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 navigation tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

Carlos Beltrán was the quintessential five-tool player, a switch-hitting center fielder who harnessed his physical talents and became a superstar. Aided by a high baseball IQ that was essentially his sixth tool, he spent 20 seasons in the majors, making nine All-Star teams, winning three Gold Gloves, and helping five different franchises reach the playoffs, where he put together some of the most dominant stretches in postseason history. At the end of his career, he helped the Astros win a championship.

Drafted out of Puerto Rico by the Royals, Beltrán didn’t truly thrive until he was traded away. He spent the heart of his career in New York, first with the Mets — on what was at the time the largest free-agent contract in team history — and later the Yankees. He endured his ups and downs in the Big Apple and elsewhere, including his share of injuries. Had he not missed substantial portions of three seasons, he might well have reached 3,000 hits, but even as it is, he put up impressive, Cooperstown-caliber career numbers. Not only is he one of just eight players with 300 home runs and 300 stolen bases, but he also owns the highest stolen base success rate (86.4%) of any player with at least 200 attempts.

Alas, two years after Beltrán’s career ended, he was identified as the player at the center of the biggest baseball scandal in a generation: the Astros’ illegal use of video replay to steal opponents’ signs in 2017 and ’18. He was “the godfather of the whole program” in the words of Tom Koch-Weser, the team’s director of advance information, and the only player identified in commissioner Rob Manfred’s January 2020 report. But between that report and additional reporting by the Wall Street Journal, it seems apparent that the whole roster, as well as higher-ups including bench coach Alex Cora, manager A.J. Hinch, and general manager Jeff Luhnow, was well aware of the system and didn’t stop him or his co-conspirators. In that light, it’s worth wondering about the easy narrative that has left Beltrán holding the bag; Hinch hardly had to break stride in getting another managerial job once his suspension ended, and Cora was rehired as Red Sox manager after he served his suspension. While Beltrán was not disciplined by the league, the fallout cost him his job as manager of the Mets before he could even oversee a game, and he has yet to get another opportunity. Read the rest of this entry »

One of my favorite annual exercises is a quick and dirty assessment of every team’s 40-man roster situation. Which prospects need to be added to their club’s 40-man by next Tuesday’s deadline to be protected from the Rule 5 Draft? Which veterans are in danger of being non-tendered because of their projected arbitration salary? And which players aren’t good enough to make their current org’s active roster, but would see the field for a different club and therefore have some trade value? These are the questions I’m attempting to answer with a piece like this. Most teams add and subtract a handful of players to their roster every offseason — some just one or two, others as many as 10. My aim with this exercise is to attempt to project what each team’s roster will look like when the deadline to add players arrives on Tuesday, or at least give you an idea of the names I think are likely to be on the table for decision-makers to consider.

This project is completed by using the RosterResource Depth Charts to examine current 40-man occupancy and roster makeup, and then weigh the young, unrostered prospects who are Rule 5 eligible in December against the least keepable current big leaguers in the org to create a bubble for each roster. The bigger and more talented the bubble, the more imperative it is for a team to make a couple of trades to do something with their talent overage rather than watch it walk out the door for nothing in the Rule 5.

Below you’ll see each team’s current 40-man count, the players I view as locks to be rostered, the fringe players currently on the roster whose spots feel tenuous, and the more marginal prospects who have an argument to be added but aren’t guaranteed. I only included full sections for the teams that have an obvious crunch or churn, with a paragraph of notes addressing the clubs with less intricate roster situations at the bottom. I have the players listed from left to right in the order I prefer them, so the left-most names are the players I’d keep, and right-most names are the guys I’d be more likely to cut. I’ve italicized the names of the players who I believe fall below the cut line. As a reminder, players who signed at age 18 or younger must be added to the 40-man within five seasons to be protected from the Rule 5, while those signed at age 19 or older must be added within four. Brendan Gawlowski examined the National League yesterday, so be sure to check that out too. Let’s get to it. Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of my ongoing look at the candidates on the 2026 Contemporary Baseball Era Committee ballot. Originally written for the 2015 election at SI.com, it has been updated to reflect recent voting results as well as additional research. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, use the tool above. An introduction to JAWS can be found here.

