TA: Nationals Add a Littell Pitching

Washington Nationals sign RHP Zack Littell to a one-year contract.How often would you imagine that a team signed its ace a week into March? OK, it probably happened back in the bad old days of the reserve clause, when holdouts were more common. And while PECOTA sees Littell as the best member of his new staff (106 projected DRA-), the general consensus is that the man set to join John Lannan, Odalis Pérez, and Josiah Gray in one particular ring of honor will be Cade Cavalli, the Nationals’ long-time top prospect. The younger pitcher certainly offers more upside, but Littell easily slots in at no. 2 ahead of Miles Mikolas, Jake Irvin, and Brad Lord, along with the modern, diminished Gray.

We don’t know the contract figures as this goes to print, and it’s surprisingly difficult to imagine them. On the one hand, innings still cost money, to the degree that back-end starters like Aaron Civale, Michael Lorenzen, Tomoyuki Sugano, Chris Paddack, and Ryan Weiss all netted deals in the $6-8 million range. On the other, look below to 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 remaining free agents, I wondered if the Padres might not be the best fit for him, given their budget, Littell’s likely price tag, and the number of starts projected to the likes of Randy Vásquez, Matt Waldron, and 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 simply didn’t want him.

And you can see it, if you’re being honest. It’s not like Littell does anything that drives much demand. His 92-mph fastball is pedestrian and fairly dead-zonish, and he gives up a ton of contact, much of it fairly hard, much of it in the air. His splitter doesn’t really miss bats—it ranked 61st out of 75th (min. 100 thrown) in whiff rate—and his sinker doesn’t really sink, earning only a 40% ground-ball rate on balls in play. His slider doesn’t slide, either, but you’d expect that by 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 weird trick here: Littell can’t miss bats, and that’s actually a feature, not a bug. It’s rare you see a guy fill the zone as much as he does (56.1%, seventh out of 52 qualified starters) while also earning so much chase (30.2%, ranking 18th). The guys in this territory are generally the ones whose pitches are so filthy it hardly matters where it’s going—this was once, sadly, known as the deGrom Paradox—but for Littell, it’s more calculated. Hitters managed just .136/.178/.229 when they put the ball in play on a pitch outside the zone, good for a 90th-percentile wOBA against among starters throwing 1,000 pitches. That’s far, far better than earning a stupid, sexy strike with some rubber-band changeup or frisbee slider, particularly early in the count, allowing him to keep pitch counts down and innings up.

Is Littell actually good? No, not really, though his rarely used sweeper, which he whipped out just five percent of the time in 2024 and 2025, doubled in whiff rate as he got it closer to the edge of the plate. There’s something here worth messing with, and it’s a shame that the messing will take place in Washington, and not in 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 lousy outfield, so they’re forced to sign stopgap outfielders.

The stopgap outfielders are bad, so the Royals have a lousy outfield.

The Royals have a lousy outfield, so they’re forced to sign stopgap outfielders.

In a world that often feels like it’s in decline, there’s a comfort in the cyclical, even when it’s a bad cycle.

“Does he have anything left?” is not the fun kind of analysis that drives kids to step into the lucrative and stable business of baseball analysis. Nobody is creating a stuff model for falling off the edge of the aging curve. But we could desperately use one: A crystal ball that could tell you when Hunter Renfroe, Michael Conforto, Leody Taveras, or Mark Canha just don’t have 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 go.

So is Marte washed? He hasn’t been an average starter for three seasons now, as injuries mounted in the back half of his contract with the Mets. But he also never really cratered, posting DRC+ figures in the low 90s. His defense has settled into “stand in a corner” level, which, to be fair, fans in Kansas City are probably fairly used to these days, and it helps a little that they’ve moved the walls in at Kaufmann. But he’s probably a better hitter, if not quite as good a fielder, as fellow stopgap Lane Thomas, and the Royals need someone in case Isaac Collins turns out to be a one-hit wonder or if Jac Caglianone can’t manage to at least be a one-hit wonder.

It’s a perfectly acceptable gamble, albeit damning that this is the eighth time the Royals seem to have needed to make it. Marte will be fine 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 Luke Raley.

Texas Rangers sign DH Andrew McCutchen to a minor-league contract.A disappointing signing, perhaps, but not a bad signing. McCutchen, of course, for having to wait until March for a job, wearing that garish blue and red like a weary manager of a fast-food restaurant, a symbol for the horrors of middle age. The Rangers, for waiting so long to find a platoon mate for Joc Pederson, and for not installing the obvious choice, Jake Burger, by signing a real first baseman.

But for as limited as what the 39-year-old McCutchen’s offerings are at this point, it does fit. The Rangers can’t pretend their 26-man roster was too packed to include a short-side platoon DH and pinch-hitter, and the former MVP did 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 consume all of 250 plate appearances—though his bat speed, declining by a tick and a half last year, would be that shade of orange that your spouse swears is actually red. Still, it’s a minor-league contract, so no complaining allowed. It’s just another sign of the Rangers slapping 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-a-bridesmaid 29-year-old has been recalled, and demoted, eight times in the past three seasons, serving as emergency catcher. Salazar cannot hit. At all. He makes Martín Maldonado look like Candy Maldonado (good hitter; look it up) by comparison, and also happens to be Albert Pujols-level slow. At least Salazar seems to understand this, and swings as little as he possibly can; it’s unlikely that’ll work 200 times, however.

Vázquez brings the Astros a new dimension by… actually, everything about Salazar is equally true about the veteran at this point, except that he’s also aging enough that the framing is starting to go. That’s not necessarily a dealbreaker, given the rules changes and that the Astros have been employing Yainer Diaz and Maldonado for years. But it does make you wonder why they left this situation untouched until the last possible second.

San Diego Padres sign OF Alex Verdugo to a minor-league contract.Over the course of the 2026 season, 492 batters saw at least 100 plate appearances, which meant that 492 batters saw at least 100 0-0 counts. Hitters as a whole have tended to remain reticent on the first pitch, perhaps preferring to train their eye a bit before swinging; the league swung just 32.1% of the time, as opposed to 47.6% in total. This, despite the natural advantage hitters have in such counts; their collective wOBA is .384 when the count is empty, .291 when it isn’t.

In 2026, Alex Verdugo hit .421/.421/.526 when he swung at the first pitch, whether he hit it or not. The only problem: He did so just 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 did watch those first pitches sail by, he became a .219/.284/.264 hitter.

Verdugo is probably not as bad as he was last year. The dropoff in defense is worrisome, particularly for someone not yet 30; after all, defense is what kept him employed, 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 ramp up, then got hurried back to Atlanta after a spate of injuries, Verdugo managed to be both unlucky and bad. He’s always swung a slow bat, and compensated by making lots of contact. But whereas the usual hitters of that profile—your Arraezes and Jacob Wilsons—like to swing, confident that they can lace anything over the infielders, Verdugo hates it. His swing rate was the ninth-lowest among players with at least 200 PAs, and he demonstrates an excellent eye. Unfortunately, he rarely got to use it: He was also ninth-highest at seeing pitches in the strike zone, and he was the only hitter in baseball last year at that threshold to watch more than half of them sail by.

San Diego’s starting outfield is set, and their reserves are stocked and simultaneously suspicious: Sung-mun Song has never played the position professionally, we all know what Nick Castellanos looks like out there, and we don’t know what Bryce Johnson looks like because no one remembers Bryce Johnson ever playing baseball. Verdugo will probably head back to Triple-A to bide his time, perhaps forever, but while he’s down there he might want to consider taking a few practice swings, especially on 0-0 counts.