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Yo yo yo…spring training isn’t far away. Pitchers and catchers will be reporting soon. Hope springs eternal.

Opening Day is still a little over two months away, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t start prognosticating about what 2026 might bring for Your Texas Rangers.

So we want to know…where do you think the Rangers will finish in the A.L. West this year?

Cast your vote below…

Earlier this week, baseball writers voted Carlos Beltrán into the Baseball Hall of Fame. On his fourth year of the ballot, Beltrán garnered 84.2% of the votes cast, well more than the 75% required to gain induction. He finished his career in 2017 as a member of the World Series champion Houston Astros.

Of course, he began it in Kansas City as a young star with the Royals. Quickly, he morphed into a superstar.

In 1999, his first full season in the Majors, Beltrán posted the first of several career 20-20 seasons. At the young age of 22, he corked 22 home runs while swiping 27 stolen bases. For the year, he slashed .293/.337/.454. He led the Royals in runs scored while placing or tying for second in other major offensive categories such as bWAR (4.7), hits (194), home runs, RBIs (108), and stolen bases. He took home the American League Rookie of the Year Award in a landslide, collecting 26 of the 28 first-place votes, finishing 88 points ahead of the runner-up, pitcher Freddy Garcia.

The Royals finished 64-97.

That was pretty much the story for Beltrán’s tenure in Kansas City: great individual numbers while the team struggled. In his third season, he had, by bWAR, his best year with the Royals, finishing 6.5 wins-above-replacement while posting a slash line of .306/.362/.514 for an OPS 23% above league-average. For the first of just two times in his career—both with the Royals—he finished with at least 10 triples. As evidenced by the slugging percentage, the power jumped, as he added another 76 extra-base hits to go with his triples.

He was 24.

The Royals finished 65-97.

The following season, when the Royals finished 62-100, Beltrán came up a home run shy of a 30-30 season, finishing with 29 homers and 35 stolen bases. For the only time in his career, he played in all 162 games.

In 2003, the Royals actually competed but fell short of the playoffs with a record of 83-79. Beltrán finally received some MVP consideration, finishing 9th in a year in which he finished with 5.8 bWAR, 10 triples, 26 home runs, 41 stolen bases, 102 runs scored, 100 RBIs, and an OPS of .911. He turned 26 in the season’s first month and looked to be the centerpiece of a Royals team that would finally start consistently competing.

None of that happened.

As Max wrote about in 2017, in 2003, Beltrán and the front office appeared to have a deal that would’ve kept Beltrán in Kansas City through 2005. Beltrán, his agent Scott Boras, and the Royals brass had hashed out a three-year deal worth $25 million. That’s $25 million total, mind you, which comes out to just over $8 million per season.

But Dan Glass, son of the late and former Royals owner David Glass, pushed back on the deal, wanting it cut by $1 million. Again, that’s total, not per season. The new offer peeved Beltrán and Boras, who broke off negotiations.

In June of 2004, after another stellar 69 games that would earn Beltrán his first All-Star nod, as part of a three-team deal, the Royals traded him to the Houston Astros in a three-team trade for Mark Teahen, John Buck, Mike Wood, and cash.

Almost immediately, Beltrán experienced something with Houston that he never did with the Royals—the playoffs. Before that, though, Beltrán played 90 regular-season games with the Astros, and elevated his slugging to another level, going off for 17 doubles, seven triples, and 23 home runs. He remained a menace on the bases, too, going a perfect 28-for-28 in stolen base attempts.

When Houston reached the postseason, somehow, Beltran further upped his game. Check out these ridiculous stats from his 2004 postseason, which ended with a Game 7 NLCS loss to the Cardinals – .435/.536/1.022/1.557, 21 runs, three doubles, eight home runs, 14 RBIs, eight-for-eight in stolen bases, nine walks plus one intentional walk to eight strikeouts.

Absolutely insane.

Once free agency hit, Beltrán left the Astros for the New York Mets in a massive deal for the time: seven years, $119 million. Once his career ended, Beltrán would’ve played more games for the Mets than for any of his seven teams, including the Royals. In Queens, Beltrán would make seven All-Star games, finish as high as fourth in MVP voting (in 2006), earn three Gold Gloves and two Silver Sluggers.

Mirroring his time in Kansas City, though, he made the playoffs only once, and it ended in an iconically disastrous way.

Also similar to his days with the Royals, Beltrán’s career with the Mets ended in a trade during the last year of his contract, this time heading to San Francisco for a short spell with the Giants.

