Picks to Click: Who We Expect to Make the 2027 Top 100
Prospect Limbo: The Best of the 2026 Post-Prospects
Today is the first day of the 2026 college baseball season, and to celebrate, I’m cutting the ribbon on our 2026 draft rankings and scouting reports. They’re now live on The Board, so head over there for all of these players’ tool grades and blurbs. In this piece, I’ll touch on several individual players who I think are among this year’s best and most interesting prospects for readers to watch and monitor over the next five months as we approach July’s draft in Philadelphia (I can’t wait). I’ll also discuss the class as a whole from a talent standpoint, as well as which teams are in position to have a huge draft.
First, some quick housekeeping on the rankings. I’ve got 51 players on The Board right now. I’ve hard-ranked the players with a 40+ FV and above, while the 40-FV players are clustered by demographic below them. Draft-eligible sophomores are denoted with an asterisks. At this stage in the draft process, players are more in neighborhoods or clusters. It’s too early to have many dozens of players ordinally ranked in a way that won’t change drastically between now and draft day, especially once we get beyond the players who fit within the first two rounds. More players will be added to The Board as the spring progresses.
This is also your reminder that we now have collegeleaderboards on the site, as well as college player pages, all of which I will be wearing out this spring as the class produces another season of data. Read the rest of this entry »
The rosters for the 2026 World Baseball Classic were announced late last week, so aside from changes due to injuries or insurance eligibility decisions, we now know who will be suiting up for each country when the tournament begins early next month. In this series of posts, you’ll find a team-by-team breakdown, with notable players, storylines to monitor, and speculation on the serious stuff, such as how the squad will fare on the field, as well as commentary on some of the less serious stuff, like uniforms and team aura.
If you missed the post covering Pool A, or you need a quick refresher on how the WBC works, you can catch up on that here. And the post covering Pool B is right over here.
The five teams competing in Pool C — Japan, South Korea, Australia, Czechia, and Chinese Taipei — will play their games in Tokyo from March 5 to March 10. The two clubs with the best records after playing each of the other four will advance to the Knockout stage, where they will compete in a single-elimination bracket against the six teams that advance from the other pools. Read the rest of this entry »
Picks to Click: Who We Expect to Make the 2027 Top 100
Prospect Limbo: The Best of the 2026 Post-Prospects
The pros are still moseying on down to Florida and Arizona for training camp, but the college baseball regular season starts today. I’ve long been an evangelist for the college game, and it’s hard to overstate how much more accessible it has become just in the past 15 to 20 years. Basically every power conference game gets aired either on cable or streamed on ESPN+ or a similarly accessible provider. I remember having to calculate OPS by hand from the press box in the mid-teens; now FanGraphs has wRC+ for every Division I player, while D1Baseball puts out batted ball stats.
And the quality of play is better now than it’s ever been. That’s true in most sports; societal standards of nutrition and fitness only tend to go up over time, as does the human understanding of science. And the past decade has seen not one revolution in college baseball but several. Professional-quality, data-driven coaching techniques have hit the amateur game. The truncation of the draft to 20 rounds and the imposition of bonus caps have led more elite prospects to college baseball, and the loosening of transfer policy has led more players to find programs where they can flourish.
In every way that matters, Division I baseball is more like the professional game than it’s ever been. So the statistical environments of the two forms of baseball should be pretty similar, right? Read the rest of this entry »
A few weeks ago, I took a high-level look at the Mets’ offseason overhaul. I thought it came out well, and readers also seemed to like it, so I’m going to use that same rubric to take a look at the Red Sox today. As before, I’ll be focusing on wrapping all of the team’s decisions up together and evaluating across several axes. As I put it last time:
“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.”
I’m not going to give Boston a single grade. Instead, I’m going to evaluate the decisions that Craig Breslow and the Red Sox made 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 find yourself on the borderline of the playoffs and then start subtracting, that’s not coherent. It’s never quite that simple in the real world, but good teams make sets of decisions that work toward the same goal.
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. One note on optionality: It’s not the same as not having any long contracts. Long contracts to key players actually improve flexibility, because “have a few stars” is a key part of building a championship team. Not having a star under contract when you need one is almost as much of a problem as having too many aging veterans, and I’ll consider both versions of flexibility.
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 correlated with 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 on other clubs 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.
The Sox came into the offseason with a pretty clear problem to solve. Alex Bregman opted out of his deal and returned to free agency, which left the roster in a particularly unbalanced state. Boston’s best four position players were all outfielders – Roman Anthony, Jarren Duran, Ceddanne Rafaela, and Wilyer Abreu. The infield was relatively barren. Trevor Story and Romy Gonzalez were the only two holdovers who notched even 250 plate appearances in the dirt. Rafaela played nearly as many games in the infield as Marcelo Mayer, the team’s top shortstop prospect, last year. Read the rest of this entry »
Picks to Click: Who We Expect to Make the 2027 Top 100
Prospect Limbo: The Best of the 2026 Post-Prospects
If you’re not already into college baseball, I’ll give you the briefest possible form of my annual elevator pitch. It comes in three parts. First: The regional round of the NCAA Tournament isn’t for another four months, but it’s one of the best weekends of TV in all of sports. That’s true even if you drop in cold, but it’s better if you know some of the characters involved. The time to start one’s homework is now.
Second: If you watch college baseball, you can have opinions about the draft that’ll make you look smart in front of your friends. If you’re wrong, no one will remember who you were even talking about, but if you’re right, you can dine out on that prediction forever.
Third: What are you going to do, watch spring training? Davy Andrews wrote last week about a blurry photo of a white guy with a goatee in a blue uniform. He says that was Nolan McLean, but for all I know, it was Civil War General Daniel Sickles. You can watch meaningful regular season baseball tomorrow, or you can delude yourself into thinking there’s anything to be learned from watching Carlos Correa get walked by a minor league pitcher with a uniform number in the 80s.
