the red sox told me they kept trading third basemen so i asked how many third basemen they have and they said they just go to the free agent market and get a new third baseman afterwards so i said it sounds like they’re just feeding third basemen to other teams and then wally started crying.

I know we all want to say “It’s not my money”, but right now if the Phillies signed Bichette at a AAV similar to Bregman, plus acquired a catcher they would be adding somewhere near $60M in cash payments to 2026. With the luxury tax they would be paying near $200M over like 2024

I think Bichette goes to Boston. It is an obvious fit and they have the money available. The Phillies aren’t a clean fit and have to make other moves to do it and I don’t know if they want to spend that much on him.

I don’t think we are going to completely have a “every team should just have signed Kyle Tucker instead” offseason, but a lot of teams are trying hard to not sign Kyle Tucker

More Phillies roster moves now official: Deiry Gonzalez, Romeli Espinosa, and Anderson Araujo brought stateside Maylin De Leon, Adrian Garica, Jorge Julio, and Maxwell Hernandez released Rene Pinto and Tucker Davidson signed

Now that FanGraphs has projections on the player pages I can do one of my favorite activity, seeing how much they need to regress Brandon Marsh's BABIP. They all sort of come in somewhere in the .330s (which is high), Brandon Marsh's career is .371 it was .363 last year.

I think I am in a good headspace, my first thought with the Max Kepler news was to check if Germany was in the WBC and if this affected that. Germany is not in the tournament, and I am guessing Max Kepler's career might be over completely now.

Bumping this up for the east coast lunch crowd. This group of 15 prospects was really interesting to me and does have guys that I think will appear in the majors for the Phillies over the next two years.

Missed this earlier, and the answer is not really and the guy the Phillies lost in the Rule 5 (Griff McGarry) would have been in the 20s. The system is weak, but Zach McCambley to me is a major league caliber reliever who is ready now and that is a top 25-40ish prospect.

This is the part of the list that I might like the most about the process and just focusing on a single organization. I am not going to tell you that this is a bunch of great prospects, but there will be major leaguers from this group and largely it is not a group that gets talked about much.

Phillies 2026 Top Prospects - Dreams and Middle Relievers (#22-#36)

Dollars/WAR is a strange measure. It says nothing at all about the value of non-free agents (who would massively dilute that figure if truly “free”) and is substantially driven by the minority of teams with a ton of cash to burn whose acquisition model revolves around those signings.

Now watching Porco Rosso both because it is a great movie and “I’d rather be a pig than a fascist”

My rational assumption with Bichette is that other teams will and should have more interest in giving him a massive deal than the Phillies will. That isn't saying the Phillies aren't legitimately interested, but there are clearly teams that need him much more and the fit is easier.

This is definitely more a spring discussion, but it is in the Phillies best financial interests that if they can get Luzardo to extend that any extension start in 2027 and not include 2026 (much like Wheeler's extension). That is because any extension would raise the $11M for AAV and tax purposes.

The Phillies have released the following DSL players, presumably ahead of the new signing period next week: Domingo Morla, Markos Sanchez, Diego Marquez, Michael Nieto, Roiser Cespede, Gustavo De La Cruz, Rafael Oropeza, Gabriel Martinez, Leonardo Carpio, Marco Sipion, Luis Quintero, and Juan Parra

Kyle Brnovich signing also made official and backdated to December

Easily the best thing I've written all year

I don't think we have adjusted to the fact that both AAA leagues, not just the PCL, have supercharged hitters leagues for a bit now and triple slash lines just are not helpful. Rookies keep having long adjustment periods in the majors, but triple slash lines continue to be the quick scouting.

Christian Cairo, Jonathan Hernandez, Lenny Torres, and Trevor Richards signings have been added to the transaction log backdated to December

Just for fun (because good lord we need fun) here is Luzardo's pitching ranks with the two starts removed. IP - 24th ERA - 13th FIP - 5th (yes I calculated the 2025 FIP constant for some reason) BB% - 28th K% - 6th (same but much closer to Yamamoto and Skenes) HR/9 - 6th

I guess you could make the argument that Cabrera is like Luzardo was a year ago, but with another year of control, but Luzardo had his 2023 season where he had actually pitched 178 innings.

