Kevin Sousa, Benny Sieu, Eric Hartline, Troy Taormina-Imagn Images
Cody Ponce left his first start on a cart with a trainer.
Ponce collapsed in considerable pain Monday after making an awkward attempt to field a grounder in the third inning against the Rockies. He appeared to twist his right knee in a direction it’s not meant to go. He stood and limped to the cart on his own before exiting. Blue Jays’ manager John Schneider said after the game that Ponce will get an MRI.
The injury is an unfortunate setback for Ponce, who was making his first start in the majors since 2021. He was perhaps the most anticipated in a quartet of free agent pitchers who signed out of the KBO or NPB this winter. I’d already planned to write about each of them, leading with Ponce for the reasons he displayed before the injury. And while I don’t want to overreact to one start, I think there are interesting takeaways from each that could inform the shape of their respective seasons to come. Read the rest of this entry »
Teel is set to begin the season on the injured list. He pulled his hamstring while legging out a double for Team Italy last week at the World Baseball Classic. The diagnosis is a Grade 2 strain, which could keep him out for most of April. It’s an unfortunate start to what was meant to be his first full big league season.
In some ways, this answers a crucial question for the White Sox: Who will start at catcher on Opening Day? Teel, 23, would have been the obvious choice for most rebuilding organizations. He was a top 100 prospect last year before his debut in June, and he then posted a 125 wRC+ in 297 plate appearances. He’s at the forefront of Chicago’s burgeoning prospect pipeline and a key figure as the organization searches for its next core.
But the same can also be said for Edgar Quero, a similarly rated prospect who debuted last year at just 22 years old. Quero is now set for the starting job right out of camp, and he’ll have the first chance to showcase his development in 2026. Read the rest of this entry »
Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about speedster Braiden Ward’s record spring, whether there’s a baseball equivalent of Bam Adebayo’s 83-point game, and Paradise being a baseball show, then preview the 2026 Atlanta Braves (38:00) with From the Diamond’s Grant McAuley, and the 2026 Chicago White Sox (1:29:45) with Sox Machine’s James Fegan.
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 »
For pitchers, it’s really not optimal to show up late to spring training. Roll up to Arizona or Florida sometime in early March, and then you’re behind all your friends, still ramping up when it’s supposed to be go time. Maybe you find your form sometime in May. Maybe your season never gets off the ground. Such a fate is to be avoided, if at all possible.
And so with pitchers and catchers reporting Tuesday, Monday was, in effect, the final day to sign to ensure a regular build-up. Appropriately, there was a predictable run on the straggling starting pitchers of the free agent market. Nick Martinez went to the Rays; Erick Fedde returned to the White Sox; Chris Paddack found a life raft with the Marlins. Also, even though José Urquidy signed with the Pirates last Thursday, we’re bringing him to the party, too. Let’s talk about each of these signings in that order.
Nick Martinez Signs With Rays (One Year, $13 Million)
Martinez is the biggest name of the bunch, and he accordingly received the largest deal — $13 million for a year’s work — as reported by MLB.com’s Mark Feinsand. Of the remaining pitchers available, his 2.1 ZiPS projected WAR was third best.
It’s unclear if he’ll assume his typical swingman role in Tampa Bay. The RosterResource crew sees him slotting into the back of the rotation, a place he thrived in the second half of 2024 with the Reds. Despite averaging just 92.6 mph on his four-seam fastball that season, Martinez leveraged a wide mix and impeccable command to deliver a 3.21 FIP over 142 1/3 innings, good for 3.4 WAR. On the strength of that campaign, he received (and accepted) the qualifying offer, bequeathing him a hefty $21.05 million for 2025.
Last offseason, I speculated that Martinez was a good candidate to repeat his surprising success due in large part to his ability to blend his pitches together. These arsenal effects, I thought, would lead to sustainable soft-contact generation, allowing for continued success in spite of a so-so strikeout rate.
In some sense, I was half-right: New arsenal metrics from Baseball Prospectus, introduced months after the publication of that article, reinforced my thesis. Martinez’s 2025 Pitch Type Probability (a measure of unpredictability) ranked in the 94th percentile among pitchers with at least 1000 pitches thrown; his Movement Spread and Velocity Spread also clocked in well above average. True to form, he limited damage on contact, holding hitters to a 34.5% hard-hit rate (90th percentile) and a .275 BABIP.
