The Athletic | Jim Bowden ($): Bowden gives us his picks for the top 40 free agents’ landing spots, and most interestingly he projects NPB’s Teruaki Sato as likely to sign with either the Yankees or Red Sox after his posting. Sato, 27, is coming off a .991 OPS with the Hanshin Tigers, launching 39 home runs and probably being a better option at third base than Ryan McMahon. The Yankees don’t have the best track record when it comes to signing Japanese stars lately, but a successful pursuit of Sato would
be a big boost.
New York Post | Joel Sherman: We’re going to hear a lot of whinging about “competitive balance” as owners and the MLBPA battle out a contentious CBA negotiation this winter. Despite the fact that two of baseball’s smallest markets are facing each other in the World Series, we’ll still be told that baseball’s a game you pay to win, and therefore we need a salary cap. The other great counter to this argument is what’s perennially the toughest division in baseball to win, the AL East. In the last three seasons three different teams have taken the division, with the Rays atop this year, the Blue Jays winning the tiebreaker over the Yankees in 2025, and the Yankees winning outright the season before. If the meat grinder in the east can stay “balanced” without an existing cap, why can’t the rest of baseball?
New York Daily News | Gary Phillips: The Yankees are once again in the position of having a few too many first base/DH types on the roster, with Aaron Judge, Ben Rice, Luis García Jr., Cody Bellinger and Giancarlo Stanton all under contract for next year and all expected to get time at one or both of those positions. One way to unstick some of these knots is if García Jr. can play a competent second base. He was quite bad at the position in 2025, not playing an inning there this year, but he’s strong enough coming in and going to his left that perhaps pairing him with someone like George Lombard Jr. at shortstop could hide some of those other weaknesses.
