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Every team needs a guy who can spend most of the year in the minors and comes up to the big leagues to fill in for someone who is hurt or to help the rest of the rotation get another day of rest. As a team, you could do worse than to have lefty Cade Povich in that position.

After making 16 starts in 2024 and 20 starts in 2025 for the Orioles, Povich couldn’t crack the Orioles’ starting rotation out of Spring Training in 2026. It’s not surprising. While Povich showed flashes of brilliance over the previous two years, he was mostly quite bad. His ERA was over 5 both seasons. He walked too many guys and allowed too many homers.

With Shane Baz and Chris Bassitt added to the team, there was no room for Povich in the rotation. Heck, there wasn’t even room for Dean Kremer. And so off Triple-A Norfolk Povich went.

Povich’s 2026 debut came on March 31st with the Norfolk Tides. It was not good. He struck out eight and didn’t walk anyone, but he allowed five runs in five innings and gave up two home runs. Even so, he was the first man up when Zach Eflin went onto the IL after just one start.

Povich only appeared in eight games with the Orioles, and he never made more than two appearances in a row before being sent back to the minors. He was truly a use in case of emergency kind of guy.

His first stint with the team lasted two games, and he was actually pretty good. On April 5th, he relieved Bassitt in the third inning and pitched 5.2 strong with two runs. His next appearance was an excellent game against the Giants. Povich pitched 6.2 innings, allowing just one run.

Despite the limited success, Povich was sent back to the minors the day after his second start. The Orioles needed a starter for the next day, so they swapped him with Kremer. He wasn’t down long, though. After two starts at Triple-A, Povich was right back on the big league roster.

He might have lasted longer in this stint, but in his second start back, he was pulled after just three innings. He had forearm soreness, which, luckily for him, did not send him to Tommy John surgery. It did cause him to miss quite a bit of time. By the time he healed, rehabbed, and was back with the Tides, he was almost two months later.

By early July, the Orioles rotation was solidified with Trevor Rogers, Kyle Bradish, Kremer, Brandon Young, and Shane Baz. So Povich settled into Norfolk’s rotation, although he didn’t have a very impressive stretch. Over five starts, he had an ERA over 7. He only had two true clunkers, but failed to pitch deep into games and gave up a bunch of homers. If he was angling for a call-up, he wasn’t doing a very good job.

He got called back up at the beginning of August anyway. Somebody had to pitch after Kremer was traded to the Twins, so Povich it was. And in his start on August 4th against the Angels, he was very good. He pitched six shutout innings with seven strikeouts and earned himself another look. But once again, he was gone after two starts. It had to be frustrating to him. Bassit was returning to the rotation, so someone had to go.

Povich got two more starts with the Orioles after that. He was back for just one day on August 31st to start against the Rockies, and again on September 18th against the Brewers.

Altogether, Povich had five stints with the Orioles, five stints with the Tides, and one rehab stint with the Chesapeake Baysox. In 13 starts with the Tides, he had a 6.28 ERA. He struck out over 10 batters per nine innings, but allowed 17 homers in just 61.2 innings.

In eight games with the Orioles, Povich pitched 37 innings with a 4.38 ERA. He struck out 28, which was just 6.8 per nine innings. But he only allowed six home runs! Small victories.

Cade Povich turns 27 years old just after Opening Day 2027. He is no longer a prospect, and he was never a top prospect. He struggled mightily in Triple-A, especially with the long ball.

It’s hard to judge his MLB season with the way he was moved up and down, but it’s hard to envision him having a place in the Orioles’ Major League rotation. Since Povich was shut out of the Opening Day rotation in 2026, the Orioles have lost (or will lose after the World Series) Trevor Rogers, Dean Kremer, Chris Bassitt, and Zach Eflin.

They still have Shane Baz, Kyle Bradish, and Brandon Young but will have to build out the rest. If they end up filling those spots with Povich and/or Trey Gibson, it will be hard to take them seriously as a team that intends to contend.

Povich could be included in a trade, but in my opinion, he will, in 2027, fill a similar role to the one he did in 2026. It’s probably what he is best suited for. I’d love for him to prove me wrong.

The 2026 World Series begins tonight, as the Tampa Bay Rays travel to Milwaukee to take on the Brewers. First pitch in tonight’s Game 1 is scheduled for 8pm on FOX. It’s the first World Series since 1980 where neither franchise has ever won a title, ensuring that a first time-champion will be crowned.

It is both surprising and not that these two teams are the last ones standing. They may not have many marquee names attached to them, but both possessed the best records in their respective league, with the Brewers winning an MLB best 103 games and the Rays tallying the third best 98 wins. Both have gotten here in somewhat contrasting styles to most teams in the modern game today, mostly by playing impeccable defense with strong pitching and an offensive approach that led to the two best team batting averages but power numbers in the middle of the pack.