For the lunch crowd, some general thoughts on the Phillies system and the bottom of my top 50 prospects list

First part of my Phillies prospect list is out now

Phillies 2026 Prospect Ranking: Intro and Bottom of List

Bottom of the Top 50 has been scheduled for tomorrow. Because I never do these in nice clean numbers, it is 37-50 and sort of a jumbled mess of guys.

This Phillies reuniting Tucker Davidson and Bryse Wilson in the IronPigs rotation is almost certainly a fine depth move, but it feels very weird and uncomfortable.

It is always funny that the US hat/logo has not been updated for any level of competition and just continues to look like the generic logo from a video game.

Dislocated my collarbone diving for a volleyball as a camp counselor, then spent the next many weeks with my arm in a sling playing one armed against a bunch of 8 year olds

Cool to see the Flyers are still the Flyers, just falling for one of the classic move of making a good move and the doubling down to make it a bad move.

Because I have been caught up in so many other things I feel like I have not been playing enough games, and while I am aware of my backlog of video games, I am totally out of the loop on board games and have largely struggled to keep up with what is new and interesting.

There are still some red flags (7 BB 26 K), but Devin Saltiban has quietly been very good in Australia this winter. He has continued to move back to center field and in 30 games is hitting .333/.386/.570 with 12 doubles, 5 home runs, and 9 stolen bases.

I have long thought Randal Grichuk was an ideal fit, but we are sort of running out of time of Randal Grichuk actually still hitting lefties well enough for Randal Grichuk to be an ideal fit.

I am really basic, but it is probably best that I don't know how many hours of Age of Empires II I played

This will be Jorge Alfaro's 10th team (and potentially 9th he will play in a mlb/milb game for) and 17th professional season. He does not turn 33 until June.

List is going to start coming out this week, but here is the preview from my wife who always does the editing. "The lack of depth in the system is so clear by the just the caliber of players you feature in this tier. Several of these players wouldn't even make a list in other years."

The baseball rumor monger is essentially dying off as a journalist path. Teams/agents just aren't leaking things in a way that don't just sound like lies and the heyday of Twitter engagement is dead so there isn't really a reason to do it anymore. This is all probably a good thing overall.

I mostly have been distracting myself today by writing and while not really successful at distracting me, I have gotten a lot done

A couple of things here. Miller isn't ready now (or not assured to be ready). The skillset fits a bit better on the left side, but he probably could play second. There isn't a big Stott market either and Stott's glove makes his floor high. So you don't have a clean 2026 path.

My take on the Okamoto deal and the Phillies is that he isn’t good enough to commit to blocking Aidan Miller or deciding you are going to trade Aidan Miller. Alec Bohm at a one year commitment is just a placeholder.

Dominican Republic not getting Jhoan Duran and Cristopher Sanchez is probably good for the Phillies but bad for the WBC

The opt outs vs long term contract thing on Imai opens up a downside not being talked about. What if he takes 4-5 months to adjust and develop, you get months of mediocre results and the market and his reps don’t care about sample size and he opts out

The Astros earlier in the offseason traded two of their top 3 prospects for a pitcher unlikely to make the Pirates rotation

So Imai went to a pitching desperate team on a deal that indicates he didn’t have a market that believed in him

Also Happy New Year to my fellow central time people!

We went outside because we thought we heard fireworks. There weren’t any, but it was real fucking cold.

This is now 13 years living in Madison realizing that the rest of the world isn’t like Philly where there isn’t just a channel showing me the city fireworks (I don’t know if this is still true about Philly)

This isn’t really tiki, but it is rum forward while also clearly having a wine-y vanilla roundness. Sort of almost flavor wise a Manhattan distant cousin with the singular but complex flavor that is boozy but not burning

Here is the thing, I don't. I have publicly available information. I don't have detailed pitch shape and what the ball difference does to that. I don't know the competition level translations. It is totally different that me looking at Ranger Suarez.