Wherever Gary Sheffield went, he made noise, both with his bat and his voice. For the better part of two decades, he ranked among the game’s most dangerous hitters, a slugger with a keen batting eye and a penchant for contact that belied his quick, violent swing. For even longer than that, he was one of the game’s most outspoken players, unafraid to speak up when he felt he was being wronged and unwilling to endure a situation that wasn’t to his liking. He was a polarizing player, and hardly one for the faint of heart.

At the plate, Sheffield was viscerally impressive like few others. With his bat twitching back and forth like the tail of a tiger waiting to pounce, he was pure menace in the batter’s box. He won a batting title, launched over 500 home runs — he had 14 seasons with at least 20 and eight with at least 30 — and put many a third base coach in peril with some of the most terrifying foul balls anyone has ever seen. For as violent as his swing may have been, it was hardly wild; not until his late 30s did he strike out more than 80 times in a season, and in his prime, he walked far more often than he struck out.

Bill James wrote of Sheffield in the 2019 Bill James Handbook:

“In all the years that I have been with the Red Sox, 16 years now, there has never been a player the Red Sox were more concerned about, as an opponent, than Gary Sheffield. Sheffield was a dynamite hitter and a fierce competitor… When he was in the game, you knew exactly where he was from the first pitch to the last pitch. He conceded nothing; he was looking not only to beat you, but to embarrass you. He was on the highest level.”

Two decades before that, James referred to Sheffield as “an urban legend in his own mind,” referencing the slugger’s penchant for controversy. Sheffield found it before he ever reached the majors through his connection to his uncle, Dwight Gooden. He was drafted and developed by the Brewers, who had no idea how to handle such a volatile player and wound up doing far more harm than good. Small wonder then that from the time he was sent down midway through his rookie season after being accused of faking an injury, he was mistrustful of team management and wanted out. And when he wanted out — of Milwaukee, Los Angeles, or New York — he let everyone know it, and if a bridge had to burn, so be it; it was Festivus every day for Sheffield, who was always willing to air his grievances. Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of my ongoing look at the candidates on the 2026 Contemporary Baseball Era Committee ballot. Originally written for the 2013 election at SI.com, it has been expanded and updated. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, use the tool above. An introduction to JAWS can be found here.

Don Mattingly was the golden child of the Great Yankees Dark Age. He debuted in September 1982, the year after the team finished a stretch of four World Series appearances in six seasons, and retired in 1995 after finally reaching the postseason — a year too early for the franchise’s run of six pennants and four titles in eight years under Joe Torre.

A lefty-swinging first baseman with a sweet stroke, “Donnie Baseball” was both an outstanding hitter and a slick fielder at his peak. He made six straight All-Star teams from 1984 to ’89 and won a batting title, an MVP award, and nine Gold Gloves. Along the way, he battled with owner George Steinbrenner even while becoming the standard bearer of the pinstripes, the team captain, and something of a cultural icon. Alas, a back injury sapped his power, not only shortening his peak, but also bringing his career to a premature end at age 34. At its root, the problem was that Mattingly was so driven to succeed that he overworked himself in the batting cage.

“Donnie was one of the hardest workers I had ever seen and played with. He would go in the cage before batting practice and take batting practice. And after batting practice was over, he’d take batting practice,” former teammate Ron Guidry said for a 2022 MLB Network documentary, Donnie Baseball (for which this scribe was also interviewed).

