Worldwide Sports News

The Mets announced that Francisco Lindor is undergoing surgery on his hand today to address the hamate issue that became public knowledge yesterday. As David Stearns had said in giving that update, the expected recovery timeline for Lindor is six weeks. The Mets’ 2026 season begins six weeks from tomorrow.

It goes without saying that Lindor is crucial to the Mets’ success, as he’s been the team’s best player over the past several years. And even with the addition of Juan Soto last year, Lindor was the team’s best player by fWAR, albeit by a relatively small margin, while he slightly trailed Soto in bWAR.

If Lindor’s recovery goes smoothly and he is ready to play on Opening Day, the time he misses in spring training shouldn’t be a major problem. If there are delays, though, it’ll be interesting to see what the Mets do at shortstop in the early part of the season. The team has several players who have played short in the past, but whether or not any of them are ideal substitutes for Lindor is another matter.

On Monday, Tom and I asked your thoughts about the Jays’ most exciting and most concerning moves (or non-moves) of the winter. Now, how do you think they did overall?
I’m sure the vibes would have been better on this question 48 hours ago, before we knew that Anthony Santander was out for most of the season and that Shane Bieber had the dreaded forearm tightness. But then it makes the Cody Ponce signing and the decision not to try to trade Nathan Lukes both look pretty wise.
I’m happy overall. The pitching is better and deeper, and while they didn’t get a big bat, Kazuma Okamoto has interesting upside and fits into the roster. On paper they’re better than the team that came within a run of winning the World Series in November. Of course, a lot had to break right for them to get that far, and would have to do so again. That’s kind of always the case. But I don’t see a roster in the American League that’s better than theirs.
What do you think? Did they do enough? Or are there holes that they’ll regret not addressing?

The Atlanta Braves got some more bad news when it was discovered that Spencer Schwellenbach will need arthroscopic surgery on his right elbow. This leads to wondering what the way forward.

It was widely expected that the Braves would try to land a playoff caliber starting pitcher this off-season, which obviously has not happened yet. This is not to say that the front office has not tried. It is not like walking into a grocery store and you pick what you want. It takes two parties and a lot of moving parts to get a deal done. This goes with both free agents and trades.

As it stands now, the five-man rotation looks to likely be Chris Sale, Spencer Strider, Reynaldo Lopez, Grant Holmes, and Hurston Waldrep to start the season. AJ Smith-Shawver is likely out for the entire year, Strider has yet to be his former self, and we don’t know for certain how Reynaldo López will be post injury. Add the fact that the Braves usually opt to give Sale extra rest and that means they will need either a sixth man or run a bullpen game. The depth has been worn thin yet again this season.

It makes sense that the Braves should at the very least entertain bringing someone else in. There are a few free agents available still, but there these names have been floated around social media like crazy. There have been some trade targets that have been talked about a lot like Sandy Alcántara. There is also a possibility that a farm arm steps into a rotation spot. However, let’s have some fun and look at some lesser mentioned names, or out of the box ideas.

First, we need to point out a few things. If you are looking at trades, then you must be realistic. Teams that are looking to make a playoff push rarely move starters. We have also seen teams that likely won’t win their division add players. For example, the Pirates and Angels have added a decent number of players for teams in their position that typically would not, which leads to thinking they are planning on keeping their starters for now. It should also be noted that we are not looking at players to replace Schwellenbach’s level of play, but rather serviceable arms to fill out the rotational depth that is sorely needed.

Let’s start with a team that may think they can compete but may be willing to move certain starters if the trade makes sense for them.

Pablo López (Twins)

López is coming off a season in which he only pitched 75.2 innings, but he looked like his former self in terms of ERA with a 2.74. He had a much higher expected ERA (xERA) of 3.96, but that is still in the upper half of pitchers in MLB. Fangraphs has him projected at 3.75 ERA, 3.60 FIP, 3.2 fWAR, 9.0 K/9, and 2.3 BB/9. The reason this may work is he still has two years left on his contract with an AAV of $18.375MM. The Twins may be willing to move him to clear up some money while also bringing in prospects. 

Bailey Ober (Twins)

It may seem weird to be considering a pitcher that had a 5.11 ERA last season, but don’t quit reading just yet. His xERA of 4.36 shows he was unlucky, not to mention he was dealing with a hip issue. Braves fans know that hip injuries can have a lingering effect after watching Marcell Ozuna last year. He was a hitter, but still. Ober is supposedly good to go this season.

