TA: Nationals Add a Littell Pitching | Baseball prospectus

Washington Nationals sign RHP Zack Littell to an annual contract.
How many times would you imagine a team signing its ace a week in March? Okay, it probably happened in the bad old days of the reserve clause, when holdouts were more common. And while PECOTA sees Littell as the best member of its new staff (106 projected DRA-), the general consensus is that the man is close to joining John LannanOdalis Pérez, and Josiah Gray will be in a certain ring of honor Cavalli fallsthe Nationals’ old top candidate. The younger pitcher certainly offers more opportunity, but Littell easily lands at number one. 2 forward Miles Mikolas, Jake IrvinAnd Brad Lordalong with the modern, diminished Gray.

We don’t know the contract figures at the time of printing, and it’s surprisingly difficult to imagine them. On the one hand, innings still cost money, to the extent that back-end starters like that Aaron Civale, Michael Lorenzen, Tomoyuki Sugano, Chris PaddackAnd Ryan Weiss all netted deals in the $6-8 million range. On the other hand, below you can see how free agents typically fare in March. The reason to wonder isn’t to empathize with Littell, but to wonder why teams not already eliminated from postseason contention didn’t come knocking. In our PECOTA Week series on the remaining free agents, I wondered if the Padres might not be the best choice for him given their budget, Littell’s likely price tag and the expected number of starts for the likes of Randy Vásquez. Matt WaldronAnd JP Sears. A month later the calculus hasn’t changed at all. Either Littell priced himself out of San Diego, in which case it’s hard to imagine why the Nationals were willing to pay to climb from 66 to 67 wins, or, more likely, AJ Preller just didn’t want him.

And you can see that, if you’re honest. It’s not like Littell is doing something that generates a lot of demand. His 90-mph fastball is pedestrian and fairly dead-sun-like, and he gives up a ton of contact, much of it quite hard, and much of it in the air. His splitter doesn’t really miss bats – he ranks 61st out of 75th (min. 100 thrown) in whiff rate – and his sinker doesn’t really sink, earning just a 40% groundball rate on balls in play. His slider doesn’t move either, but you’d expect that at this point in the paragraph. It’s a weird arsenal, which is why the Rays were interested in him as a project in the first place.

But there’s a strange trick here: Littell can’t miss bats, and that’s actually a feature, not a bug. It’s rare to see a guy fill the zone as often as he does (56.1%, ranked seventh out of 52 qualified starters) while also earning as much pursuit (30.2%, ranked 18th). The guys in this area are generally the ones whose fields are so dirty that it hardly matters where it goes (this was once known as the deGrom paradox, unfortunately), but for Littell it’s more calculated. Batters hit just .136/.178/.229 when putting the ball in play on a pitch outside the zone, good for a 90th percentile wOBA against among starters who threw 1,000 pitches. That’s much, much better than earning a stupid, sexy hit with a rubber band change or a Frisbee slider, especially early in the count, which allows him to keep the pitch countdown and innings up.

Is Littell actually good? No, not really, although his rarely used sweeper, which he struck out just five percent of the time in 2024 and 2025, doubled in whiff the closer he got to the edge of the plate. There’s something worth messing with here, and it’s a shame that the tampering will take place in Washington, and not San Diego or Houston. At least not until July 31.

Kansas City Royals sign OF Starling Marte to a one-year, $1 million contract with $2 million in incentives.
The Royals have a bad outfield, so they are forced to sign emergency outfielders.

The emergency outfielders are bad, so the Royals have a crappy outfield.

The Royals have a bad outfield, so they are forced to sign emergency outfielders.

In a world that often feels like it is in decline, there is comfort in the cyclical cycle, even if it is a bad cycle.

“Does he have anything else?” is not the fun kind of analysis that entices kids to get into the lucrative and stable business of baseball analysis. No one creates a material model to fall off the edge of the aging curve. But we could urgently use one: a crystal ball that can tell you when Hunter Renfroe, Michael Conforto, Leody Taverasor Mark Kanha Simply not having it anymore would have saved teams hundreds of painful plate appearances and a handful of necessary wins. It’s just not particularly sexy, as cases of statistically based analysis claim.

So is Marte washed? He hasn’t been an average starter for three seasons now, as injuries piled up in the second half of his contract with the Mets. But he never really got into trouble and published DRC+ figures in the late 1990s. His defense has settled into the “corner” level that, to be fair, fans in Kansas City are probably pretty used to these days, and it helps a bit that they’ve moved the walls on Kaufmann. But he’s probably a better hitter, if not as good a fielder, as a fellow emergency backup Avenue Thomasand the Royals need someone just in case Isaac Collins turns out to be a one-hit wonder or something Jac Caglianon I can’t manage to be at least a one-hit wonder.

