#30-home-run-milestone

#30-home-run-milestone

To hit for the Saint Cycle, a player must only sacrifice themselves in every plate appearance. They cannot be glorified with a hit, and in each trip to the plate, they must be saintly in a new way.

The objective of this exercise is to identify the best players for the 2026 season, not who might be best in five years or over their career. Who will be the best pitchers to take the mound this season? Who are the game's most powerful hitters in 2026? And how do marquee positions like shortstop and center field shake out?

For most franchises, this sort of thing is cause for celebration and the warm embrace of nostalgia. But this is the Yankees we're talking about, and so of course fans and media members managed to turn it into one more thing to yell at each other over.

Baseball doesn't actually need defending. It's one of the world's great global games and is enjoyed in various forms by hundreds of millions of people every year. It's going to outlive all of us, I promise. But because of baseball's historical and cultural position in America, it is constantly subjected to a weird kind of forensic analysis that isn't usually applied to other sports: is it dying? Is it too slow?

During the regular season of the Dodgers' defense of their World Series title, Ohtani hit .282 with 55 home runs and 102 RBIs, adding 146 runs and 20 stolen bases. In the playoffs, Ohtani continued to make an impact at the plate, adding eight home runs - including three in one game, during which he also threw 10 strikeouts from the mound - 14 RBIs and 13 runs.

Good morning! Boston saw its first significant snow storm of 2026 yesterday, and it's well below freezing today. In other words, it very much does not feel like baseball season here. But baseball is being played all around the world, including in the Dominican, where a spot in the LIDOM championship series was decided by a walkoff walk: Game 1 of the championship series is on Wednesday and you can stream it on MLB.TV.

The Baseball Hall of Fame will have two new members in a few months, as Carlos Beltran and Andruw Jones were officially elected yesterday. The two Red Sox legends on the ballot, Dustin Pedroia and Manny Ramirez, failed to hit the 75% vote threshold. Pedroia, though, is only in his second year on the ballot and saw his vote percentage jump from 11.9 to 20.7, which bodes well for his campaign going forward.