National League Cy Young favorite Jacob Misiorowski will take the mound tonight in Game 1 at home for the Brewers and will face off against Nick Martinez of the Rays as Tampa curiously elects not to start their own ace and postseason revelation Drew Rasmussen. This gamble would allow the Rays to start Rasmussen in Game 2 on an extra day of rest. It will be interesting to see if that decision pays off.

So, who is your World Series pick? Who will be hoisting the trophy for the first time in their franchise’s history?

For some people, Braves out equals no more baseball. For others, they’ll take as much as they can get.

I’m weird: I’ll take as much of the regular season as I can get, but lose interest in the short-series-tournament format pretty handily. I nominally watched the Braves in their two postseason series, though with far more multitasking and less paying attention than all the games that came before. I haven’t watched any other postseason series, though I have followed along with some. (Most were kinda boring, though.)

Honestly, a big reason why I have less interest is because MLB.tv is very convenient, but those stateside can’t get MLB.tv to show playoff games without a lot of hassle, and I just have no real interest in enduring hassle for the sake of receiving a product that I already receive, with payment willingly made, for the prior six months. One day, MLB might offer an a la carte plan for postseason viewing, and, well, my tune might change. But that’s not this year, or probably next year, either.

But, you are not me, and there’s one series left. Will you be watching?

On Monday, I watched the Tampa Bay Rays clinch their place in the World Series. The broadcast was entirely in French.

Now, part of the fault of this lies directly with me, I’ll admit. I am in fact, a Canadian. During the regular season, I watch all my games—those available to be watched—on MLB TV, a service which has steadily become less and less worth the $120 Canadian a season I pay for it. The postseason is not carried on MLB TV. For the two postseasons before this, I made the same mistake each year: I went to the SportsNet website directly to sign up for an account for October. I then subsequently realized I couldn’t use that same account if I wanted to sign into SportsNet through Prime Video. So for two years in a row, I paid twice for the same service.

Eager not to make the same mistake this season, I pulled up the game on my TV through Prime and selected the paid feed option. I was delighted to see the price had gone down, but didn’t know why it was telling me my subscription would be through “RSN.” It is worth noting that up to this point, every single step of the process had been in English. I finalized my new subscription and turned on the game, only to discover that the entire broadcast, commercials included, was all in French. No subtitle options, no language change options, no ability to switch my audio feed.

I know enough French that this was not devastating or worth the effort of cancelling only to find an alternate feed for SportsNet, but the frustration remained. Because of the way MLB allows regional broadcast restrictions—in the case of Canada, we cannot watch a single Blue Jays game through MLB TV, they are exclusively available through Rogers—my ability to properly watch the postseason in my preferred language was made unnecessarily difficult.

In 2026, MLB aired exclusive games on multiple streaming services, including Apple TV+, Peacock, and Netflix. In the case of Netflix, they had exclusive rights to the Opening Night game—the first game of the 2026 season—and events like the Home Run Derby and the Field of Dreams game. Peacock, meanwhile, had rights to Sunday Night Baseball, the draft, the Future’s Game, and more importantly, every single game of the 2026 Wild Card series. Apple TV+ had exclusive access to two Friday night games each week.

In addition to this, many teams debuted their own regional networks this season after leaving behind Bally Sports/FanDuel sports and other traditional RSNs. This meant that for many fans, they now had to subscribe to a local regional network package in order to watch their team play. With all these packages, and MLB TV factored in, a baseball fan in 2026 might need to spend over $100 a month just to watch baseball. And if they want to watch the All-Star Game or the rest of the postseason? Well, too bad, hope you still have cable.

For years, I have bemoaned the lack of MLB foresight when it comes to making their most exciting product available to the widest possible audience. The MLB All-Star Game each July plays host to the biggest names and hottest talent in baseball, and for a sport that has been having trouble getting and maintaining a young viewership of new fans, this seems like a gross oversight. The game is not broadcast on any streaming services, but it’s also not available on MLB TV, so for those who have cut out cable, there is no way to watch the biggest exhibition game of the year. Moving this game to YouTube, where it would be freely accessible to anyone who wanted to watch it, would create not only plenty of ad revenue for MLB, but would also make it easy for new fans to find and participate in. MLB even attempted an arrangement with YouTube in 2019 with the MLB Game of the Week Live on YouTube, where select regular season games were broadcast on the online platform. This program lasted through the 2022 season, but was not renewed in 2023, as MLB explored new options.