And yet Martinez’s 2025 season was a bust; his ERA jumped from 3.10 to 4.45, with the poor peripherals to back it up. After running a 3.2% walk rate in 2024, some control regression was expected. But his bat-missing went from acceptable to dire, his strikeout rate dropping nearly four percentage points. The main culprit was the changeup, which generated a huge amount of chase in 2024 and fell all the way back to Earth in 2025. The shape did not change significantly, but his command of the pitch slipped considerably. Check out how much more plate his changeup caught against left-handed hitters this season (left) versus last (right):
The changeup unlocks the entire Martinez experience, and its performance will determine whether the Rays will be getting a durable but unexciting innings-eater or a guy you might trust to start Game 3 of a Divisional Series. Either way, he improves the Tampa Bay staff for 2026, giving the team insurance against the wild whims of Joe Boyle. And in the case of a Boyle breakout, Martinez can easily shift back into his familiar swingman role.
Erick Fedde Signs With White Sox (Contract TBA)
It was mad ugly for Fedde in 2025. He started the year in St. Louis, pitching a little over 100 innings of exactly replacement-level ball; at the trade deadline, the Braves picked him up for a handful of gumballs, hoping he’d hoover up some innings in a lost season. Three weeks later, they straight up released him; the Brewers brought him in for a few mopup opportunities before hitting him with a DFA on the final day of the regular season.
That’s not what you want. Fedde’s east-west attack fell apart in 2025; excluding Rockies hurlers, his 13.3% strikeout rate was worst in baseball (minimum 100 innings pitched.) Perhaps fatally, his walk rate ballooned as he opted to pitch around hitters instead of challenging them in the zone.
But what better place to resurrect his career? Those handful of months on the South Side in 2024 were the best he’s pitched since his triumphant return from the KBO. In 21 pre-trade deadline starts that year, Fedde bullied righties with his sinker-sweeper combo, and jammed enough lefties with his cutter to viably work his way through lineups. A 3.11 ERA earned him a deadline promotion to a contender, and he proceeded to pitch roughly as well as a Cardinal, though the team ultimately missed the playoffs.
Fedde was still pretty good against righties in 2025, but lefties smoked him to the tune of a .389 wOBA. His cutter lost a crucial couple inches of glove-side bite, and so the pitch tended to finish middle-up instead of on the inner edge. A perfectly straight 90-mph cutter is fodder for tanks; with no four-seam option on the table, Fedde was faced with the difficult choice of getting aggressive with subpar stuff or aiming at too-fine targets.
If getting back with pitching coach Brian Bannister can help Fedde gain back those two inches of break on the cutter, the White Sox can expect him to deliver on his presumably modest deal.
Chris Paddack Signs With Marlins (One year, $4 million)
Paddack’s plan of attack is pretty straightforward, venturing not much further than a carry fastball and a butterfly changeup. When you throw a carry fastball nearly half the time at mediocre velocity, you’re going to give up a lot of home runs. So it’s been for Paddack his entire career, and never more so than in 2025, when he gave up a career-high 31 chucks across his 158 2/3 innings of work.
With Martinez and Fedde at least, you can squint at them and see an unlikely path to a 3-WAR season. Paddack, however, presents no such upside. He is what he is: a guy with reliably excellent command and not enough stuff to miss bats or stay off barrels. This blurb is already pretty negative, but still, I must admit that I am surprised that he received a guaranteed big league deal. (And for $4 million, no less.)
I’m not even really sure I understand this signing for the Marlins. RosterResource projects this signing to kick Janson Junk into a long relief role. Junk is, to my eye, a better version of Paddack, featuring similarly excellent command and a carry fastball from a high arm angle. But Junk can throw a pretty good breaking ball; Paddack’s extreme pronation bias prevents him from spinning the ball with any effectiveness. Unless the Marlins are planning to imminently ship out Sandy Alcantara, I don’t see what Paddack brings to their club at present. Perhaps he could work as an unconventional relief arm, throwing only fastballs and changeups.
José Urquidy Signs With Pirates (One Year, $1.5 million)
Remember him? Urquidy’s last full season of work was all the way back in 2022, when he racked up 164 1/3 innings for a World Series-winning Astros club. In the three years hence, he’s battled shoulder problems and then, finally, a torn elbow ligament, causing him to miss the entire 2024 season and nearly all of 2025.
Crucially for the purposes of providing analysis in this blurb, Urquidy did briefly resurface in Detroit for 2 1/3 innings of work in September, allowing us to compare his stuff to where it was before the injury. Surprisingly, it was mostly the same. Both before and after, Urquidy possessed a four-seam fastball with crazy carry (nearly 20 inches of induced vertical break), a changeup with respectable vertical separation, and a slow two-plane curveball, and his fastball velocity was nearly identical, 93.1 mph in 2023 and 93.0 mph in 2025. But there was one pivotal difference: Urquidy’s sweeper, which was completely incongruous with the rest of his arsenal and racked up a bunch of whiffs in 2023, did not resurface in his brief big league stint last year.
