Category: Sports News

Yesterday the Colorado Rockies organization took two losses. First, a 5-6 defeat for the major league squad at the hands of the Kansas City Royals despite a scoreless four inning start from Kyle Freeland, and a two double performance from Troy Johnston. Later in the day, the Rockies top prospects came together to be beaten 10-3 by their counterparts on the Arizona Diamondbacks.

Today the Sacramento Athletics will visit Salt River Fields to take on the Rockies.

On the mound for the A’s will be veteran left hander Jeffrey Springs. His career so far having been defined by injuries, Springs’ ability to take the ball 32 times and pitch 171 innings last year was a welcome accomplishment.

While his velocity is nothing to write home about, Springs features a changeup that is a genuine put-away pitch against righties (41.3% whiff rate in ‘25) and a solid slider that he uses equally against batters on both sides of the plate.

Opposing him will be Michael Lorenzen making his first start for the Rockies since an impressive run with team Italy in the WBC.

While his spring training appearances leave something to be desired, across his two appearances in the tournament he logged 7.1 innings with a 3.68 ERA. That included earning the win against a stacked team USA lineup in pool play. He’ll look to keep those strong performances going against a good A’s lineup in what will be his final start before the regular season.

First Pitch: 2:10 pm MDT

TV: None

Radio: None

MLB Gameday: Live Box Score

Lineups:

One last Cactus League matchup 🌵 pic.twitter.com/46tZTmDv3t

— Colorado Rockies (@Rockies) March 22, 2026

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If there’s one player we’re a good deal higher on than the industry, it’s left-handed starting pitcher Jake Miller. Personally, I think Miller has a solid chance to develop into a mid-rotation caliber starting pitcher. Others will note the 2025 injuries that stalled his workload progression and see too much downside risk. More likely, he’s a good swingman who spot starts occasionally, but is still a very valuable member of the Tigers’ pitching staff in the years ahead. We’ll see how it turns out over the next few seasons.

Miller had just turned 21 when the Tigers selected him out of Valparaiso in the 2022 draft. They used their eighth round pick on the lefty, paying him the minimum bonus. That looks like another steal from the college pitching ranks. Miller was unheralded in college despite being a left-hander, in part because his fastball sat in the low-90’s. Over the past three full seasons of pro ball, he’s built that up to sit 94 mph. In the process, he’s developed above average command of a deep mix of secondary pitches, helping them all to play up and work in concert together.

The 6’2” left-hander initially weighed in at a somewhat lanky 185 pounds, but has added 15-20 pounds of good muscle over the last few years. He has a simple compact delivery, working into his motion with a rock step and a fairly high leg kick from a closed stance that gives him some deception, and then firing his quick arm through a standard three-quarters arm slot into release.

In his first full season of A-ball, Miller wasn’t particularly impressive until his command really came together late in the year to finish strong. He stayed in Lakeland to start the 2024 season, but eventually moved to High-A and reached Double-A by the end of the year. He posted a combined 1.85 ERA with a 30.4 percent strikeout rate against a truly miserly 5 percent walk rate over 87 1/3 innings of work. His command of a solid fastball and a plus changeup together was just overwhelming to A-ball level hitters.

Miller is typically 93-94 mph with his fastball, hitting 95-96 at max effort. It’s a straightforward fourseam fastball with a bit of riding action and a pretty flat plane to the top of the zone, but nothing outstanding. His crossfire and quick arm accleration give him some deception, and he moves around on the rubber to get different angles depending on the pitch and hitter, shifting his foot on the rubber into his delivery. All that helps make his release point trickier to track for hitters. It’s really just a perfectly average major league fastball, but he does a lot of little things to help it play up.

Miller began the season with Erie, and put together four good starts out of the gate before going on the injured list. There weren’t any reports at the time, so we had to wait until season’s end to find out what was going on. Rumors were that back spasms were the issue, and Miller had a procedure and missed all of May, June, and July, before making a few rehab appearances in Lakeland to close out the year. His second rehab appearance saw him smoked in the back by a 105 mph comebacker and knocked out the game. Kind of a microcosm of his year than as soon as he got back on the mound, something else went wrong.

The back trouble actually turned out to be caused by hip issues. Miller was announced for the Arizona Fall League last fall to make up some innings, but further medical exams after the reguar season ended showed partial tears to both hip labrums. Miller had surgery on both hips and he’s been completing his offseason rehab work throughout camp. Reports on his progress are positive, but he might take until late April for him to get on the mound for the Toledo Mud Hens, where he was optioned back on March 6.

