Final rosters for the 2026 World Baseball Classic were announced late last week, so aside from small changes due to injuries or insurance eligibility decisions, we now know who will be suiting up for each nation 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.
First, a quick refresher on how the WBC works and all the important details for this year’s edition. Twenty nations qualify for the tournament based on performance either in pool play during the previous WBC or during qualifying events last spring. The 20 teams are divided into four pools of five teams for the first stage of the tournament, which runs from March 5 to March 11. Team pool assignments were made last April and attempted to prioritize competitive balance (understanding that final rosters were not yet known), with host nations assigned to pools playing in their home countries. This year, pool play will be conducted at Hiram Bithorn Stadium in San Juan, Daikin Park in Houston, the Tokyo Dome in Tokyo, and LoanDepot Park in Miami.
During pool play, each team plays the other four teams in its assigned pool, and the two teams with the best record in each pool advance to the Knockout stage. During the Knockout stage, the remaining eight teams are placed into a single-elimination bracket that will determine the overall winner. The first round of bracket play will take place on March 13 and 14, with the semifinals on March 15 and 16, and the championship game on March 17.
Brendan Gawlowski: Hello everybody. We’re going to go relatively short today so smoke em if you got em.
2:01
Goule: Feel like Im not seeing enough River Ryan ROY talk. Is that because he’s older? I see an easy path to 20 plus starts.
2:01
Brendan Gawlowski: I agree with you, I think he’s really good.
2:02
Steve: Where does Chowolsky fit among top SS prospects right now? Is he in the Griffin, McGonigle, Made, De Vries et. al. group or the next tier down? How quickly does he get to the majors?
2:03
Brendan Gawlowski: I’m optimistic on the guy but let’s let him see some pro pitching before we really get nuts.
2:03
Alec: (apologies for being completely unrelated to prospects but) JUSTIN VERLANDER IS HOME! I have no idea if they’re doing a six man rotation when either Olson is healthy or Melton shoves in presumably Toledo to start the year but the prodigal son has returned!
As you read this, baseball players across the world are flocking to Florida and Arizona. Pitchers and catchers have started reporting. Another annual rite: The last hitter among our Top 50 free agents just signed. Marcell Ozuna and the Pirates are in agreement on a one-year deal worth $12 million, as Jeff Passan first reported. The 35-year-old DH is the latest in a string of mid-market acquisitions, both in free agency and trade, as Pittsburgh improves its lineup in support of Paul Skenes and a dynamic pitching staff.
Allow me to say the obvious thing first: Even with their other moves, the Pirates needed another bat, and it’s great they got one. We project Ozuna as the best hitter on the entire roster. That’s not the kind of acquisition you generally make with a one-year deal in February. The Pirates might be starting from a low base, but that doesn’t make it any less important that they improve. They only have Skenes under team control for so long! This deal makes them better by more than anything else they could have done this week. There are no better free agents remaining, no likely trade targets with greater potential impact. But that’s not an entire article, so let’s consider this deal more deeply.
Ozuna is coming off of a down 2025 where he played through a serious hip injury. It was the latest dip in a career of highs and lows, both on and off the field. In 2024, he finished fourth in NL MVP voting after a majestic offensive season, posting a .302/.378/.546 line and a 154 wRC+. That was his second straight season of offensive success, and for Ozuna, a strong rebound from two years in the doldrums. In 2021, he missed most of the season with a broken hand. That season ended with a 20-game suspension under the league’s joint domestic violence policy, and Ozuna then struggled through a below-replacement 2022 that also saw him arrested for a DUI; he later pled no contest and paid a fine. The Braves looked for alternatives – and then of course, two years later, he nearly won MVP. Read the rest of this entry »
Clearly, none of those people who argues that the day after Super Bowl Sunday should be national holiday is in charge of the Brewers or the Red Sox. Things got complicated very early this week, as Milwaukee and Boston announced a six-player trade on Monday morning.
