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Royals, Justin Dunn Agree To Minor League Deal

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The Royals are in agreement with righty Justin Dunn on a minor league contract, reports Jaylon Thompson of The Kansas City Star. The former first-round pick had been pitching in Triple-A with the White Sox but was released last week.

Dunn signed an offseason minor league deal with Chicago. He had a tough run in Triple-A, allowing a 7.64 ERA across 33 innings. He walked more than 15% of opponents while allowing hard contact on half the batted balls against him. He’d started his first seven appearances before moving to the bullpen. Dunn tossed a scoreless outing in his first relief appearance but gave up seven runs (five earned) over the next 2 1/3 frames and was released.

The 29-year-old last appeared in the majors with Cincinnati in 2022. He battled shoulder problems the following season and was limited to three minor league appearances. That culminated in surgery that cost him the entire ’24 campaign. Dunn has averaged 92.4 MPH in this year’s Triple-A work, which is in line with his velocity from his most recent MLB action. He has 32 big league starts to his name between the Mariners and Reds, posting a 4.44 ERA in 133 2/3 innings.

Brandon Woodruff Pulled Off Rehab Stint With Elbow Contusion

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Brandon Woodruff’s attempt to return to the MLB rotation has hit another snag. The Brewers announced Thursday afternoon that the veteran starter suffered a right elbow contusion during yesterday’s rehab start at Triple-A Nashville. Adam McCalvy of MLB.com reports that the team expects the injury to sideline Woodruff for a few weeks. He has been pulled off his rehab assignment.

Last night’s start was supposed to be Woodruff’s final minor league tune-up. He was on track to be reinstated from the injured list next week. He was drilled on his throwing elbow by a comebacker that left the hitter’s bat at 108 MPH. X-rays didn’t reveal any fractures, but it’s a painful and frustrating setback when he was so close to getting back to American Family Field.

Woodruff has been out since the end of the 2023 campaign recovering from shoulder surgery. He missed the entire ’24 season and took things slowly in Spring Training this year. Milwaukee sent him on an initial rehab stint in the middle of April. He was pulled back a few weeks later due to minor ankle tendinitis. He began a new assignment 10 days later and was in his third start of the second stint yesterday. There’s at least nothing structurally at issue. Still, it’s going to keep him out for another few weeks and might necessitate another rehab start or two.

MLBTR’s Steve Adams wrote about the Milwaukee rotation last week, observing that it’s a stronger group than some might assume based on its early-season patchwork nature. That was based partially on Woodruff’s expected imminent return. They recently welcomed Jose Quintana back from injury. That rounds out a starting five that also includes Freddy Peralta, Quinn Priester, Aaron Civale and Chad Patrick. The 26-year-old Patrick has had an impressive rookie season but was a candidate to be optioned to Triple-A once Woodruff returned. (He and Priester are the only two of the five who can be sent down.) Barring injury, they’ll presumably stick with that rotation for the next couple weeks.

Astros Sign Omar Narvaez To Minor League Contract

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The Astros signed veteran catcher Omar Narváez to a minor league deal and assigned him to Triple-A Sugar Land, the team announced (relayed by Ari Alexander of KPRC 2). The ISE client was granted his release by the White Sox last month.

While the White Sox are in a full rebuild, they had a crowded depth chart behind the plate. Edgar Quero made his MLB debut in April. Fellow top prospect Kyle Teel will do the same tomorrow. Former Astro Korey Lee remains on the Sox’s roster as a defensive specialist. Matt Thaiss, who had operated as the backup catcher early in the season, was traded to Tampa Bay. Teel and Quero are the potential long-term answers for the White Sox, so Narváez was never going to get more than a stopgap run.

The 33-year-old did spend a week on the MLB roster in mid-April. Lee had recently sprained his ankle and the Sox had yet to promote Quero. Narváez went 2-7 with a couple walks in four games before being cut loose. He returned to the organization on a new minor league deal and spent a month in Triple-A. He hit .218/.317/.345 over 15 games.

