despite shaky 2025 results. The next shoe to drop wasn’t quite as heralded of an option, but he too got multiple years and beat market consensus. The signing in question: Emilio Pagán and the Reds agreed to a two-year, $20 million deal, with an opt out after the first year.
Pagán was a far more effective reliever in 2025 than either of the two splashier names ahead of him. He had one of the best seasons of his career at age 34, in fact: 68 2/3 innings pitched, a 2.88 ERA and 3.72 FIP in hitter-friendly Cincinnati, and 32 saves in his first full-time closing job since 2019. He bounced back from an injury-interrupted 2024 with better fastball velocity and better pitch shape across the board, and got richly rewarded for it with a 30% strikeout rate. Is he homer-prone? You bet, thanks to a 0.51 GB/FB ratio. But a .200 BABIP and a solid HR/FB% (10.8%) meant that he actually allowed fewer homers per nine innings (1.31) than his career mark (1.51), and not by a small amount, despite pitching in a launching pad.
When things are going well for him, Pagán makes everyone think they can hit a home run, then pulls the rug out. He runs his four-seamer high and spots a heavy splitter off of it, a classic fly ball pitcher mix. It’s one of those strategies that looks awful when it isn’t working, and yet seems to come through most of the time anyway. More specifically, Pagán went through a three-year stretch of terrible form from 2020-2022, posting a 4.61 ERA and 4.71 FIP. Then he broke out in 2023 and has been solid since. The weirdest part of it all? His stuff and command metrics barely budged between those two wildly different stretches.
Reversals like that go a long way toward explaining why reliever performance is so difficult to predict. When Pagán has it, he’s a worthy late-inning reliever. His ERA- was 40th among relievers last year, and it’s 60th over the past three years, even with his ineffective 2024 in the mix. He’s pitched like you’d expect a closer or setup man to, in other words. His FIP tells a broadly similar story, and I’m willing to believe that pitchers with his extreme tendencies outperform their FIP in the long run. If you get good Pagán, he’s a very useful bullpen piece, the kind any team would love to have in the bullpen and many fringe contenders would love to have as a closer.
That’s the calculus from the Reds’ perspective. They’ve managed their payroll tightly in the early years of Elly De La Cruz’s team control window, hovering around the $100 million mark with wiggle room in either direction. With that budget constraint in mind, the top five or so relievers in this free agency class were presumably off the board. The next tier down is a mixture of interesting pop-up arms, aging closers, and reclamation projects. Would you rather have Kenley Jansen or Pagán? Seranthony Domínguez? Kyle Finnegan? Phil Maton? Maybe Drew Pomeranz? I think I’d take Pagán or Jansen over the field – I ranked them that way in my Top 50 Free Agents list – and as an added bonus, he’s already familiar with Cincinnati. I’d take Raisel Iglesias over him – rankings, again – but he signed for one year and $16 million, probably outside of this team’s price range. The Reds probably could’ve gotten some solid lefty specialists for the $10 million or so annual salary that they gave Pagán, but that’s not what they were in the market for this winter. They needed a bankable closer, and in the aisle they were shopping in, there weren’t that many options.
This team really does need relief arms. The Reds didn’t have to cover many bullpen innings in 2025, but even then they struggled to piece it all together. Pagán, Tony Santillan, and Graham Ashcraft formed an effective three-headed monster at the top, but the rest of the pen was ineffective even in limited time. With a bandbox for a home stadium, it’s hard to expect a similarly limited need for relief pitching in 2026. This was the path of least resistance for a team that really does need to do something to challenge for the NL Central title in 2026 and build on its surprising 2025 Wild Card berth.
Now, the risks? They’re real. It was only a year ago, after his down 2024 performance, that Cincinnati fans were lamenting Pagán’s decision to pick up his player option for 2025. More innings and a .200 BABIP turned that frown upside down, but it’s not like it’s impossible to imagine an ineffective Pagán. Would you be shocked if he had an uneven, homer-prone 55 innings in 2026 and then picked up his option? I certainly wouldn’t be. We just saw that!
That leaves me in the situation of liking this deal more for Pagán than for the Reds, and yet I’d make this offer if I were in their shoes anyway. Figuring out which relievers will be good in a year’s time is incredibly difficult. If it were easy to solve, the Dodgers wouldn’t have signed Tanner Scott and Blake Treinen last winter and then spent this entire October hiding them. Despite that difficulty, relievers are integral to a contending club. If you aren’t winning the close games, it’s hard to make the playoffs. The Reds likely wouldn’t have done that last year if not for Pagán.
