Category: Sports News

Joe Thon is in his second year coaching in the Dodgers’ system, serving this year as the bench coach for Triple-A Oklahoma City after holding the same job for High-A Great Lakes in 2025.

During part of last season, Thon was undergoing kidney dialysis, and needed a kidney transplant in December. The donor was his father, Dickie Thon, a major league shortstop for 15 years. From Brian McTaggart at MLB.com:

Joe, 34, was a bit hesitant at first to take his father’s kidney, and for good reason. Dickie is 67 years old and healthy, but the idea of taking a kidney from his father made Joe uncomfortable. It took urging from his dad and doctors to convince him it was the right course of action.

“I didn’t want to put him in a tough spot, either,” Joe said. “But the doctors assured me that everything was good. It wouldn’t really take too much of a toll physically, but you hate to put somebody in a spot like that. But it was best for me and my family, too. Dad was really adamant he wanted to do it.”

Dodgers minor league pitcher Michael Vilchez, a 22-year-old right-hander out of Curacao who pitched last season for Class-A Rancho Cucamonga, was among the pitchers listed in reserve for The Netherlands as part of the designated pitcher pool for the World Baseball Classic. Michael Clair at MLB.com has more info on the complete list.

Neil de Mause writes about the economics of publicly-financed sports stadiums at Field of Schemes, and he talked to Marc Normandin about that in relation to MLB’s labor battle and the upcoming collective bargaining agreement negotiations:

The books are never opened for a reason, and MLB teams insisting that real estate revenue made at a baseball stadium isn’t baseball revenue is another reason to keep them closed. Having to open the books and argue about what is or isn’t revenue would take longer than the rest of bargaining combined, and it’s not even clear if the owners would agree with each other, never mind the players, about what constitutes baseball revenue.

Spring Training Hope Comes With a Familiar Astros Fear

This is the week baseball fans have been waiting for. Pitchers and catchers are reporting to spring training, and with that, the long offseason finally gives way to possibility. For Astros fans, it’s the chance to put last season firmly in the rearview mirror and focus on what still lies ahead during another year of the Golden Era of Houston baseball.

But as much as I want to lean fully into optimism, there’s already a familiar knot forming in my stomach.

The excitement of a fresh start is real. So is the hope that this team, one that played quality baseball for most of last season, can bounce back and reassert itself as a legitimate contender. Yet before workouts have even started, one lingering issue from the past has already resurfaced, and it’s the same one that has haunted this franchise for the last several years: injuries and how they’re handled.

On Monday, ESPN’s Buster Olney reported that All-Star closer Josh Hader has begun throwing lightly on flat ground, with the Astros expecting to learn more about his readiness for the season sometime midweek. On the surface, that may not sound alarming. But for those of us who have lived through the Astros’ recent medical misadventures, it was enough to make us cringe.

We’ve seen this movie before.

Over the past several seasons, the Astros have been plagued not just by injuries, but by what felt like repeated missteps, vague timelines, and frustrating outcomes tied to player health. Whether it was pitchers, position players, or cornerstone stars, too many situations ended with prolonged absences and more questions than answers. Last year, it cost the team dearly, contributing to an unthinkable finish: a strong regular season that still ended with Houston on the outside looking in at the postseason.

That’s why the organization’s decision to clean house and make wholesale changes to the medical staff this offseason felt like a necessary reset. For the first time in a while, there was real hope that the Astros were finally ready to turn the page on the constant cycle of setbacks, misdiagnoses, and lost time.

Which is why hearing even a mildly concerning update on Hader this early hits differently.

When you start stacking the names, Isaac Paredes, multiple pitchers including Christian Javier and Luis Garcia, Josh Hader, Jake Meyers, and even Kyle Tucker the year before, it’s hard not to feel exhausted and disgusted by the pattern. Astros fans have been conditioned to brace for the worst, not because we want to, but because history has taught us to.

Call it PTSD. Call it precedent. Whatever the label, it’s hard to shake.

To be clear, this may amount to nothing. Hader could ramp up without issue, be fully ready for Opening Day, and anchor the bullpen the way he’s supposed to. That’s the outcome everyone is hoping for, and I genuinely want to believe that the Astros are better positioned, both on and off the field, when it comes to player health moving forward.

But until we actually see a noticeable difference, skepticism is fair.

