The Kansas City Royals are my dark horse team for 2026. They managed not only to make the playoffs in 2024 but also to win a round despite not having anything resembling a playoff-quality offense, and then went a respectable 82-80 in 2025 even after losing ace Cole Ragans to a rotator cuff strain and watching no. 2 starter Seth Lugo start to suffer the effects of age.

Heading into 2026, the Royals have a deep pitching staff and more good position players than they’ve had at one time in at least 10 years. Maikel Garcia and Bobby Witt Jr. are baseball’s best left-side-of-the-infield duo, and Vinnie Pasquantino is pretty good too. If not for the giant sucking maw at second base, the Royals infield would be among the best in the majors.

Still, they could, as ever, use another thumper. Witt is the team’s only truly transformative offensive player, and while Kansas City has bolstered the lineup with the addition of Isaac Collins, it had only four players last season with double-digit home runs. That’s the lowest total in baseball; 27 teams had at least six such players, 16 had eight, and four had 10.

Seems like a team that could really use a gigantic Floridian with 80-grade power. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about MLB owners avoiding the Epstein files, preview the season preview series, bemoan the insurance issues preventing some stars from playing in the WBC, and break down the Luis Arraez and Eugenio Suárez signings, the Brendan Donovan trade, the latest White Sox moves, and their major takeaways from the release of the 2026 playoff odds. Then (1:22:00) Ben brings on historian Richard Hershberger to discuss the 150th anniversary of the National League’s founding, followed by (1:41:02) a postscript.

Audio intro: Philip Tapley and Michael Stokes, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Luke Lillard, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to Epstein files sports roundup
Link to season preview series wiki
Link to insurance article
Link to Ben on WBC injuries
Link to Arraez signing FG post
Link to Dan S. on Arraez
Link to Sam on Arraez
Link to team 2B projections
Link to Arraez offers report
Link to Arraez defensive stats
Link to Moneyball quote
Link to Washington hiring
Link to Ben on Arraez
Link to “gotta hand it to them” tweet
Link to “It’s Been Awhile”
Link to Suárez signing FG post
Link to over/under draft tracker
Link to palindrome post
Link to Donovan trade post
Link to Dipoto trade story
Link to “WWJDD?”
Link to Dipoto hospital story
Link to Cijntje specialization story
Link to Cijntje splits
Link to Becker on three-team trades
Link to Rays ballpark funding info
Link to Sam’s trade post
Link to Sam’s original Rays post
Link to “White Soxer” post
Link to FG offseason tracker
Link to Baumann on the White Sox
Link to BP on the White Sox
Link to Slater “top target” quote
Link to Murakami bidets story
Link to Sasaki bidets story
Link to Mamdani bidets story
Link to Ben on bidets
Link to team payrolls
Link to Dan S. on beating the Dodgers
Link to Dan on the Pirates/A’s
Link to the playoff odds
Link to Clemens on the playoff odds
Link to projected team WAR
Link to Strike Four
Link to Richard’s SABR work
Link to projected team WAR
Link to Past Blast wiki
Link to Richard’s NL post 1
Link to Richard’s NL post 2
Link to Richard’s NL post 3
Link to 1876 NL
Link to prediction markets update
Link to team broadcasts update
Link to 2025 player earnings data
Link to original Stat Blast
Link to new Stat Blast data
Link to $/WAR by year

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If you were looking to reunite the 2019 Yankees for some reason, you could get a jump on rounding them up using our Free Agent Tracker. Based on our Depth Charts projected WAR for the upcoming season, four of the top 10 unsigned position players logged playing time with that 2019 squad, which in that season of the juiced ball hit more homers (306) than all but two teams in major league history. That tally of free agents doesn’t even include DJ LeMahieu, whom they released last summer and still owe $15 million for 2026. Several other Yankees of more recent vintage dot the list as well. Does everybody else know something that Brian Cashman doesn’t?

Perhaps, but that’s outside the scope of this article, and you’re going to have to wait a few paragraphs for those names. With the calendar having flipped to February, and pitchers, catchers, and World Baseball Classic-participating position players all due to report to spring training next week, it’s worth taking a look at the most notable free agents still searching for landing spots. Just one of the position players still available cracked our Top 50 Free Agents list, but several of the others are capable role players. I’ll take a look at the best of them here, and round up the pitchers — a group that includes three starters from our Top 50, including fourth-ranked Framber Valdez — in my next installment.

