Pitching Grips

Dennis Lee-Imagn Images They might still play in a minor league ballpark, but things were looking up for the Sacramento-ish Athletics coming into the 2026 season. The franchise hadn’t had a winning record (and typically hasn’t even been close) since 2021, with their last stretch of playoff relevance ending after the COVID-shortened 2020 season. The 2025 A’s only went 76-86, but an offensive core of Nick Kurtz , Shea Langeliers , Brent Rooker , Tyler Soderstrom , and Jacob Wilson seemed to give the club a good chance to score runs this year. The A’s entered the season with 21.4% playoff odds , their best in some time. The team’s most plausible breakout scenario involved leaning on a good offense while cobbling together just enough pitching to keep from being on the short end of a bunch of slugfests. The A’s were even confident enough to be on the other side of a salary dump for once, picking up Jeff McNeil over the winter. Unfortunately, things hav...

Eric Longenhagen Since the draft concluded last week, the two of us have been working to add the newly-minted pro players to their team lists (you can find them here ), move this year’s graduates to their own tab on The Board (which you can find here ), and make a sweeping update to our Top 100 Prospects List. Below you’ll find the updated list, followed by notes on who moved and why via a rundown of the clusters of players that formed around similar profiles throughout the rankings. As a reminder, we rank however many players we have graded as 50 FV or better in our Top “100,” and as of this update, that’s 111 guys. Players whose grade have changed have a “↑” or “↑↑” in the trend column of the table, with the latter designation noting cases where the re-evaluation is quite dramatic; players dealing with full-season injuries are indicated with a bandaid. If you want more information about these players, please head over to The Board , where yo...