Lucas Elissalt is an under-the-radar prospect in one of the game’s top farm systems. A 21-year-old right-hander whom the Detroit Tigers tabbed in the 13th round of the 2024 draft out of Chipola College, Elissalt is coming off of a first full professional season in which he put up a 2.51 ERA and 3.23 FIP over 89 2/3 innings split between Low-A Lakeland and High-A West Michigan. Moreover, his 26.9% strikeout rate was the highest among Detroit farmhands who tossed 80 or more frames.

Elissalt’s fastball wouldn’t be described as high octane. The 6-foot-4, 190-pound hurler’s heater sat 90-93 mph last year, occasionally ticking up to 94 (but also down to 89). Adding good weight to his lanky frame — “maybe 15 or 20 pounds” — could contribute to increased velocity, arguably the key to his developing into a major league starter.

Regardless of any velo gains that might be forthcoming, the ABS system could work in his favor. Elissalt’s 9.4% walk rate wasn’t exactly Maddux-esque, but command nonetheless profiles as one of his strengths going forward. At a time when some organizations are reassessing their views of power versus pitchability, the young righty may be ascending the minor league ladder at an opportune moment. What Elissalt lacks in gas, he makes up for with guile. Read the rest of this entry »

Two years ago, Zac Gallen was one of the top pitchers in baseball. Building upon a breakout 2022 season in which he finished fifth in the NL Cy Young voting, he went 17-9 with a 3.47 ERA, a 3.26 FIP, and 5.2 WAR in 210 innings for the Diamondbacks, making his first NL All-Star team, helping an upstart Arizona squad reach the World Series — where he took a no-hitter into the seventh inning of his Game 5 start — and placing third for the Cy Young. Since then, however, it’s been mostly downhill. After hitting free agency on the heels of a season in which his ERA ballooned to 4.83 and his WAR dipped to 1.1, the 30-year-old righty remains unsigned, and pitchers and catchers are due to report to spring training camps next week.

With Wednesday’s news that Framber Valdez signed a three-year, $115 million deal with the Tigers, Gallen is the only remaining free agent from among the nine who declined $22.025 million qualifying offers. He’s also the best-available player remaining on our Top 50 Free Agents list — where Ben Clemens placed him 19th — but hardly the only one. In fact, one can almost cobble together a passable rotation out of the starters still on the market, namely Gallen (19th), Chris Bassitt (35th), Lucas Giolito (36th), Zack Littell (49th), and Justin Verlander (50th). They’d be a stronger unit if we turned the clock back to 2022 or ’23, but for ’26 those five project to combine for 9.1 WAR, which would tie the White Sox for 27th on our Depth Charts. With Valdez instead of Giolito in my first draft of this article — going by 2026 projected WAR, the latter’s ranking doesn’t match where Ben placed him — the quintet projected to produce 11.4 WAR, which would rank 19th, ahead of three playoff teams from last year, namely the Cubs, Guardians, and Padres. Neither of those totals includes reinforcements who would have improved their standing a bit, since no team gets by on just five starters alone.

In parallel with Tuesday’s roundup of the best position players still available, what follows here is a run through the best free agent starters who’ve yet to sign. I’ll be working in order of projected WAR. Read the rest of this entry »

The biggest name remaining in free agency is now off the board, as Framber Valdez agreed to a three-year, $115 million contract with the Detroit Tigers on Wednesday night. The 32-year-old lefty, who ranked fourth on our Top 50 Free Agents list, hit the open market for the first time in his major league career this winter after parts of eight seasons with the Astros. In his final season in Houston, Valdez put up a 3.66 ERA and a 3.37 FIP in 31 starts over 192 innings, good enough to reach the 4.0-WAR mark for the third time in his career. His new deal with the Tigers comes with an opt out after the 2027 season, $20 million of the deal in the form of a signing bonus, and some unknown amount of deferred money, which will reduce the overall value of his contract by, well, an unknown amount.