The Brewers received infielder David Hamilton and left-handed pitchers Kyle Harrison and Shane Drohan. The Red Sox received infielders Caleb Durbin, Andruw Monasterio, and Anthony Seigler, along with Milwaukee’s competitive balance Round B draft pick. The headliner of the deal is Durbin, who will slot in as Boston’s everyday second or third baseman. When you factor in that Boston also traded for Willson Contreras, signed Isiah Kiner-Falefa, and claimed Tsung-Che Cheng off waivers, the Red Sox have now added more than an entire infield this offseason. Don’t worry; their infield situation is still plenty complicated. Harrison headlines the package going to Milwaukee. The Brewers get the chance to work their magic on two young pitchers, and they get to add to their collection of speedy, scrappy, undersized infielders.
It was an odd trade in some ways. All six players were on 40-man rosters already. The Red Sox got the comp pick (as of now, the 67th pick in the draft) even though they were also getting the biggest name, a player who will go straight from Milwaukee’s starting lineup into their own. The left-handed Hamilton has a few more tools than the right-handed Monasterio, but the two are at least comparable; it’s likely that the handedness of the two players affected Boston’s willingness to part with him. You could argue that the Brewers gave up more than the Red Sox, but that they needed what they got much more. The Red Sox have one of the deepest rotations in the league, so Harrison is going from a team that would have struggled to find room for him to a team that will likely need him to hold down a rotation spot from day one. Read the rest of this entry »
Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks! Happy pitchers and catchers day to all, even if your team — those besides the Diamondbacks, White Sox, Giants, Braves, and Red Sox — reports tomorrow or Thursday instead of today
Jay Jaffe: If you missed it, my latest piece was a tribute to a pair of rubber-armed lefties from the 1960s and ’70s, namely Mickey Lolich (who passed away last week) and Wilbur Wood (who passed away in mid-January). https://blogs.fangraphs.com/the-300-a-tribute-to-the-ultra-durable-mic…
12:04
Jay Jaffe: A few of you asked/requested I write about Wood but I was swamped by Hall of Fame coverage at the time so couldn’t get to it but… well, Father Time remains undefeated.
12:06
Jay Jaffe: Lolich is the third member of the Tigers for whom I’ve written a tribute during my time at FanGraphs after AL Kaline and Bill Freehan. From the 1968 Cardinals I also wrote up Lou Brock, Orlando Cepeda, and Bob Gibson when they passed. The World Series took place before I was born but I’ve got a pretty decent working knowledge of it.
12:07
Jay Jaffe: anyway, next on my plate is a roundup of some smaller transactions as camps open. We’ll see just who that contains when the bell rings. And now, on with the show…
A lot of people think this job is about immersing oneself in the glorious, vibrant culture of baseball. Feeling the sun on your face, schmoozing with athletes, learning the finest intricacies of a children’s game. And it is, to some extent. Some people think this job is about the craft of writing, and ingesting and disseminating knowledge. It is, to some extent. Some people think this job —at least how we do it here at FanGraphs — is about math, the unforgiving exactitude of numbers. And again, it is, but only to an extent.
The more time I spend doing this job, the more I’ve come to believe it’s about the rules. Sometimes literally — once a week I answer a question for our Members Only mailbag, and it usually has something to do with “Why hasn’t anyone thought to do X?” The answer, more often than not: Because they’re not allowed.
So I’ve found myself spending lots of time with two documents: The major league rulebook and the collective bargaining agreement. The latter document is of interest to most fans because of the ways in which it governs transactions. This is where the minimum salary is established, along with the competitive balance tax and rules about arbitration — the minutiae of which made headline news just last week.
