The Chicago Cubs and Los Angeles Dodgers kicked off the 2025 MLB season in style, as the reigning champions swept the two-game Tokyo Series.
The festivities included much-anticipated MLB debuts for Matthew Shaw and Roki Sasaki and featured a cache of Japanese stars, including Sasaki, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Shohei Ohtani, Shota Imanaga, and Seiya Suzuki.
With the rest of the league set for Opening Day on March 27, the final wave of roster transactions have started to fill the newswire. Let's recap the biggest MLB news of the last few days, beginning with a pair of free agent signings.
Braves, Rangers finally sign free agents Alex Verdugo and Patrick Corbin
Starting with Verdugo, the outfielder reportedly had "zero offers" on the table as of a week ago. It's funny how fast things can change for major league-caliber talent.
The left fielder will begin the 2025 season at Triple-A Gwinnett to ramp up after missing all of camp and spring training. He's ostensibly the main competition for Jarred Kelenic in right field, though he could also challenge Bryan De La Cruz for the fourth outfielder job until Ronald Acuña Jr. is healthy.
Between 2020-23 with the Boston Red Sox, Verdugo accrued 8.1 WAR and a .761 OPS in 493 games. He was the starting left fielder on the 2021 team that made the ALCS, slashing .310/.383/.452 in those playoffs. However, he's coming off a season in which he posted just a .647 OPS and earned a scant 0.8 Wins Above Replacement.
Alex Verdugo is signing a $1.5M deal with the Braves, per @JonHeyman pic.twitter.com/fgPCRlywYU
— B/R Walk-Off (@BRWalkoff) March 20, 2025
Meanwhile, Patrick Corbin is joining a depleted Texas Ranger staff, one that just lost Jon Gray to a broken wrist for at least a few months.
The 35-year-old southpaw was tremendous in his first season with the Nationals in 2019, authoring a 3.25 ERA and 238 strikeouts in 202.0 innings. He struggled some in the playoffs, but as the tertiary member of the rotation's Big 3 (along with Stephen Strasburg and Max Scherzer), he played a key part in the team's World Series title run
Of course, in the years since, Corbin has been an abject disaster. Since 2020, Corbin has led the league in hits allowed three times (2020, 2022, 2024), earned runs allowed three times (2021, 2022, 2024), losses three times (2021-23), and home runs allowed once (2021).
However, this isn't purely a "hope and pray" signing for Texas. As I wrote about in depth back in February, Corbin added a cutter to his arsenal in 2024, which finally re-unlocked the once-dominant version of his slider. With better pitch mixing this season, he can easily make good on the one-year, $1.1 million contract he signed.
Opt-out date looming for more than 30 MLB veterans
In the current CBA, there are three universal opt-out dates for players with six-plus years of MLB service time that signed a minor league deal over the offseason.
The first of those dates is five days prior to Opening Day, which is March 22 this year. May 1 and June 1 are the final two opt-out dates for such veterans.
You can see a full list of the 36 players eligible to opt out on March 22 here, but there are many notable players that could leave their current organizations after accepting non-roster invites to camp.
Eloy Jimenez, Jose Iglesias, Mark Cahna, and Nick Ahmed represent some of the higher-upside position players on that list, while veteran arms like Wade Miley, Andrew Chafin, Mike Clevinger, and Carlos Carrasco could all seek new homes in just a few days.