For the Tigers, the benefits of adding Valdez to the rotation are quite clear. Of course, he would improve any team, since having too many good pitchers has been an actual problem zero times in baseball history, but he fits Detroit’s needs like a glove. The Tigers have managed to get their rotation through the season successfully over the last two years despite a lack of depth, but come playoff time, they have basically gone with a starting staff of Tarik Skubal and a trio of shrug emojis. Don’t believe me? Detroit has played 15 games across the last two postseasons, and I will now run down the full list of five-inning starts by Tigers pitchers with last names that aren’t Skubal:

[…]

[…]

Oh, sorry, I was eating tacos. There aren’t any players on that list. Signing Valdez gives the Tigers a dependable no. 2 starter, one who is better and with a better health record than Jack Flaherty. While I’m chaotic-neutral enough to get a thrill out of A.J. Hinch’s admitting in press conferences that he and the front office were basically coming up with the pitcher assignments as they went along, I’m sure that’s not an ideal scenario for making decisions. Read the rest of this entry »

Carlos Santana is well into the immaculate grid portion of his 16-year career. After spending 10 of his first 11 seasons in Cleveland, Santana has played for seven teams over the past five seasons (including one last stint with the Guardians last year). On Tuesday, we learned that he will be joining his newest, and southernmost, franchise in 2026, as the veteran first baseman has agreed to a one-year, $2 million deal with the Diamondbacks.

With just 0.3 WAR and a wRC+ of 81, Santana is coming off the second-worst season of his storied career. He will turn 40 a week after the season starts. All of that makes him a perfect fit for a Diamondbacks team whose mantra was announced by owner Ken Kendrick back in September: “We will not be spending at the same level.” Kendrick has so far lived up to his word. RosterResource currently has Arizona projected for a payroll of $173 million, down from $188 million in 2025. Santana said last year that the Diamondbacks were interested in him before he decided to return to Cleveland, and he is a reasonable bounce-back candidate and a cheap option for a team that’s only interested in cheap options. Read the rest of this entry »

Brayden Taylor had a disappointing season. Ranked seventh when our Tampa Bay Rays Top 56 Prospects list was published last February, the 23-year-old infielder went on to slash .173/.289/.286 with eight home runs and a 77 wRC+ over 437 plate appearances with Double-A Montgomery. It was a precipitous fall from the previous summer, when Taylor homered 20 times with a 143 wRC+ between High-A Bowling Green and the Double-A Biscuits.

I asked Taylor, a 2023 first-round pick out of Texas Christian University, about his lackluster performance in the early weeks of the Arizona Fall League season, where he was suiting up with the Mesa Solar Sox.

“Sometimes in baseball you just get a little bit out of sync,” said Taylor, who rallied to the tune of a .264/.400/.472 line in the hitter-friendly AFL. “Your sequence doesn’t feel good. Your body doesn’t feel good. Your mentality isn’t the greatest. I just didn’t have my best year at the plate.” Read the rest of this entry »

On Monday, Michael Rosen wrote a fun article about catcher blocking. He didn’t just write about it; he created his own blocking metric from scratch in order to grade every catcher in the game and to understand how much value a single block or passed ball can carry. The whole article is excellent, but one piece in particular caught my eye. Michael put together a supercut of Agustín Ramírez’s passed balls, all of which shared a theme. They weren’t the pitches in the dirt that you’d expect to end up as passed balls. They were normal pitches on the edges of the zone, ones that Ramírez tried so hard to frame them that he ended up missing them entirely. Michael drew the obvious inference: His framing focus, I believe, may have led to some of these inexcusable passed balls. At the risk of piling on, here are the pitches in question:

I’m so sorry, Agustín. This is brutal, and it makes Michael’s point very bluntly. It also makes me wonder about the relationship between the framing skill and the blocking skill. Does selling out to be a better framer hurt your blocking? Clearly, it can and at least sometimes does for Ramírez, but it still doesn’t strike me as a particularly likely hypothesis overall. Moreover, even if framing does hurt your blocking, the trade-off would certainly be worth it. Read the rest of this entry »

The Kansas City Royals are my dark horse team for 2026. They managed not only to make the playoffs in 2024 but also to win a round despite not having anything resembling a playoff-quality offense, and then went a respectable 82-80 in 2025 even after losing ace Cole Ragans to a rotator cuff strain and watching no. 2 starter Seth Lugo start to suffer the effects of age.

