Category: Sports News

Does the Colorado Rockies lineup currently hold the foundation for a playoff-contending team if the pitching were much better, or would it need a major makeover before they would be able to contend?

All previous Rockies playoff teams have been anchored by an MVP candidate or two:

• Larry Walker in 1995
• Matt Holliday in 2007
• Troy Tulowitzki in 2009
• Nolan Arenado in 2017 & 2018

It’s possible that one of the Rockies current crop of core young players hits their 90th-percentile outcome and turns into a superstar, but looking at the data right now, there isn’t anyone the low minors that has that sort of ceiling.

But do they need an MVP candidate in order to field a competitive team?

First, we need to define what competitive means in the context of MLB.

Since the third Wild Card spot was introduced for the 2022 season, the bar for making the playoffs has ranged from 81 wins (2026 Houston Astros) to 89 (2024 Atlanta Braves). Based on that, let’s say that a team with a real shot at fighting for a playoff spot in late September needs to be aiming for around 85 wins.

A team of entirely major league “replacement level” true talent players is estimated as one that would win 48 games.

So, to be a true playoff contending team, the sum of all of your players’ value would need to add up to roughly 37 Wins Above Replacement (WAR).

The actual exercise of building a contending team would need to be much more nuanced and in-depth than this oversimplification, but for some quick back-of-napkin math, this will suffice.

With that goal in mind, let’s break down where on the Rockies roster those wins would need to come from

We need to take into account the fact that the pitching talent level in the organization is currently far behind that of the offense. We should not assume they will be able to go from one of the worst pitching teams in the league to that of an average playoff team anytime soon.

Instead, let’s be a bit more realistic and look at the lowest pitching fWAR totals of playoff bound teams in each season since the third Wild Card spot was implemented:

• 2022: 12.9 Seattle Mariners
• 2023: 12.9 Arizona Diamondbacks
• 2024: 12.3 Milwaukee Brewers
• 2025: 11.3 Toronto Blue Jays
• 2026: 7.5 Houston Astros

Other than being further proof that the American League West was truly dreadful this season, the list above gives a decent indication about where the minimum bar is for the pitching staff of a potential playoff team.

Until the Rockies can field a pitching staff around the 12-13 fWAR mark, it likely won’t matter how good the offense is. If they are able to achieve that mark, though, the lineup would need to reach 24-25 fWAR for the team as a whole to have a legitimate chance at the playoffs.

Continuing the oversimplifications: The line for what qualifies an MVP candidate most years starts at around six fWAR. All-Stars generally sit around four. Quality starters somewhere around two.

If the Rockies were able to fill all nine of their lineup spots with quality starters they would be sitting at 18 fWAR from the lineup… well short of the 24-25 we’ve established as the goal. Without finding an MVP-candidate type of player, they’d need to both fill the lineup with quality starters and get three of them up into that clear All-Star tier.

How far away from that were they this past season?

The 2026 Rockies only had five players reach anywhere near the quality starter benchmark:

• Jake McCarthy at 2.7
• TJ Rumfield at 2.5
• Hunter Goodman at 2.5
• Kyle Karros at 2.0
• Cole Carrigg at 1.7

There were, however, many reasons to believe better days could be ahead for this lineup core.

• Goodman was worth 3.5 fWAR just a season ago.
• Carrigg was on pace for roughly four wins before slumping near the end of the season.
• In short stints for the Major League team, both Adael Amador and Connor Norby were on pace for at least quality starter-worthy full seasons.
• Before he got hurt, Mickey Moniak was also on pace to be in that quality starter tier.
• Ezequiel Tovar appeared to break out of his extended slump in the final two months of the season.
• The Rockies still have some potentially impactful hitters at Triple-A including, most notably, Charlie Condon (No. 2 PuRP).

Without needing to wait for the core of the farm system (which currently resides in the low minors) to be Major-League ready, the Rockies could soon field a full lineup of two-ish win starters with a small handful of four-ish win All-Stars.

That is within the realm of possibility with the current core. However, it would require a lot of things to go right.