I’ll generally be working in order from highest projected WAR to lowest, though I’ve grouped some of these players — generally the ones coming off a combination of injuries and subpar performances — at the end. And yes, I’ll get to those 2019 Yankees along the way. Read the rest of this entry »

“Could be, like, where I’m at on the ball too, but…”

With that fragment, Nolan McLean kicked off the baseball season. Ask a dozen baseball fans when they think the season starts, and you’re likely to get five or six different answers. Maybe you think the season starts on Opening Day, or with the first showcase series before Opening Day, or when spring training games start, or when your local broadcast starts actually airing spring training games, or on the first day of spring training, or when pitchers and catchers report, or on truck day. Or maybe you just think that all of these milestones deserve to be celebrated in their own right as we creep out of the cold toward actual, meaningful baseball. Nobody’s wrong, but some of us believe that baseball begins when grainy cellphone footage of players performing baseball-related activities on the backfields in Florida and Arizona starts trickling into our social media feeds. If you count yourself among that cohort, then congratulations. Baseball season has started.

First sight of Nolan McLean ????? atmlb.com/4qDlxyw

— New York Mets (@mets.com) 2026-02-02T18:00:19.780Z

McLean was on the mound at Clover Park, the Mets’ spring training facility in Port St. Lucie, Florida to throw some sort of bullpen session alongside fellow prospect Jonah Tong. Someone on staff captured footage of the two young players pitching, and both videos went up on social media in the early afternoon on Monday. The videos were taken vertically, then cropped down to an awkward 672×768 pixel ratio, but they featured the loud pop of ball meeting glove, and that’s enough. By virtue of being posted first, McLean’s kicked off the season. Read the rest of this entry »

12:03

Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks! Greetings from Brooklyn, where it’s almost freezing — which seems genuinely balmy after temperatures in the teens all last week. We’re apparently in the midst of the longest stretch of sub-freezing days in NYC in the past 65 years. Hoping my new space heater arrives today, but wish it had been around last week (I have a lower-powered but less energy-efficient one).

12:04

Jay Jaffe: After taking a few days off last week to recuperate from te Hall of Fame election cycle crunch, yesterday I wrote about the Giants signing Luis Arraez to a one-year deal https://blogs.fangraphs.com/on-second-thought-giants-sign-free-agent-l…

12:05

Jay Jaffe: Today I have the first of a two-piece series covering the still-available free agents. This one rounds up the position players and will probably go up while I’m mid-chat; apologies if I have to duck out here and there to answer an editorial query.

12:07

Jay Jaffe: Two things to note before we get started, both of which went by on Bluesky. First, today is the day that the BBWAA has published the ballots of all Hall of Fame voters who granted permission; apparently it includes about 100 which aren’t in Ryan Thibodaux’s Tracker. He and his team will be adding those. https://bbwaa.com/26-hof-ballots/

12:08

Jay Jaffe: Second, distinguished FG alum Eno Sarris has updated Stuff+ and the new data will be making its way to our site soon (https://bsky.app/profile/enosarris.bsky.social/post/3mdxtcmtwi2)

12:08

Jay Jaffe: and now, on with the show

Read the rest of this entry »

One of my favorite sports movie tropes is the Scrappy Underdogs Who Discover the Power of Friendship. While there are myriad variations on the theme, the basic template involves a group of lovable losers facing off against some big baddie and initially being humiliated. As the movie goes on, the various underdogs unite against their common foe, and through determination, grit, moxie, and typically some shenanigans, they meet their antagonists again, only on more even footing. Ideally, our ragtag band emerges victorious, but even if they don’t, they’ve at least learned something about themselves and friendship, often earning the grudging respect of their rivals along the way.

The Yankees were once baseball’s Evil Empire, but these days, the Dodgers reign supreme. They’re rich, they’re smart, they play in a ritzy city, and they would definitely look down on the kids at the ramshackle summer camp across the lake. As it has in most recent seasons, ZiPS projects the Dodgers to be the best team in baseball, and the newly-released FanGraphs Playoff Odds agree. But baseball needn’t accept its projected fate. It’s time to fight back! It’s time to unite some scrappy underdogs — at least on a spreadsheet. And so, with a tip of the hat to Tom Tango, whose theoretical inspired me to put together this piece, to the computer!