The best secondary pitch in Miller’s toolkit is a plus circle changeup that really falls off the table with good deception and fade away from right-handed hitters. His command of the fastball-changeup combination is his bread and butter. Miller doesn’t just throw a good ratio of strikes. He already spots the fastball consistently all around the zone, jamming right-handers and adding a bit of cut to the fourseamer to do so, and getting more twoseam looking run on it to his armside. He’s very adept at tying up hitters inside and then getting them to expand the zone chasing fastballs up and away, or by dropping the changeup off the same eye line for whiffs and plenty of weak contact. He’ll use it left-on-left, and his excellent armspeed really helps him sell it and get hitters way out in front.

Miller’s breaking stuff is a more ordinary. He throws a pretty prototypical gryo slider around 84-85 mph, and over the past year shaped his power curveball into more of a sweeper at 79-80 mph. The slider is above average at its best but can be a little too rounded rather than breaking sharply. His consistency needs to improve a bit more with that pitch, while the sweeper is easier for hitters to recognize, but has serious horizontal break and is difficult to square up. The velocity on everything was down a tick or two during his rehab work in Lakeland last summer, and that’s the only Statcast data we have to work from, but when healthy he should be right back to the numbers provided here.

The pitcher who looks most similar to Miller on the Tigers’ right now is lefty Enmanuel de Jesus. They have similar stuff, though Miller at his best has a bit of a velocity advantage, but de Jesus’ ability to spot four pitches and really work hitters over with his command is very reminiscent of Jake Miller at his best. Pitchers like this are often underrated because there is no eye-opening “stuff” data to build a projection from, just a solid, well composed mix of pitches. It would help him to develop the slider into a harder, sharper version that plays more like a cutter, but command still plays even without a true plus pitch in the mix.

Most national sites have Miller as a 40+ future value grade. I’ll go two steps higher. He’s not a high percentage guy to develop into a number three starter in a good rotation, but the likelihood that he makes it as a backend starter, is pretty high in my opinion. Of course, he may be good enough to do that and still used in a hybrid/swingman role anyway. Should he come back strong from rehab and sitting closer to 95 mph consistently, as he has for a few brief stretches in the minors, he’ll push closer to top 100 status nationally.

The Tigers know what they have here, and they added Miller to the 40-man roster last fall to protect him from the Rule 5 draft. Instead of moving him to the 60-day IL this spring to open a roster spot for Enmanuel de Jesus, the Tigers moved Troy Melton onto that list instead. Reports from camp, along with that set of decisions, suggest that Miller is tracking well to get on the mound in April, but we’ll just have to see how it plays out. One way or another, a healthy Jake Miller is a weapon, and a pitcher who will probably help the Tigers out this year. He’ll just need some time in Toledo to get his timing and command all the way back after a tough 2025 season.

The Dodgers finally made a decision on the final spot for their Opening Day roster.

And their choice qualified as a mild surprise.

On Sunday morning, the team announced it had optioned infielder Hyeseong Kim to Triple-A Oklahoma City, clearing the way for fellow infielder Alex Freeland to make the team to begin the season.

Now, the Dodgers’ position player group looks set, with Freeland likely to platoon at second base alongside Miguel Rojas while Tommy Edman continues recovering from an offseason ankle surgery.

Freeland and Kim had been competing for that second base opening throughout the spring, trying to serve as a left-handed-hitting option opposite Rojas.

But for much of camp, it appeared Kim had the advantage –– thanks not only to Freeland’s struggles in Cactus League play, where he hit .116, but the added dynamic of Kim’s speed and ability to play in the outfield, as well as the strides he seemed to be making early in the spring with his swing mechanics.

However, during his time with Team South Korea in the World Baseball Classic, Kim’s swing suffered a rapid regression. He went 1 for 12 in the tournament with six strikeouts, even against largely lesser-quality pitching. And when he rejoined the Dodgers last week, manager Dave Roberts said his swing was looking “out of sync” compared with earlier in the spring.

Freeland, meanwhile, impressed Dodgers brass enough with his improved plate discipline in camp, drawing as many walks as he did strikeouts (11 each) in the Cactus League.

He also punctuated his spring with a highlight, hitting a home run in Saturday’s Cactus League finale.

“I think he’s taken great at-bats,” Roberts said this week of Freeland, who hit .190 in 29 major-league games as a rookie last year. “The numbers, the surface line certainly isn’t there. But it’s still spring training.”

Sunday’s move might say more about the progress the club still wants to see Kim make, as sending him to Triple-A will provide him with regular playing time he wouldn’t have gotten if he began the season in the majors.