Spring training is supposed to be about clean slates and renewed belief. Starting the season with injury uncertainty, especially involving a key arm like Hader, doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. I’ll keep my fingers crossed and stay hopeful for positive news in the coming weeks.

Just don’t blame me if, for now, I’m already fearing the worst.

Alejandro Kirk is a 27-year-old, right-handed hitting catcher from Tijuana, Mexico. He’s played the last five seasons (plus 9 games) with the Jays.

In 564 MLB games, he has a .268/.345/.398 batting line with 51 home runs, 1 stolen base and a 11.3 bWAR (fWAR likes him better, 14.9 career).

When he came up, we thought he would be a good bat/ok glove catcher, but his defense has been terrific. Baseball Savant has him at the 100th percentile for ‘Fielding Run Value’, as well as 100th percentile for Blocks Above Average (as much as we continue to be told that the one-knee-down catching cause more wild pitches/passed balls) and 98th percentile for Framing.

Kirk wasn’t all that great at throwing out baserunners this year, 56th percentile. He was great early, through the end of June he had thrown out 15 of 49 stealers (31%). The rest of the way he was 2 of 37 (5%). I don’t know what happened; maybe there was an injury that we didn’t know about.

On the season he threw out 22% of base streals, in 2024 he threw out 31%.

And, of course, he’s slow. Baseball Savant has him at the 1st percentile in Baserunning Run Value, and Sprint Speed is 2nd percentile. I tend to think the talk about his speed is overblown, If I have to choose between a fast catcher and a great defensive catcher, I’ll take the latter.

I think the same thing when people complain that he’s heavy. I’d rather have a very good catcher than a catcher in great shape. As John Kruk said ‘He’s a baseball player, not an athlete’. Again, I’d rather the ballplayer than the athlete. Of course, he’s my middle son’s favourite players, my son says he can relate to Krik, he can’t relate to

Kirk is in the 91st percentile in hard hit balls, squared-up balls and expected batting average. He’s 95th percentile in strikeout percentage.

His best season with the bat was 2022, when he hit .285/372/.415. I think he’s going to have a season where he puts it all together with the bat and his .300+ with 20+ home runs.

Steamer thinks he’ll play 106 games this year, with a .276/.354/.435 line and 14 home runs for a 4.2 fWAR.

The first time Andrew Friedman reached the World Series as a general manager, his upstart 2008 Tampa Bay Rays team had a payroll of $43 million, the second-smallest in the majors that year.

When last year’s Friedman-built Dodgers squad won its second-consecutive World Series title, the club’s star-studded roster cost almost 10 times that amount, with a record-setting $415 million payroll that incurred another $169 million in luxury tax penalties on top of it all.

Looking back at that juxtaposition now, Friedman can’t help but chuckle.

“(When I got to the Dodgers), I didn’t even know what the CBT really was, or how it exactly worked,” he said. “And even to think back to where we were then, to where we are now, is comical.”

Indeed, such has been the transformation of not only the Dodgers in recent years, but also their longtime president of baseball operations.

Once the posterboy for small-market success, sustainable spending, and an analytically-driven approach that was supposed to help negate the traditional financial disparities within the salary cap-less sport, Friedman has a new reputation now:

Architect of a villainous Dodgers dynasty widely criticized as being “bad for baseball.”

“I’ve heard that over the last couple years,” Friedman deadpanned last month, when asked about public outcries over the Dodgers’ near-limitless spending. “For us, all we’re consumed with is the partnership that we have with our fans … That’s our only focus.”

For much of his 20-year front office career, of course, Friedman operated differently.

In Tampa Bay, he built a consistent winner on shoestring budgets, pioneering a value-based operation to work around the club’s financial limitations. Even early in his Dodgers tenure, he practiced fiscal constraint when constructing his teams, occasionally dipping under the luxury tax threshold while avoiding many big-money free-agent signings.

That all changed when the Dodgers signed Shohei Ohtani two offseasons ago –– turning the team into a revenue-generating machine with resources unmatched by any other club in baseball.

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Since then, Friedman has embraced his new financial reality, completing one star signing after another, including additions of Edwin Diaz and Kyle Tucker this winter that have pushed the team’s 2026 payroll back over the $400 million mark.