He spent his next two seasons back in Missouri, but with the Cardinals, reaching the World Series for the first time in his career in 2013, but falling to the Red Sox.

Once more hitting the open market, he returned to New York as a Yankee. Years removed from his graceful defending of centerfield, Beltrán primarily patrolled right field while occasionally DH’ing. He posted decent numbers for the Yankees before once again getting traded in 2016 to the Rangers.

His last season came in 2017 as he returned to the Astros, and, well, you may have heard about the 2017 Houston Astros before today. On the field, Beltrán posted by far the worst numbers of his career. He also became embroiled in a cheating scandal that would later cost him a managerial gig and forced him to wait until his fourth year on the ballot to get into the Hall of Fame.

Yet, he is now a Hall of Famer as it appears a majority of voters appear to have forgiven—or least moved past—those trashcan days.

Now the question becomes, what cap will he don in Cooperstown?

My bet is the Mets. He played more there than any other stop and also reached heights he’d yet to achieve while in Kansas City and wouldn’t again reach after leaving for the Bay.

That shouldn’t stop Royals fans from celebrating his career.

It was one of the finest, and it all started here.

In John Green’s 2005 novel Looking for Alaska, the main character Miles is obsessed with famous people’s last words, and especially those of the 16th century French writer François Rabelais: “I go to seek a Great Perhaps.” Over the course of the novel, the Great Perhaps becomes shorthand for the kind of life Miles wants to have; he’s tired of his provincial, “minor” life. He wants something more—he’s just not exactly sure what that might be yet.

For baseball players, the Great Perhaps is pretty clear-cut: ascend the minor-league ladder, make the big leagues and stay there, hopefully for a long time. But while aspiring big-leaguers might have the advantage of a clear path to what they want—they know what’s around the riverbend, over the rainbow, that the somewhere that’s green is a major league field—that doesn’t make the path easy, and there’s no guarantee that once you get there you can stay. This is where Troy Taylor finds himself: caught between the Great Perhaps and the Quad-A Perhaps, looking for a breakthrough.

Taylor crossed into the MLB record books as the 23,305th player in the majors on August 11, 2024, 29 days before his 23rd birthday. The Mariners were trouncing the Mets, 12-1, on the strength of a two-homer day from Cal Raleigh and a nine-strikeout day from Luis Castillo, giving the rookie the softest of landings to make his debut. Not that he needed it: Taylor issued a walk to former Mariner Ben Gamel but also collected his first two big-league strikeouts to finish out the game and secure the series sweep, both on a nasty buckling slider. It was a particularly electric debut, especially combined with Taylor’s top-shelf fastball velocity.

Taylor built on his strong debut with a solid performance down the stretch, striking out over a third of batters faced and working his way up the depth chart with 25 strikeouts in 19.1 innings, and looking like he would be in the mix for a major bullpen role in 2026. But an off-season lat injury held Taylor out of spring training, costing him development time. He scuffled through five rehab appearances with Tacoma, only recording 3.2 innings over the five appearances and allowing six runs on nine hits. But he also struck out four, and the bullpen-needy Mariners recalled him in mid-April at the start of a three-city, 10-day roadtrip with an eye to bolstering the bullpen.

Once again, Dan Wilson tried to provide Taylor a soft landing, putting him in against the bottom half of the lineup in the seventh inning of a 5-0 lead at Cincinnati. By the time Taylor walked off the mound, the score was 5-2 and he hadn’t recorded an out. Taylor’s fastball had good velocity, ticking 96-97, but he struggled to throw strikes with it, keeping him from getting to his best putaway pitch, the slider; and when he did throw the slider, hitters were ready for it, as Christian Encarnacion-Strand pummeled one below the zone for a two-run double.

The Mariners optioned Taylor back to Triple-A after that rough season debut, but were forced to recall him a week later when Logan Gilbert went down with forearm tightness. The team tried to protect Taylor, lacking now both spring training and minor-league rehab innings, using him only in the lowest-leverage situations—blowouts against teams like the Angels and Marlins, as well as a laugher in Texas—as he worked to get back in stride. But he continued to struggle with command, falling behind in counts, and when he did work his fastball in the zone, hitters were able to make solid contact on it. The sweeper, formerly his best whiff-getter, also failed to tempt hitters into swings. Back to Tacoma he went, only to again be recalled just six days later when another injury hit the pitching staff in the form of Trent Thornton’s appendicitis.

