It is one of the most common questions casual fans and youth-baseball parents ask: do baseball players actually wear protective cups? With baseballs flying around at 100 miles per hour and foul tips deflecting in every direction, it seems like an obvious yes, but the real answer is more nuanced and depends heavily on the … Read more
Every July, mid-Derby, millions of viewers ask the same question: do these count? The short answer is no — not one of the hundreds of home runs hit in a Home Run Derby counts toward anything in a player’s official statistics. Josh Hamilton’s legendary 28 in 2008 appear nowhere in his career record. Kyle Schwarber … Read more
The most-watched Home Run Derby ever is the one everyone would have guessed: 2008, when Josh Hamilton hit 28 first-round homers into the old Yankee Stadium night and 9.1 million people watched him do it. What almost nobody knows is that the list this record sits atop just became a closed book: 2025 was the … Read more
If Tuesday’s All-Star Game is tied after nine innings, there are no extra innings. Instead, baseball deploys the most entertaining tiebreaker in American sports: a home run swing-off — three hitters per side, three swings each, most homers wins the game. It sounds like something invented on a playground, it was written into the actual … Read more
MLB’s luxury tax — officially the Competitive Balance Tax (CBT) — is baseball’s substitute for a salary cap: teams can spend whatever they want, but every dollar above a set threshold gets taxed at escalating rates that reach 110% for the biggest repeat spenders. In 2026, the final year of the current labor deal, the … Read more
When the White Sox make the first pick of the MLB Draft in Philadelphia tomorrow night, they’ll be cashing a ticket they won seven months ago, on a stage in the Winter Meetings ballroom, via ping-pong balls. The MLB Draft Lottery is baseball’s newest anti-tanking weapon, just four drafts old, and it works nothing like … Read more
The Home Run Derby has killed the clock. After a decade of sprint-format chaos, hitters racing a timer, gasping between hacks, Monday night’s Derby at Citizens Bank Park debuts a completely new set of rules: every slugger gets a fixed number of swings, every swing counts whether it leaves the yard or not, and the … Read more
Shohei Ohtani led off the bottom of the first at Dodger Stadium on Tuesday night, turned on a Michael Lorenzen sinker, and became the 170th member of baseball’s 300 home run club, the first Japanese-born player ever to reach the mark, in the fifth-fewest games in MLB history. It capped a remarkable three-week rush on … Read more
Every MLB team runs on two rosters at once, and the difference between them explains half the transactions you’ll ever read. The 26-man roster is the team you watch: the players in uniform tonight, eligible to play. The 40-man roster is the organization’s protected inventory: everyone under a major-league contract, including a dozen-plus prospects and … Read more
“He was optioned to Triple-A.” “He’s out of options.” “They can’t send him down without waivers.” No piece of baseball jargon confuses more fans than the option system, and none explains more roster moves. Options are the invisible currency that determines which struggling young player gets sent to the minors overnight and which one a … Read more