With that backdrop, what were the Reds supposed to do? Sign a different, similar guy for slightly less? Sign two reclamation projects on one-year, $5 million deals? It’s not even like the second year is that much of a disaster; in a year’s time, they’re going to be contending with a core built around De La Cruz and looking for relievers, and I don’t think the market rate is likely to plummet in the meantime or anything. Sure, you might get bad Pagán in 2026 and then have him opt in, but the inherent volatility of relievers means that even that isn’t a tragedy. It worked out last time!
There’s some chance that Cincinnati could have waited longer, negotiated more stingily, and reached a slightly more team-friendly deal with him. So far, Pagán is the early signing whose market has most outstripped my projections. But who cares? What were the Reds going to do, save a million dollars or two? From their perspective, the risks were greater, because if they dragged their feet in negotiating with Pagán and he signed elsewhere, they’d suddenly be sifting through a variety of relievers they’re presumably less interested in with a strong need to find a deal. I’d prefer to overpay slightly for a guy I’m comfortable with than hunt for unknown bargains to fill an essential role, and it seems the Cincinnati front office thinks similarly.
I’m not convinced that this is a great long-term way to run a team. It certainly wouldn’t be my preference in a vacuum; I’m a Rays/Dodgers/Brewers-style bullpen guy at heart. I love reclamation projects and throwing a lot of relievers at the wall to see what sticks. I love betting on guys with elite stuff and seeing if they can figure out how to throw strikes, or betting on guys with elite command and seeing if they can figure out how to throw harder.
I’m also not running the Reds, staring at two superstars in De La Cruz and Hunter Greene and trying to make the playoffs again after a miracle run. Sure, it would be great to build an incredible pitching development system from the ground up. But it’s December, and the season starts in four months, and that’s not enough time to overhaul an entire organization, not even close. The Reds needed a reliever. They got a guy they’re comfortable with at a rate that won’t force them to cut back elsewhere. Maybe it’s a slight overpay, and maybe he’s more volatile than his 2025 results would suggest, but for the Reds? He’s just what they needed.
So I had this brilliant theory. My brilliant theory was that Elly De La Cruz wasn’t as bad a defender as the numbers would have us think. De La Cruz finished the 2025 season with 11 fielding errors, the second most in baseball, and 15 throwing errors, also the second most in baseball. Put those two together and you get 26 total errors, the most in baseball. I thought those totals might be shortchanging De La Cruz a bit. My brilliant theory was wrong, but before I get to why, let me explain my thinking.
We should start with the fact the advanced numbers do not say that De La Cruz is a bad shortstop. He makes up for most of his errors with length, speed, and the Mega Man cannon where his right arm should be. Statcast’s FRV loved De La Cruz’s defense in 2024, and it pegged him as perfectly average as he battled through a quad strain in 2025. Baseball Prospectus’ DRP, which tends to skew more conservative than the other advanced metrics, had him at 0.8 runs in 2024 and -0.4 runs in 2025. Sports Info Solutions’ DRS has always liked De La Cruz’s defense the least, pegging him at -2 in 2024 and -5 in 2025. So it’s not as if De La Cruz is grading out as a catastrophe. I just thought he deserved even more credit, and with that credit, we might have started seeing him as an above-average shortstop rather than a good-enough shortstop. Read the rest of this entry »
For the 22nd consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction, as well as MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the next team up is the Cincinnati Reds.
Batters
Much like during the 2020 COVID season, the 2025 Reds finished just above .500, barely squeaked into the playoffs, and got bounced from the Wild Card round in two games. At least this time around, they actually scored runs! But the lineup was a recurring problem in the regular season, the biggest reason Cincy needed a late-summer collapse by the Mets in order to play October baseball. The lineup’s 13.2 WAR ranked 26th in baseball, with Elly De La Cruz and TJ Friedl combining for more than half of that total. Finishing 21st in home runs isn’t good for a team that plays in one of the best home run parks in the majors today. Read the rest of this entry »
The Arizona Diamondbacks might have the best middle-infield duo in MLB, which is something most people outside of their fanbase probably aren’t aware of. Mike Hazen didn’t disagree when I suggested as much to him in Las Vegas.