Ironically, where things improved for Taylor is where he looks least impressive on paper, in outings against the Blue Jays and Yankees on a particularly dreadful May homestand. Coming into the seventh inning in a game where the Mariners trailed Toronto 5-3, he wound up giving up a run due in part to an extremely weird leadoff hit (nine-hole hitter Tyler Heineman broke his bat on a pop up but somehow made it to first base, charge that run to the Leody Taveras Experiment.). But in the most high-leverage work he’d gotten so far that season, Taylor looked…better. He still walked a batter, falling well behind Bo Bichette when the lineup turned over, but his misses weren’t as wild, he hit more of his spots, and overall seemed to have more confidence on the mound and a better handle on his stuff, an impression backed up two days later by a 1-2-3 inning against those same Jays (this time in a blowout against the Mariners where Leo Rivas would be the final Mariners pitcher).

But because the Mariners pitching at the time was so thin, Taylor had to be called on for back-to-back duty against a hot Yankees team the very next night. Once again, Taylor suffered some bad luck on batted balls, giving up a two-run homer on a well-placed fastball, and then had to face the top of the Yankees lineup, somehow escaping with just one additional run on an Aaron Judge sac fly. However, it was enough to put the game out of reach for the Mariners, and included a gut-wrenching moment where Oswaldo Cabrera, running home on the sac fly, broke his ankle while crossing home plate, suspending play for about ten minutes.

Being a sinker-slider reliever doesn’t work if you don’t have your slider, and it was becoming apparent that Taylor just wasn’t able to rely on that pitch consistently. His relatively good turns against the powerhouses of the AL East was followed by a poor performance against the lowly White Sox, where a 5-0 Mariners lead turned into an already overworked Andrés Muñoz having to come in to finish the game after Taylor issued back-to-back walks to open the frame. After that outing, the Mariners sent Taylor back to Tacoma. He would not return.

Even in Tacoma, away from the pressures of the big leagues, Taylor posted a career-high walk rate, almost 14%. While he’s never been a poster boy for sterling command because of the way his stuff moves, that’s a significant jump from his career average. His ERA/FIP in Tacoma is also a significant outlier—double, or even triple at times, his career average. That’s largely driven by an inverted bell curve of performances: Taylor either gave up no runs or 3-4 runs at a time, with little in-between. To me, all this suggests a performance and execution issue rather than a degradation of stuff or batters figuring him out. That’s encouraging, because it seems like a solvable issue. That’s terrifying, because anyone who has fought for a bigger dream—a Great Perhaps—knows what a cunning adversary one’s own mind can be.

Along with the Great Perhaps, the other controlling quotation in Green’s book comes from the (supposed) last words of Simón Bolívar: Damn it! How will I ever get out of this labyrinth? The characters in the book choose different routes, some more destructive than others, in exploring the question. At the end, Miles comes upon a scribbled notation from his friend Alaska in the margin next to the question of how to escape the labyrinth of suffering: “straight and fast!” While Troy Taylor shouldn’t take this advice exactly—fast okay, straight not so much—the spirit of it is correct: launch yourself into the Great Perhaps, fast and fearless, to achieve escape velocity from a minor (league) life.

Baseball America announced their preseason Top 100 prospects for 2026 and two Cubs prospects were named to the list. Catcher Moisés Ballesteros was named the 36th-ranked prospect and right-handed pitcher Jaxon Wiggins was named the 78th-best prospect.

Recently-traded outfielder Owen Caissie, now of the Marlins, was named the 43rd-best prospect in the game.

Additionally. two Cubs outfield prospects, Ethan Conrad and Kane Kepley, were listed among the “20 MLB prospects who just missed.” Conrad and Kepley were the Cubs’ first- and second-round picks in the 2025 draft.

In their comments on Ballesteros, they reiterated that he’s a special hitter with defensive questions. On Wiggins, they said that he is one of the hardest-throwing starters in the minors but with durability issues.

Clearly the Cubs system is down a bit from the same time last year. Cade Horton and Matt Shaw graduated. Owen Caissie was traded to Miami. Kevin Alcántara, who was in the preseason Top 100 last year, had a rough season and dropped out.

However, Ballesteros jumped from 62 to 36 and Wiggins went from unranked last year to 78th this year. Conrad hasn’t made his professional debut yet because of injury, but Baseball America is very excited to see him play this year. Kepley made a big splash in Low-A Myrtle Beach which was enough for a second-round pick to get some consideration for the top 100. So the cupboard isn’t completely empty.

Freddy Peralta, one of the Mets’ latest additions in a very busy week, began his professional career in baseball as an international signing with the Mariners out of the Dominican Republic in 2013. Following a solid season in the Dominican Summer League that year, Peralta was promoted to Seattle’s rookie ball affiliate in Arizona for his age-18 season in 2014 and repeated the level in 2015, putting up slightly better results in his second go-around after struggling a bit in his first.