“I should have learned quicker to not to beat my body up, and if I did less, I could perform better,” said Mattingly for the same documentary. 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 »

I’m trying out a new format for our managerial report cards this postseason. In the past, I went through every game from every manager, whether they played 22 games en route to winning the World Series or got swept out of the wild card round. To be honest, I hated writing those brief blurbs. No one is all that interested in the manager who ran out the same lineup twice, or saw his starters get trounced and used his best relievers anyway because the series was so short. This year, I’m skipping the first round, and grading only the managers who survived until at least the best-of-five series. Today, we’ll start with the two managers who lost in the American League Divisional Series, Aaron Boone and A.J. Hinch.

My goal is to evaluate each manager in terms of process, not results. If you bring in your best pitcher to face their best hitter in a huge spot, that’s a good decision regardless of the outcome. Try a triple steal with the bases loaded only to have the other team make four throwing errors to score three runs? I’m probably going to call that a blunder even though it worked out. Managers do plenty of other things — getting team buy-in for new strategies or unconventional bullpen usage behind closed doors is a skill I find particularly valuable — but as I have no insight into how that’s accomplished or how each manager differs, I can’t exactly assign grades for it.

I’m also purposefully avoiding vague qualitative concerns like “trusting your veterans because they’ve been there before.” Playoff coverage lovingly focuses on clutch plays by proven performers, but Cam Schlittler and Michael Busch were also great this October. Forget trusting your veterans; the playoffs are about trusting your best players. Blake Snell is important because he’s great, not because of the number of playoff series he’s appeared in. There’s nothing inherently good about having been around a long time; when I’m evaluating decisions, “but he’s a veteran” just doesn’t enter my thought process.

I’m always looking for new analytical wrinkles in critiquing managerial decisions. I’m increasingly viewing pitching as a tradeoff between protecting your best relievers from overexposure and minimizing your starters’ weakest matchups, which means that I’m grading managers on multiple axes in every game. I think that almost no pitching decision is a no-brainer these days; there are just too many competing priorities to make anything totally obvious. That means I’m going to be less certain in my evaluation of pitching than of hitting, but I’ll try to make my confidence level clear in each case. Let’s get to it. Read the rest of this entry »

NEW YORK — About 45 minutes after the “best team” that Aaron Boone has ever managed was eliminated from the playoffs, several of its members sat in the clubhouse drinking a few small beers. The mood was wistful, the somber finality of it all floating through the very same air that less than a week earlier had reeked of celebratory champagne.

They had just lost the American League Division Series to the Blue Jays in four games, and for the most part, it wasn’t all that close. Despite an all-time great postseason performance from Aaron Judge following yet another all-time great regular season from him, New York was thoroughly outplayed by Toronto. Boasting the most annoying opposing lineup in baseball, the Jays peppered pitchers with their all-fields approach and their refusal to swing and miss. Theirs was a Boomer’s more-than-platonic ideal of an offense – they had the lowest strikeout rate (17.8%) and the highest batting average (.265) in the majors this season — but it wasn’t a true throwback. The Blue Jays weren’t dependent on the long ball, but they were more than capable of hitting home runs, as we all saw during the ALDS. As a team, Toronto slashed .338/.373/.601 for a 168 wRC+ across the four games. Yankees pitchers struck out 23.7% of the hitters they faced during the regular season but just 14.9% of the Blue Jays who batted in the series.

“They beat us this series,” Boone said. “Simple as that.”

Yet even as the Yankees accepted their fate, that they had played their last baseball game of the season, they were still trying to understand how it all went wrong. Hadn’t they addressed their shortcomings from a year ago, when they lost to the Dodgers in the World Series? They lengthened their lineup, improved their baserunning, and enhanced their rotation during the offseason, and then ahead of the trade deadline, they made more moves designed to shore up their defense and bolster their bullpen. Some of those deals didn’t pan out, but many of them did. Read the rest of this entry »

A lot of different types of players get sent to the Arizona Fall League by their parent clubs: prospects who have lost time due to injury, org arms there to soak up enough innings for the league to function, guys eligible for the Rule 5 Draft whose teams aren’t yet sold on putting them on the 40-man roster, and, quite often, the most talented and exciting players in minor league baseball. It’s a rich and robust tapestry.