To construct our ragtag squad, we’ll start with the worst projected team in baseball, the Rockies, and ask ZiPS to build the best 26-man roster it can to square off against the Dodgers in a fictional seven-game World Series. I’m looking for two probability thresholds here: A Fighting Chance (a one-in-three shot of winning the series) and the Hunter Becomes the Hunted (the underdogs pass the 50% mark). If a roster made entirely of Rockies fails to meet these thresholds, then the players from the next-worst projected team will join the pool. We’ll keep repeating the process until our heroes emerge victorious. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m not going to pretend that you should care about, or even have heard of, Carmen Mlodzinski before now. He’s a spot starter and medium-leverage reliever on a bad team that gets 90% of its national attention when a specific other pitcher is on the mound. And if you’re not watching the Pirates for Paul Skenes, you’re probably watching them for Bubba Chandler or Mitch Keller or (before he got hurt) Jared Jones, and changing the channel when the bullpen comes in.

It’s fine. Life, unlike Skenes, is short. There are many more important players out there than Mlodzinski.

Nevertheless, he’s doing some fun stuff and I’d like to tell you about it. Read the rest of this entry »

The first thing Chaim Bloom did after taking over baseball operations in St. Louis was trade away everything that wasn’t nailed down. Sonny Gray? Thanks for your contributions, now go try to win a ring in Boston. Willson Contreras? Gone, and to the same team. Nolan Arenado? Thanks for the memories, enjoy the desert. With those trades sorted, he’s moved on to step two: prying up some of those aforementioned nails to make more deals. The most recent shoe to drop in the Cardinals retooling might be the biggest one, though. Brendan Donovan is now a Seattle Mariner, the key piece in a three-team trade that sends Ben Williamson to Tampa Bay and a heaping helping of prospects and draft picks to the Cardinals.

Donovan isn’t a household name like many of the best Cardinals of recent years, but that has far more to do with the team’s middling success of late than any lack of talent. His combination of versatility and offensive firepower calls to mind Ben Zobrist, and unlike almost every other flexible defender who gets compared to Zobrist, this one actually makes sense. Zobrist ran a 121 wRC+ during his seven-year peak. Donovan’s career mark is 119, the same as his 2025 total. He’s under team control for two more years at a reasonable rate, too: $5.8 million this year, with his last trip through arbitration set for 2027.

“A plus bat who can play defense everywhere” generally isn’t a good title to have applied to you. That’s because most of the hitters who receive that label either aren’t plus bats, don’t play good defense, or both. But as I mentioned, that’s not Donovan, and we might as well examine each of those two skills, as he’s the entire reason this trade happened, the best player going to any of the three clubs by a mile. Read the rest of this entry »

It took all the way until February, but the last few free agency dominos are starting to fall. The Reds were one of the first teams to dip their toes into the market this winter, signing Emilio Pagán to a two-year deal at the start of December. Now they’ve made it a bookend set – over the weekend, they signed Eugenio Suárez to a one-year, $15 million deal, as first reported by Jeff Passan.

I missed high on my contract estimate for Suárez. I had him down for two years at $25 million a year, while our crowdsourced projections thought he’d get three years at $20 million each. The lowest public-facing projection I found for him was two years at $22.5 million per. In other words, Suárez settled for less than predicted, and he signed late as a result. It’s a classic example of the fact that free agents who sign later sign for less.

At a top-line level, seeing Suárez sign for this little is surprising. He isn’t some flash in the pan seeking a 10-year deal. He’s been one of the best power hitters in baseball for quite a while now. The 2025 season was the fourth out of the last five where he’s topped 30 homers. He socked 49 while spending half the year in a home run graveyard in Seattle, though he did most of his damage before the trade; he posted a 91 wRC+ as a Mariner. Teams pay for projection, not performance, but Suárez’s wRC+ over the last three years is better than his career mark. But that power didn’t overwhelm a host of other question marks. Read the rest of this entry »