Like Paddack, the arsenal characteristics (93-mph carry fastball) will ensure a bushel of tanks. Can Urquidy limit damage around the homers enough to hold the fort down until the return of Jared Jones? I think it might come down to the state of that sweeper. Otherwise, I’m not sure he has an out pitch against same-handed hitters. As far as backend bets go, there are worse ideas than giving $1.5 million to a guy who reliably beat his FIP for years prior to the injury. The Pirates aren’t asking for much, and Urquidy seems reasonably likely to meet those low expectations.
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 »
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.
Last week, the White Sox admitted defeat in their handling of Luis Robert Jr.’s contract, shipping him out to the Mets for two lottery tickets and salary relief. That salary relief must have been burning a hole in their pocket, though. Or perhaps someone looked at their books, said “Guys, we play in Chicago but we’re projected for the lowest payroll in baseball and people are going to talk,” and handed GM Chris Getz a list of players who hadn’t yet signed. In any case, Seranthony Domínguez and the White Sox have agreed to terms on a two-year deal worth $20 million, as ESPN’s Jeff Passan first reported.
The right-handed Domínguez is no stranger to high-pressure relief work. In both the 2022 and 2023 postseasons, he appeared in mid- and high-leverage situations for the Phillies, and he handled them quite well (1.13 ERA, 0.78 FIP in 16 innings). In 2024, Philadelphia didn’t have much use for his services after his slow start, and so they sent him and Cristian Pache to the Orioles for platoon bat Austin Hays (whom they promptly non-tendered after the season). The O’s employed Domínguez for a year (he made two appearances for them in the playoffs), then dealt him and cash to the Blue Jays in exchange for Juaron Watts-Brown, a 40-FV relief prospect. He pitched for the Jays in October, and memorably had some ups and downs in their long run.
In other words, playoff teams have been employing Domínguez for years, but they haven’t been placing particularly high importance on his performance. He’s twice been traded to contenders in deadline deals, and at no point did his suitors offer much to get him. Those teams considered him a mid-leverage option; even the Blue Jays had him as a second-tier option out of their weak-link bullpen that flailed its way through October. 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 »
With most of the top free agents having found new homes – 12 of our top 15 have signed – the baseball transaction news figured to be light this week. Maybe the Yankees and Cody Bellinger would keep making lovey-dovey eyes at each other across the negotiating table to give us some headlines, but that felt like the only game in town for at least a few days. But just because no one is left to sign doesn’t mean nothing can happen. Out in Queens, the Mets weren’t content to sit pat after signingBo Bichette. They continued their offseason splurge by acquiring Luis Robert Jr. from the White Sox in exchange for Luisangel Acuña and pitching prospect Truman Pauley, as ESPN’s Jeff Passan first reported.
I’ve grappled with evaluating Robert innumerable times over the past few years. For a while, he was a yearly feature in our Trade Value series, an electric talent in his early 20s. Then he became an interesting litmus test when talking to team evaluators, as his production dipped but his prodigious tools remained as loud as ever. Finally, as his contract hit the expensive team option phase, I considered him for a list of top free agents, as I have to predict what option decisions teams will make. At every turn, I came away equally impressed and frustrated by Robert’s ludicrous ceiling and subbasement-level floor.
You want a tooled-up center fielder? Robert is your guy. If you click on the “Prospects Report” tab on his player page, you’ll see this short blurb by Eric Longenhagen: “Graduation TLDR: The Vitruvian Outfield Prospect in all facets save for his approach, Robert graduated from prospectdom as one of baseball’s most exciting players.” That Vitruvian Outfield Prospect phrase has stuck with me.
If you made an outfielder in a lab, he’d look a lot like this. Power? Robert has 90th-percentile bat speed and clobbered 38 home runs in his last full season of playing time. He gets the ball in the air, too, all the better to maximize his best contact. Speed? You guessed it, 90th-percentile sprint speed. He’s also among the best defensive outfielders in the game when he’s healthy. He even has a strong throwing arm, though it’s inaccurate at times. If you’re looking for a Gold Glove defender who can hit 40 homers at the hardest outfield spot and swipe 30 bags, he’s one of maybe three players in the entire majors who fits the bill. Read the rest of this entry »
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