After a somnambulant first day of the Winter Meetings, one of the buzzier rumors involved free agent first baseman Pete Alonso getting in his car, driving up I-4 from his home in Tampa to Orlando, and pitching himself in person to the Red Sox and Orioles.
Apparently, those meetings went well. The drive from New York to Baltimore mostly takes place on expensive toll roads, but Alonso now has an extra $155 million to put on his EZ Pass account. Big Pete, the Polar Bear, the face of the Mets’ franchise, is bound for Baltimore on a five-year contract. Read the rest of this entry »
Re-signing Kyle Finnegan to the two-year, $19 million contract that was reported Tuesday night makes a ton of sense for the Tigers. Reliable relievers don’t grow on trees, and the 34-year-old right-hander has a track record that includes 90 saves and 3.65 ERA over the past three seasons, a span in which he’s averaged 63 appearances annually. Moreover, prior to suffering an abductor strain that landed him on the shelf for much of September, Finnegan pitched well after being acquired from the Washington Nationals at last summer’s trade deadline.
Finnegan won’t need to do all of the heavy lifting at the backend of Detroit’s bullpen. Will Vest emerged as the club’s primary closer last year, racking up 23 saves and registering a 3.01 ERA and a 2.71 FIP over 68 2/3 innings. He then shoved in October, too, allowing just three baserunners over eight scoreless frames between the ALDS and ALCS. As things currently stand, Vest and Finnegan profile as a formidable right-handed duo to finish off games for a starting staff that may or may not include Tarik Skubal. Reports are rampant that the Tigers are considering trading the back-to-back Cy Young Award winner, who is heading into the final year of his contract. Doing so would not only be bold, but it also would greatly impact the team’s chances of contending in 2026.
The success Finnegan had upon reaching Detroit — a 1.97 FIP and a 34.8% strikeout rate in 16 appearances — was influenced by meaningful tweaks to his pitch usage. He already had those alterations in mind when he changed teams. Read the rest of this entry »
For the 22nd consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction, as well as MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the next team up is the San Francisco Giants.
Batters
The 2025 season was an odd one for the Giants, as they lurched in and out of playoff contention at various points. A solid start kept San Francisco in the mix in the early months, lurking just a few games out in the NL West for a surprisingly long time. The team’s high water mark came in mid-June, when a victory over the Dodgers briefly got them into a first place tie, but just a few weeks later, they found themselves nine games out and falling to .500 faster than Bitcoin prices in 2014. It only took a week to trim that deficit down to four games, but a couple of significant losing streaks wiped out that work going into the trade deadline. The Giants traded Camilo Doval, Tyler Rogers, and Mike Yastrzemski at the deadline, and the team treaded water just enough to find themselves in the Wild Card race at the very end of the season thanks to the New York Mets really Metsing it.
After that kind of season, finishing at .500 feels like the universe getting the exact right result for a change. ZiPS does see a lot of sources of optimism in the offense, and thinks the Giants likely underperformed their actual talent level in 2025. Both Matt Chapman and Willy Adames finished the season with All-Star-caliber numbers, especially impressive for Adames considering how much he struggled in the early going. ZiPS actually thought both of them underperformed their peripheral statistics, a pretty decent divergence from Statcast, which wasn’t quite as optimistic. ZiPS has been high on Chapman and Adames in recent years anyway, and sees both as leading All-Star contenders next season. 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.
For the past several election cycles, as a means of completing my coverage of the major candidates before the December 31 voting deadline, I’ve grouped together some candidates into a single overview, inviting readers wishing to (re)familiarize themselves with the specifics of their cases to check out older profiles that don’t require a full re-working because very little has changed, even with regards to their voting shares. Today, I offer the first such batch for this cycle, a pair of elite hitters who would already be enshrined if not for their links to performance-enhancing drugs: Manny Ramirez and Alex Rodriguez. Read the rest of this entry »
Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley break down Scott Boras’s Winter Meetings wordplay and discuss the Kyle Schwarber and Edwin Díaz deals, a smattering of starting-pitcher signings, the Pirates as supposed spenders, the latest on the Ippei Mizuhara TV series, a Lane Kiffin canine conspiracy, and a Johanfran Garcia nickname.
No player, not even Bryce Harper, has personified the Phillies’ recent run of four straight trips to the postseason more than Kyle Schwarber. Faced with the prospect of losing their signature slugger to the division rival Mets, Philadelphia instead retained Schwarber on a five-year, $150 million deal, news of which enlivened the Winter Meetings here in Orlando on Tuesday.
Schwarber, who turns 33 on March 5, hit .240/.365/.563 and led the National League with 56 home runs and 132 RBI while playing in all 162 games in 2025. He set career highs in home runs, RBI, games played, slugging percentage, wRC+ (152), and WAR (4.9). The last of those marks owed plenty to manager Rob Thomson’s limiting him to eight games in left field, where he’s a major liability, having totaled -37 FRV and -34 DRS in 2022–23. Only Shohei Ohtani took more plate appearances as a designated hitter in 2025 than Schwarber’s 687.