Four out of the last five seasons he has been in the top ten percent or better in walk rate, and from 2023-2024 he was arguably an all-star level talent with an xERA of 3.61 and 3.25 respectively. Fangraphs does not have much faith in him projecting a 4.28 ERA, 4.25 FIP, 1.8 fWAR, 8.2 K/9, and 2.1 BB/9. If the Twins are willing to sell low on him, he may be worth the gamble. The Braves would have team control through 2027.

Staying in the division, let’s look at the Guardians.

Tanner Bibee (Guardians)

If the Guardians are willing to move Bibee, he is an excellent bounce back candidate that could be under team control through 2030. He has four years left on his $48MM contract with a team option for 2030. It is clear the Guardians plan on him being part of their core, so it depends on if they think they can be competitive within his contract window.

A 4.25 ERA is nothing to be excited about, but his xERA was much lower at 3.64 and was actually the lowest of his three-year career. He also is extremely durable. He had two complete games and pitched 182.1 innings last season. His lowest number of innings in a season was 142.0, and that was his rookie season.

Fangraphs projects that he will have a 3.90 ERA, 4.04 FIP, 2.5 fWAR, 8.4 K/9, and 2.7 BB/9. These are numbers that pretty much any rotation would be happy to have, especially when you consider the inning count. The real question is if the Guardians can be persuaded to move him. The odds are low.

Moving on to an outside of the box idea. The Cardinals are clearly sellers, but how much do they want to sell? They have two arms that are under their control for a while.

Michael McGreevy (Cardinals)

The odds of the Cardinals trading McGreevy are slim to none, but why not consider it if it is a non-zero chance? McGreevy is under team control through 2031and has only pitched 118.2 innings at the MLB level with a 3.94 ERA. Fangraphs likes what they have seen enough to project him having a 3.98 ERA, 4.02 FIP, 1.6 fWAR, 6.3 K/9, 2.2 BB/9. It should be noted that Statcast does not like his stuff as much as Fangraphs.

Matthew Liberatore (Cardinals)

In the same line of thinking we can look at Liberatore. He is under control through 2029. To say his career started off poorly would be an understatement, but he has shown improvements to be at least a cheap depth arm that is good enough for the back of a rotation. Back in 2023 he had a horrendous xERA of 6.04. It was in the bottom 5.0 percent of all MLB pitchers, but he improved to a much more palatable xERA of 4.19 in 2024. Both of those seasons he bounced between being an SP and RP. In 2025 he settled in as  a full-time starter and gave the Cardinals 151.2 innings of 4.21 ERA and 4.03 FIP ball. This included his best strikeout to walk ratio of his career with a 3.05.

Fangraphs projects him to have a 4.22 ERA, 4.19 FIP, 1.5 fWAR, 7.5 K/9, and 2.9 BB/9. These are not numbers that jump off the page, but they are much better than what we would likely see from Bryce Elder, who is out of options anyway. It would be a gamble by both the Cardinals that he would not progress and the Braves that he would progress if this hypothetical trade were to take place.

One can only guess what route the Braves will take in terms of reacting to Spencer Schwellenbach’s injury, but one thing is for sure. The Braves will most certainly need depth after what we saw last season.

Most readers here love the game of baseball and love our Royals, but there are some seasons that truly test us. The hitters can’t hit, the pitchers can’t throw strikes, the ball gets kicked around the field, and the losses pile up. By June, you already have an eye towards Chiefs training camp. You’re a real sicko if you’re watching a 106-loss Royals team get beat down by the Twins in front of a few hundred fans in September.

By pure losses, here are the worst seasons in Royals history:

• 2023 (106 losses) – A bad season after a long rebuild, but there seemed to be hope about the future
• 2005 (106 losses) – Tony Peña quits in the middle of the season, and the Buddy Bell era isn’t any better
• 2018 (104 losses) – The entire championship team departs, leaving a lot of “who is this guy?”
• 2004 (104 losses) – Fresh off a surprise run in 2003, this team fell flat on their face
• 2019 (103 losses) – Allowed 219 home runs, second-most in club history.
• 2006 (100 losses) – Gave up a club record 971 runs, getting Allard Baird fired
• 2002 (100 losses) – Chuck Knoblauch and Neifi Perez. Enough said.

But maybe it was a season that was miserable for other reasons – Dick Howser’s death in 1986? The strike-shortened almost-contention of 1994? Maybe it was miserable for reasons in your personal life?

Royals fans have lived through rebuilds, retools, collapses, and the long, quiet stretches in between contention windows. So let’s ask the uncomfortable question: what was the most miserable Royals season you ever endured as a fan?

