World Baseball Classic managers were made available to the media during the Winter Meetings, and I took that opportunity to ask Chinese Taipei’s Hao-Jiu Tseng about some of the best arms in Taiwan. I had specific pitchers in mind, but opted to begin with an open-ended question rather than cite any names. The response I got was likewise non-specific.

“I hope all pitchers from our team can be known by all baseball fans,” Tseng told me via an interpreter. “There are so many young pitchers. Most of them are still playing at the minor league level, but this tournament can help them improve their skills and experience, and someday grow into great players at a top level.”

The first pitcher he mentioned when I followed up was Wei-En Lin, a 20-year-old left-hander in the Athletics system who was featured here at FanGraphs back in August. The second was the hurler I was most interested in hearing about
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“Jo Hsi Hsu pitches in the [Chinese Professional Baseball League], ”Tseng said of the recently-turned-25-year-old right-hander, who had a 2.05 ERA and 120 strikeouts, with just 78 hits allowed, over 114 innings for the Wei Chuan Dragons. “He is a posted player this offseason. Right now he is eligible to negotiate with foreign clubs. He possibly will transfer his contract to Japan or America. He is the ace of the CPBL. Read the rest of this entry »

As is often the case the week after the Winter Meetings, there has been a flurry of transactions for us to cover at FanGraphs since we got back from Orlando. So many relief pitchers came off the board. The Padres re-signed Michael King on Thursday night while Meg’s Seahawks were staging an absolutely stupid comeback against my Rams; San Diego followed that up yesterday by signing a Korean infielder with the musical name, Sung-mun Song. Earlier this week, the Twins signed Josh Bell to hit in the middle of their order, while the Phillies added Adolis García to replace right fielder Nick Castellanos, who is still technically on the roster but definitely won’t be when the season starts. The two moves inspired Michael Baumann to compare them to babies putting every single thing they see into their mouths. Lovely.

Then, yesterday, two big trades went down. Eric Longenhagen has you covered on the Rays-Orioles swap that sent Shane Baz to Baltimore, while Brendan Gawlowksi analyzed the three-team trade between the Rays, Pirates, and Astros. Of course, there are a number of high-profile free agents still out there, including four of the top five on Ben Clemens’ Top 50 list and six of the top 10.

We won’t be covering any of that in today’s mailbag; you can find all the relevant buzz in Jon Becker’s latest edition of the Matrix Reloaded column. Instead, we’ll answer your questions about the position players with the most WAR who never made an All-Star team, whether baseball should use WPA as pitcher wins, the windup, and more. But first, I’d like to remind you that this mailbag is exclusive to FanGraphs Members. If you aren’t yet a Member and would like to keep reading, you can sign up for a Membership here. It’s the best way to both experience the site and support our staff, and it comes with a bunch of other great benefits. Also, if you’d like to ask a question for an upcoming mailbag, send me an email at mailbag@fangraphs.com. Read the rest of this entry »

The Pirates, Rays, and Astros came together on a three-team trade on Friday. In the move, Pittsburgh acquired Brandon Lowe, Jake Mangum, and Mason Montgomery from Tampa Bay. The Bucs sent Mike Burrows to Houston, who in turn dealt Jacob Melton and Anderson Brito to the Rays. Multi-teamers are always complicated, and I find it most helpful to break these down team by team.

Pittsburgh Pirates

Acquires: 2B Brandon Lowe, OF Jake Mangum, LHP Mason Montgomery

Loses: RHP Mike Burrows

The motivation for the Pirates here is obvious, as they entered the offseason with a dire need to convert their pitching surplus into a few bats. The Pirates scored 583 runs this past season, the fewest in baseball, and only Colorado saved their collective 82 wRC+ from bringing up the rear in that category, as well. At the same time, the team’s pitching development pipeline is humming. Paul Skenes is the best pitcher in the NL, and Mitch Keller is a solid mid-rotation starter behind him.

From there, the Pirates have plenty of rotation candidates. Burrows, Braxton Ashcraft, Carmen Mlodzinski, Thomas Harrington, and Bubba Chandler all started games this year. Another potential starter, Hunter Barco, clambered ashore from the banks of the Allegheny late this season, and Jared Jones will presumably return from Tommy John surgery in 2026 and be in the mix, too. It’s enviable depth and ripe for a resource exchange. Pittsburgh started that process earlier this winter, flipping Johan Oviedo to the Red Sox for outfielder Jhostynxon Garcia, and really kicked things into gear with this move. Read the rest of this entry »

Orioles fans have had “Frontline Starter” on their Christmas list since the departure of Corbin Burnes, and though Friday’s acquisition of Shane Baz is perhaps the gift equivalent of asking for a Ferrari and getting an Acura, it adds a proven element to the middle of an Orioles rotation that still feels like it will be anchored by Kyle Bradish and Trevor Rogers.

To acquire the 26-year-old Baz, who is coming off a 2-WAR season, the Orioles had to part with a prospect potpourri made up of a pair of 2025 draftees (Coastal Carolina catcher Caden Bodine and high school outfielder Slater de Brun), a Competitive Balance Round A pick in next year’s draft, upper-level starting pitcher prospect Michael Forret, and speedy 22-year-old outfielder Austin Overn. It’s an enormous, high-volume return for one player and helps the roots of the Chris Archer trade tree anchor deeper into the game’s soil. I’ll talk more about each prospect, the comp pick, and the way this trade impacts both clubs’ farm systems later in the post. But let’s start with the most immediately consequential piece of the deal: Shane Baz.

