The Bandwagon guide to MLB hot stove season

Where were we?

Hey everyone, it’s Zach, which will no longer be a required clarification. So I took a bit longer to get back to it, but as promised: The newsletter is going to continue, with some changes, as Hannah is off doing great work at CNN.

We’re going to jump into some advice for maintaining a healthy fan equilibrium during this week’s Winter Meetings and beyond, but first, some housekeeping:

1. Expect one edition of The Bandwagon a week. It will still focus on baseball and fandom, with some occasional detours to explore other outcroppings of culture, if you’ll indulge me. I’ll still make an effort to make note of major (or Bandwagon-ish) news in baseball, but that aspect of the newsletter will inherently be less comprehensive.
2. The newsletter will be free to read. I’ll likely provide a new way to voluntarily support the project in the new year, once you’ve hopefully gotten to know and like the new cadence.
3. Feedback, ideas and questions are welcome. Email HelloBandwagon@gmail.com or post in the comments section or newsletter chat (both of which are now open to all readers).

OK, back to the programming.

Rumor has it

The Winter Meetings are happening now in Orlando, which means MLB’s offseason is about to start rolling downhill. At least partially because a whole pack of reporters seeking content will be trawling around the same hotel complex collecting tidbits and posting them to social media sites too hurriedly for their own good.

A lot of that not-so-good-for-you rush either bubbles up or filters down to the fans. Every season should be a lesson in how little any given transaction (non-Shohei Ohtani division) tells us about the season to come, but we collectively tend to forget it. Freaking out a little bit is part of the fun. Freaking out a lot should be saved for months that include competitive pitches.

So in lieu of experiencing unnecessary doom or premature glee, here are a few simple rules to enjoy baseball’s winter spectacle for what it is.

Do enjoy the wayward buzz: Did you hear that the Cubs signed Zac Gallen? If you didn’t, don’t worry, because they didn’t. You probably just weren’t online for this winter’s first 10-minute window of insider oopsies.

I think I remember where I was for the Giants’ signing of Arson Judge more than I do for many actual seismic transactions, and that seems fine to me.

I am not pro-errant journalism, but these mostly wind up as harmless flurries of static that temporarily allow us to gauge our own emotions. Sometimes you need to actually think something is happening, need to actually make a decision, to have the full scope of how you feel wash over you. Hell, maybe Aaron Judge was going to the Giants until he saw that tweet.

Kidding. I think.

While we’re here: Remember this hilarious @ misfire?

Yeah, I didn’t either, but I’m glad a sharp Bluesky poster recirculated that screenshot. If you want to stay relatively up to date without using X, there are Bluesky bots for that, like this one.

Don’t over-index last year: Here’s an argument you might have already heard: The Mets are crazy. Newly signed reliever Devin Williams had a 4.79 ERA last year!

A reliever judged by ERA is a particularly potent brew of unreliable ingredients, but versions of this happen pretty much constantly. Kyle Tucker isn’t worth X, he wasn’t even the best player on his own team. Or My team is a joke for not giving Kyle Schwarber 6 years! He hit 56 homers!

You can quickly drive yourself crazy copy pasting last year’s truth into next year’s expectation and simming it through your head as reality. Don’t succumb to this! Use the powers of the internet to check yourself. Both Baseball-Reference and FanGraphs player pages allow you to hold shift and click the beginning and end of a span to get longer-term numbers and averages. I recommend starting with a player’s last three full seasons.

Do evaluate aesthetically: I appreciate a deep backstory and a big, wide array of breaking balls. So I adore the Red Sox deal for Sonny Gray, which brings the diminutive and sneaky great starter into direct conflict with the Yankees. Gray, who had a rough patch in an otherwise terrific career in pinstripes, has been open about his excitement to be with a club “where it’s easy to hate the Yankees.” Yankees GM Brian Cashman, in return, has said Gray lied back then about wanting to be in New York, supposedly at the behest of his agent. Who knows?! It’s fun.

This can be applied any number of ways. Maybe you love groundball pitchers and covet Framber Valdez. Maybe you just want to see dingers and dream of the Pete Alonso-Eugenio Suarez combo play.

Me? I’d be rooting for my team to take a chance on Michael King, the questionably durable starter with a diabolical sinker-sweeper combo.

Whatever gets you going, root for that, but also understand that any overlap with a GM’s ultimate decision-making is probably coincidental.