The best feature of the Rockies lineup is how many potentially decent options it now contains. The team doesn’t have all of its value concentrated in just one or two superstars. They have nearly a full starting nine of solid starter options.

That depth, however, means that there are fewer spots available to upgrade cheaply. It’s much harder to find an improvement on a two-win player than it is to find one for a “replacement level” one.

Tallying all of that up, if the Rockies upgraded their pitching sufficiently, and everything broke right on the offensive side, they could have a playoff caliber roster without finding or developing a superstar.

The margin for error on that path, however, is incredibly slim. They would need essentially every starter on the roster to perform up to expectations.

The more plausible route back to contention is to develop or acquire a star (or two) that can put up MVP worthy numbers and reduce pressure on every other portion of the roster.

That’s easier said then done.

Sadly, the players in the organization that most realistically have that sort of upside are all down in the lower levels of the minor leagues. The team will need wait to see if any of their high-ceiling prospects at Single-A hit the higher end of their projections in order to start planning a stable contention window around them.

In the meantime, a realistic goal at the Major League level is probably just to prove that they can continue to raise the floor and to ensure that when/if they are able to find their next MVP candidate, they have sufficient depth surrounding them on the roster to capitalize on the opportunity.

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Dodgers pitcher Will Klein had surgery on Wednesday to remove bone chips and clean up a bone spur in his right elbow, the team announced. The right-hander is expected to be ready for spring training.

Klein was acquired by the Dodgers from the Seattle Mariners in June 2025 and pitched his way onto the World Series roster. The right-hander pitched five scoreless innings over two games against the Toronto Blue Jays, the highlight a career-best four-inning effort in the marathon Game 3, which needed 18 innings to survive. It was the kind of game that earned Klein recognition in and around Los Angeles, and even occasional free drinks.

Those good feelings continued into 2026, with Klein making the opening day roster, and he was a mainstay in the bullpen for the first four months of the season, fifth on the team with 36 appearances and fourth in the bullpen with 41 2/3 innings through July 31.

Klein on the season had a 3.67 ERA and 3.47 xERA with 49 strikeouts and 21 walks in his 41 2/3 innings, and recorded his first two major league saves. He was placed on the injured list on August 1 with right elbow discomfort and was moved to the 60-day injured list on September 2. The latter ended Klein’s regular season, though he continued to rehab through the last week of the regular season and into October, facing hitters in simulated games.

“With Will it’s more get healthy, show that you’re healthy, throw to some hitters,” manager Dave Roberts said on September 22. “He’ll throw during the week off, then we’ll kind of see if there’s an opportunity later on in the postseason, sort of like last year.”

That opportunity never came this postseason for Klein. He’ll begin next season with one year, 81 days of service time and one option year remaining, having used options in 2024 and 2025.

In the wake of the Dodgers’ elimination in the National League Championship Series last week, president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman said one of his first offseason phone calls was with team owner Mark Walter.

His takeaway from their chat?

“It’s been business as usual,” Friedman said this week.

Over the previous five months, of course, things had hardly been as usual in Walter’s larger business empire.

There was the ongoing federal investigation into the dealings of several insurance companies he owns. His sudden, and troubling, sale of the Lakers in June. Questions about whether he would have to sell the Dodgers next. Uncertainty about whether his Guggenheim Baseball Management group could continue to fund the team at the same historic levels it has in recent years.

However, Friedman said that when he spoke to the embattled billionaire businessman following the team’s sweep against the Milwaukee Brewers, Walter was “obviously really disappointed” but also already focusing on the future.

“What can we do? What are our plans? What are our thoughts for the offseason?” Walter said, as Friedman recounted.

“Our brains weren’t quite there yet,” Friedman added with a chuckle, while speaking at an end-of-season press conference on Wednesday. “But so much of his focus was, ‘How do we put ourselves in the best position to win in ‘27?’”

Friedman’s phone call was the latest indication that, for now at least, nothing about Walter’s ownership of one of MLB’s flagship franchises has tangibly changed.