“We’ve always dealt with that,” the D-Backs general manager replied. “We play on the West Coast — we play late for the East Coast — and we’re not on national TV a lot, so it comes with the territory. But yeah, [Geraldo] Perdomo probably had a top-five season in all of baseball this year, and [Ketel] Marte does it every year. With those two guys, along with [Corbin] Carroll, I think we have three of the top 25-30 guys in all of baseball.”
That was certainly the case in 2025. Carroll, the club’s right-fielder, ranked seventh-best in MLB with 6.5 WAR, while the keystone combination came in at fifth-best (Perdomo at 7.1) and 24th-best (Marte at 4.6) respectively. Productive bats were a big reason for that. Carroll put up a 139 wRC+, Perdomo was a tick below at 138, and Marte was fourth-highest in the senior circuit at 145.
How long Arizona’s middle infield will remain intact is currently in question. Rumors that Marte — on tap to gain 10-5 rights in the coming season — could be traded have been circulating, and while Hazen has reportedly said that moving the 32-year-old second baseman is “mostly unlikely,” he has also acknowledged a need to listen to offers. Howe many of those he has received to this point is unknown, but given Marte’s résumé — the three-time All-Star has a 140 wRC+ and 15.3 WAR over the past three seasons — the return would be noteworthy. Read the rest of this entry »
We’re less than a month from the Winter Meetings and the Rule 5 Draft, which means it’s a good time to evaluate every team’s 40-man roster situation. This is the time of year when teams have one final chance to protect Rule 5 eligible players by placing them on the 40-man. Eligibility is determined by a mix of how long a player has been with their parent organization and how young they were when they signed: Players who signed at 18 or younger must be added to the 40-man within five seasons, while everyone else must be added within four. RosterResource monitors Rule 5 eligibility, if you’re curious to see the lay of the land.
During the season, teams can free up roster space by placing an injured player on the 60-day IL. In the offseason, teams don’t get extra slots for injured players, which tends to put pressure on the back of the roster. The Diamondbacks are a good example of how space can tighten quickly, as they’ve currently got six pitchers battling long-term injuries occupying a spot. You may have noticed a flurry of moves immediately following the World Series, with many teams outrighting players off the 40-man in order to make room for all the guys who were on the IL.
Below, I’ve assessed every National League team’s 40-man roster situation (Eric will sort through the American League tomorrow). Some teams, like the Braves, have plenty of roster space, and thus a lot of flexibility in adding whoever they like. Others, like the Cardinals and Marlins, will face some tough choices as they seek to balance protecting interesting prospects with retaining players already on the roster, as well as finding room for prospective additions via trade or free agency. Some clubs don’t have many impact players to add, while others may need to protect a half-dozen or so guys. I’ve tried to identify which players are most likely to be added, which guys on the 40-man are vulnerable to getting lopped off in a roster crunch, and who could be moved in a deal to free up roster space. Let’s dig in. Read the rest of this entry »
I found this in my notes last week. I have no idea how long it’s been there. It says: “How many times this season has an infielder let the ball go right between their legs?” I had no idea whatsoever. I couldn’t recall the last time I’d seen it. Probably in a highlight from the 1986 World Series.
Baseball is the ultimate scorekeeping sport, and thanks to sites like ours, when you ask how many times any particular event has happened, the answer is usually easy to find. How often does a righty hit a home run off a lefty in the top of the eighth inning with the tying run in the on-deck circle? It took me twice as long to type that question out as it did to look up the answer: It has happened five times in each of the last three years. Easy. But so far as I know, nobody keeps a count of grounders that go right through the wickets.
Errors get classified in certain ways. Our leaderboard tracks fielding and throwing errors. The play-by-play notes on Baseball Savant add in missed-catch errors. Other sources differentiate between reached-on-error errors and runner-advanced errors. But that’s about it. Because they represent arguably the most embarrassing way to commit an error, between-the-legs errors are special in a human sense, but nobody splits them out into their own column because there’s nothing particularly special about them in a baseball sense. At least, you wouldn’t think so initially. Read the rest of this entry »
Rhett Lowder has his eyes on Yoshinobu Yamamoto as he works back from a pair of injuries that wreaked havoc on his 2025 campaign. Expected to be a part of the Cincinnati Reds’ starting rotation, the 23-year-old right-hander instead experienced a forearm issue in the spring, and that was followed by a more serious oblique strain. He ended up pitching just nine-a-third innings, all of them down on the farm.