“The moment that we signed Shohei, it was important to back that up and continue to show our commitment to winning and reinvesting in the team,” Friedman said in a recent interview with The California Post. “How that has played out, in conjunction with having Shohei, I think has increased (our willingness to spend) and made it an even more aggressive plan than we initially thought. But again, we didn’t sit down and say, ‘OK, now it can be X instead of Y.’ It was more like, let’s be more aggressive. And as we’ve done that, aggressiveness has beget more aggressiveness.”

Friedman didn’t always envision, or even seek, this kind of opportunity. During his time in Tampa Bay, “I thought I was going to be with the Rays forever,” he said.

Coming to the Dodgers in 2014, however, represented what he described as a “perfect situation” –– in large part because it meant “throwing myself in the deep end and activating a totally different part of my brain.”

A decade later, it has led more of Friedman’s offseason focus to now be on pursuing top free agents with eye-popping financial proposals, rather than more marginal maneuvers with payroll management in mind.

And while the Dodgers “are doing some things that probably aren’t sustainable, or we probably wouldn’t do for 10, 15, 20 years,” he acknowledged, the opportunity to capitalize on this current window has warranted such a drastic change in spending habits.

“(We are) appreciating this moment in time and the talent we have on our roster,” he said, “and not being flippant about the fact that it will always be like this.”

When asked if such unprecedented resources has made his job any less stressful, Friedman paused to consider his career path.

“Whatever the rules are, whatever the unique challenges of your market and situation are, my focus has always been on just doing the best that we can to put the best team on the field and give us the best chance to win a championship,” he said. “So while it’s been very different in my two experiences, the pressure you feel, the work you put in, feels very similar. Because the constraints are given to you, and then you do your best within them to do the best you can.”

Still, the fact that the constraints are so much less now has led to a marked shift –– turning the man who once represented the antithesis to the Dodgers’ current style of spending, the face of a deep-pocketed dynasty sparing no expense in its hunts for more championships.

“I think it speaks to the success that we’ve been able to enjoy organizationally,” Friedman said. “And our mindset is to pump that back into our team on the field.”

Welcome to SB Nation Reacts, a survey of fans across Major League Baseball. Throughout the year we ask questions of the most plugged-in Yankees fans and fans across the country. Sign up here to participate in the weekly emailed surveys.

Spring training is almost here! Despite a winter that moved at a glacial pace, we’ve somehow already arrived at pitchers and catchers reporting to camp, the Yankees contingent arriving in Tampa on Wednesday. But before the warmer weather arrives, we ought to take one final look back at the business conducted by the Yankees during a frigid offseason and the man pulling the strings behind those decisions, general manager Brian Cashman.

The Yankees’ offseason began just over four months ago with their unceremonious dumping out of the ALDS at the hands of the Blue Jays. From that point forward, focus turned to 2026 and the calculus it would require to get the Yankees back to the playoffs. The team could boast a solid foundation of players — one which produced the best offense in baseball — and the question became whether to run in back and hope for better results vs. taking a more proactive approach to improving the roster.

Four months later, we know the answer to that question. Despite his public protests to the contrary, Cashman held firm to a policy of rolling the dice with largely the same group of players that fell well short of the ultimate prize in 2025, hoping that better luck might bring improved results. Let’s review the decisions he made before I hand the floor over to you to voice your opinions on the course charted by the front office.

Upon the conclusion of the World Series, eight players became free agents — Trent Grisham, Paul Goldschmidt, Devin Williams, Luke Weaver, Amed Rosario, Austin Slater, Ryan Yarbrough, and Paul Blackburn — with Cody Bellinger joining them a day later when he declined his player option for 2026. You’d be forgiven if you missed the Yankees’ opening moves of the offseason, the team picking up their club option on Tim Hill while declining the option on Jonathan Loáisiga. In a similar vein, their first free agent signing was Yarbrough, retained on a one-year, $2.5 million deal to reprise his swingman role from 2025. The focus remained on the margins of the bullpen in the early weeks of November, the front office trimming the fat by non-tendering Mark Leiter Jr., Ian Hamilton, Jake Cousins, and Scott Effross.

