+ The International signing season is open for 2026. All signed players now have a player page on the site. Players will continue to be added as they sign. There's still more tasks. Signing bonuses. Draft database update. Transactions log. TBC never sleeps.

+ Prospect season is also opening. Lots of good ones this year. There's Konnor Griffin (PIT), Kevin McGonigle (DET), JJ Wetherholt (STL), Trey Yesavage (TOR), Jesus Made (MIL) and Clark and Jenkins and Jensen and Chandler and De Vries! Just a reminder: TBC captures prospect rankings for pre-season only. Baseball America and MLB Pipeline make frequent updates during the season and as always, I recommend that you go to them (duh) for up-to-date prospect rankings.

> I have a new sanctuary. A place away from work. Where I can only think about work. If I want. Its not Starbucks. Its not a baseball card store. Its an indoor track.

3 times a week I go to this multi-sports center where I signed up for access to their indoor track. Its a big space with tennis courts, pickleball courts, a rock-climbing wall, a badminton court and even a trapeze that comes down once a week. I come for the track.

This place has a fitness gym, a crossfit gym, a gymnastics center, a regular gym, a cycling room and so much more. I only come for the track.

But there is a buzz in this place. A positive buzz. A healthy buzz. The moment you walk in. You can feel it. People look healthy or are on their way to becoming healthy. The place reeks of positive trajectory. There are men and women. Young people and old people. Fit people and on-their-way-to-being-fit people. They all come for different reasons. I come for the...

... and I bring my AirPods. I bring my iPhone holder and strap it to my arm. I play techno music. I enter the omnisports room and sit cross-legged on a mat. I set the playlist. I slow down. The pace changes from hustle to intention. I enter the container of self-care. I step in. Close the door. I set my intention for the run. Today its how I handle the multitude of tasks I want to accomplish in a day.

Eventually, when I'm ready, I start the first song and I walk to the track. I prefer a busy track. I prefer company. I don't want to be alone. I can be alone anytime. I come at 6pm because there are people. Running. Walking. Sprinting. Training. Doing the same thing as me. Only faster. Or slower. But usually faster.

And when I run on this track. I think. I try not to think actually but I want things to come up. I want the truth to come up. The intention I set about work... some words came up. Simplify. Prioritize. Organize. And so I took action on those words. The first 5 minutes is me fighting my brain. Minutes 6-15 are me learning to let me brain go and to let the words come up. After 15 minutes, when the intention has some resolution, I can either continue to fight the brain or enter a state of meditative flow. Where I am not just running. I AM running. I am above myself. Looking down. I crave that state but it doesn't always arrive. On this day, it arrived.

Based on collected contract data by The Baseball Cube, here are the contracts with a total value of great than $100 million.

The list will be updated dynamically. It is sorted by most recent contracts first.

+ Not a ton of new data or features on the site in the last few days. Projects are always moving forward though. I'm currently working on adding 2026 International Signings and College Rosters. A secondary project is the addition of pre-2015 Service Time data.

+ eBay ads have been added to the PREMIUM section on player pages. They can be hidden.

+ Page Sponsorships have been removed.

> I worked in a car this past weekend. We drove to Massachusetts. I worked for 3 hours on the trip as we deposited our softball player into her Senior year. We made it to campus in good time. 1 stop at a Tim Horton's and then another at a random gas station on a highway with no Targets. We drove through side streets and city roads and through the smallest of small towns. You never what kind of mood Google Maps will be in.

By 3:30, we had done the hugs and have a good semester and we'll see you soon and the season will start before you know it, and we were headed to our return drive. We had done the lunch at Dave's Hot Chicken and we hit a TJ Maxx and a Target for food for the Senior and cards for the other Senior. Effectively, this was our 8th drop-off. Been there done that. Good bye, see you when the NCAA starts its engine.

Buying Baseball Cards in the US is better than buying cards in Canada. Even with a horrifying exchange rate. A blaster box of 2025 Topps can cost $50 retail up here. Plus taxes. Buying the same blaster in New Hampshire is $24.99. No tax. Multipled by 1.4 is $35. Therefore, I hunt cards in the US.

So we stopped in New Hampshire. At a mall. And we got the trifecta of retail cards shopping. A mall with a Target, a Newberry Comics right next to the Target and then within view, a GameStop. The GameStop had some Panini but I passed because I was looking for Archives and Update. The Newberry had their newer blasters in a glass case but nothing of interest. But then I found a 2020 Topps Series 2 blaster box with a sticker for $14.99. The sticker said "Tennis". Obviously wrong sticker. In Quebec, stores are required to abide by wrong sticker prices so I took a chance. The 20-something at the cash scanned it and said "$9.99" and my knees almost buckled. Mrs Cube hip-checked me softly. But then the clerk had a quizzical look and said "hmmm". I held my breath. She looked closer at the sticker and ripped it off and said, this is the wrong price. "Oh?" I said. "Yes, this should be $33.99". I politely told her no deal and left the store disappointed and feeling a little bit ashamed that I tried to take advantage of the situation.

I bought a box of Archives and a fat pack of Update at the Target, ripped them 10 minutes into the car ride and was predictably disappointed with the outcome. I have been ripping Topps Update for a month and have not found a single Nick Kurtz rookie. Yeah, I got the rookie debut. Yeah, I got a couple of inserts (already sold) but I just wanted a base rookie. Thanks though for the 8 Thomas Harrington rookies.