Following the 2015 season, the Mariners traded him and a pair of fellow pitchers to the Brewers in exchange for Adam Lind, who was coming off one of the best years of his career and went on to put up a .717 OPS and -0.3 bWAR in his lone season in Seattle before putting up a solid-if-unspectacular stat line with the Nationals in the final season of his major league career in 2017.

The Brewers had Peralta spend his 2016 season in Single-A and High-A and used him out of the bullpen fourteen times while having him make just ten starts. In total, he 82.0 innings in the minors that year and finished with a 3.62 ERA in his age-20 season.

Peralta opened the 2017 season in High-A, fared much better there than he had in his stint at the level in the previous year, and earned himself a promotion to Double-A. He thrived there, as he had a 2.26 ERA in 63.2 innings, and across both levels, he made the vast majority of his appearances as a starter.

After making seven starts in Triple-A at the beginning of the 2018 season, Peralta was called up for his major league debut in mid-May and had a rather electric outing against the Rockies at Coors Field as he went five-and-two-thirds innings and racked up thirteen strikeouts, gave up just one hit, and didn’t allow any runs. Following his second start against the Twins in the next turn through Milwaukee’s rotation, Peralta went on to bounce between Triple-A and the big leagues for the rest of the season, but he threw 78.1 innings with a 4.25 ERA and a 3.72 FIP in his time with the Brewers.

Milwaukee decided to use Peralta mostly as a reliever in 2019, and that season didn’t go particularly well for him. In 85.0 innings, he finished with a 5.29 ERA and had a pretty significant home run problem, as he gave up 1.6 per nine innings, largely erasing the good work he did in striking out 115 batters that year. The Brewers stuck with using him out of the bullpen in the shortened 2020 season, a small sample that saw him put up a much better 3.99 ERA.

In 2021, however, the Brewers moved Peralta back into the rotation on a full-time basis, a move that worked so well that he’s remained a starting pitcher ever since—aside from a lone appearance out of the bullpen in each of the 2021 and 2022 seasons. In 144.1 innings in the former, he had a 2.81 ERA and a 3.12 FIP and was worth 3.7 bWAR.

The 2022 season didn’t go quite as swimmingly for Peralta, who dealt with lat and elbow issues and made just 18 appearances, putting up a 3.58 ERA in just 78.0 innings. But from 2023 through 2025, Peralta turned into one of the more durable pitchers in the game. He logged 516.0 innings over that span, the 15th-highest total in baseball, and finished those three seasons with ERAs of 3.86, 3.68, and 2.70, respectively.

Peralta’s percentile rankings on Statcast looked very good in the 2023 and 2025 seasons, and last year, he used a four-pitch arsenal that included a four-seam fastball that he threw a majority of the time, a changeup, a curveball and a slider.

That pitch mix hasn’t changed all that much since the Brewers moved him into rotation, though it might be worth noting that he went from his slider being his most-used secondary pitch in every season from 2021 through 2024 to his least-used one in 2025. He’s thrown his changeup more in each season since 2022, and the 2025 season was the first time that he threw it more than either his slider or his curve.

Finally, Peralta is in the last year of his contract, an incredibly team-friendly deal that he signed with the Brewers ahead of the 2020 season for seven years and $30 million. He’ll turn 30 years old in June, making this his age-30 season, but he’d be a pretty good candidate for an extension should the Mets be interested in keeping him around for more than the 2026 season.

In the winter/offseason of 2006-07, the prized pitcher on the market was Daisuke Matsuzaka. The 26-year-old was posted by the NPB’s Seibu Lions after a decorated career with them that included a 2004 Japan Series championship and a star turn in the inaugural 2006 World Baseball Classic, where he was MVP. Many teams were interested in Matsuzaka, including the Yankees. When the pitcher instead went to the rival Boston Red Sox, that felt a gut punch in the moment, although Matsuzaka didn’t necessarily live up to all the hype after a championship in his debut season.

The Yankees decided to pivot and pursue another NPB starter. While he wasn’t as high-profile an arm as Matsuzaka, the Yankee career of Kei Igawa goes down as one of the most mentioned failures of the franchise in recent memory.

Kei Igawa
Signing Date: December 27, 2006
Contract: Five years, $20 million (plus a $26 million posting fee)

Having posted an 18-strikeout game in high school, Igawa was selected by the Hanshin Tigers in the second round of the NPB draft in 1997. While he showed potential, his early years were marred by wildness, including setting a record for wild pitches in the NPB’s minor league. However, his parent club weren’t going anywhere good in the standings, and gave Igawa a chance with the NPB’s Tigers in 1999, when he was just 19 years old.