Then came the Rule 5 Draft, the Yankees selecting righty pitcher Cade Winquest from the Cardinals while adding Spencer Jones, Elmer Rodríguez, and Chase Hampton to the 40-man roster to protect them from departing. “Operation: Run it Back” kicked into another gear as the Yankees focused on returning even the fringe role players from 2025, both Rosario and Blackburn re-signed on one-year pacts. Shortly thereafter, the Yankees came to agreements with all of their remaining arbitration-eligible players — Clarke Schmidt, Oswaldo Cabrera, Jazz Chisholm Jr., David Bednar, Anthony Volpe, Fernando Cruz, Camilo Doval, Luis Gil, José Caballero, and Jake Bird. (The final piece of the ”Run it Back” puzzle fell into place this past week with the reunion with Paul Goldschmidt for one year and $4 million.)

The first real contentious decision of the offseason actually occurred a few weeks prior to the arb calls, when the Yankees extended the $22.025 million qualifying offer to Trent Grisham. The 29-year-old center fielder accepted it pretty quickly. Focusing solely on the player, one could make the argument that it’s a high-reward, low-risk move — he either repeats his career year from 2025 and plays for a relative bargain, or he regresses in which case he’s only on the books for one season. However, in the broader context of the offseason’s overall budget, many fans worried that his salary would dissuade ownership from authorizing spending on a potential foundational piece for the future.

The majority of the Yankees’ rumors were dominated by the dance between Bellinger and the front office — Cashman adamant in his desire to keep Bellinger in the Bronx, and Bellinger and Scott Boras holding out for an unattainable jackpot before returning to reality when a seven-year offer failed to materialize. The two sides reunited on a five-year, $162.5 million contract with Bellinger possessing opt-outs after each of the first two seasons. Because of how much money is front-loaded in the terms, Bellinger will be the Yankees’ most expensive player in 2026 and 2027 carrying a luxury tax hit of $44.75 million — almost $5 million more than the AAV of Aaron Judge’s contract and roughly $6 million less than Juan Soto’s AAV with the Mets.

While not an identical roster to 2025, the Yankees’ external additions could still be construed as lateral moves at best. They traded for lefty starter Ryan Weathers from the Marlins, but he’s effectively replacing Schmidt in the rotation as the latter recovers from Tommy John surgery. They lost two of their highest leverage relievers in Williams and Weaver, but filled their vacancies with a Rule 5 dice roll (Winquest) and the worst qualified reliever in baseball in 2025 (no matter how tantalizing the stuff might be) in Angel Chivilli. And of course, true to form, Cashman likened Gerrit Cole’s return from Tommy John rehab to a big-ticket acquisition despite the now-35-year-old starter having pitched just 95 innings since the end of 2023. Cashman also cited the 2025 Trade Deadline additions as 2026 pickups as well, given that the likes of Bednar and Doval will now have full seasons in the Bronx.

Obviously, all of these decisions have to be viewed in the context of the needs of the roster and the players they declined to pursue to upgrade it. Cashman somewhat oddly labeled Kyle Tucker as the backup plan to re-signing Bellinger despite the former being the younger, more superior player and settling for a short-term (albeit a record-high-AAV) deal with the Dodgers. They were vaguely linked to Bo Bichette before he signed his own short-term, high-AAV deal with the Mets, but seemingly felt that the defensives upside and cheaper cost offered by Ryan McMahon and Anthony Volpe justified passing on Bichette’s superior offensive profile.

The same goes on the pitching side. They were never players in the markets for the top-end names like Dylan Cease, Framber Valdez, and Ranger Suárez. They passed on Tatsuya Imai, who joined Astros for a surprisingly cheap three years and $54 million. They had varying levels of interest in trading for Freddy Peralta, MacKenzie Gore, and Edward Cabrera, but opted for the less expensive option in Weathers, despite the expectation that Cole, Schmidt, and Carlos Rodón will miss the start of the season as they rehab from their respective elbow surgeries. For whatever it’s worth, at the end of the day, both FanGraphs and Baseball Prospectus project the Yankees as the 2026 AL East winners, though both also project the Mariners and Dodgers for better records and World Series odds.

So now I would like to turn it over to you. Do you approve of the job Yankees GM Brian Cashman has done this winter in filling out the roster? Additionally, we are asking that you assign a letter grade to the Yankees’ offseason, giving us a slightly more concrete understanding of how the fanbase is feeling heading into spring training. Vote in our poll below:

Baseball Prospectus has released its PECOTA projections for 2026. PECOTA projects the 2026 Mets to win 88.4 games and come in second place in the National League East, and it puts the Mets’ chances of making the playoffs at 78.3% with a 28.5% chance of winning the division and a 49.8% chance of finishing with an NL Wild Card berth.

