Shohei Ohtani, attempting to be the first two-way superstar baseball has seen since Babe Ruth, signed with the Los Angeles Angels on Friday. The 23-year-old Japanese sensation will attempt to become a trend-setting, groundbreaking player, making starts once a week for the Angels as a pitcher while also occasionally starring in a loaded lineup alongside Mike Trout, Albert Pujols, and Justin Upton.

In a franchise-altering move, the New York Yankees acquired All-Star outfielder Giancarlo Stanton from the Miami Marlins on Saturday, as Jon Heyman of FanRag Sports first reported. To acquire Stanton, the Yankees gave up just one of their Top-30 prospects, right-handed pitcher Jorge Guzman. Minor League shortstop Jose Devers also headed to the Marlins in the deal, as did Major League second baseman Starlin Castro in order to offset some of the salary.

They together helped deliver Detroit’s last baseball championship in 1984, and now Alan Trammell and Jack Morris are headed to baseball’s Hall of Fame.

Jared Diamond wrote exclusively about the Mets (and for a time the Yankees) before focusing on all of baseball for The Wall Street Journal. He was kind enough to join the boys of Good Fundies around this time last year to talk about, among other things, what the heck actually goes on at the Winter Meetings besides the occasional trade and privately begging Bryan Shaw to not wait for a four year contract offer.

After the blockbuster trade of the offseason to ​acquire Giancarlo Stanton, the Yankees ​are in a situation where they have too many players. Now, with one of the most loaded lineups in baseball, New York isn't done dealing. The Yankees are reportedly shopping Jacoby Ellsbury and Chase Headley, and are not done by any means when it comes to offseason moves.

Press release Barons Wroclaw Baseball Club After 15 years of trying’s final Wroclaw baseball community gets a brand new, fully

Of the 1,069 propagandizing words sent Tuesday to Baseball Hall of Fame voters urging them to just say no to steroids, none encapsulated the museum’s tone-deafness quite as blatantly as calling it, "The most sacred place in Baseball."

After commissioner Rob Manfred spent the entire 2017 season denying the baseballs were “juiced,” Major League Baseball has appointed a committee to conduct a study to determine whether that’s actually the case. According to Kristie Ackert of the Daily News, Mets assistant general manager John Ricco confirmed the league’s study after it was revealed during this week’s general managers meeting in Orlando. Ricco adds that the league’s early findings have yet to suggest any notable changes to the baseball, but the investigation is still on-going.

Every year, around this time, I look forward to this post. I look forward to it because it checks the two boxes most important to me as a writer: the post is always popular, and I don’t have to try to come up with a new idea. It’s always the same idea, and it’s always the same basic research. What changes are the names and the dates and the numbers. It’s not that the research and prep are easy, but finding an idea is usually the challenge. That’s not a concern when you have a recurring series.

Roy Halladay, one of the best pitchers to wear a Toronto Blue Jays uniform, was killed Tuesday when his small plane crashed in the Gulf of Mexico. He was 40.

With the surprising firings of Dusty Baker, Joe Girardi, and others, Major League Baseball is learning that managers must do far more than just win.

In the middle innings of Game 7 of the World Series, as Los Angeles Dodgers ace Clayton Kershaw carved through the Houston Astros lineup, one question emerged from the smoke of the ash pit that was the game’s first hour: Why wasn’t he doing this in the innings that lost the Dodgers the World Series? Buoyed by a deluge of early runs off Dodgers starter Yu Darvish and their own stellar mish-mash of pitchers, the Astros won their first World Series on Wednesday night in a 5-1 victory at Dodger Stadium.

The deal was a little too good to be true, but for one lucky baseball fan, a once-in-a-lifetime trip to the World Series only cost him $9.08. Jordan Benedict was on StubHub searching for tickets to tonight's game between the Houston Astros and the Los Angeles Dodgers when he spotted the unbelievable offer.

Quietly revealing that it had happened on a similar cloudy fall night, Dodgers second baseman Chase Utley reportedly freaked out his teammates before Game 3 of the World Series Friday evening with a spooky story of a home run ball that was never found. “Listen, all, to this old tale of a home run ball that was hit out of the park and never, ever heard from again,” said Utley, holding a flashlight under his face as his teammates slowly gathered around him, huddling under blankets in the dark, silent Dodger Stadium dugout.

The moment was so perfect that, in hindsight, disaster was inevitable. While the Cleveland Indians had reached the World Series in ’95—their first appearance since 1954—they lost to the Braves in six often bitter games that left fans disgusted even decades later. (Doubt it? Google “1995 World Series strike zone.”) By 1997, star slugger/Halloween enthusiast Albert Belle was gone and the team entered the playoffs having won only 86 games, 13 less than the previous year.

With 10 teams now qualifying for MLB's playoffs, an argument can be made that sometimes, the best team doesn't win the World Series.

In effect, Verlander is a holdover from an earlier era of baseball, when starting pitchers took pride in piling up a huge amount of innings.

The Yankees were perpetually old and doomed. Let me just click on a random year in Baseball-Reference and, oh, look at that. It’s 2012, and the Yankees won 95 games. Raul Ibanez was the starter in left field. He was 40. Andy Pettitte was on the team somehow, I don’t even, and he went deep in both his postseason starts. He was 40, too. Hiroki Kuroda was their best starter. He was 400.

The Red Sox announced Wednesday that John Farrell is out as the team's manager. Farrell was 432-378 in five seasons with Boston, leading the Red Sox to a World Series title in 2013.

Nick Mirkovich and Erik Haldi spent the 2001 baseball season dealing with biting trash talk. The two computer game designers were co-owners in an industry fantasy league in which every team owner came from gaming studios that had licenses with Major League Baseball, and all the big names were represented. Microsoft and 2K and EA had rosters, and so did a relative minnow amid those giants: Humongous Entertainment, Mirkovich and Haldi’s employer, and a company that had produced educational computer games for children for five years before branching out into sports.