After signing a three-year, $12.5 million deal last offseason, Kim hit .383 in his first 37 games but then slumped to a .175 average over the second half of the year, with MLB pitchers quickly learning to exploit holes in his swing (most notably, an ability to adjust to spin below the zone).

And while Kim still finished his nine Cactus League games this spring with a .407 average, he also struck out eight times and drew only one walk, showing some of the same bad habits that derailed his rookie campaign.

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Here’s the last Cactus League game lineup:

Kwan CF

Martinez LF

Ramirez 3B

Hoskins 1B

DeLauter RF

Arias SS

Naylor C

Manzardo DH

Rocchio 2B

Williams P

TAMPA — The Yankees swung a minor trade on the final day of camp as they whittled down their roster to 26.

The club is sending infielder Jorbit Vivas to the Nationals for minor league pitcher Sean Paul Liñan.

Vivas was out of options and was not going to make the team, so the Yankees were able to get a non-40-man player for him instead of potentially losing him for nothing.

Liñan, 21, is a right-hander who split 2025 between Single-A, High-A and Triple-A, posting a 3.03 ERA across 19 games (15 starts) with 106 strikeouts in 77 1/3 innings.

He was originally signed by the Dodgers out of Colombia before being dealt to the Nationals in a package for Alex Call last summer.

Vivas was also an original Dodgers sign before being acquired by the Yankees with reliever Victor Gonzalez for Trey Sweeney ahead of the 2024 season.

He appeared in 29 games for the Yankees last season but hit just .161 with a .516 OPS.

Trading Vivas opens up a spot on the Yankees’ 40-man roster.

The Yankees need at least one open spot to officially sign Randal Grichuk, who is making the club after being in camp on a minor league deal.

The Brewers will take on the Athletics today in the second of two Spring Breakout exhibition games. The Spring Breakout games are a way to highlight prospect talent by giving each team an opportunity to field a full lineup consisting of players from all levels of their minor league systems. Today’s lineup consists almost entirely of top-30 Brewers prospects, including the organization’s No. 1 and 2 prospects (infielders Jesús Made and Luis Peña) in the top two spots of the order. Third baseman Andrew Fischer, who smoked a 112.4-mph ground-rule double off of Mason Miller yesterday, is hitting third.

Blake Burke, who had one of the biggest second-half breakouts in the Brewers’ system, is hitting cleanup. He’s followed by Josh Adamczewski, in left field today, and 2025 sixth-round pick Daniel Dickinson. Matthew Wood, 2024 first-round pick Braylon Payne, and Josiah Ragsdale make up the bottom of the lineup. Starting on the mound today is Tyson Hardin, Milwaukee’s No. 19 prospect, who recorded a 2.72 ERA and 9 K/9 last year between High-A and Double-A.

You can watch today’s final Spring Breakout game on MLB TV and MLB Network. First pitch is slated for 3:05 p.m. CT.

Spring Breakout Game 2️⃣

📺: https://t.co/0aVCkWeSJz & @MLBNetwork#ThisIsMyCrewpic.twitter.com/UYS081oCNp

— Milwaukee Brewers (@Brewers) March 22, 2026

Spring Breakout is here 👀 pic.twitter.com/uk2Q9M8bPj

— Athletics (@Athletics) March 22, 2026

The Philadelphia Phillies already had Cristopher Sánchez locked into a long-term deal that ensured the left-hander could remain a Phillie through 2030.

Yet they feel so strongly about their All-Star ace that they guaranteed him an extra $60 million into his mid-30s.

The Phillies announced Sunday, March 22, they signed Sánchez to a six-year contract that begins in 2027, runs through 2032 and includes a club option for 2033. Including the $3.5 million Sanchez will earn this season, he’s now guaranteed $107 million through 2032, according to The Athletic.

It’s an interesting maneuver for both sides: Sánchez had signed a four-year, $22.5 million contract in June 2024 that included club options of $14 million and $15 million in 2029 and ’30. That’s a decidedly club-friendly deal for a lefty who led all pitchers in baseball with 8.0 WAR in 2025, crossed the 200-inning mark with a 2.50 ERA and finished runner-up in NL Cy Young Award voting.

So what was in it for the Phillies? Extending Sánchez for two years and $60 million at the end of the deal, which, given inflation in pitcher salaries, might look like a bargain come 2034 and 2035.

As for Sánchez, he locked in a degree of financial security in originally signing the deal, but now has guarantee of a salary approaching market value by the deal’s end, all while remaining with a team that appears in it for the long haul.

It’s a significant leap of mutual faith by club and player.