Lowder is currently taking the mound for the Arizona Fall League’s Peoria Javelinas, and I caught up with him following a recent outing to learn what he’s been focusing on. Along with making up for lost innings, what is he doing to make himself a better pitcher?
“There are a couple things in the delivery, trying to take some pressure off the arm and the oblique, helping set myself up to be healthy,” replied Lowder, who’d logged a 1.17 ERA over six late-season starts with the Reds in 2024. “I’ve watched a little bit of Yamamoto and how he moves. Everything looks so effortless when he throws. I’ve tended to leak a little bit to the third base side, then compensate by over-rotating. That puts more pressure on the oblique, which is a rotational muscle, so I want to be more direct toward home plate with my delivery.”
Being direct to home plate is a common goal for pitchers. Appearance of effortlessness aside, what specifically made Yamamoto a point of study? Read the rest of this entry »
At last, we’ve got a World Series matchup to wrap our heads around. Representing the American League are the Blue Jays, who are back in the Fall Classic — making it a truly international World Series — for the first time since 1993. They’ll face the Dodgers, who are vying to become the first back-to-back champions since the 1999–2000 Yankees. They’re the first defending champions to repeat as pennant winners since the 2009 Phillies, who lost that World Series to the Yankees. If that matchup feels like a long time ago, consider that it’s been twice as long since the Blue Jays were here.
Though the core of the lineup is largely unchanged, this year’s Dodgers team differs from last year’s in that it has reached the World Series on the strength of its starting pitching rather than in spite of it. Due to a slew of injuries in the rotation last year, manager Dave Roberts resorted to using bullpen games four times to augment a rickety three-man staff consisting of Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Jack Flaherty, and Walker Buehler. Even as those starters (or “starters,” in some cases) put up a 5.25 ERA while averaging just 3.75 innings per turn, the bullpen and offense more than picked up the slack, and the Dodgers took home their second championship of the Roberts era.
This time around, with Flaherty and Buehler elsewhere and Blake Snell, Tyler Glasnow, and Shohei Ohtani joining Yamamoto, Dodgers starters have been absolutely dominant, posting a microscopic 1.40 ERA while averaging 6.43 innings per turn through the first three rounds, helping the team to paper over a shaky bullpen. After Snell utterly dominated the Brewers, holding them to just one hit over eight innings while facing the minimum number of batters in Game 1 of the NLCS, Yamamoto followed with a three-hit, one-run masterpiece — the first complete game in the postseason since the Astros’ Justin Verlander went the distance against the Yankees in Game 2 of the 2017 ALCS. Glasnow, who began the postseason in the bullpen, allowed one run across 5 2/3 innings in Game 3 of the NLCS, while Ohtani backed his 10 strikeouts over six shutout innings in Game 4 with a three-homer game in what for my money stands as the greatest single-game postseason performance in baseball history. Read the rest of this entry »
Willie MacIver has caught a lot of power arms since entering pro ball in 2018. Some were in Sacramento this season — the 28-year-old University of Washington product spent a chunk of the summer with the Athletics, backing up Shea Langeliers — but none of those hurlers stand out as having the best raw stuff he’s been behind the dish for. That distinction belongs to a former Colorado Rockies farmhand whose brief major-league ledger includes a 22.09 ERA and a 22.7% walk rate over five appearances comprising three-and-a-third innings.
“I caught a guy named Riley Pint,” said MacIver, citing the right-handed flamethrower whom the Rockies drafted fourth overall in 2016 out of an Overland, Kansas high school. “To this day, he has the best stuff I’ve ever seen. I caught him from Low-A all the way through Triple-A, so I was on the ride with him the whole time.”
That ride isn’t necessarily over. Pint is just 27 years old, and while he missed the 2025 season with an injury, the arm is indeed special. MacIver caught him as recently as 2024, and it’s being Pint, and not recent teammate Mason Miller, who he cited speaks volumes.
“When we were in Low-A, it was 102 [mph] all over the place,” MacIver told me. “Then he started throwing a sinker. We were at Driveline together and he was throwing sinkers that were registering as left-handed curveballs on the TrackMan. He could make the ball move like nothing else. His sinker would be like negative-eight, and then he would throw a true sweeper that was Morales-like with the horizontal, but at 87 [mph]. Read the rest of this entry »