It has been 469 days since we last saw Gerrit Cole on an MLB mound, and it won’t be that much longer before the Yankees’ ace makes his triumphant return. After missing an entire season to Tommy John surgery, it is uncertain whether we can still consider him to be the Yankees’ ace, but there is no doubting that he remains the leader of the staff and one of the top voices in the clubhouse. Knowing his competitive spirit and the resulting desire to erase the mistakes made in Game 5 of the 2024 World Series, I am choosing to remain bullish on Cole’s projections for 2026.

2025 Stats: Missed season due to Tommy John surgery

2026 ZiPS Projections: 19 starts, 115 IP, 7-5, 3.91 ERA, 3.98 FIP, 23.5% K%, 7.0% BB%, 1.25 HR/9, 1.17 WHIP, 1.8 fWAR

Cole injured his elbow in spring training last year — the same elbow that suffered nerve inflammation in 2024, costing him the first half of the season but determined to not require surgical intervention at that point — and underwent complete UCL reconstruction including an internal brace procedure on March 11, 2025. He was provided a 14-month recovery timetable at that point and the most recent reports confirm that he is right on schedule. He began his throwing program last August and threw his first bullpen at the start of November, with he and the team continuing to target an early-June return, though late-May is not out of the question.

Cole’s projections reflect that initial two-month absence as well as the expected rust for a pitcher coming off his first major surgery. ZiPS expects his ERA and FIP to hover just below four, which would be his worst marks as a Yankee, accompanied by the worst strikeout-minus-walk ratio (16.5-percent) since his final season with the Pirates.

It’s not just the return from injury that underlies this diminished performance. We had already begun to see a transformation in Cole’s pitcher profile prior to his injury. He lost about a mile per hour off his average fastball velocity in each of his last two seasons, though we can’t say whether this is age-related loss of stuff or an intentional effort on Cole’s part to save bullets for the grind of a long season with a further eye toward preserving longevity into his late-30s.

His first few seasons in pinstripes, Cole still pitched like the bulldog that was unleashed in Houston, looking to bully every hitter he faced into submission. The strikeouts flowed in bunches from this approach, but he was also prone to the long ball when he would stubbornly try to throw the ball by the hitter rather than pitch to a spot. However, in 2023 and 2024, he shifted his focus from hunting strikeouts to hunting early outs on harmless contact. Indeed, the strikeouts began to dry up, but so did the home runs as Cole improved his barrel and hard-hit rates, culminating in his best season with the Yankees from a run prevention standpoint and his long-elusive Cy Young award in 2023. All this being said, all these data points are at least two years old, and we simply will not know what Cole is capable of until he starts throwing in live game situations.

That’s the leading problem when it comes to Cole: uncertainty. We just don’t have enough data points to project with any clarity what his 2026 will look like. How do you project a starter who hasn’t thrown a pitch in MLB since Game 5 of the 2024 World Series? How do you project someone with just a 95-inning sample size over the last two seasons, when most recent performance is the best predictor of future outcomes? How do you project how his body will respond now at the age of 35 coming off the first Tommy John surgery — and first arm surgery of any kind — of his career?

The error bars are so wide that it really feels like anything is possible. His pedigree as the former best pitcher in all of baseball might lull you into a false sense of security when it comes to his floor and allows you to dream of a ceiling as a Cy Young candidate. On the other hand, there is a legitimate chance he pitches less than half the season should he encounter a delay at any stage of his rehab.

If the Yankees are searching for a kernel of hope, they might look to Justin Verlander as the ideal outcome for Cole. Verlander underwent Tommy John surgery on September 30, 2020, and missed the entirety of the 2021 campaign. He made his return to an MLB mound on April 9, 2022, having thrown just six big league innings since the end of the 2019 season. He blew every expectation out of the water, making 28 starts with a 1.75 ERA, 2.49 FIP, 185 strikeouts, and 6.1 fWAR to secure the third AL Cy Young Award of his career at the age of 39.

I don’t need to tell you that it is unreasonable to expect Cole to come back and win the Cy Young, if for no other reason than the existence of a certain pitcher named Tarik Skubal. And of course, far more pitchers who undergo Tommy John surgery struggle in their first season back, many of them younger than Cole.

Instead, the focus for Cole is and should remain getting fully healthy and properly built up without putting unnecessary stress on himself to return by some predetermined date. If there is any pitcher on the Yankees’ staff who I would trust to complete his rehab properly, it’s Cole. He’s one of the true pitching professors in the game, and he knows better than anyone else what his body needs to eventually take the ball every fifth day.

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See more of the Yankees Previews series here.