Now that the league’s action has commenced, one use of the AFL is to provide a sort of decontextualized look at some of the players whose strong performance in 2025 was already cause for some re-evaluation. Here’s one player from each AFL roster who arrived with some helium, prompting us to ask if they’ve changed their scouting report, or are just progressively improving into the player we expected.

Glendale Desert Dogs
Sam Antonacci, 2B, White Sox
2025 FV: Honorable Mention

Not only did the White Sox trade for Chase Meidroth months after giving Antonacci a slightly over-slot bonus in the fifth round of the 2024 draft, their Double-A Birmingham affiliate won the Southern League while slotting Antonacci in as the third straight feisty little bat-to-ball maven at the top of their lineup behind Rikuu Nishida and William Bergolla. At six feet, he’s a bit taller, but similar to Meidroth, below-average thump and a dearth of the athleticism necessary to drive a shortstop projection cooled early scouting reads for Antonacci, and he was an honorable mention for us on the White Sox list in April. Despite only playing his junior season there after two years of Division II ball, Antonacci is so Coastal Carolina-pilled that 35 hit by pitches form a substantial part of the .433 OBP he held over his first full pro season. (That he has yet to be plunked in his first three AFL games has to be, one would imagine, a source of deep personal disappointment.) Read the rest of this entry »

You may think you’ve already heard enough about Aaron Judge’s heroics during this postseason, especially considering that he wasn’t able to keep his team from getting knocked out barely a week into October. Heroes usually do a more thorough job when saving the day. I’m sure you’ve heard a lot about Judge’s 2025 playoff excellence. But I’d argue that you haven’t heard enough, because there’s a bit of context I’d like you to consider. That context? The entirety of postseason history.

Over the course of the American League Divisional Series against the Blue Jays, Judge batted .600. If you factor in his .354 batting average against the Red Sox in the Wild Card round, he batted an even .500 over 31 plate appearances this postseason. Now let’s head over to our handy-dandy postseason leaderboard. If you set a minimum of 30 PAs, you’ll find that Judge just ran the third-highest batting average ever over a single postseason; his .581 on-base percentage is the second highest. His 253 wRC+ is the 14th highest in postseason history (just behind the 255 mark that teammate Giancarlo Stanton put up in 2020). By that standard, Judge just produced one of the greatest postseason performances ever.

Read the rest of this entry »

NEW YORK — Ernie Clement simply wore out Yankees pitchers during the Division Series. After collecting three hits in Game 2 — including a two-run homer off Max Fried that opened the scoring — in a Blue Jays win, then four more hits in their Game 3 defeat, the 29-year-old infielder sparked rallies in Game 4 with a pair of singles that led to the go-ahead run in the fifth inning and then two more runs in the seventh, helping Toronto break the game open. Backed by opener Louis Varland and seven other relievers who combined to hold the Yankees to six hits and two runs, the Blue Jays bounced their AL East rivals with a 5-2 victory in Game 4.

While Vladimir Guerrero Jr. (.529/.550/1.059) and Daulton Varsho (.438/.471/1.000) were the Blue Jays’ heaviest hitters in the series, combining for five homers and 13 RBI, Clement — who spent time at all four infield positions this year and started games at both second and third base in this series — hit .643/.625/.929 himself while scoring and driving in five runs apiece. Though he showed a wide platoon split during the regular season, producing a 146 wRC+ (.326/.351/.549) against lefties and 75 wRC+ (.254/.295/.327) against righties, both of his Game 4 singles were off fireballing righty Cam Schlittler, who was very good if not nearly as dominant as he had been against the Red Sox in the Wild Card Series finale.

“I think Ernie Clement has made everyone aware of how good he is,” said manager John Schneider after the game. “It’s been like that the whole year for the bottom part of our lineup. You try to navigate it to where guys can put the ball in play, guys can get on base for guys at the top. Read the rest of this entry »