Heading into 2026, the Royals have a deep pitching staff and more good position players than they’ve had at one time in at least 10 years. Maikel Garcia and Bobby Witt Jr. are baseball’s best left-side-of-the-infield duo, and Vinnie Pasquantino is pretty good too. If not for the giant sucking maw at second base, the Royals infield would be among the best in the majors.

Still, they could, as ever, use another thumper. Witt is the team’s only truly transformative offensive player, and while Kansas City has bolstered the lineup with the addition of Isaac Collins, it had only four players last season with double-digit home runs. That’s the lowest total in baseball; 27 teams had at least six such players, 16 had eight, and four had 10.

Seems like a team that could really use a gigantic Floridian with 80-grade power. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about MLB owners avoiding the Epstein files, preview the season preview series, bemoan the insurance issues preventing some stars from playing in the WBC, and break down the Luis Arraez and Eugenio Suárez signings, the Brendan Donovan trade, the latest White Sox moves, and their major takeaways from the release of the 2026 playoff odds. Then (1:22:00) Ben brings on historian Richard Hershberger to discuss the 150th anniversary of the National League’s founding, followed by (1:41:02) a postscript.

Audio intro: Philip Tapley and Michael Stokes, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Luke Lillard, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to Epstein files sports roundup
Link to season preview series wiki
Link to insurance article
Link to Ben on WBC injuries
Link to Arraez signing FG post
Link to Dan S. on Arraez
Link to Sam on Arraez
Link to team 2B projections
Link to Arraez offers report
Link to Arraez defensive stats
Link to Moneyball quote
Link to Washington hiring
Link to Ben on Arraez
Link to “gotta hand it to them” tweet
Link to “It’s Been Awhile”
Link to Suárez signing FG post
Link to over/under draft tracker
Link to palindrome post
Link to Donovan trade post
Link to Dipoto trade story
Link to “WWJDD?”
Link to Dipoto hospital story
Link to Cijntje specialization story
Link to Cijntje splits
Link to Becker on three-team trades
Link to Rays ballpark funding info
Link to Sam’s trade post
Link to Sam’s original Rays post
Link to “White Soxer” post
Link to FG offseason tracker
Link to Baumann on the White Sox
Link to BP on the White Sox
Link to Slater “top target” quote
Link to Murakami bidets story
Link to Sasaki bidets story
Link to Mamdani bidets story
Link to Ben on bidets
Link to team payrolls
Link to Dan S. on beating the Dodgers
Link to Dan on the Pirates/A’s
Link to the playoff odds
Link to Clemens on the playoff odds
Link to projected team WAR
Link to Strike Four
Link to Richard’s SABR work
Link to projected team WAR
Link to Past Blast wiki
Link to Richard’s NL post 1
Link to Richard’s NL post 2
Link to Richard’s NL post 3
Link to 1876 NL
Link to prediction markets update
Link to team broadcasts update
Link to 2025 player earnings data
Link to original Stat Blast
Link to new Stat Blast data
Link to $/WAR by year

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If you were looking to reunite the 2019 Yankees for some reason, you could get a jump on rounding them up using our Free Agent Tracker. Based on our Depth Charts projected WAR for the upcoming season, four of the top 10 unsigned position players logged playing time with that 2019 squad, which in that season of the juiced ball hit more homers (306) than all but two teams in major league history. That tally of free agents doesn’t even include DJ LeMahieu, whom they released last summer and still owe $15 million for 2026. Several other Yankees of more recent vintage dot the list as well. Does everybody else know something that Brian Cashman doesn’t?

Perhaps, but that’s outside the scope of this article, and you’re going to have to wait a few paragraphs for those names. With the calendar having flipped to February, and pitchers, catchers, and World Baseball Classic-participating position players all due to report to spring training next week, it’s worth taking a look at the most notable free agents still searching for landing spots. Just one of the position players still available cracked our Top 50 Free Agents list, but several of the others are capable role players. I’ll take a look at the best of them here, and round up the pitchers — a group that includes three starters from our Top 50, including fourth-ranked Framber Valdez — in my next installment.

I’ll generally be working in order from highest projected WAR to lowest, though I’ve grouped some of these players — generally the ones coming off a combination of injuries and subpar performances — at the end. And yes, I’ll get to those 2019 Yankees along the way. Read the rest of this entry »