Narváez has some familiarity with the Astros organization. He signed a minor league deal with Houston last June — a move that came a few weeks after he’d been released by the Mets. He only hit .196 over 42 games in Sugar Land and never received a big league call. Narváez hasn’t hit much at either the MLB or Triple-A levels over the past few seasons, but the Astros evidently value him as a defender and clubhouse presence.

Houston is carrying each of Yainer Diaz, Victor Caratini and Cesar Salazar on the active roster. Narváez is unlikely to get a look unless one or two players from that trio suffers an injury. They didn’t have much in the way of non-roster catching depth in the upper minors, though. Joe Hudson, the only other backstop in the organization with MLB experience, is a 34-year-old who has appeared in 19 big league games and is hitting .129 in Triple-A.

Cooper Hummel Elects Free Agency

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The Orioles yet again announced that outfielder/first baseman Cooper Hummel elected free agency after going unclaimed on outright waivers. He was designated for assignment on Monday when Colton Cowser returned from the injured list.

Hummel had two stints in Baltimore that lasted a combined four days. He signed an MLB deal with the O’s after opting out of a non-roster contract with the Yankees. They designated him for assignment a day later when they needed a third catcher. He cleared waivers and re-signed on a fresh major league deal. Hummel spent three more days on the active roster. He struck out in his only at-bat and played two innings in right field.

It has presumably been a frustrating sequence, but Hummel picked up a little over a week of big league pay between his stint on the active roster and in DFA limbo. He’ll now return to the market and should at least find another minor league deal if no team is willing to plug him directly onto the MLB roster.

The switch-hitting Hummel appeared in 66 MLB contests for the Diamondbacks during his 2022 rookie season. He’s only made 17 big league appearances in the two-plus years since then. A career .159/.254/.274 hitter, he’s shown more offensive ability in the minors. Hummel has a .284/.419/.475 slash line over parts of five Triple-A seasons. He reached base at a .415 clip in 10 games with the Yankees’ affiliate before opting out.

Rangers Option Kumar Rocker

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The Rangers optioned rookie starter Kumar Rocker to Triple-A Round Rock before tonight’s game against Tampa Bay. That creates an active roster spot for reliever Chris Martin, who was reinstated from the 15-day injured list. Evan Grant of The Dallas Morning News reported the moves before the club announcement.

Rocker just returned from a month-long IL stint. He’d been bothered by a shoulder impingement that knocked him out after five appearances. The former third overall pick had a tough April, allowing more than eight earned runs per nine with a diminished 17% strikeout rate. He was hit hard again last night, giving up five runs on six hits and a pair of walks over 3 1/3 innings in a 5-4 loss to Tampa Bay.

The 6’5″ righty also had an ugly mental mistake in yesterday’s game. Jake Mangum was hitting with runners on second and third and two outs in the third inning. He hit a ground-ball to first baseman Jake Burger. Rocker was late off the mound to cover the bag, allowing Mangum to beat it for an RBI infield single. Making matters worse, Rocker continued jogging up the first base line after Burger had flipped him the ball, which allowed the runner from second to score as well.

Manager Bruce Bochy was blunt about the play postgame. “The biggest (mistake) is the fundamental of covering first base. The fundamentals got us tonight. That’s a basic play. It could have saved us two runs,” the veteran skipper told the Texas beat. “He just forgot the situation and the other man on third and it compounded the damage. And that’s the difference in the ball game.”

GM Chris Young told Grant that the demotion was not a punitive decision, instead suggesting that Rocker needs further development time in the minors. It’s difficult to argue given his results this season. The 25-year-old has very little minor league experience. He underwent Tommy John surgery early in 2023, his first full professional season. That sidelined him until late last year, when he dominated minor league hitters to earn his MLB debut. He made only 10 minor league appearances, though, tossing 36 2/3 frames overall. He’s made just three career Triple-A starts — one of which was a rehab outing after this year’s shoulder injury.

