Is It Spring? Close Enough.
Let's talk baseball
Thank you for reading The Dope.
We both know you haven’t been keeping up. Don’t lose sleep over it. It’s not you, it’s baseball. Too many players going in too many directions — besides which, if you can’t stop paying attention during the off-season, when can you?
So anyway:
Kyle Tucker got bought by the Dodgers.
Kyle Schwarber stayed in Philly.
Cody Bellinger looked around, then re-signed with the Yankees.
Alex Bregman ditched the Red Sox for the Cubs.
(Time out: The people above, and those below, all got paid. It’s not like they just wandered off one practice field and suddenly turned up on a different one. They’re all going to be just fine.)
Pete Alsonso left the Mets for Baltimore.
Justin Verlander and Framber Valdez went to Detroit.
Eugenio Suarez took his 49 home runs to Cincinnati.
(He’ll hit 59 in Great American Ball Park.)
Bo Bichette is now a Met.
Edwin Diaz, who was a Met, is in L.A.
Dylan Cease hightailed it to Canada.
I mention these names only to get you going again; hundreds and hundreds of MLB transactions later, we’re still trying to get the lay of the land as spring training gets under way. But suffice it to say that unless your favorite team is the Yankees, you probably need to spend a little time looking at your newly configured squad.
This will be a fascinating year for a bunch of reasons, and as much as I hate to place an impending labor negotiation on the list, it is unquestionably one of those reasons. If the Dodgers are going to three-peat, they will be doing so during what a significant portion of MLB’s billionaire class of owners hopes is the final league season without a salary cap.
We won’t unpack that conversation now, but to put it in a thimble, it’s an idiotic ask that has the chance to blow up the 2027 season at the precise moment that baseball is making a comeback among sports fans, especially younger ones.
Classic. And it’s all the more reason to be interested in what happens here in good old ‘26.
A few of the fun things to begin tracking as camps fully open (Start right now! Waste no time!):
