Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley share their responses—and the baseball world’s response—to the events of this month in Minnesota. Then (17:26) they banter about deboned Carlos Rodón, the latest pseudoscientific pursuits of Bryce Harper (and Mike Trout?), and the Giants signing Harrison Bader, before (48:06) discussing José Ramírez’s new extension with the Guardians, Andrew McCutchen’s quarrel with the Pirates, and what teams and star players owe to each other, if anything. Finally (1:26:22), they bring on data scientist/writer Zach Gozlan to Stat Blast about whether baseball is overrrepresented among sports clues on Jeopardy!

Audio intro: Jonathan Crymes, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Justin Peters, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to Calhoun info 1
Link to Calhoun info 2
Link to Calhoun info 3
Link to Ben on Calhoun in 2018
Link to other athlete statements
Link to more athlete statements
Link to Wemby comments
Link to Ober post
Link to Strider post
Link to Woods Richardson post
Link to Klein repost
Link to political affiliation data
Link to Rodón interview clip
Link to Rodón interview article
Link to Harper post summary
Link to Harper clouds repost
Link to Harper’s TikTok
Link to Harper’s mat post
Link to Harper’s mat
Link to Harper and Dombrowski
Link to Trout’s reply to Rooker
Link to Trout’s sponsored post
Link to Trout’s “chamber”
Link to Goop article 1
Link to Goop article 2
Link to Goop article 3
Link to FG post on Bader
Link to BP post on the Giants
Link to FG post on Ramírez
Link to Ramírez interview
Link to Ramírez’s FA value
Link to McCutchen post
Link to Cherington comments
Link to McCutchen article 1
Link to McCutchen article 2
Link to Defector article
Link to Zach’s website
Link to Zach’s data
Link to baseball crosswords research
Link to crosswords wiki summary
Link to Jeopardy! football questions
Link to Jeopardy! Big Dumper question

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The San Francisco Giants, with their unique front office leadership and unconventional manager, have gone the traditional route. “Acquire Harrison Bader” is a tried-and-true team-building strategy for a would-be contender; the former Florida Gator is on his way to his seventh organization in the past four-and-a-half years.

The Giants, unlike Bader’s previous employers, seem interested in keeping him around long enough to unpack all his furniture: Bader’s new contract is for two years and $20.5 million.

Regardless of any analysis to follow, this move makes the Giants stronger in 2026. Bader is a legitimate center fielder who’ll relieve the defensive pressure on the freshly emancipated Jung Hoo Lee (who’s stretched in center) and Heliot Ramos (who’s stretched at any position that requires him to wield a glove). Guys who can play center field comfortably and have a clue at the plate are harder to find than you’d think — especially in free agency — and the Giants got one. Read the rest of this entry »

One day, José Ramírez will get old. One day, he’ll dodder out to the grass in front of the pitcher’s mound on the arm of an adorable grandchild and lollipop the ball into the dirt in front of home plate to the warm cheers of the Cleveland faithful. That’s sure to happen at some indeterminate point in the future. This weekend, however, the Guardians expressed their belief that Ramírez’s inevitable decline is a long way off, inking the 33-year-old future Hall of Famer to a seven-year contract extension that will keep him in the fold through the 2032 season. When the extension expires, Ramírez will be 40.

We’ll break down all the numbers and the dollars, but the biggest story here is the most obvious one. This is great news for anybody who loves Ramírez, the Guardians, or baseball. Ramírez has full no-trade rights, and there’s every reason to expect him to stay for the rest of his career. It’s time to talk about statues and plaques and how nice it is that we’ll never have to know just how wrong it would feel to see him in a jersey that doesn’t say Cleveland on it. This is the third extension Ramírez has signed. The first came in 2016, and it bought out his arbitration years plus two option years. The second came in 2022, and, like this one, it bought out the final three years of the previous extension. Ramírez wanted to stay in Cleveland, and with those first two extensions, he forfeited tens of millions of dollars on the open market to do so.

This extension is slightly more complicated, and the details matter quite a bit. Ramírez was already signed though the 2028 season as part of the previous seven-year extension, so it’s not as if there was a pressing need to get this done. He was owed $69 million over the next three years. This deal reworks his compensation over that period and adds four more years. Over the next seven seasons, Ramírez will earn $25 million per year, with $10 million per year deferred. (Each of those deferrals lasts 10 years, and then pays out $1 million per year for 10 years. So he’ll get $1 million in 2036, $2 million in 2037, and so on until he gets his final $1 million payment in 2051.) The deal also came with perks like increased bonuses for awards and high finishes in the MVP voting, an extra hotel room on road trips, and use of a private jet to and from the All-Star Game plus one extra time per year. Read the rest of this entry »

12:01

Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks! It’s a very chilly day here in Brooklyn (21 degrees) with the snow piled high on the curb. I think we got 10-12″ on Sunday. My basement office is cold enough to hang meat, to borrow a phrase from the late, great voice of the Utah Jazz, Hot Rod Hundley.

