Brett Davis-Imagn Images, Kamil Krzaczynski-USA TODAY Sports, Matt Krohn-Imagn Images
It’s roughly the midway point of the offseason, and things are starting to slow down. Most of the headline free agents are off the board, clearing the way for the Trevor Williamses, Joe Rosses, and Caleb Thielbars of the world to find their 2025 homes.
Those guys all signed in the final days of 2024, inking modest deals for National League clubs. Here’s a little bit about all three.
Trevor Williams Re-Signs With the Washington Nationals
For the first time since the Eisenhower Administration, women dreaming of playing baseball professionally in the United States will have the opportunity to see that dream realized with a league of their own.
Last October, the Women’s Pro Baseball League (WPBL) issued its first press release to announce the founding of the country’s only professional women’s baseball league, which is set to launch in the summer of 2026. The league is co-founded by Justine Siegal — who is best known for founding Baseball For All, “[A] girls baseball nonprofit that builds gender equity by creating opportunities for girls to play, coach, and lead in the sport” — and Keith Stein, a businessman, lawyer, and member of the ownership group for a semiprofessional men’s baseball team in Toronto. The league has also brought in former Toronto Blue Jays manager Cito Gaston and Team Japan’s two-time Women’s Baseball World Cup MVP Ayami Sato as special advisors.
Women’s baseball has a long, but unfortunately sparse, history dating back to the late 1800s, when colleges in the Northeast, such as Vassar, fielded teams. Since then, women have largely accrued playing time by representing their country’s national team at the Olympics, playing on barnstorming teams – from the Dolly Vardens in the 1870s to the Colorado Silver Bullets in the 1990s – or by earning roles in leagues primarily created for men, from the amateur ranks to the pros (see Mo’ne Davis, Toni Stone, Lizzie Arlington, and more recently, Kelsie Whitmore, among many others). Aside from the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, formed during WWII to fill a void left by the male ballplayers fighting overseas, women in the United States have not had a dedicated professional league.
So after all these years without a league, why now? “The past was the right time,” Stein says in a recent interview with FanGraphs. “Thirty years ago was the right time. Four years ago was the right time. Definitely, definitely, now is the right time.” As evidence, he notes, “There’s now a professional women’s hockey league that’s thriving, a professional women’s soccer league, a professional women’s basketball league. They’re all thriving because of the appetite, the incredible appetite, for women’s sport.” Read the rest of this entry »
This year I had the honor of filling out a Hall of Fame ballot for the fifth time, and as was the case with the previous four, I‘m endeavoring to explain my reasoning. This is something I feel every voter should do. Casting a ballot is a privilege that should demand not only due diligence, but also transparency.
Let’s cut to the chase.
Noteworthy among my 2025 selections is that the holdovers differ somewhat from previous ballots. My most recent Sunday Notes column — I missed last week’s due to a health issue — suggested a few of those changes. As I explained on December 22, my previous ballots all included Manny Ramirez and Alex Rodriguez, but I was seriously considering dropping them and instead voting for two of Félix Hernández, Dustin Pedroia, and David Wright. I did just that. Following no small amount of deliberation, I adopted my colleague Jay Jaffe’s stance that Manny’s and A-Rod’s being suspended after PED rules were put into place is a meaningful distinction. With neither erstwhile slugger having a realistic chance of ever being elected by the BBWAA — another factor in my decision — a strategic change seemed in order.
Ben Lindbergh, Meg Rowley, and Patreon supporter Jordan Smith banter about Jordan’s baseball background, the Tigers’ 2025 hopes, the Dodgers signing Hyeseong Kim, and more, then (30:48) answer listener emails about per-game stats, “advanced” stats, televised arbitration cases, an owner playing in games, pit stops on the basepaths, assorted variations on the Golden Batter (and the Golden Batter vs. the zombie runner), relaxing substitution rules, defining “changeup,” and $ per HR.
As John Oliver would say after pounding his desk on Last Week Tonight while the studio audience claps: “Welcome, welcome, welcome! It has been a busy week.” Or two weeks, if we’re being exact. Anyway, happy 2025 everyone! I hope you all had a lovely holiday season; I certainly did. The Offseason Matrices document has continued to whir as we enter the New Year. Let’s get started. Read the rest of this entry »
After last year’s disappointing follow-up to their 2023 World Series-winning season, the Texas Rangers jumped the first base market in December and improved the rest of their roster in the process. First, at the Winter Meetings, they acquired corner infielder Jake Burger in a trade with the Miami Marlins, a move that gave us one of Michael Baumann’s best headlines: “Everything Is Burger in Texas.”
Burger’s addition made incumbent first baseman Nathaniel Lowe expendable; sure enough, a few weeks after the Burger trade, Texas sent Lowe to the Washington Nationals for left-handed reliever Robert Garcia.
Immediately after moving Lowe, the Rangers added some thump to their lineup with the signing of Joc Pederson to a two-year, $37 million deal with a mutual option for a third season. Altogether, the three moves essentially function as a two-for-one lineup swap, one that should provide more power to this offense, and also come with the bonus of fortifying their bullpen with a solid lefty who has yet to reach arbitration. Read the rest of this entry »
I’m sure that Yankees fans are well and truly tired of hearing about Juan Soto. We get it, he likes the other New York team more. So don’t worry, friends. I won’t mention Juan Soto, unparalleled hitting genius, after this paragraph. Sure, the ghost of Juan Soto, signer of the biggest contract in professional sports history, might inform the rest of the moves the Yankees are making. Sure, not signing superstar Juan Soto after his incandescent 2024 season makes all the rest of the team’s moves feel minor. But again, you won’t see the words “Juan Soto” after this instance, so let’s get to the moves the Yankees are making to bolster their team in the aftermath of losing one of the brightest stars in the game.
