The Royals announced that outfielder Alex Gordon, the team’s longest-tenured player, has turned down his $14 million player option for 2016, making him a free agent.MORE: Best spots for Jason Heyward | Top six FA first basemen | Top five FA catchers Gordon batted .271/.377/.432 with 13 homers and 48 RBIs in 104 games this season. He strained his left groin while chasing down a fly ball in July. The three-time All-Star and four-time Gold Glove Award winner will be a hot commodity this winter....

Short version: The Cardinals have to give their first two picks in the 2017 draft to Houston and also pay $2 million to the Astros. And Chris Correa, the club’s former scouting director who was deemed solely responsible for the whole fiasco, has been added to MLB’s permanently ineligible list. For more details, check out this story. Here, we want to provide some context for those two picks heading to Houston, to put faces with the numbers....

Astros second baseman Jose Altuve hit a walkoff single in the bottom of the 10th and extended his streak of multi-hit games to eight as the Astros extended their winning streak to seven with a 3-2 victory over the Mariners. MORE: Fantasy rankings, sleepers for Friday | Game times down by more than 8 minutes Not only did Reds starting pitcher Mike Leake pitch eight scoreless innings against the Braves, he also helped his cause with a solo home run in the seventh inning....

Steven Matz’s first MLB start on the mound was nothing short of extraordinary because of what he did at the plate. The Mets rookie became the first pitcher in franchise history to record four RBIs in his big league debut and also went 3 for 3 at the plate. MORE: 13 guys we want to see in the HR Derby | MLB’s most powerful father-son duos Meanwhile, the Orioles dominated the Indians in a doubleheader with fantastic defense, not allowing any Philadelphia player to to cross the plate....

Current MLB lines: Thursday’s card In last night’s overnight line, the Yankees were the -125 favorite. It was a different case this morning though, with the Westgate Las Vegas SuperBook flipping favorites to Toronto as the -114 favorite. It’s hard to resist betting against Sabathia, just because we haven’t seen a solid performance out of the former Cy Young winner in quite a while. After eight shaky starts in 2014 (3-4, 5....

MLB betting lines: Live odds from Las Vegas The Nats now sport a disappointing 60-60 record, and bettors who bought into the theory that the stacked starting rotation would dominate and sided with OVER 94 wins are looking for someone to buy their bets at bargain prices. Vegas sports books are squeezing any type of future wagers they can on the Nationals, who are mathematically still alive, by offering 16-to-1 odds to win the World Series....

Tonight on ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball, Lester is a -160 favorite to beat the Reds and Anthony DeSclafani. MLB odds: Baseball lines from Las Vegas Chicago took the first and third game of this four-game series on Thursday and Saturday, and Cincinnati won on Friday. The Cubs, sitting third in the NL Central, are trying to keep their swagger, while Cincinnati, five games below .500, are trying to find theirs....

Check The Linemakers on Sporting News’ odds page for current baseball lines from Las Vegas. Toronto Blue Jays -108 (vs LAA Angels)R.A. Dickey vs Matt Shoemaker We can’t get past the Blue Jays vs the Angels. The Jays have lost two games at home by one run in this four-game series, and in both of these games they held the lead only to gift wrap the win for the Angels....

Now, let’s get to a ranking, along with supporting arguments. I want to be very clear about one thing: We’re ranking teams based on their chances of winning the World Series. The path to the title matters, very much. If we were ranking teams regardless of matchups, this would have different look. MORE: Ranking all 10 MLB playoff teams based on rootability On to the list … 1. Cleveland Strengths: This team has everything necessary to win in the postseason....

FAGAN: Blue Jays all the way? | MORE: Ranking AL postseason pitching staffs On the routes leading to the ballpark, pedestrians were handed paperboard armbands featuring Iago, the parrot from the movie Aladdin, which comes out on Blu-ray next week, information handily contained on the back of the armband, with the hashtag #WalkingTheParrot. Why would Blue Jays fans want cartoon bird armbands? To celebrate Edwin Encarnacion’s home run trots. Encarnacion, who hit 39 homers this season and has 197 dingers in his Blue Jays career — sixth on the team’s all-time list — celebrates going deep by raising his arm as if carrying a parrot around the bases....

A couple years ago, Sporting News ranked the smartest athletes across sports, and Young’s inclusion was a no-brainer. Young finished his Princeton thesis — titled “The Impact of Jackie Robinson and the Integration of Baseball on Racial Stereotypes in America: A Quantitative Content Analysis of Stories about Race in The New York Times” — while he was playing in the minor leagues. MORE: Top ALDS photos | David Price’s playoff struggles continue with Jays...

Now they’ll get to face another club they outscored in the regular season, the Indians, with a chance to return to the World Series for the first time since 1993, a year the Jays won it all. MORE: MLB playoff history: 14 postseason oddities Although the Tribe was the higher seed, a three-game sweep of the Red Sox in the ALDS was considered an upset by many. Cleveland pitchers shut down one of the most potent lineups in baseball and sent David Ortiz packing without a playoff victory in his final MLB season....

To keep beating a dead bantha, this season has been as convoluted and complex as the “Star Wars” expanded universe. Every team in the NL East is .500 or worse in their past 10 games. The injured Yankees and their band of scruffy-looking nerfherders are 9-1 in their past 10. Joey Gallo is becoming self-aware. So buckle up: It’s time to accelerate to attack speed. Many Bothans died to bring you this information....

So before you continue reading these far-too-early Power Rankings and start spewing mean-spirited tweets at me and tell me to find a new job, also remember: Baseball is a fickle sport where the only thing that’s for sure is that nothing is for sure. (Thanks, Sting.) MORE: Watch ‘ChangeUp,’ a new MLB live whip-around show on DAZN Here’s a take: Baseball in 2019 won’t be much of a surprise. There will be expectedly good teams, there will be horrifyingly bad teams and there won’t be much of a middle-class....

If you’ve never heard of the Rule 5 Draft, don’t worry about it — that’s what we’re here for. It’s an opportunity for teams to acquire players who have been relatively given up on by one organization in the hopes of unearthing an unexpected star or big-league contributor. In recent years, Johna Santana, Shane Victorino, Dan Uggla and Josh Hamilton all turned out to be standout Rule 5 Draft picks....

THE RUMOR: Jon Lester is expected to make his free-agent decision no later than Tuesday. REPORTED BY: Buster Olney of ESPN.com. THE DETAILS: Lester, 30, is one of the marquee names on the market this offseason and has garnered interest from the world champion Giants, Dodgers, Cubs and his former team — the Red Sox. John Henry, Red Sox principal owner, reportedly flew to Atlanta Friday to meet face-to-face with the pitcher he traded away last season....

Spring training workouts in Arizona and Florida are scheduled to start February 16. But that timeline is in major jeopardy while the lockout drags on. Also in trouble is the start of the season. The league and players would need to reach an agreement by early March at the latest to ensure opening day, scheduled for March 31, starts on time. Teams need at least three weeks of spring training, from initial workouts to exhibition games, to be ready for the season....