Herein lies the problem with MLB’s current model. There is no one place anyone can go to watch their team play a whole season of baseball. Once upon a time, MLB TV allowed for an optional postseason package for international viewers, allowing them to live watch all the postseason games, but that has since been dropped. Canadian fans who don’t watch the Blue Jays are not able to watch their chosen teams play if they happen to be up against the Toronto club. That’s a whole country blackout, arguably the largest geographical blackout for restricted viewing. But even for American viewers, unless someone wants to keep cable, and then subscribe to an additional 3-6 streaming packages, there will be games during the season that are simply unviewable.

And that’s because MLB doesn’t care if fans can watch the games. We’re just in an ongoing game of chicken to see how far fans can be pushed.

MLB is, at the end of the day, the stomping ground of billionaires who are mostly concerned with fattening their bottom line. They want localized sports networks, they want Netflix money, they will accept any and every streaming offer if it means a sweet shared payday when everything is said and done. Under the current administration of baseball, we’ve seen a vast number of changes made to quicken the pace of games, making them more watchable, hoping to hold fan retention in an era of increasingly shortened attention spans. We’ve seen pitch timers, ghost runners in extra innings, the ABS challenge, the elimination of actually throwing pitches for an intentional walk. All of these things were introduced, ostensibly, to create a more consumable product.

But MLB does not seem to care if you actually get to consume their product, because they have already cashed their checks. With each MLB TV subscription, even if it doesn’t include all the games of the season, they have made their money. When we tune into the Home Run Derby because hey, we already have Netflix, they already have their money. When we sign up for Peacock to watch the Wild Card games and forget to cancel it for several months, they have made their money. Meanwhile, we’re now on to finding a service on which to watch FOX and TBS, if you don’t already have them, in order to see the rest of the playoffs.

In a sport where we already talk about players as if they were commodities to be bought, sold, and traded, we are, in a sense, complicit in our own downfall. We have accepted that we are consumers being fed a product that moves ever further from the original sport into a packaged television program, and like all industries, those with the money and power and control are seeing just how far they can push us before we refuse. Before the fans say No, I won’t subscribe to seven different channels to watch my team lose.

We haven’t hit that point yet, and MLB knows it.

But we should have hit that point a long time ago, when something we paid $120 a year for stopped being enough. When we couldn’t watch an entire season all in one place, we should have drawn a line. Because MLB has created a monster. Fans will now be treated to an incredibly irritating CBA dispute while getting squeezed for every dollar just to consume the product.

And even in saying all of that, even in feeling a sense of fury and frustration over how ridiculous the enterprise has become, I still paid $25 to watch eight baseball games.

In French.

As award season is ramping up, Matt Olson is the first Atlanta Brave to be honored this offseason. It was announced Thursday that Olson was selected to receive the Fielding Bible award. 

​​https://x.com/Braves/status/2113331140870156573

The Fielding Bible Awards recognize the best defensive player at each of MLB’s nine positions, along with a top multi-position player, an overall Defensive Player of the Year and the best defensive team in baseball. Olson has accumulated six of these awards and is also a Gold Glove finalist. 

More Braves News:

Our 2026 player review series continues with left-hander Connor Thomas. 

Relive the 10 most unlucky moments for the Atlanta offense during 2026.

MLB News:

The Washington Nationals are reportedly retaining all of their coaching staff in 2027.

Before we begin looking ahead to 2027, OTM is looking back at 2026, diving into the highs and lows of the roster. Today, we look at the team’s biggest free agent acquisition.

2026 In a Nutshell

Suarez was the Red Sox’s biggest offseason acquisition. He had some great starts and some bad starts. He did not appear in either of the two postseason games, which should tell you all you need to know about whether he lived up to his price tag.

The Good

On his day, Suarez showed why he earned such a large contract. He had six starts in which he pitched over six innings while allowing one or fewer runs, including two eight-inning shutouts.

He continues to be one of the best in the game at limiting hard contact. His barrel and hard-hit rates both ranked in the top 20% of qualifiers, thanks to his ability to pitch to the edges. Some of his other metrics took a step back, but he was able to navigate that and turn in a 3.22 ERA while maintaining a respectable 23% strikeout rate.

He also remains excellent in the field. It often goes unnoticed for pitchers, but the lefty routinely showed cat-like reflexes on the mound when balls were hit up the middle. His defense has always been stellar, and that continued in 2026.

The Bad

There’s going to be more bad than good, but I’d like to emphasize that Suarez was still very effective this year.

The biggest area where the lefty took a step back was in his strike throwing. His walk rate jumped from 5.8 to 7.5%. His mark is still very solid, but it’s not quite the elite mark he posted in 2025 and it limited him to just 5.1 innings per start.

As for why his walk rate rose, there are a few places to look. ABS is an obvious one, and it certainly had an impact. Batters successfully overturned 17 strikes against Suarez, second most in baseball. On the other side of the equation, though, the Red Sox overturned 13 calls in Suarez’s favor, which ranked near the top of the league. Furthermore, his rate of pitches outside the strike zone called strikes in 2025 wasn’t extraordinary, so it’s not as if he was relying on framing and bad umpiring to throw strikes.