Baz has been famous since his junior year of high school, when he emerged as one of the better pitching prospects in the 2017 draft. He was selected by Pittsburgh in the middle of the first round and traded as the Player to be Named in the Archer deal a little over a year later. The pandemic and persistent injuries (there were some near-misses as well) slowed Baz’s ascent through the minors and prevented him from working more than 81 innings in any single season until literally 2025. The Rays doggedly deployed him as a starter despite his injuries and early-career command woes, and they were rewarded with something of a breakout this year, as Baz ate 166.1 innings across 31 starts. He posted a 4.87 ERA, but hurricane damage to Tropicana Field meant that he pitched his home games in a minor league park with the hitter-friendly dimensions of Yankee Stadium; his xERA, which controls for defense, quality of contact, and the hitting environment, was 3.86. Read the rest of this entry »

Happy Friday once again, everyone! The post-Winter Meetings period has seen an absolute flurry of deals added to the Matrix, so I won’t give my esteemed editor too long of an intro to tackle before we get to the past week’s signings, though I did want to share a quick programming note: Matrix Reloaded will be off next week, but as a gift to you, the reader, it will be back the following Monday (December 29) and Friday (January 2) to cover everything that happens in the interim.

And since this is the last Reloaded before the holiday, allow me to wish a very merry Christmas to those of you who celebrate! (I will be celebrating a very Jewish Christmas by watching football and eating sushi.) Now without further ado, here’s what happened around the league in the last seven days. Read the rest of this entry »

Already an appealing addition based on cool name factor alone, Korean infielder Sung-mun Song put himself on the MLB radar with a late-20s breakout for the KBO’s Kiwoom Heroes. The 29-year-old was posted by Kiwoom last month on the heels of back-to-back .900+ OPS seasons that saw him crank 45 total home runs, and FanSided’s Robert Murray was the first to report that Song’s hard work has achieved the purest form of recognition our society can offer: money.

The Padres have reportedly reached an agreement with Song on a three-year deal, which The Athletic’s Dennis Lin says is for around $15 million total. Since San Diego is sort of pot-committed to this Manny Machado character as its everyday third baseman, Lin reports that Song is expected to bounce around the infield, filling in only occasionally at his primary position and appearing at second and first base more often. 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 and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

Alex Gordon spent nearly a decade and a half embodying the ups and downs of the 21st-century Kansas City Royals. His 14-year career began with unreasonably high hopes and then typical growing pains before culminating in one of the more unlikely championships in recent memory, followed by a steep decline.

After dominating at both the high school and college levels in Lincoln, Nebraska, Gordon was drafted as a third baseman by the Royals with the second pick in 2005, and touted as the Next George Brett, a nearly impossible bar to live up to in any era, let alone one in which his team was a perpetual doormat in need of a savior. He hadn’t even played a major league game before Brett himself claimed to be flattered by the comparisons. In the spring of 2007, as Gordon worked to make the jump from Double-A to the majors, the Hall of Fame third baseman with three batting titles, 3,154 career hits, and a rock-solid claim as the best player in franchise history told a reporter, “I take it as a compliment. When I watch him play, he makes the game look pretty easy. When I played the game, I knew how hard it was. He’s better than I was at (23). Much better.” Read the rest of this entry »

The San Diego Padres have re-signed starting pitcher Michael King to a… let’s just call it a three-year deal worth $75 million for now, though the particulars are somewhat more complicated.

Good for the Padres, getting their Christmas shopping done on time; not all of us are so organized. I also can’t remember if I’ve already used the joke about how a reunion between King and the Friars is the opposite of Becket, the 1964 film starring Richard Burton and Peter O’Toole. These are confusing times.

Especially for the Padres, who have been one of baseball’s more chaotic teams in the 2020s, shipping massive talents in and out with little warning and little regard for the long-term future. King came to San Diego in one of the more famous examples of this behavior: the trade that sent Juan Soto to the Yankees in 2023.

That all-in attitude — even when the Padres were selling in the short term, it was to set up another major push in the medium term — was assumed to have a shelf life. Especially after the death of popular owner Peter Seidler, whose largesse enabled GM A.J. Preller to satisfy his inexhaustible thirst for making deals. Read the rest of this entry »

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Is Luke Weaver good? I’m asking for a friend of mine who will remain anonymous, initials D.S. It’s a matter of some urgency, he told me. Perhaps – and I, of course, wouldn’t want to speculate – it might be related to a news item first reported by Will Sammon of The Athletic. Weaver and the New York Mets are in agreement on a two-year, $22 million deal that continues to overhaul their bullpen.

Eleven million a year for a quality reliever is a solid rate. Eleven million for a guy who is only a season removed from nearly carrying the Yankees to a World Series title? A screaming buy. Thus, the question in evaluating Weaver’s free agency is simple: Is he the guy who dominated in 2024, or the one whom Aaron Boone launched down the bullpen hierarchy and eventually gave up on in the 2025 postseason?

When the Weaver experience is firing on all cylinders, you watch him pitch and wonder why everyone can’t do it like this. He starts things off with a model-friendly four-seam fastball, 94-95 mph and with prototypical backspinning movement. The combination of velocity, movement, and command turn what might seem like an ordinary pitch into a great primary option. As a starter, Weaver’s fastball was plus but not unhittable. It was held back by subpar velocity, but that was the only shortcoming of an otherwise solid offering. His star turn in 2024 was driven largely by that pitch, with a few ticks of velocity making it a monster instead of merely good.

When Weaver isn’t pounding the strike zone with his fastball, he’s snapping off one of the best changeups in baseball. The superlative cambio has always been his top offering. He broke into the majors as a starter and used the change to survive, throwing it more than a quarter of the time without any other solid secondaries to speak of. It’s so good that it’s no mere platoon pitch, and it’s gotten better since his transition to the bullpen. The same few ticks of extra juice that turned his fastball unhittable also gave batters nightmares with his offspeed offerings. Read the rest of this entry »