A listing of the schools with the most NCAA Division I Tournament appearances in the last 25 tournaments. The number of appearances represents participation in the full tournament (usually 64 teams) and not only the College World Series.

There was no tournament in 2020 due to the Coronavirus pandemic.

More College Baseball coverage on The Baseball Cube.

+ New Baseball Card set added to the Baseball Cards section:

2025 Topps Update. 350 cards with many rookies, rookie debuts, traded players and others who were not listed in the base 2025 Topps set. Nick Kurtz and Drake Baldwin are among the rookies. Many later-season debuts are not included and will be in the 2026 set, coming in a few months. (Anthony, Caglianone, Misiorowski, Tong, McLean etc)

+ You'll start to notice player names at the top of the page (and in browser title), gradually change to include accents and suffixes. They won't be updated (yet) in the data grids and I'm not sure if I ever will. But every night, a few hundred players will be updated with their name listed as it should be listed.

+ The University of Massachusetts baseball team is going with 2 Head Coaches for the 2026 season. Max Weir and Brandon Shileikis will guide the Minutemen. Will there be 2 men standing at third base? Will 2 men run out to argue with the Umpires? Will they change pitchers, 1 indicating lefty and the other righty? I have questions...

But seriously, I've seen this a couple of times in JUCO but have no idea how it works functionally. I know Michael Scott and Jim Halpert tried it on The Office and that didn't go so well. I am sure there is a good reason for this. According to the Mid-American Conference web site (yes, UMass is now in the MAC), they are "acting" co-head coaches. Both have been UMass assistants at some point.

> You know I live in Canada. I do not like winter. I like heat. Maybe not Florida heat in July. But I like hot days. I like the sun.

Where I live. In Canada. It snows. This year, it snows lots. It started in mid-November. Not abnormal. But usually it disappears. It melts. Like a magic trick, it goes bye-bye. But it stayed. Like a talkative guest who won't leave your house. It won't stop. The snow keeps coming. Every 2nd day. Why do I tell you this? Because I decided, in all of my infinite wisdom, because I work from home, because I don't like having to clean/move my cars on demand, (I decided) to shovel my own driveway and not hire a company with tractors.

I just got back inside. 2nd time today. Heavy snow at the bottom of the driveway because the city piles the street snow in front of driveways. Haha it says as it passes by. A guffaw maybe. I went out at 11:30am and ran out of steam. You see...let me tell you something you may not know. Its one thing to shovel snow and gently throw it onto the side of your driveway. If you live in Maryland, maybe you have done that before. And its another thing to have heavy wet snow, and maybe if you live in Dover, Delaware, maybe you've done that too and just gently tossed that onto the side of your driveway, with a bit more gusto. BUT, its ANOTHER thing to have to heave that snow 6 feet in the air over the existing snowbanks from the other 42 times that you had to shovel snow earlier this winter (and fall!!!).

Its my own fault. I did this to myself. I have no one to blame. This is ALL my doing. And I'll likely do it again next year because its fun, its great exercise and it feels GREAT when its done!

+ Added 2026 arbitration contracts signed thus far. Thanks to MLB Trade Rumors for their great coverage! Not all players have signed. Many will be headed towards the icky arbitration process if they can't settle in the next little while.

+ The International Free Agent signing period is starting in a couple of days. If you're a super-fan, maybe you know some of the names. I'm a super-fan but I don't know any of the names. So maybe I'm not a super-fan. Signings and bonuses will be added over the next few weeks. I call these UDFA's. Undrafted Free Agents.

+ Thanks to "TB" for his TBC PREMIUM renewal and to "TL" for becoming a new PREMIUM subscriber! Always appreciated! I'll say it again: If you visit the site daily,

> I failed out of college. Twice. I didn't know I had ADHD. I had always breezed through school. I got passing grades in boring subjects and killed it the one's I liked. Math. Gym. Music. English. I studied Accounting in University. I don't know why. I hated it. I skipped classes. There was a management accounting class that I never attended beyond the first day. I didn't drop it. I even went to the exam. I carry guilt for that. I failed out after that. I failed out twice. Accounting was sludge.

After the 2nd time, I went back. At 26. I begged them. Same school. Same degree. Different major. I switched to Management Information Systems (MIS). Hybrid of computer science/business. I learned about web programming. Databases. SQL. Applications. Working with users. Testing. Fixing bugs. I went to school at night. After my day job where i was a handyman computer guy at a company with no computer guys. MIS was pavement.

I graduated in 3 years. I got all my credits. I stood on the stage in the Bell Centre (Then called the Molson Centre)...yes, we spell centre r-e in Canada ... I was 28 years old. I was about to get married. And I got my degree. It was hard. It was long. It took a decade.

Its just a piece of paper but it represents something. School is hard. Its hard on brains. Its even harder on ADHD brains. I got through it. The deep sludge. Like I was being peppered by machine gun fire by the enemy. Like I was going to get wounded at any moment. And I did get wounded. Twice. But I took 1 step at a time. I kept going. And little did I know, and I would learn this later in life, that there wasn't an enemy manning the machine gun. It was me.

A summary of the last 5 NCAA D1 seasons by Conference.

The list considers only non-conference games and ranks by overall winning percentage for these games in an attempt to rank conference strength. Although the list does not consider quality of opposition/strength of schedule, over the 5 years and with a sizeable number of schools per conference, the winning percentage should be statistically significant.

The list will update at the conclusion of each D1 college baseball season.