While winning three World Series with the Dodgers, Max Muncy and Enrique Hernández have both made their marks in October, with the former setting the franchise record for postseason home runs (16) and the latter doing so for games played (92). Both will remain in Dodger Blue for awhile longer, with a chance to increase those totals — and chase a third consecutive championship. On Thursday, a day ahead of their pitchers and catchers reporting to Camelback Ranch, the Dodgers announced that Muncy has agreed to an extension for 2027, and that Hernández, a free agent, will again return to the fold. A day earlier, Los Angeles announced that it had re-signed righty Evan Phillips, who missed last year’s postseason run due to Tommy John surgery and was non-tendered in November. Amid the ensuing roster crunch, the Dodgers designated catcher Ben Rortvedt for assignment for the second time this winter, and traded previously DFA’d lefty Anthony Banda to the Twins for international bonus money.

That’s a lot to pick through, creating ripples up and down the roster. We’ll start with Muncy, who with the retirement of Clayton Kershaw is now the longest-tenured Dodger, having joined the team in 2018. The 35-year-old slugger was already signed for 2026, because in November the Dodgers picked up the $10 million option on his previous two-year, $24 million extension. His new contract — his fourth extension in the past six years, all of them so team-friendly that he’s never had a base salary above $13.5 million — guarantees him another $10 million, with $7 million for his 2027 salary and another $3 million as a buyout for a $10 million club option for ’28.

Those are bargain prices given the production and track record of Muncy, who has evolved from a cast-off by the A’s into a two-time All-Star and a pillar of the Dodgers lineup. While he was limited to 100 games in 2025 due to a bone bruise in his left knee — suffered on July 2, moments before Kershaw notched his 3,000th career strikeout — and then an oblique strain in mid-August, he hit .243/.376/.470 with 19 home runs in 388 plate appearances. Both his 137 wRC+ and 2.9 WAR were his highest since his All-Star 2021 campaign, but hardly out of character. Limited to 73 games in 2024 due to an oblique strain and a displaced rib, he hit .232/.358/.494 (133 wRC+) with 15 homers and 2.3 WAR in just 293 plate appearances. Read the rest of this entry »

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 college leaderboards 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 »

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 »

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.

Audio intro: Gabriel-Ernest, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio interstitial 1: The Gagnés, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio interstitial 2: Moon Hound, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Josh Busman, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to hamate injuries story
Link to “bird bones” wiki
Link to hamate research 1
Link to hamate research 2
Link to Walcott news
Link to Acuña 200% story
Link to >100% wiki entry
Link to Casas “dry swings” story
Link to rib story
Link to Castellanos post
Link to Gelb on Castellanos
Link to Castellanos release news
Link to Craig on Castellanos
Link to Stubbs milk post
Link to Kimbrel photo
Link to Kimbrel photo thread
Link to Tong photo
Link to Getz/Acuña montage
Link to Getz/Acuña story
Link to Sam on Getz/Acuña
Link to Murakami misspelling
Link to prediction markets story
Link to Passan cap story
Link to previous Passan cap story
Link to Drellich cap story
Link to previous Drellich cap story
Link to Rubenstein/Epstein story
Link to team payrolls page
Link to Orioles offseason tracker
Link to Orioles depth chart
Link to team SP projections
Link to team RP projections
Link to team offseason spending
Link to Elias quote
Link to O’s catchers
Link to Andy’s author archive
Link to Padres offseason tracker
Link to Padres depth chart
Link to AJ’s last 2025 post
Link to AJ’s first 2026 post
Link to Padres sale story 1
Link to Padres sale story 2
Link to Padres sale story 3
Link to Manfred quote
Link to team RP WAR
Link to team ISO
Link to ESPN farm rankings
Link to BP farm rankings
Link to BA on Padres prospects
Link to Shildt story
Link to AJ on Preller
Link to AJ’s author archive
Link to Stathead query 1
Link to Stathead query 2
Link to Stathead query 3

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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 »

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 »

Read the rest of this entry »