This temporarily drops Texas to a four-man rotation of Jacob deGrom, Tyler Mahle, Patrick Corbin and Jack Leiter. They’re without Nathan Eovaldi until at least next Friday as he battles a triceps issue. They’re off on Monday, so they could get by with a four-man rotation if Eovaldi returns after a minimal stint. They could otherwise use a bullpen game or potentially reselect Dane Dunning onto the 40-man roster if they need to buy some time.

Pablo Lopez To Miss Multiple Months With Teres Major Strain

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June 5: The Twins formally placed Lopez on the injured list and recalled Festa today, per a club announcement.

June 4: The Twins announced that Pablo López suffered a Grade 2 strain of the teres major in his throwing shoulder. He’s expected to miss eight to 12 weeks. He’ll be shut down from throwing entirely for at least a month before he goes for reevaluation.

López left last night’s start against the A’s after five innings. He reported shoulder discomfort while throwing his warm-up pitches in advance of the sixth. The Twins immediately acknowledged that an injured list stint was inevitable. They were awaiting the results of today’s imaging before making that move. It’s unfortunately significant enough that it’ll cost him the majority of the remaining schedule.

This is the same injury and degree of strain which rotation mate Joe Ryan sustained last August. Ryan went down early in the month and missed the remainder of the season. It didn’t carry into the offseason, and he has returned as strong as ever this year. That’s a source of long-term optimism for López, but it doesn’t change the significant hit to the rotation over the next few months.

It’s the righty’s second, and far more notable, IL stint this year. López had a minimal absence in April due to a hamstring strain. The injuries have interrupted a characteristically strong performance. He sports a 2.82 earned run average across 60 2/3 frames. It would have been his first career sub-3.00 showing if he maintained it all year. He has fanned nearly a quarter of opponents while allowing two or fewer runs in nine of his 11 appearances.

Minnesota has one of the top rotations in the league. They’re fifth in MLB with a 3.43 ERA while ranking eighth with a 23.2% strikeout rate. López, Ryan, Bailey Ober and Chris Paddack have all performed well. The final spot has been the only weak point. Simeon Woods Richardson was optioned out after allowing more than five earned runs per nine. Zebby Matthews replaced him in the rotation last month. He made his fourth start of the season tonight and carries a 5.21 ERA over 19 innings. He’s missing plenty of bats, though, so he’s a more exciting fifth starter than Woods Richardson has been.

David Festa will get the first crack at plugging López’s rotation spot. He was scratched from a start at Triple-A St. Paul this evening, as first noted by Declan Goff of SKOR North. Festa traveled to Sacramento to meet the big league team. Dan Hayes of The Athletic writes that he will likely go in tomorrow’s series finale to give the rest of the starters an extra day of rest.

The 25-year-old Festa ranked as one of the sport’s better pitching prospects when he was promoted last summer. He allowed a 4.90 ERA over his first 14 MLB appearances. He made a trio of starts early in the season while López was sidelined by the hamstring. Festa managed an impressive 15:5 strikeout-to-walk ratio while allowing only three runs through 13 innings. He has pitched well through six Triple-A starts, turning in a 2.83 mark with a near-31% strikeout rate. Hayes notes that he was sidelined for much of May by biceps inflammation, but he has looked sharp in two appearances since returning. He fired five scoreless frames with five strikeouts in his most recent start.

Festa is a high-upside injury replacement. Woods Richardson remains on optional assignment as a depth arm. The rotation depth is a silver lining, but it’s fair to wonder how this impacts the team’s deadline approach. López won’t be back at least into August and could be shelved into September. The Twins are in the thick of a congested AL Wild Card race and six games behind the Tigers in the division.

MLB To Propose Automatic Ball-Strike Challenge System For 2026

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The challenge system for calling balls and strikes seems to be less than a year away. MLB commissioner Rob Manfred tells Evan Drellich of The Athletic that the league will propose that change, to go into effect in the 2026 regular season, to the Competition Committee. While the term “propose” may sound uncertain, MLB essentially has the ability to pass any on-field rule changes it wants.