While unusual, it’s not without precedent a club would go longer with a player they’d inked to a deal that’s already been out-performed. The Kansas City Royals signed catcher Salvador Perez to three extensions after he sailed past the five-year, $7 million deal he’d originally signed – eventually inking a five-year, $52.5 million deal a year before his first one expired.

And the Cleveland Guardians locked up franchise player Jose Ramírez to a seven-year, $141 million deal entering the option year of an original five-year, $26.5 million extension. In January, Ramírez added a seven-year, $175 million extension that superseded the final three years of that old deal and added four more seasons.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Cristopher Sánchez contract: Phillies ace gets $107M extension

The Yankees are quicklyfinalizing the 26-man roster that they’ll bring with them to San Francisco for Wednesday’s season opener, and with several bubble roster spots recently solidified, all that’s left is bookkeeping on the margins.

One of those moves was to figure out what to do with infielder Jorbit Vivas, who was out of minor-league options and either had to be rostered, DFA’d, or traded. A very deep Yankees bench made it so that the first option was off the table, so GM Brian Cashman worked the phones, and it appears he has found a partner. Per Andrew Golden of the Baltimore Banner, Vivas is heading to the Washington Nationals in exchange for right-handed pitching prospect Sean Paul Liñan.

The Washington Nationals are acquiring INF Jorbit Vivas from the New York Yankees and sending pitching prospect Sean Paul Liñan back to New York, per sources.

Vivas debuted and played 29 games for New York last season.

— Andrew Golden (@andrewcgolden) March 22, 2026

What’s interesting about this trade is that both of these players were originally signed out of South America by the Los Angeles Dodgers. For Vivas, who was signed back in July 2017, he showed enough promise to have his contract selected by the Dodgers in November 2021 while he was still in High-A. The 5-foot-9 infielder’s bat slowed down after that, but he was still considered a decent prospect through the end of the 2023 campaign, when he and relief pitcher Victor González were traded to the Yankees for former first-round pick Trey Sweeney (now of the Tigers).

González had a fairly forgettable stint with the 2024 Yankees, but Vivas would spend the majority of the year with Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre (aside from a cameo in the bigs that did not involve any in-game appearances), eventually making his MLB debut in 2025 due to injuries to DJ LeMahieu, Giancarlo Stanton, and Jazz Chisholm Jr., playing both second and third base while LeMahieu, Chisholm, and later Oswaldo Cabrera hit the shelf.

For a guy who had just 66 plate appearances and a putrid .516 OPS in 29 games, he still had two memorable moments in pinstripes, one good and one bad. The good was his hitting his first major-league home run in a 1-0 win against the Texas Rangers back in May, which earned him the honor of being mentioned in a witty Pinstripe Alley headline.

The bad was, unfortunately, him being on the wrong side of one of the best throws you’ll ever see from Ronald Acuña Jr. in July, which saw the former MVP hose Vivas tagging for third and not sliding. This clip will be replayed long after Vivas is done playing professional baseball and I think he’d rather never see it again.

Vivas was at least serviceable minor league depth, but the Dodgers’ decision to start his clock two years before he was traded to New York eventually reared its head, leading to him departing the organization just after his 25th birthday. He’ll now join a Nationals organization that will offer him a roster spot as he slides into a competition for reps with José Tena, Brady House, and Nasim Nuñez.

There’s reason to be intrigued by Liñan, who MLB Pipeline ranked as the Nationals’ No. 27 prospect. Acquired from LA for Alex Call at the deadline, he spent much of the last two months on the injured list after a very strong campaign with High-A Great Lakes, which saw him post a 2.65 ERA with 39 strikeouts to just 14 walks in 37.1 innings. A high point was on April 25th, when he fanned 11 in a single outing:

Liñan’s strikeout stuff flashed significantly more in Single-A and rookie ball, but with him entering his age-21 season, there’s reason to believe he can get back to the strikeout machine he was.

As for his offerings, he tosses a low-90s fastball and mid-80s slider that Pipeline believes limit his ceiling, but he offers “a legitimate claim for the best changeup in Minor League Baseball.” Pipeline describes it as a screwball-like pitch that registered a whiff rate of 60 percent and looked a lot like the deadly Airbender we got familiar with last year with Devin Williams. Lucas Apostoleris of Baseball Prospectus echoed the enthusiasm around the changeup:

We’ve seen players with outlier pitches be optimized to the fullest extent under Matt Blake and Sam Briend’s pitching development, so to get a player like Liñan with such a great offering who’s young enough to mold into something for an infielder who was going to get DFA’d is savvy business.