Those are the headline details — the big-money sections, literally — that will likely capture the public’s imagination over the next several months. But the CBA is first and foremost a covenant between labor and capital to govern workplace conditions, and it is herein that you’ll find all manner of fascinating tidbits that fans would never notice or care about, but are important to the everyday lives of the players. Read the rest of this entry »
For pitchers, it’s really not optimal to show up late to spring training. Roll up to Arizona or Florida sometime in early March, and then you’re behind all your friends, still ramping up when it’s supposed to be go time. Maybe you find your form sometime in May. Maybe your season never gets off the ground. Such a fate is to be avoided, if at all possible.
And so with pitchers and catchers reporting Tuesday, Monday was, in effect, the final day to sign to ensure a regular build-up. Appropriately, there was a predictable run on the straggling starting pitchers of the free agent market. Nick Martinez went to the Rays; Erick Fedde returned to the White Sox; Chris Paddack found a life raft with the Marlins. Also, even though José Urquidy signed with the Pirates last Thursday, we’re bringing him to the party, too. Let’s talk about each of these signings in that order.
Nick Martinez Signs With Rays (One Year, $13 Million)
Martinez is the biggest name of the bunch, and he accordingly received the largest deal — $13 million for a year’s work — as reported by MLB.com’s Mark Feinsand. Of the remaining pitchers available, his 2.1 ZiPS projected WAR was third best.
It’s unclear if he’ll assume his typical swingman role in Tampa Bay. The RosterResource crew sees him slotting into the back of the rotation, a place he thrived in the second half of 2024 with the Reds. Despite averaging just 92.6 mph on his four-seam fastball that season, Martinez leveraged a wide mix and impeccable command to deliver a 3.21 FIP over 142 1/3 innings, good for 3.4 WAR. On the strength of that campaign, he received (and accepted) the qualifying offer, bequeathing him a hefty $21.05 million for 2025.
Last offseason, I speculated that Martinez was a good candidate to repeat his surprising success due in large part to his ability to blend his pitches together. These arsenal effects, I thought, would lead to sustainable soft-contact generation, allowing for continued success in spite of a so-so strikeout rate.
In some sense, I was half-right: New arsenal metrics from Baseball Prospectus, introduced months after the publication of that article, reinforced my thesis. Martinez’s 2025 Pitch Type Probability (a measure of unpredictability) ranked in the 94th percentile among pitchers with at least 1000 pitches thrown; his Movement Spread and Velocity Spread also clocked in well above average. True to form, he limited damage on contact, holding hitters to a 34.5% hard-hit rate (90th percentile) and a .275 BABIP.
And yet Martinez’s 2025 season was a bust; his ERA jumped from 3.10 to 4.45, with the poor peripherals to back it up. After running a 3.2% walk rate in 2024, some control regression was expected. But his bat-missing went from acceptable to dire, his strikeout rate dropping nearly four percentage points. The main culprit was the changeup, which generated a huge amount of chase in 2024 and fell all the way back to Earth in 2025. The shape did not change significantly, but his command of the pitch slipped considerably. Check out how much more plate his changeup caught against left-handed hitters this season (left) versus last (right):
The changeup unlocks the entire Martinez experience, and its performance will determine whether the Rays will be getting a durable but unexciting innings-eater or a guy you might trust to start Game 3 of a Divisional Series. Either way, he improves the Tampa Bay staff for 2026, giving the team insurance against the wild whims of Joe Boyle. And in the case of a Boyle breakout, Martinez can easily shift back into his familiar swingman role.
Erick Fedde Signs With White Sox (Contract TBA)
It was mad ugly for Fedde in 2025. He started the year in St. Louis, pitching a little over 100 innings of exactly replacement-level ball; at the trade deadline, the Braves picked him up for a handful of gumballs, hoping he’d hoover up some innings in a lost season. Three weeks later, they straight up released him; the Brewers brought him in for a few mopup opportunities before hitting him with a DFA on the final day of the regular season.
That’s not what you want. Fedde’s east-west attack fell apart in 2025; excluding Rockies hurlers, his 13.3% strikeout rate was worst in baseball (minimum 100 innings pitched.) Perhaps fatally, his walk rate ballooned as he opted to pitch around hitters instead of challenging them in the zone.