Schwarber’s season — which propelled him to a second-place finish in the NL MVP voting behind Ohtani (who won unanimously) — may have been a career year, but it was no fluke. Thanks to his ongoing work with hitting coach Kevin Long, who joined the Phillies just a few months before Schwarber signed his four-year, $79 million deal with them in March 2022, he has evolved from a pushover against lefties into a top threat in those matchups. From 2015–21 with the Cubs, Nationals, and Red Sox, Schwarber hit just .214/.324/.361 (86 wRC+) in 584 plate appearances against lefties, making 100 PA against them just twice and topping a 100 wRC+ against them only in the last of those seasons, during which he bounced from Washington to Boston. He has topped 200 plate appearances against lefties in all four of his seasons with the Phillies, and he was an above-average hitter against them in each of the last three. Over the past two years, his 524 plate appearances against lefties led the majors, while his 157 wRC+ (.275/.385/.547) and slugging percentage both ranked second behind Yordan Alvarez (albeit in just 247 PA). By comparison, he hit .244/.365/.525 (143 wRC+) against righties in that span. Read the rest of this entry »
In the last competitive major league baseball game of 2025, the Dodgers used six pitchers, five of whom had spent most or all of their careers as starters. They used all four pitchers from their playoff rotation, most notably getting eight outs from Yoshinobu Yamamoto on zero days’ rest to close out the 11-inning contest. Manager Dave Roberts had run out of patience with his high-leverage bullpen, a group that had already been reinforced with starter Roki Sasaki late in the regular season.
The Dodgers, the best team in baseball, a force so immutable it got the American public to turn on capitalism, had a crappy bullpen.
On the second day of baseball’s Winter Meetings, the Dodgers signed Edwin Díaz to a three-year, $69 million contract.
The first day of the Winter Meetings turns out to have been the calm before the storm, but it did end with a modest bang. Late Monday night, Marc Topkin of the Tampa Bay Times reported that left-hander Steven Matz has agreed to a two-year deal with the Rays. Many details have yet to be reported. The dollar amount is unknown, and it’s not immediately clear whether Matz will slot into the bullpen or the rotation. What is known is that the 34-year-old is coming off an excellent 2025 season, his first as a full-time reliever after 11 years in the majors, and his first without spending a single day on the IL. Matz started the season with the Cardinals before getting dealt to Boston at the deadline. He ran a 3.05 ERA and 3.46 FIP over 53 appearances, including a hot stretch with a 2.08 ERA after the move.
Matz is a sinkerballing left-hander with a career 46% groundball rate. A second-round pick by the Mets in the 2009 draft, he suffered a series of injuries in the minors, including a UCL tear. He debuted in 2015, the last member to debut out of the fearsome youth movement that included Matt Harvey, Jacob deGrom, Zack Wheeler, and Noah Syndergaard. After all that waiting, Matz succeeded immediately, posting a 2.27 ERA over six starts and pitching well in the team’s World Series run. He followed that up in 2016 by going 13-8 with a 3.16 ERA and 3.44 FIP and picking up a Rookie of the Year vote. Unfortunately, the injuries kept coming: back spasm, elbow tightness, shoulder strain, bone spurs, flexor tendon strain, ulnar nerve transposition, finger strain, forearm strain, shoulder impingement. Amazingly, Matz still reached 30 starts twice in his six years with the Mets (and made a full complement of starts in the shortened 2020 season), but he combined for a 4.35 ERA and 4.49 FIP, putting up just 5.1 WAR.
The Mets traded Matz to Toronto in 2021, and he had arguably the most productive season of his career, running a 3.82 ERA and 3.79 FIP over 29 starts and 150 2/3 innings. He parlayed that success into a four-year deal with the Cardinals. His performance was up and down in St. Louis; he continued to deal with injuries and posted ERAs over 5.00 in 2022 and 2024. He put up solid numbers in 2023, but things looked different in 2025. After filling a swingman role in previous seasons, Matz spent the nearly the entire 2025 campaign in the bullpen, where he flourished. (He made two spot starts for St. Louis.) He went more than an inning in 25 out of his 53 appearances, and he was one of just 39 pitchers to throw at least 75 innings and run both an ERA and FIP below 3.50. The Cardinals traded Matz to the Red Sox at the deadline, and he made two more scoreless appearances against the Yankees in the Wild Card Series. Read the rest of this entry »
Maui Ahuna isn’t a high profile prospect, but he is one of the more intriguing infield bats in the San Francisco Giants system. Drafted in 2023 out of the University of Tennessee, the 23-year-old shortstop is coming off a season where he slashed .269/.370/.453 and posted a 123 wRC+ over 274 plate appearances spread across the Arizona Complex League (a rehab stint), Low-A San Jose, and High-A Eugene.
Injuries have been an issue. Seen as a potential first rounder going into his final collegiate season, Ahuna slid to the fourth round after landing on the shelf with a stress reaction in his back. He subsequently had Tommy John surgery in 2024, keeping him out of action until this past May. Making up for lost reps, he finished the year in the Arizona Fall League, playing in 11 games for the Scottsdale Scorpions.
When I caught up to Ahuna in Arizona, the first thing I asked him about is the frequent comparisons he gets to former Giant Brandon Crawford. Much as I expected, the Hilo, Hawaii native appreciates the comparison, yet prefers to just be himself. Read the rest of this entry »
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