12:02

Jay Jaffe: Yesterday I published the final article of this year’s Hall of Fame election cycle, my look at the next five elections. https://blogs.fangraphs.com/peering-into-the-crystal-ball-the-next-fiv…

12:03

Jay Jaffe: For the first time, I went back and audited my own performance at this exercise, which has always been more art than science. Last week of course I had the Hall of Fame results (https://blogs.fangraphs.com/centers-of-attention-carlos-beltan-and-and…) and the candidate-by-candidate breakdown (https://blogs.fangraphs.com/a-candidate-by-candidate-look-at-the-2026-…)

12:04

Jay Jaffe: Finally, I’m one of four FanGraphs writers nominated for a SABR Analytics Conference Research Award. You can vote here: https://blogs.fangraphs.com/2026-sabr-analytics-conference-research-aw…

12:05

Jay Jaffe: Gotta stand up for what’s right! Melt ICE And now, on with the show

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Joe Boyle is emerging as a late-bloomer success story. Now 26 years old, the Tampa Bay Rays right-hander is coming off a campaign during which he not only continued to display a power arsenal, but began to rein in his command as well. Over 86 innings with Triple-A Durham, Boyle paired a 32.9% strikeout rate with an 11.8% walk rate; across 52 innings with the big league club, those numbers were 25.7% and 12.4%. While admittedly far from George Kirby-esque, those free-pass percentages were nonetheless a meaningful step in the right direction.

Boyle’s relationship with the strike zone has long been tenuous. In May 2024, Eric Longenhagen wrote that while “Boyle has had huge stuff for his entire life as a prospect, [he has] also been very wild.” Fast forward to December of that same year, and our lead prospect analyst again cited the nastiness of the 6-foot-8, 250-pound hurler’s offerings, adding a caveat that he has “zero feel for location.”

Something else that Longenhagen wrote 13 months ago bears noting:

“It’s possible that the Rays will attempt to do with Boyle what they successfully accomplished with Tyler Glasnow: Simplify his delivery to make it more consistent and hope it’s enough for him to be a five-inning starter.”

Currently projected as the Rays’ fifth starter by RosterResource, Boyle is now with his third organization. Selected in the fifth round of the 2020 draft by the Cincinnati Reds out of the University of Notre Dame, he was subsequently swapped to the Oakland Athletics in 2023, and then to Tampa Bay the following winter. It is understandable that the pitching-savvy Rays were, and remain, enamored with his potential. While Boyle’s success at the major league level has been spotty — his ERA last season was 4.67 — his comps stick out like a sore thumb. Baseball Savant’s list of the pitchers most similar to Boyle based on velocity and movement comprises Chase Burns, Jacob deGrom, Dylan Cease, Hunter Greene, and Bubba Chandler. Read the rest of this entry »

You already know how it works: January is for signings, trades, and articles that grade those signings and trades. Everything gets a letter, every transaction has a winner and loser, and positive thinkers like me hand out thumbs up left and right. I’ve rarely seen a signing I didn’t like. I think that most trades help out both sides. What about the aggregate effect of all the signings and trades, though? Which teams play the offseason game the best or the worst? Looking at the Mets this winter got me thinking.

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.

Instead of a single number, I’m going to evaluate the decisions that David Stearns and the Mets made this winter 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 trade a star for teenage prospects and then extend a 33-year-old, that’s not coherent. Real-world examples are never that simple, but you get the idea. Some spread in decisions is inevitable, but good teams don’t work against themselves more than they have to.

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.

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 often correlated to 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 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.

Let’s begin with a look at the transactions that reshaped the lineup. The biggest of these has to be the infield turnover, with Pete Alonso out and Bo Bichette, Jorge Polanco, and Marcus Semien in. Since we’re including Semien, we’ll have to include the departure of outfielder Brandon Nimmo as well. These decisions are clearly coherent; Alonso’s leaving meant space in the infield and an offensive deficit, and the Mets signed multiple free agents to account for that. I’ll analyze the Coherence of Strategy axis at the end of this write-up, but for each individual deal, I’ll focus on the other two axes of analysis.
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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 »

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 tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

Last week, BBWAA voters elected Carlos Beltrán and Andruw Jones to the Hall of Fame — and in doing so, they once again foiled my chances at a perfect five-year projection of upcoming elections. Not that I had any real expectation of running the table given my spotty track record regarding this endeavor, but while a year ago I correctly projected that Beltrán, who received 70.3% on the 2025 ballot, would make it this year, I was somewhat surprised that Jones, who received 66.2% last time — leaving him with what has typically been roughly coin-toss odds of reaching 75% the next year — made it as well.

If I’ve learned anything from 14 years of doing these five-year outlooks, dating back to the wrap-up of my 2014 election coverage at SI.com, it’s humility, because there are far more ways to be wrong in this endeavor than to be right; when a candidate gets elected more quickly than I expect, or lags relative to my expectations, it creates a ripple effect. The presence of a high-share holdover means less space for and less attention paid to the mid-ballot holdovers, so clearing one from the ballot can have ramifications that won’t be felt for a few years; likewise, a more rapid election than predicted can accelerate other candidates’ timelines. What’s more, the Hall can change the rules for election without warning, and candidates can do unforeseen things that compromise their chances.

The first time I tried this was so long ago that candidates still had 15 years of eligibility instead of 10, so I could afford to project Tim Raines for election in 2018, his 11th year of eligibility. The Hall’s unilateral decision to truncate candidacies to 10 years would come just months later, though thankfully voters accelerated their acceptance of Raines, who was elected in 2017. Both the eligibility shortening and Hall vice chairman Joe Morgan’s open letter pleading with voters not to elect candidates linked to performance-enhancing drugs changed the landscape in ways I couldn’t foresee. Meanwhile, Ichiro Suzuki made a two-game comeback that bumped his eligibility back a year, Curt Schilling found increasingly elaborate ways to offend voters, Omar Vizquel became the subject of multiple allegations of domestic violence against his wife and sexual harassment of an autistic batboy, and Beltrán lost a shot at first-year election because of his involvement in the Astros’ illegal sign-stealing scheme. My Magic 8 Ball didn’t see any of that coming. Read the rest of this entry »