An actual exhaustive college baseball preview takes months of research and dozens of articles, even for specialist publications that can devote a full staff to the undertaking. Me? I’m one guy with about 3,000 words to play with, so I’m giving you a brief rundown of seven teams I’m interested in. These seven teams include national championship contenders — specifically the two heavy preseason College World Series favorites — but this is not a ranking. I tried to pick good, talented teams from a few conferences that could end up having interesting seasons. Make of it what you will. Read the rest of this entry »
Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about hamate fractures and other deflating spring training injury announcements, Zack Wheeler’s preserved rib, Chris Getz and Luisangel Acuña, a profusion of salary cap coverage, and more, and then preview the 2026 Baltimore Orioles (38:50) with The Baltimore Banner’s Andy Kostka, and the 2026 San Diego Padres (1:27:28) with MLB.com’s AJ Cassavell.
The rosters for the 2026 World Baseball Classic were announced late last week, so aside from changes due to injuries or insurance eligibility decisions, we now know who will be suiting up for each country when the tournament begins early next month. In this series of posts, you’ll find a team-by-team breakdown, with notable players, storylines to monitor, and speculation on the serious stuff, such as how the squad will fare on the field, as well as commentary on some of the less serious stuff, like uniforms and team aura.
If you missed the post covering Pool A, or you need a quick refresher on how the WBC works, you can catch up here.
The five teams competing in Pool B — the United States, Mexico, Italy, Great Britain, and Brazil — will play their games at Daikin Park in Houston from March 6 to March 11. The two clubs with the best records after playing each of the other four will advance to the Knockout stage, where they will compete in a single-elimination bracket against the six teams that advance from the other pools. Read the rest of this entry »
Kevin Jairaj, Patrick Gorski, Brad Penner-Imagn Images
Jordan Montgomery helped the Rangers win their first World Series in 2023, but since then, things haven’t gone so well for him. First, he had a rough trip through free agency, then pitched poorly after signing a one-year deal with Arizona, left Scott Boras’ agency, publicly blasted Boras, got blasted by Diamondbacks managing partner Ken Kendrick… and underwent his second Tommy John surgery, which cost him all of the 2025 season. While rehabbing, he was even traded to the Brewers in a salary dump. After all that drama, now he’s a Ranger again.
On Wednesday morning, the day after Rangers pitchers and catchers reported to the team’s spring training facility in Surprise, Arizona, the Dallas Morning News’ Evan Grant reported that the 33-year-old lefty will join Texas on a one-year deal with a $1.25 million base salary and as-yet-unreported incentives. Montgomery had his surgery last April 1, so he won’t be ready until sometime in midseason, but the hope is that he can help the Rangers down the stretch.
With camps opening this week, Montgomery isn’t the only free agent who’s found a new home. On Tuesday, fellow starter Aaron Civale signed a one-year contract with the A’s, while Montgomery’s former Rangers batterymate Jonah Heim inked a one-year deal with the Braves. I’ll round all of these up below. Read the rest of this entry »
The Orioles have signed Chris Bassitt to a one-year, $18.5 million contract. That number includes a $3 million signing bonus, and Bassitt can earn another half a million if he reaches 27 starts, a feat he last failed to accomplish in the shortened 2020 season. That dependability is a major part of what the Orioles are paying for. Bassitt, who came in at no. 35 on our Top 50 Free Agents list, will turn 37 in 10 days, and at this stage of his career, he’s a player who raises your floor rather than your ceiling. With this signing, Orioles continue their recent strategy of coming into the season expecting their pitching staff to outperform middling projections. ESPN’s Jeff Passan broke the news first, because of course he did.
It’s easy to draw a dividing line in Bassitt’s career, starting in 2024. From his debut in 2014 through 2023, he owned a 62-42 record with a 3.49 ERA and 3.91 FIP. Over the past two years, he’s 21-23 with a 4.06 ERA and 4.04 FIP. However, the advanced numbers say he actually started faltering in 2023, when he ran a 3.60 ERA in spite of a 4.28 FIP. Knowing that, it’s important to note that despite similar top-line numbers, some advanced stats saw Bassitt as bouncing back a bit in 2025. The difference is especially apparent in the expected stats. His xERA dropped from 4.52 in 2024 to 4.16 in 2025, and his xFIP dropped from 4.28 to 3.84. He continued to drop his arm angle, which helped him induce a hair more soft contact and raise his groundball rate. That kind of change often comes with a reduction in a pitcher’s walk and strikeout rates, but Bassitt was able to lower his walk rate while keeping his strikeout rate roughly the same. That’s a neat trick if you can pull it off, but it’s by no means a sure thing that Bassitt will be able to keep it going in his age-37 season.
Bassitt throws the kitchen sink, boasting an eight-pitch repertoire that includes both a traditional changeup and a splitter, but that belies the fact that he is, for the most part, a sinkerballer. He throws the pitch nearly half the time against righties and 30% of the time against lefties, with his seven other pitches all playing off it. The sinker averaged just 91.6 mph in 2025, the lowest mark of his career. There’s a velocity floor for just about every pitcher, below which it doesn’t matter how many pitches you throw or how well you can place the ball. We don’t know what Bassitt’s is, but it stands to reason that it can’t be all that far below 91 mph. From here on out, the projections won’t trust him too much because they’ll always bake in a year of age-related decline. Still, the vast repertoire, the veteran savvy, and the long track record of success with below-average velocity make it easy to view Bassitt as one of those players who deserves the benefit of the doubt until he finally puts up a true clunker of a season. Read the rest of this entry »
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