Andy McCullough

1 week ago | nytimes.com | Andy McCullough |Fabian Ardaya

LOS ANGELES — Days after Mark Walter’s Los Angeles Dodgers won the World Series last fall for the second time in five years, he met with the team’s president of baseball operations, Andrew Friedman, to discuss an offseason strategy. The team had stunned the baseball world with its spending the year before, inking Shohei Ohtani to a record-setting $700 million contract during a $1.4 billion spending spree. Friedman wanted to know what Walter prioritized as a new season dawned.

1 week ago | nytimes.com | Andy McCullough

Before he became manager of the Arizona Diamondbacks, Torey Lovullo served as the bench coach for the Boston Red Sox, aiding a group of players who won the World Series in 2013 and helping develop a new batch who would win it all again in 2018. All of those players are gone now — and the most prominent of the bunch have followed Lovullo closer to the other coast.

1 week ago | nytimes.com | Andy McCullough |Tim Britton |Dennis Lin

Red Sox get: RHP Jordan Hicks, LHP Kyle Harrison, OF James Tibbs, RHP Jose Bello Andy McCullough: Here is the good news for the Giants: They are receiving the best player in the trade. Rafael Devers, for all his flaws as his defender and for all of his apparent defensiveness about the general concept of changing positions, is a really good hitter. He entered Sunday's games ranked 13th among qualified hitters in OPS (.894), 15th in weighted on-base average (.386) and 18th in wRC+ (145).

2 weeks ago | nytimes.com | Andy McCullough

On almost any given night, from late March to early November, a baseball fan can turn on the television and find a game to watch. The players, managers and coaches of Major League Baseball can become a presence in the viewer's life, a collection of protagonists and antagonists able to be followed as spring turns to summer turns to fall. Because you can see these people all the time, you can understand their lives.

2 weeks ago | nytimes.com | Andy McCullough

Watching from afar, unable to avoid headlines about the historic futility of his former franchise, Nolan Arenado can envision a path forward for the Colorado Rockies. What he can't say for sure is whether the team will take it. "The only way you get out of this, my opinion, is you have to really start over," said Arenado, the St. Louis Cardinals third baseman who spent the first eight seasons of his MLB career in Colorado. "Trade guys that have value and deal with the restart.