It’s a perfectly acceptable gamble, even if it’s damning that this is the eighth time the Royals appear to need it. Marte is good when he’s healthy and cheap when he’s not. We’ll see you back here in July when he’s on the IL and the Royals have to trade a live arm for Lucas Raley.

Texas Rangers sign DH Andrew McCutchen to a minor league contract.
A disappointing signing perhaps, but not a bad signing. McCutchen, of course, because he had to wait until March for a job, in that garish blue and red like a tired fast-food restaurant manager, a symbol of the horrors of middle age. The Rangers, because they waited so long to find a platoon mate Game Pedersonand for not installing the obvious choice, Jake Burgerby signing a real first baseman.

But no matter how limited the 39-year-old McCutchen’s offer is at the moment, it fits. The Rangers can’t pretend their 26-man roster was too full to include a short-side platoon DH and pinch-hitter, and the former MVP still hit .267/.353/.389 against lefties in 2025 despite the poor overall numbers. In fact, there are no real red flags here pointing to a collapse — one that, granted, would take all 250 at-bats — although his bat speed, which dropped by a tick and a half last year, would be the shade of orange that your partner swears is actually red. Still, it’s a minor league contract, so no complaining allowed. It’s just another sign that the Rangers are putting some duct tape on an aging core and calling it good. You wish there were more. It almost makes your heart ache.

Houston Astros sign C Christian Vázquez to a minor league contract.
Vázquez provides depth/leadership/insurance/pressure to Houston’s current backup catcher, César Salazar. The always-bridesmaid 29-year-old has been recalled and demoted eight times over the past three seasons, serving as an emergency catcher. Salazar can’t hit. Not at all. He makes Martín Maldonado look Candy Maldonado (good hitter; look it up) in comparison, and also happens to be Albert Pujols-level slow. At least Salazar seems to understand this and swings as little as possible; however, this is unlikely to work 200 times.

Vázquez brings a new dimension to the Astros… basically everything about Salazar right now is equally true for the veteran, except he’s also getting so old that the framing is starting to disappear. That’s not necessarily a dealbreaker, given the rule changes the Astros have implemented Yainer Diaz and Maldonado for years. But it does make you wonder why they left this situation unaddressed until the last possible second.

San Diego Padres Sign FROM Alex Verdugo to a minor league contract.
Over the course of the 2026 season, 492 batters saw at least 100 plate appearances, meaning 492 batters saw at least 100 0-0 counts. Hitters as a whole tend to hold back on the first pitch, and may prefer to train their eyes a bit before swinging; the league only swung 32.1% of the time, compared to 47.6% overall. This is despite the natural advantage hitters have in such counts; their collective wOBA is .384 when the count is empty, and .291 when it is not.

By 2026, Alex Verdugo hit .421/.421/.526 when he swung at the first pitch, whether he hit it or not. The only problem: He only did this 19 times, leaving the bat on his shoulder the other 91% of the time. He ranked 492nd in first-pitch swing rate. And when he saw the first pitches sail by, he became a .219/.284/.264 hitter.

Verdugo is probably not as bad as last year. The decline in defense is worrying, especially for someone who is not yet 30; After all, it’s the defense that kept him working, if never quite average, during those down years with the bat in New York and Boston. But in 2025, when he also signed late, reported straight to Triple-A to step up and then was rushed back to Atlanta after a rash of injuries, Verdugo managed to be both unlucky and unlucky. He always swung a slow bat and compensated by making a lot of contact. But while the usual hitters of that profile – your Arraezes and Jacob Wilsons – like to swing, confident they can get anything over the infielders, Verdugo hates it. His swing rate was ninth-lowest among players with at least 200 PAs, and he shows an excellent eye. Unfortunately, he was rarely able to take advantage of it: He was also ninth-highest in seeing pitches in the strike zone, and he was the only hitter in baseball at that threshold last year to see more than half of them sail by.

San Diego’s starting outfield has been set, and their reserves are filled and at the same time suspect: Sung-mun Song has never played this position professionally, we all know what Nick Castellanos it seems out there, and we don’t know what Bryce Johnson looks like it because no one remembers it Bryce Johnson ever played baseball. Verdugo will likely return to Triple-A to bide his time, perhaps forever, but while he’s there he might want to consider taking a few practice swings, especially at 0-0.