But what better place to resurrect his career? Those handful of months on the South Side in 2024 were the best he’s pitched since his triumphant return from the KBO. In 21 pre-trade deadline starts that year, Fedde bullied righties with his sinker-sweeper combo, and jammed enough lefties with his cutter to viably work his way through lineups. A 3.11 ERA earned him a deadline promotion to a contender, and he proceeded to pitch roughly as well as a Cardinal, though the team ultimately missed the playoffs.
Fedde was still pretty good against righties in 2025, but lefties smoked him to the tune of a .389 wOBA. His cutter lost a crucial couple inches of glove-side bite, and so the pitch tended to finish middle-up instead of on the inner edge. A perfectly straight 90-mph cutter is fodder for tanks; with no four-seam option on the table, Fedde was faced with the difficult choice of getting aggressive with subpar stuff or aiming at too-fine targets.
If getting back with pitching coach Brian Bannister can help Fedde gain back those two inches of break on the cutter, the White Sox can expect him to deliver on his presumably modest deal.
Chris Paddack Signs With Marlins (One year, $4 million)
Paddack’s plan of attack is pretty straightforward, venturing not much further than a carry fastball and a butterfly changeup. When you throw a carry fastball nearly half the time at mediocre velocity, you’re going to give up a lot of home runs. So it’s been for Paddack his entire career, and never more so than in 2025, when he gave up a career-high 31 chucks across his 158 2/3 innings of work.
With Martinez and Fedde at least, you can squint at them and see an unlikely path to a 3-WAR season. Paddack, however, presents no such upside. He is what he is: a guy with reliably excellent command and not enough stuff to miss bats or stay off barrels. This blurb is already pretty negative, but still, I must admit that I am surprised that he received a guaranteed big league deal. (And for $4 million, no less.)
I’m not even really sure I understand this signing for the Marlins. RosterResource projects this signing to kick Janson Junk into a long relief role. Junk is, to my eye, a better version of Paddack, featuring similarly excellent command and a carry fastball from a high arm angle. But Junk can throw a pretty good breaking ball; Paddack’s extreme pronation bias prevents him from spinning the ball with any effectiveness. Unless the Marlins are planning to imminently ship out Sandy Alcantara, I don’t see what Paddack brings to their club at present. Perhaps he could work as an unconventional relief arm, throwing only fastballs and changeups.
José Urquidy Signs With Pirates (One Year, $1.5 million)
Remember him? Urquidy’s last full season of work was all the way back in 2022, when he racked up 164 1/3 innings for a World Series-winning Astros club. In the three years hence, he’s battled shoulder problems and then, finally, a torn elbow ligament, causing him to miss the entire 2024 season and nearly all of 2025.
Crucially for the purposes of providing analysis in this blurb, Urquidy did briefly resurface in Detroit for 2 1/3 innings of work in September, allowing us to compare his stuff to where it was before the injury. Surprisingly, it was mostly the same. Both before and after, Urquidy possessed a four-seam fastball with crazy carry (nearly 20 inches of induced vertical break), a changeup with respectable vertical separation, and a slow two-plane curveball, and his fastball velocity was nearly identical, 93.1 mph in 2023 and 93.0 mph in 2025. But there was one pivotal difference: Urquidy’s sweeper, which was completely incongruous with the rest of his arsenal and racked up a bunch of whiffs in 2023, did not resurface in his brief big league stint last year.
Like Paddack, the arsenal characteristics (93-mph carry fastball) will ensure a bushel of tanks. Can Urquidy limit damage around the homers enough to hold the fort down until the return of Jared Jones? I think it might come down to the state of that sweeper. Otherwise, I’m not sure he has an out pitch against same-handed hitters. As far as backend bets go, there are worse ideas than giving $1.5 million to a guy who reliably beat his FIP for years prior to the injury. The Pirates aren’t asking for much, and Urquidy seems reasonably likely to meet those low expectations.