Don’t fall for the salary cap soothsayers: In 51 weeks, MLB’s collective bargaining agreement is going to expire and the owners will (almost certainly) lock out the players while a tense labor negotiation hits pause on the usual business and sets the rules of engagement for the next few years.

There’s a growing mountain of evidence that the owners will attempt to put a salary cap in place, potentially setting off a fight so extreme it endangers the 2027 season. I recognize how big and bad and bold-faced that sounds. But I’m here to tell you to not worry about it yet. For one: Hannah wrote a pretty good prognostication here a while back detailing why MLB might not have the stomach for brinksmanship on that front. For another: That’s what next winter is for.

You’re going to see little hints of sensationalism trying to tie this contract or that trade or this ownership decision to a future that none of the parties involved are actually sure of. Many will say the uncertainty will depress spending. Others point out (with pretty solid logic) that the upcoming labor posturing is pushing the Pirates and Marlins to at least gesture at spending. Just before the last lockout, the league went bananas as teams gobbled up stars on big deals.

If labor strife is driving decisions, I promise the picture of next winter isn’t any clearer than Cody Bellinger’s 2026 WAR projection. So unless baseball is just your personal excuse to nerd out on labor law (more power to you), try not to let the un-fun stuff ahead get to you early.

Do distinguish opportunity cost from financial cost: There was a good discussion on The Athletic’s Roundtable podcastthis week about the current favored style of baseball transaction analysis. As they accurately point out, deals for potentially helpful players are met mostly with a chorus wondering why every other interested or would-be interested team didn’t spend even more to secure the player in question.

Every team owner could afford it. This line is true, and a good thing to remember in the macro sense of spending, but it’s not the same thing as a reason to give an unproven pitcher with some upside $40 million and a roster spot that any team would be loathe to punt.

The money is so often the story in baseball, and the winter puts it under the microscope. And while contracts are forever going to be useful in setting bars for how players are valued, I’m trying to lead a more interesting hot stove life by thinking about moves in terms of opportunity cost.

There are still only 26 roster spots per team. There are still nine positions to cover at any given moment. The nine positions part, for example, explains why the Mets moved on from Brandon Nimmo in favor of Marcus Semien even though the contracts got a lot of coverage. To maximize the Juan Soto era, the front office needed to afford manager Carlos Mendoza a little more leeway at designated hitter than he would have had with Nimmo, an ebullient clubhouse leader trending downward defensively with a Good but not MVP level bat, still in the lineup. There are still problems to solve, but the opportunities to unlock improvement are easier to envision with Semien solving second base defense.

Give it a try next time a move happens or doesn’t happen. Think through some flow charts. Some sort of logic might be there. There will never be a satisfying reason a rich guy didn’t spend more.

Bandwagon Wrapped?

Like every other content consumption service, MLB.TV users have access to a Spotify-wrapped style recap of their year. If you’re logged into your MLB account, click the watch tab on MLB.com and then go to the My Stats page. Or, you know, click that link there.

It’s the basics. What teams you watched, what stats were accumulated while you watched. It, of course, only captures what you streamed. For many, that probably doesn’t include their primary team if they live in the local market.

It got me thinking: I’m interested in seeing some more fun, more thorough versions of baseball fandom Wrapped, as it were.

If you’re game for some self-assessment, fill out this quick survey and I’ll share some results and reflections closer to the end of the month.

The Bullpen

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I mentioned Hannah has already started at CNN. She wrote about new Nationals manager Blake Butera’s very big dayand, beyond baseball, the magic behind a winning version of the Chicago Bears.

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One day maybe I’ll have something rational or intelligent to say about the irrational and unintelligible process used to elect Hall of Famers. Jeff Kent is going in, thanks to the Contemporary Baseball Era Committee, while his contemporaries who actually dominated an era of baseball are left out.

You can muster reasons for each decision separated into its own stand of logic, but they don’t make much of any sense in concert. Seems to be a thing with committees.

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Bryce Harper is … doing something real weird with his blood. I don’t know if it’s more or less dangerous than drinking raw milk, but honestly I’ll allow it just for this post.

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If you rely on The Bandwagon for your entire diet of baseball news, a) Sorry about that, and b) Dylan Cease signed with the Blue Jays, Josh Naylor re-upped with the Mariners and a handful of guys you’ve heard of took qualifying offers to stay with their existing teams. There will be time for thoughts on those deals once more of the free agent market develops.

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