As for the rest of the NL East, PECOTA taps the Braves as the likeliest division winners, projecting Atlanta for 92.2 wins and over 90% playoff odds. The top three teams in the NL East are once again tightly packed with the Phillies projected for 85.1 wins with 58.9% playoff odds. Not surprisingly, there is a large gap between those top three teams and the Miami Marlins and Washington Nationals, who are projected for 75.2 and 65.6 wins, respectively.

Taking a deeper dive into what PECOTA likes and doesn’t like about the 2026 Mets, the short answer is that the lineup is headlined by two very good players in Juan Soto (156 DRC+, 5.7 WARP projection—behind only Shohei Ohtani for all hitters) and Francisco Lindor (121 DRC+, 3.7 WARP projection). Going further down the depth chart, PECOTA predicts a bounce back season from Marcus Semien offensively (101 DRC+) and projects above average offensive production from all of Bo Bichette, Francisco Alvarez, Jorge Polanco, and even Mark Vientos. PECOTA also notably thinks Luis Robert Jr. will have a fully healthy season, penciling him in for 535 plate appearances of roughly average output with the bat, which would put him at 2 WARP and would represent a huge upgrade over what the Mets got out of the center field position last year.

On the other hand, PECOTA projects only 14.8 WARP from the Mets’ pitching staff—ten wins less than what it projects from their position players. Though it is quite bullish on the Mets’ bullpen and thinks Devin Williams projects similarly to Edwin Díaz in 2026, PECOTA is not enamored with Nolan McLean, despite his prospect ranking and big league success last year. McLean is projected to throw just 150 innings and put up a 100 DRA- and less than 2 WARP—pretty pedestrian numbers for what the Mets are hoping is a top of the rotation starter. McLean is probably the most obvious candidate to overperform his PECOTA projections. PECOTA does think Freddy Peralta (91 DRA-, 2.8 WARP projection) will have a very Freddy Peralta season—the exact boon to the rotation the Mets hoped for when they traded for him. And it is also intriguingly optimistic about Sean Manaea (90 DRA-, 1.3 WARP projection), but has him down for only 80 innings. PECOTA is less optimistic about the rest of the Mets’ rotation, which it projects as below average outside of Jonah Tong, who PECOTA thinks will make 11 starts with a 91 DRA-.

Both the Mets and the Atlanta Braves had disappointing finishes in 2025. The Mets turned over a significant chunk of their roster in response while the Braves are trusting their core and more or less running it back in 2026—an approach the other major competitor in the division in the Philadelphia Phillies is also taking this season. PECOTA projects a bounce back for both the Mets and the Braves, but a much more significant one for Atlanta, whose position player core outside of the shortstop position PECOTA likes quite a bit, expecting a regression to the mean for many of the Braves’ key players.

Isiah Kiner-Falefa, a former Yankee in his own right, said on Tuesday that the Toronto Blue Jays were "a lot happier" to face the Yankees instead of the Boston Red Sox in their 2025 American League Division series matchup.

“I don’t know if people were expecting Boston to get in last year. But I know in Toronto we were happy they lost because we weren’t ready for (Garrett) Crochet and all those guys,” said Kiner-Falefa, via Lauren Campbell of MassLive.com.

“One-hundred percent,” he answered when asked if that was truly a topic in the Jays clubhouse. “We thought it was a better matchup for us the other way. We were watching Crochet just dice up. ... We definitely felt like it was a tougher matchup for us. So, once we saw the other team (win), we were a lot happier. It was definitely a topic.”

Now a member of the Red Sox, the 30-year-old Kiner-Falefa played two seasons in the Bronx from 2022-23, slashing .253/.311/.333 with 10 home runs, 85 RBI, and 105 runs scored. He was the starting shortstop in 2022 before serving in more of a super-utility role in 2023, when Anthony Volpe won the starting job out of spring training.

IKF played with Toronto in 2024 and ended up back with the Blue Jays late in 2025, as Toronto went on to beat the Yankees in the ALDS in four games before eventually having its dreams crushed in Game 7 of the World Series by the Los Angeles Dodgers. 

Kiner-Falefa went 0-for-6 with a strikeout against the Yankees in the ALDS.

The Yankees, of course, defeated the Red Sox in the Wild Card Round, despite losing to Crochet and the Red Sox in Game 1.