Their seasons in the doldrums allowed the Tigers to let Igawa work through his issues, and eventually led to a breakout season in 2001, another good one the following year, and a dominant one in 2003. In the 2003 season, Igawa won both the NPB equivalent of the Cy Young and also the Central League MVP, having posted a 20-5 record with a 2.80 ERA and 179 strikeouts.

Igawa helped the Tigers to the Japan Series, although they fell to the Fukuoka Daiei Hawks in seven games, failing to break the “Curse of the Colonel.”

ERA-wise, Igawa took a step back the next two years, although he continued to strike out an impressive amount of batters. In addition to that, he helped the Tigers return to the Japan Series in 2005, where they fell short again. He bounced back in 2006, putting up a 2.97 ERA in 209 innings, while he put up his best season to that point in regards to limiting hits.

After the 2006 campaign, the Tigers agreed to post Igawa to let him pursue a career over in MLB. While he wasn’t the attention-grabbing name that Matsuzaka was, the Yankees and other teams saw him as a potential MLB-level pitcher. In the end, the Yankees won the right to negotiate with him, successfully bidding $26,000,194 as a posting fee. The “194” was to represent his NPB-leading strikeout total in 2006. After that, they came to terms with the player himself on a five-year, $20 million deal.

The Yankees didn’t have outsized expectations for their new pitcher. General manager Brian Cashman said they expected him to be a solid, back of the rotation arm. Unfortunately, Igawa wasn’t even that.

Igawa made his MLB debut on April 7, 2007, getting the ball for the Yankees’ fourth game of the season. He gave up a home run to the Orioles’ Nick Markakis in the first inning, and things didn’t get better from there. In five innings, he allowed seven runs on eight hits and three walks (they needed an amazing A-Rod-powered comeback in the ninth to win it). He was better in his next game, and then got his first career MLB win on April 18th. On April 28th, Igawa had to come in during the first inning in relief of an injured Jeff Karstens and threw six scoreless innings in a win over the Red Sox.

That ended up pretty much being the high point for Igawa’s debut season, though. In May, the Yankees sent him down to the minor leagues, hoping he could work through some mechanical flaws there. The Steinbrenners even overruled Cashman to hold onto him, nixing a potential midsummer waiver claim trade with the Padres. He would return to the big leagues in June and then again in September, but his overall season numbers were unsightly. In 67.2 innings across 14 games, Igawac coughed up 15 homers with a 6.25 ERA (73 ERA+) and a 6.37 FIP.

In 2008, Igawa failed to make the Yankees’ roster out of spring training. While injuries eventually led to his return to the majors, his 2008 ended up ever worse than his 2007, statistically. He only appeared in four innings for the Yankees in 2008, but his ERA ended up over 10, as he managed to allowed 13 hits over those 10 innings before finally being removed from the 40-man roster in July. Unfortunately for Igawa, he was also just OK at Triple-A that year, and he never got a chance to try and lower those numbers.

In fact, Igawa never got a chance to lower any of his career numbers—like his foreboding 6.66 career ERA—ever again. While he remained under contract with the Yankees for another three seasons (even continuing to live in Manhattan), the Yankees would never call him back up to the big leagues. In fairness, they made quite a number of improvements ahead of 2009, regardless of whether Igawa could pitch at the big league level or not. However, with an ERA over four at Triple-A in two of his remaining three years in the Yankees’ system shows that Igawa probably couldn’t have pitched in The Show.

In a 2011 interview with the New York Times, Cashman did not mince words in an assessment of the Igawa contract:

“It was a disaster. We failed.”

While Igawa stated a preference to remain in the U.S. after his Yankees’ deal expired—not a surprise, as he had turned down buyout opportunities in ’08 and ’09 that would have allowed him to return to Japan earlier—that chance never came. He eventually gave up the ghost, signed with the Orix Buffaloes, and played three more seasons in NPB.

Not that I find it likely that Igawa could’ve success anywhere, but Igawa’s signing really did feel like a kneejerk response to Matsuzaka going to Boston. After his contract expired, Igawa gave an interview where at an early meeting after his signing, Cashman and Joe Torre asked Igawa what his best pitch was. That feels like something that you should know before signing a guy. It’s not as if the contract was a massive one that hamstrung the Yankees, but it certainly was an annoying one.

See more of the “50 Most Notable Yankees Free Agent Signings in 50 Years” series here.