In baseball’s Age of Collaboration, the hot seat for managers should be viewed more as an oversized sofa, with front-office executives and statistical analysts all squeezing in. Firing the manager when others bear responsibility for shaping rosters and influencing decisions often amounts to blatant scapegoating. Perhaps that is one reason early dismissals are becoming less…
By Grant Brisbee, Chad Jennings and Levi Weaver Every week, we ask a selected group of our baseball writers — local and national — to rank the teams from first to worst. Here are the collective results. Two surprising weekends can make a big difference in football, but small samples mean less in baseball. Keep that…
There’s nothing that excites a journalist quite like a deal coming together past its initial deadline. Vladimir Guerrero Jr.’s 14-year, $500 million contract extension with the Blue Jays came nearly two months after Guerrero’s deadline to end talks at the start of spring training. It capped off another week of significant extensions across the sport,…
By Tim Britton, Johnny Flores Jr. and Andy McCullough Every week, we ask a selected group of our baseball writers — local and national — to rank the teams from first to worst. Here are the collective results, with the average rankings of our panel in parentheses. The first weekend of the baseball season offered its…
It’s an annual tradition: My column explaining why I think your favorite team isn’t going to win as many games as you think they are. These predictions are for fun, not a demonstration of my deep-seated loathing for your favorite team, and not the product of a sophisticated machine-learning algorithm to produce impeccable forecasts. I…
CLEARWATER, Fla. — Do you miss those robots yet? We’ve spent the past five weeks watching them pop out of hiding, every time a catcher, hitter or pitcher tapped his head to ask his favorite robot umps: Where the heck was that pitch? Then, almost instantaneously, a six-second animation would roll on the ballpark videoboard…
Look, we didn’t want to ruin the baseball season for you, but we’re professionals, so when our bosses asked us collectively to predict the best players and best teams of 2025, we knew you’d take it as the gospel truth with no arguments or complaints. Sure, there might be a few rogue outliers in the…
Editor’s Note: This article is part of our Rankings & Tiers series, an evaluation across sport about the key players, front offices, teams, franchises and much more. Welcome to The Athletic’s fourth annual MLB Position Player Tiers, where we rank the top 100 position players in baseball based on their expected all-around hitting, fielding and baserunning value for…
Editor’s Note: This article is part of our Rankings & Tiers series, an evaluation across sport about the key players, front offices, teams, franchises and much more. By Andy McCullough, Will Sammon and Sahadev Sharma The email from the New York Yankees arrived just past 6 p.m. a little more than a week before the first game of…
By Grant Brisbee, Andy McCullough and Stephen J. Nesbitt Every week, we ask a selected group of our baseball writers — local and national — to rank the teams from first to worst. Here are the collective results. It’s been 139 days since the New York Yankees fumbled Game 5 of the World Series and the…