Signing Paul Goldschmidt
The Yankees are going to need some offense if they want to replace Jua – whoa, almost broke my own rule right out of the gate. Uh… the Yankees are going to need some offense, period. They were a top-heavy team last year between Aaron Judge and his running mate, name tastefully withheld. Giancarlo Stanton’s playoff surge notwithstanding, the existing roster just didn’t have that much juice beyond Judge. Sure, addingCody Bellinger was nice, but they needed to do more. Paul Goldschmidt, signed for one year and $12.5 million, is definitely more, it’s just a question of how much after his bummer of a 2024 season. Read the rest of this entry »
Since the last time Josh Bell suited up for the Nationals on August 1, 2022, he has played for four different teams. The Nationals dealt him to the Padres alongside Juan Soto at the 2022 trade deadline. Then he became a free agent and signed a two-year, $33 million deal with the Guardians, only for Cleveland to flip him to the Marlins the following summer. He swam with the Fish for just under a year before it was Miami’s turn to cast him off at the deadline in 2024. Finally, after finishing out this past season with the Diamondbacks, Bell is returning to Washington on a one-year, $6 million contract. That closes the circle on a two-and-a-half-year expedition that took him from the East Coast to the West Coast to the Midwest to the wetlands to the desert and back to the nation’s capital. According to Google Maps, it would take you just over 166 days to walk that journey. Bell, not exactly known for his footspeed, did it in 881.
With the Gold Glover Nathaniel Lowe likely to see most of the playing time at first base, Bell should slot in as Washington’s everyday designated hitter. Bell has primarily played first throughout his career, but his defense has always been lacking, even by the standards of the position. He has never finished a season with a positive DRS, and only once has he finished with a positive OAA or FRV. In 2024, Bell ranked last among all first basemen in DRS and second to last in OAA and FRV, despite playing just 98 games at the position. As long as Lowe stays healthy, which he’s largely managed to do throughout his career, the Nationals won’t need to worry about Bell’s glove at first. Meanwhile, Bell won’t need to worry about the harsh positional adjustment for designated hitters dragging down his overall numbers. A full-time DH who plays all 162 games would finish with -17.5 Def; Bell finished with -17.8 Def in 2024. As long as he sticks at DH, things can’t get any worse.
Of course, that also means Bell’s defensive value won’t get any better. If he’s going to improve upon a replacement-level (-0.1 WAR) 2024 season, he’ll need to do it with his offense. More specifically, he’ll need to do it with his bat. Over the past four years, Bell has been the least productive baserunner in the sport, with -17.6 BsR. His best baserunning season in that span was 2021, when he finished with -3.9 BsR, eighth-worst in the majors. To put that in context, -3.9 BsR is so low that Steamer doesn’t project anyone to finish with -3.9 BsR in 2025. Heck, Steamer doesn’t have anyone else finishing below -2.9, while Bell is projected for -2.3. Bell’s baseline is such an aberration that Steamer refuses to accept it as his (or anyone’s) 50th-percentile outcome. Read the rest of this entry »
Rickey Henderson had something to offer everyone. He was a Bay Area icon who spent more than half his career wearing the green and gold of the Oakland Athletics, yet he was traded away twice, and spent time with eight other teams scattered from Boston to San Diego, all of them viewing him as the missing piece in their quest for a playoff spot. For fans of a throwback version of baseball that emphasized speed and stolen bases, “The Man of Steal” put up numbers that eclipsed the single-season and career records of Lou Brock and Ty Cobb. To those who viewed baseball through the new-fangled lens of sabermetrics, he was the platonic ideal of a leadoff hitter, an on-base machine who developed considerable power. To critics — including some opponents — he was a showboat as well as a malcontent who complained about being underpaid and wouldn’t take the field due to minor injuries. To admirers, he was baseball’s most electrifying player, a fierce competitor, flamboyant entertainer, and inner-circle Hall of Famer. After a 25-year major league career full of broken records (not to mention the fourth-highest total of games played, ahem), Henderson spent his age-45 and -46 seasons wowing fans in independent leagues, hoping for one last shot at the majors.
It never came, but Henderson’s résumé could have hardly been more complete. A 10-time All-Star, two-time world champion, an MVP and Gold Glove winner, he collected 3,055 hits and set the career records for stolen bases (1,406), runs scored (2,295), and walks (2,190); the last was eclipsed by Barry Bonds three years later, though Henderson still has more unintentional walks (2,129). He also holds the single-season record for stolen bases (130), as well as the single-season and career records for caught stealing (42 and 335, respectively).
“If you could split him in two, you’d have two Hall of Famers. The greatest base stealer of all time, the greatest power/speed combination of all time (except maybe Barry Bonds), the greatest leadoff man of all time,” wrote Bill James for The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract in 2001. “Without exaggerating one inch, you could find fifty Hall of Famers who, all taken together, don’t own as many records, and as many important records, as Rickey Henderson.” Read the rest of this entry »
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