MLB and the Players Association established the Competition Committee within the 2022 collective bargaining agreement. It’s an 11-person panel that consists of six league personnel, four player representatives, and one umpire. That committee can pass rule changes by majority vote.

The league reps have a majority of their own, so they’re able to pass any league initiatives over the objections of the players as long as there’s no dissension within their ranks. That happened with the 2023 changes that included the introduction of the pitch clock and limits on defensive shifts, which the Committee passed over unanimous “no” votes from the four players.

The MLBPA knew at the time of the 2022 CBA that the setup was essentially handing over complete control of on-field rules to the league. MLB had a formal unilateral right to implement rule changes under previous CBAs, but the union had the ability to block any change for one year before the league could override it. The Competition Committee has the authority to implement a rule change after 45 days, so any offseason measures go into effect the following season.

The players on the Committee may well be in support of the automatic zone regardless. (It’ll perhaps be more interesting, if ultimately irrelevant, to see how the lone umpire representative votes.) MLB initially had floated the concept of using a completely electronic strike zone, but it backed off that after receiving player feedback that it’d have too adverse an impact on catchers who make a living off their pitch framing acumen. They’ve tested the challenge system for years in the minors and introduced it to MLB Spring Training this year.

Human umpires will continue to make the vast majority of the ball-strike calls. Each team receives two challenges that would turn to the electronic zone to potentially overrule a call they feel is incorrect. Challenges must be called for in real time by either the hitter, catcher or pitcher. An overturned call does not result in a forfeited challenge. The limit on the number of incorrect challenges encourages players to challenge only if the call is either so egregious that they’re confident they’ll get it overturned or comes on pitches that might be particularly decisive to the outcome of the game.

Additionally, Manfred was noncommittal on when the league had interest in moving forward with a potential change to allow hitters to use bat tracking metrics to challenge check swing calls. The league began testing that with minor league players in the Arizona Fall League last season. It has not been used in any MLB exhibition games. MLB is unlikely to propose it without testing it in big league Spring Training, as they did with the ABS challenge. Manfred suggested that testing might not happen next year because of the more pressing strike zone change.

“We haven’t made a decision about the check-swing thing. … I think we got to get over the hump in terms of either doing ABS or not doing it before you’d get into the complication of a separate kind of challenge involved in an at-bat, right,” he told Drellich. “You think about them, they’re two different systems operating at the same time. We really got to think that one through.”

Yasmani Grandal Steps Away From Red Sox

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Yasmani Grandal informed the Red Sox’s Triple-A team that he is stepping away from his minor league deal. Grandal did not officially announce his retirement, but it appears he’s leaning that way.

“At the moment, it looks like he’s probably going to walk away and potentially hang them up,” Triple-A manager Chad Tracy told MassLive’s Katie Morrison-O’Day on Tuesday. “We talked (Monday), and I knew he was going to pack up and go…his response was ‘it’s time to be dad.’” The Sox technically placed him on the restricted list, according to the MLB.com transaction log. Francys Romero confirms that Grandal does not intend to return to the Boston organization.

Grandal signed a minor league deal with the Sox in mid-April. He bypassed a contractual opt-out on May 1 and ultimately appeared in 23 games for Worcester. While he posted a decent .256/.372/.397 batting line, the Sox have a more locked-in catching duo than they did at the time he signed. Connor Wong had just broken his finger. Carlos Narváez was playing in front of Blake Sabol. Wong returned on May 2, while Narváez has impressed enough to take over as the primary catcher. Sabol was recently designated for assignment, so Grandal would probably have been the first one up in the event of an injury, but that was his only real path to the big leagues.