Team president Stan Kasten made that point repeatedly during the season, downplaying concerns on multiple occasions about the investigation into Walter and any speculation that he might need to sell the Dodgers.

Walter’s holding company, TWG Global, insisted the same in a lengthy statement it put out in August, saying then that “the team is not being sold” while denying allegations of fraud related to so-called “affiliated” loans made from Walter-owned insurance companies to other entities in his business portfolio (including several connected to the Dodgers). 

Granted, only time will truly tell if the Dodgers will indeed be unaffected by Walter’s not-yet-resolved legal saga –– especially after setting MLB payroll records of $415.2 million and $432.8 million the last two years, respectively, according to Cot’s Baseball Contracts’ calculations for luxury tax purposes.

For now, though, “business as usual” remains the company line, going into an offseason in which the team will try to retool for a return to World Series contention.

Seattle baseball fans surely know it already — the Mariners are among five teams in baseball to have never won a World Series title. Heading into the 2026 season, there were plenty of people (including myself) that felt the M’s were in position to make a run at not only reaching their first World Series, but potentially even crossing their name off that short list of teams whom have never reached the sport’s highest pinnacle.

As it turned out, this was not the year for the Mariners. They did not make the playoffs — you, dear reader, surely do not need the reminder. However, with the Milwaukee Brewers and Tampa Bay Rays making it out of their respective leagues, 2026 is now guaranteed to produce a first-time World Series champion for the second time in four seasons. The list of teams to have never won the Fall Classic is about to dwindle even further, down to four.

Both teams have a host of connections to Seattle, including former Mariners players on each roster (Jake Mailhot has more on them right here). The franchise that would become the Brewers started out in Seattle as the Pilots for one season in 1969 before moving to Wisconsin. Their departure spurred the lawsuit that would eventually result in Major League Baseball awarding Seattle another team, the one we now call the Mariners. The Rays on the other hand, while never calling Seattle home, have made more trades with Jerry Dipoto’s Mariners than any other team during his tenure. They may as well be the Mariners’ younger, more successful sibling by the similar fashion in which they run their organizations. It also can’t go without mentioning that Jeff Sullivan, the founder of this very blog, is currently a senior analyst in the Rays baseball operations department.

All this is to say…somebody’s gotta win it all. It’s not going to be the Mariners in 2026. So, without further ado, I present the following discussion prompt:

Who are you rooting for, the Rays or Brewers, to win their first World Series title? And why?

Let me know your thoughts down in the comments!

With the offseason underway, we are taking a look at every player who appeared for the Texas Rangers in the 2026 season.

Today we are looking at outfielder Sam Haggerty.

That didn’t work out as we had hoped, did it?

Brought in to camp in 2025 on a minor league deal after having been released by the hated Mariners of Seattle, Haggerty was brought up in May of 2025 and filled a much needed role on the team, that of a righthanded outfield bat. It was anticipated that Haggerty would be able to provide value in that role in 2026, as well.

We maybe should have been clued in that the Rangers weren’t completely sold on Haggerty by how they handled his contract situation in the offseason. Haggerty was entering his final season of arbitration eligibility, and normally arb-eligible players are signed in early January, close to the deadline for the team and the player to submitted numbers for arbitration. Haggerty’s deal, for $1.25 million, was announced on the day of the deadline to non-tender players, which suggests the Rangers were going to bring him back at their number or else they’d cut him loose rather than risk paying him more in arbitration. Not exactly a vote of confidence in his ability to be a quality righthanded bat.

And, yes, if you want to be pedantic, Haggerty isn’t a righthanded bat, he’s a switch-hitter, but for his career he has a 765 OPS against lefthanded pitchers and a 548 OPS against righthanded pitchers, the kind of platoon split that makes you think maybe he should junk the switch hitting thing and just hit righthanded all the time.

In any case, I regret to inform you that Sam Haggerty did not provide value in that aforementioned role in 2026. He did not provide value in any role in 2026, in fact. Haggerty slashed .159/.213/.182 in 47 plate appearances in 35 games, which is pretty terrible.

