Mariners general manager Justin Hollander publicly admitted a few weeks back that the club would be looking for bullpen upgrades. Adam Jude of The Seattle Times reports that Seattle plans to add two relievers and hopes to have one locked down by the end of the Winter Meetings next week. Adding a lefty is a priority and Jude lists five names they are considering, with four of them being southpaws.
If there's a correlation between spending the most money and winning a championship, I still think it's a weak correlation. Sample size of data, not very big. But they earned every bit of it. I mean, they struggled with injuries throughout the season. But they got healthy at the right time. The rotation got healthy, and when that rotation is healthy, they're tough to beat.
By the by, it appears that Alex Anthopoulos spoke to reporters yesterday. While I haven't seen a broad summary of his remarks, we have teeny-tiny snippets like: If you take it at face value, this suggests two-plus serious-money additions at key positions, and then whatever "a lot of relievers" means, which could range from a bunch of cheap deals and speculative adds, to this Front Office's erstwhile-or-maybe-not strategy of dumping a big chunk of payroll into the bullpen for whatever reason.
There's not a whole lot of mystery surrounding the Braves' offseason needs. Ha-Seong Kim declining his player option leaves them back at square one at shortstop. They need more depth in a rotation that was battered by injury. They're potentially losing three high-leverage relievers (Raisel Iglesias, Pierce Johnson and Tyler Kinley) to free agency. President of baseball operations Alex Anthopoulos said on Tuesday that starting pitching and shortstop will take precedence early in the offseason.
Back before the 2025 season, I wrote an article that the 2025 bullpen could look a bit different than the bullpen of the three most recent Braves seasons. Basically, that article had a table that indicated: Braves' bullpen preseason projected rank was top four or better from 2022-2024, top eight the two seasons before that, and then dropping to ninth ahead of 2025; Braves' bullpen finished in the top ten in fWAR each year from 2020-2024;
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The Reds enter the offseason likely to seek bullpen help and multiple upgrades within the lineup, but they won't have an especially lofty budget for achieving those goals. President of baseball operations Nick Krall said Tuesday that 2026's budget "will be around the same as our payroll from 2025" ( link via C. Trent Rosecrans of The Athletic). Cincinnati opened the 2025 season with a roughly $112MM payroll and finished around $116MM, per Cot's Contracts.
Senate Democrats and Republicans each defeated the other party's plan to pay at least some federal employees on time amid the ongoing government shutdown, though both sides appeared to open the door to bipartisan negotiations on the issue. The Senate voted 54-45 on a motion to begin floor consideration of legislation unveiled earlier this week by Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., that would immediately pay all "excepted" employees who are forced to work during the appropriations lapse, as defined by the Office of Personnel Management. The measure needed 60 votes to advance; Sens. John Fetterman, D-Pa., Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, both D-Ga., voted in favor of the motion.
Two decades later, rapid! is expanding its role, evolving into a platform that connects payroll with the larger ecosystem of digital payments. rapid! offers PayCard, on-demand earned wage access (EWA), and disbursement solutions that now serve over 7,000 businesses. It sits within Green Dot's broader fintech and banking ecosystem and is powered by the company's own proprietary money-movement technology, which supports real-time payments across the US.
The Diamondbacks went into 2025 with an Opening Day payroll of just under $187MM, representing yet another new high for the club that had already bumped its payroll from roughly $116.1MM in 2023 to $163.3MM in 2024.