Aside from rule changes, Suarez didn’t throw his cutter in the zone nearly as frequently this season. Its zone rate against righties dropped from 57% to 44%, which dropped the strike rate about 6%. The locations were still good, and the contact against it was weak, but he was often just off the edge of the strike zone, which led to more walks. Small misses aren’t concerning, and the pitch was still good, so we’d let it slide.

More concerning, however, was his changeup. In 2025, it was his best two-strike pitch to right-handed hitters. In 2026, the chase rate dropped 10%, the swinging strike rate dropped 6%, and the strike rate dropped 9%. His feel for the pitch disappeared, with the percentage of changeups landing in the “chase” and “waste” zone jumping from 46% to 55%. By the end of the season, the pitch had virtually disappeared from his arsenal.

His changeup usage against lefties was smaller, but effective with the Phillies. In 2026, its usage was cut about in half against lefties as its effectiveness waned, leading to a decrease in strikeouts.

Suarez was on and off the roster due to injuries, which might have had something to do with him not having feel for all of his pitches. With a wide arsenal that relies on location, he needs to be precise to survive. Even without being at the top of his game, he turned in a solid season, so while the list of negatives might seem long, don’t sour on Suarez going into next year.

Best Game or Moment

Suarez threw two eight-inning shutouts in April. Those were his best games, although at that point in the season, things were going poorly for the team. In August, Suarez had a brutal month, posting a 5.70 ERA in five starts, adding another question mark to the pitching staff heading into the postseason. On September 4th, however, the lefty fired seven shutout innings against the Orioles, and followed it with seven innings of one-run baseball in his next start against the Royals. He, of course, did not pitch in the postseason, but he silenced some concerns about his demise.

The Big Question

Does the changeup come back? Suarez’s cutter is excellent at neutralizing righties, but his changeup is his best bet at continuing to punch them out. He’ll need it to continue posting solid marks against right-handed hitters.

2027 and Beyond

Suarez has always been able to survive without premium velocity. As long as he pitches to the edges, as he’s shown a history of doing, he’ll keep a solid floor and turn in long starts due to his ability to induce weak contact. On the other hand, if his command goes, that contract will look ugly in a hurry.

With the 2026 World Series set to commence, the Dodgers will be staring from the outside for the first time since 2023. While the Milwaukee Brewers and Tampa Bay Rays battling to see which side will secure their first ever title, one now former Dodger will be at American Family Field for Game 1 on Friday.

Miguel Rojas has already found a new occupation eight days after the Dodgers’ three peat hopes came to a crashing end. He, along with Peyton Tolle of the Boston Red Sox and Ernie Clement of the Toronto Blue Jays, will serve as correspondents for this year’s World Series. Rojas will attend Media Day for Game 1 and will be providing coverage in Spanish while working with MLB Español, per a statement on MLB.com.

Rojas will also attend Media Day and Game One working closely with MLB Español to provide Spanish-language coverage. The Venezuelan infielder will interview some of the top coaches and players from both Clubs.

After the World Series concludes, Rojas won’t be hanging up the spikes completely yet, as he plans on playing in the Venezuelan Professional Baseball League for Tiburones de la Guaira on Nov. 14 and 15, per Valentina Martinez of the California Post.

Although Shohei Ohtani will more than likely finish as the runner-up to Pete Crow-Armstrong for the 2026 NL MVP, his third season as a Dodger was by far the worst of his tenure. He still managed to hit 30 home runs while posting great numbers on the mound over 14 starts, but nagging knee and biceps issues in the second half limited his production until the very end.

The injuries weren’t too much of a strain to warrant any offseason surgery, and the team is confident that he will be back to his two-way status next season. Erik Kratz of the Foul Territory podcast voices his opinion on whether or not the Dodgers should hold off on Ohtani pitching until the second half of the 2027 season.

“Hitters go in slumps. The way he was pitching this year shows me this dude wasn’t going into a slump. I do think the value of Shohei for this team is doing both.”

The Dodgers core isn’t getting any younger, as Kyle Tucker and Andy Pages are the only everyday starters yet to hit 30 years of age. The saying of “out with the old, in with the new” might be in store next season, with several key prospects waiting in the wings to get their shot. Josue De Paula has a chance to help the team’s young nucleus of budding talent succeed at the big league level next season, notes Katie Woo of The Athletic.

“He’s fully aware of continuing to improve defensively,” Gomes said. “We’ve all seen what he’s capable of in the box, which is incredibly exciting. With that being said, we have a very talented core group already here, so I think it’s finding those opportunities, but also making sure that throughout this offseason and coming into spring training that he continues to improve and gets to that bar and gets to be an above-average defender.”