Picks to Click: Who We Expect to Make the 2027 Top 100
Prospect Limbo: The Best of the 2026 Post-Prospects
The St. Louis Cardinals boast one of the game’s best farm systems. Strong at the top and as deep as anyone’s — 53 players were profiled in yesterday’s rundown of the team’s top prospects — the pipeline possesses not only high-level talent procured through the amateur draft and international market, but also high-ceiling youngsters acquired via trade. Led by president of baseball operations Chaim Bloom, the NL Central club is firmly in rebuild mode, trusting its player development department to turn present-day promise into quality performance in the majors.
Rob Cerfolio is playing an important role in those efforts. Hired away from the Cleveland Guardians by Bloom — a fellow Yale University graduate — in October 2024, the 33-year-old holds the title of assistant general manager for player development and player performance. He profiles as a good fit for the job. Formerly Cleveland’s farm director, Cerfolio has been described by former Cardinals beat writer John Denton as someone who “prefers to operate while studying reams of biomechanical data, analyzing pitching arm angles and hitter swing paths and load profiles.”
Cerfolio discussed St. Louis’ player development philosophy, and some of the team’s most notable prospects, in a recent phone conversation.
———
David Laurila: Your club recently acquired Jurrangelo Cijntje from Seattle. I assume you and Matt Pierpont — he used to be with the Mariners — were part of the in-house trade discussions?
Rob Cerfolio: “Yes, our director of pitching, Matt Pierpont, had Jurrangelo for half a year before I hired him over here. We did have input. That’s a fun part of this job, and part of why I left Cleveland for the opportunity: to impact deals like this, to have a voice in the room. Obviously, Chaim is the final decision-maker, but we run a really collaborative acquisition process. Everybody from Matt, who you brought up, to myself and the rest of our senior leadership team is weighing in on the various concepts and packages. Read the rest of this entry »
Meg Rowley shares her euphoric reaction to the Seahawks’ Super Bowl win, while Ben Lindbergh largely listens and occasionally interjects with bits of baseball commentary. Then (29:14) they discuss Buck Martinez’s retirement, Terrance Gore’s untimely death, and a purported catching super-prospect, before previewing the 2026 Pittsburgh Pirates (44:23) with Roundtable Sports’ John Perrotto, and the 2026 Minnesota Twins (1:25:07) with The Athletic’s Aaron Gleeman.
On Friday afternoon, the Yankees and Paul Goldschmidt agreed to a one-year deal worth $4 million, as ESPN’s Jeff Passan first reported. Friday in the early evening, I began contemplating how I’d like my career to end. These are related incidents.
Three years ago, Goldschmidt stood at the pinnacle of the game. He’d just won NL MVP on the back of a spectacular all-around offensive season, carrying the Cardinals to the playoffs in a rousing capper to his long, decorated career. It was his eighth straight season receiving MVP votes, and brought his career WAR total to 52. Have you ever considered retiring at the top of your game? With two years left on his contract, Goldschmidt must have given the idea some thought. Finish those two out well, get a bit more hardware, and ride off into the sunset toward Cooperstown.
The next two years didn’t cooperate, however. In 2023, Goldschmidt managed 3.4 WAR, a gentle decline, but the Cards collapsed, finishing last in the NL Central for the first time in 33 years. The following season was even worse; Goldschmidt hit .245/.302/.414, for a 100 wRC+, easily the worst mark of his career. The Cardinals missed the playoffs again and tilted toward a rebuild. Goldschmidt didn’t fit in St. Louis anymore. But he couldn’t go out like this, with an outlier down season, the worst of his career, closing out his time in the majors. And so he departed for New York in free agency on a one-year, $12.5 million contract. Read the rest of this entry »
Jay Jaffe
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