If this is the end of his playing days, he’ll walk away as one of the more productive catchers of his generation. Grandal was a two-time All-Star who twice received down-ballot MVP votes. He has spent parts of 13 seasons in the big leagues. A first-round pick by the Reds in 2010, he was dealt to San Diego as a prospect in a blockbuster deal for Mat Latos. Grandal played parts of three seasons with the Padres before he was packaged in another significant trade, moving to the Dodgers alongside then-prospect Zach Eflin for Matt Kemp.

Grandal arguably did his best work in a Dodger uniform. He hit .238/.337/.453 while grading as an elite pitch framer over four seasons. He played one All-Star season with the Brewers before joining the White Sox on a four-year, $73MM free agent deal. The contract didn’t end well, but he posted a career-best .420 on-base percentage over 93 games in 2021. His most recent (and potentially final) MLB work came with the Pirates last season, when he hit .228/.304/.400 across 72 contests as the veteran in a catching group that also included Joey Bart and Henry Davis.

Mariners, Daniel Bard Agree To Minor League Contract

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The Mariners are in agreement with veteran reliever Daniel Bard, reports Rob Bradford of WEEI. The ISE Baseball client will head to the team’s Arizona complex for some work before reporting to Triple-A Tacoma. Bradford adds that the deal contains multiple opt-out dates if Bard isn’t called up to the big league roster.

Bard is a few weeks shy of his 40th birthday. He missed all of last season recovering from surgeries to address a meniscus tear in his left knee and, more concerningly, a flexor tendon tear in his forearm. It seemed the latter injury might end Bard’s career, but he embarked on a comeback effort and threw in front of roughly ten teams last month. The Mariners evidently liked what they saw.

It has been a winding career path. Bard was a quality setup man in Boston for a few seasons until running into significant command woes. He bounced around the minors and even retired for a time to take a non-playing role with the Diamondbacks. Bard announced he was making a comeback in 2020. It improbably kickstarted a second act with the Rockies, with whom he eventually emerged as closer. He combined for 54 saves between 2021-22, working to a 1.79 ERA in the latter season.

Colorado signed Bard to a two-year, $19MM extension shortly before the 2022 trade deadline. That didn’t pan out, as his control issues resurfaced the following year. He managed a 4.56 ERA across 49 1/3 innings while walking more than 21% of opposing hitters. The second season of the deal was wiped out by the aforementioned injuries. Bard is a much less risky flier for the Mariners, who will see how his stuff plays in Tacoma after his tune-up at the complex. His fastball still had good life before the flexor surgery, as he averaged 95 MPH on his sinker in 2023.

MLBPA, Tony Clark Hire Counsel Amid Federal Investigation

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Last week, ESPN’s Jeff Passan and Don Van Natta Jr. reported that the MLB and NFL Players Associations were the subjects of a federal investigation. According to ESPN, the FBI had contacted multiple players involved with the MLBPA regarding OneTeam Partners — a joint venture initially co-founded by the two players unions and a private equity firm that is concerned with issues outside the collective bargaining agreement (e.g. licensing deals for the use of player likenesses).

The players themselves are not the target of the investigation. ESPN wrote that an anonymous complainant filed allegations with the National Labor Relations Board late in 2024 that — among other things — accused MLBPA executive director Tony Clark of “improperly (giving) himself and other executives equity” in OneTeam. It seems that’s the cause for this investigation; the MLBPA has previously denied those allegations. According to ESPN, the NFLPA commissioned its own audit after the NLRB filing and determined that the NFLPA was in compliance with accepted practice.

There aren’t many specifics available. Evan Drellich of The Athletic wrote last night that Clark (as an individual) and the MLBPA have hired separate attorneys. That’s sensible because the allegations in the NLRB complaint, if true, could involve a conflict of interest between Clark and the union.

Clark has been the head of the Players Association since 2013. He has led two rounds of collective bargaining negotiations. He’s currently positioned to do so again in 2026. Last spring, he and deputy director Bruce Meyer weathered an internal push from a segment of the players who wanted to oust them in favor of former minor league advocate Harry Marino.

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