I thought that a 395 OPS might be the worst the Rangers have gotten from a player in that many plate appearances in a season, at least recently, and of course I was wrong. Doing a search on Stathead for players with a sub-400 OPS in at least 45 plate appearances in a season for the Rangers, I discovered that the 2024 Rangers had two such players — Davis Wendzel and Andrew Knizner. Wendzel had a 397 OPS, so he at least edged out Haggerty, though Knizner’s 394 OPS put him just behind Haggerty. Knizner put up his putrid OPS in 93 plate appearances, which is pretty impressive, if you think about it.

Curtis Terry had a 279 OPS in 48 plate appearances in 2021, which is the lowest for any player with at least 45 plate appearances for the Rangers since 1973, at the second lowest for the Rangers if we exclude pitchers (Dick Bosman and Pete Broberg qualify in 1972 if we do include pitchers). Robinson Chirinos in 2020, Hanser Alberto in 2016, Mike Carp in 2014 and Cristian Guzman in 2010 are the other qualifiers in the 21st century.

I’m now reminded that the Rangers traded Tanner Roark to the Nationals for Guzman, and am irked.

The most memorable part of Haggerty’s 2026 season is probably the circumstances surrounding his release. Haggerty went on bereavement leave on June 1, and then was designated for assignment a few days later, when he returned from bereavement leave. Unfortunate timing, that.

Haggerty is also a bit noteworthy because he wore number 0. Only three other players in Rangers history have sported a 0 — Al Oliver, Oddibe McDowell, and Junior Ortiz.

I am not a big uniform number guy — I would be hard pressed, off the top of my head, to give you the uniform number of any Ranger — but I do have opinions on uniform numbers. One of them is that 0 is an acceptable number, but only for certain players. There should be some flava to you and your game if you are going to wear number 0.

Al Oliver and Oddibe McDowell? Good 0s.

Junior Ortiz? Anonymous backup catcher. If he were a mediocre starting catcher, I’d say no, but I think a backup catcher who doesn’t play much can be a number 0.

Sam Haggerty as a bench guy who plays a number of positions in the infield and the outfield is an acceptable 0. But in 2026, he was basically a platoon left fielder, and you can’t be a platoon left fielder and wear number 0 unless you’ve got a lot of spice in your game, unless you’re an energy guy.

Of current Rangers on the 40 man roster, Alejandro Osuna and Cody Freeman would be good number 0s. Someone tell one of them to change their number for 2027.

Previously:

Nolan Kingham

During the playoffs, teams that aren’t participating usually fade from the spotlight. MLB discourages any team from making headlines that might take attention away from postseason action. Of course, it’s also quite possible the Blue Jays wouldn’t provide us with much to discuss regardless.

Let’s try a question:

Which Blue Jays player did you have the highest hopes for, only to see them fall short of your expectations?

There are plenty of possible answers, but right now, mine is Travis Snider. Snider was the organization’s top prospect and made an encouraging debut. In 2008, at 20, he appeared in 24 games and and hit .301/.338/.466.

The next year, at 21, he played 77 games and hit .241/.328/.419—not bad for someone his age. In 2010, he posted a .255/.304/.463 line over 82 games.

Some decisions didn’t make sense to me. He was a top prospect on a team that finished 11 games out of first place—so why not let him play every day? At 22, he posted a .767 OPS. Why not give him a regular spot in the lineup?

In 2011, he played just 49 games for Toronto. On July 30, the Pirates traded him.

He spent three seasons in Pittsburgh, hitting .244/.314/.388 over 311 games, and later spent a year with the Orioles.

I always felt he was a bit mismanaged. If you call up a player at age 21, you need to commit to playing him regularly. But the Jays had their struggles with developing young talent at that time, often opting for veterans like Kevin Millar, Brad Wilkerson, and Kevin Mench instead. When a young player arrives at 20 or 21, you have to let him play.

Now it’s your turn. You don’t need to write 400 words—just share your pick and your reasoning.