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SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The San Francisco Giants traded struggling two-time Gold Glove-winning catcher Patrick Bailey to the Cleveland Guardians on Saturday.
The Giants received minor league left-hander Matt Wilkinson and the 29th pick in the 2026 amateur draft in the trade.
Cleveland optioned Bo Naylor to Triple-A Columbus to make room for Bailey. Naylor has been the Guardians’ regular catcher since 2023.
Bailey has been regarded as one of the top defensive catchers in the game thanks in part to his elite pitch-framing skills since being called up in 2023. He leads the majors since 2023 with 69 catcher framing runs and 42 defensive runs saved over the past two-plus seasons.
But his hitting has been an issue and bottomed out this season. Bailey was batting .146 with one homer and five RBIs in 89 plate appearances. His .396 OPS ranked last among 286 players with at least 75 plate appearances this season.
Bailey had become expendable for the Giants with Daniel Susac and Jesus Rodriguez expected to handle most of the catching duties, with Eric Haase as another option. Those players have provided much more offense for the Giants, who enter the day last in the majors in scoring with 3.16 runs per game and tied with the New York Mets for the worst record in the National League.
Bailey, who turns 27 later this month, won Gold Gloves at catcher in 2024 and 2025. He is a career .224 hitter with a .611 OPS.
Naylor had a .237 batting average as a rookie in 2023 but has struggled offensively the past two-plus seasons. His .143 batting average this season is last in the majors among the 29 catchers with at least 90 plate appearances.
His .192 batting average since 2024 is next-to-last among catchers with at least 200 games played.
The Guardians entered the day with a 21-19 record and in first place in the AL Central. Bailey was expected to join the team before first pitch Saturday night against Minnesota. Austin Hedges also has seen steady playing time behind the plate.
The 23-year-old Wilkinson pitched for Canada in the World Baseball Classic earlier this year. He has made six starts this season at Double-A Akron, going 1-2 with a 1.59 ERA with 36 strikeouts in 28 1-3 innings.
Suns legend Charles Barkley didn’t mince words when explaining why he was “disappointed” in Phoenix star Devin Booker’s playoff showing.
“Devin Booker is the best player on the team, and he should never defer to anybody,” Barkley told Arizona Sports’ Bickley & Marotta on Friday. “Even when you lose, when you’re a star, you have to make sure (that you) hold up your end of the bargain, and he did not.”
Booker ran into an Oklahoma City Thunder defense in the first round that forced him into four turnovers per game (second most for a playoff series in his career) and just 15.8 shot attempts per game (the fewest of any playoff series in his career). He never took more than 17 attempts in any one game.
While those stats might be able to be brushed off by facing an all-world defense like OKC’s, the deferential shot selection is becoming a trend.
The 15.8 shots per game came on playoff series after he set another career low with 16.3 attempts per game in the 2024 series loss to the Minnesota Timberwolves. Both saw Phoenix get swept, and the Suns are on a 10-game playoff losing streak.
It showed up to a larger extent in the final game of the more recent series, as he was held to 0-for-3 shooting in the first half before a much better 8-for-13 showing in the second.
This series was Booker’s first without at least one game scoring 25 or more points, averaging 21.3 points over the sweep. His 4.8 assists per game were his lowest in any series since 4.6 in the seven-game series loss to the Dallas Mavericks in 2022.
“He’s got to be Devin Booker All-Star,” Barkley said. “Those other guys aren’t All-Stars.”
The Suns legend added that the team overachieved this season with head coach Jordan Ott being a big reason why, but he noted the team is nowhere close to OKC or the San Antonio Spurs, who appear to be on a collision course to decide the West.
The NCAA announced Thursday that it will expand its two March Madness tournaments by eight teams each next season, a long-expected move that will drop more games into the first week of the highly popular and lucrative showcase without substantially changing its overall form.
The new, 76-team brackets will jam eight extra games — for a total of 12 involving 24 teams — into the front half of the first week of the men’s and the women’s tournaments. It will turn what’s now known as the First Four into a bigger affair that will now be called the “March Madness Opening Round.”
The 12 winners will move into the main 64-team bracket that will begin, as usual, on Thursday for the men and Friday for the women.
Here is what the 76-team bracket will look like: pic.twitter.com/BmJsJZ7pOY
— Jeff Borzello (@jeffborzello) May 7, 2026
It is the first expansion of the tournaments in 15 years, when they were bumped to 68 teams each.
The NCAA said it will distribute more than $131 million in new revenue to schools that make the tournament. That money will come via expanded TV advertising opportunities for alcohol, the likes of which were previously restricted. It said the value of the rights agreement will increase $50 million each year on average over the course of the six years.
Most of the eight new slots are expected to go to teams from the power conferences that were already commanding the lion’s share of entries in the bracket. Two years ago, the Southeastern Conference placed a record 14 teams in the men’s bracket. Last season, the Big Ten had nine.
Keith Gill, the chairman of the Division I men’s basketball committee, called the expansion “a nice way to create some access but make sure we have the bracket we all love when we start Thursday at noon.”
The move is a product of the times, which includes massive expansion — the Atlantic Coast Conference, for instance, has grown from nine to 17 teams since 1996 — and the reality that mid-major schools with top-notch players will often see them plucked away by programs with bigger budgets and the ability to pay them through revenue sharing.
Cinderella? There will still be room for those stirring runs in the tournaments, though not a single mid-major advanced past the first weekend of either tournament the last two seasons.
This is hardly a concern of the decision-makers anymore, who will point to TV ratings that traditionally spell out fans’ preference for the likes of Duke and North Carolina over St. Peter’s and San Diego State, especially once the Sweet 16 starts.
What matters more to the biggest schools is that their teams have a chance to compete in what remains the best postseason in college sports and that they aren’t iced out by lower conference champions who earn automatic bids.
“You’ve got some really, really good teams who are going to end up in that 9, 10, 11 (seed) category that I think should be moved into the” 64-team bracket, SEC commissioner Greg Sankey said last year in discussing how he favored expansion.
Also, the money. The new beer and wine money will add to what the NCAA can distribute in “units” that are earned for placing teams in the bracket and then for every round those teams advance. Last year, that amounted to about $350,000 per unit for the men’s tournament. The Big Ten made nearly $70 million from both tournaments, won by conference members Michigan (men) and UCLA (women).
Leaders in the SEC, Big Ten, Big 12 and ACC have all acknowledged that smaller programs help make March Madness what it is, all the while steadily expanding their own power in NCAA decision-making. That brings with it the tacit threat of fracturing the single thing the NCAA does best — the basketball tournament.
This move might forestall that. What it isn’t expected to do is drastically change the TV deal beyond the advertising.
The current deal for the men’s tournament is worth $8.8 billion and runs through 2032. Adding a few extra games between mid-level Power Four teams on Tuesday and Wednesday won’t change that much.
One of the reasons this took as long as it did was the NCAA negotiations with CBS and TNT, which themselves have been in negotiations over their own ownership.
The more drastic option of expanding the tournament to 96 teams or beyond would involve adding an extra week to a tournament that has thrived in part because of the symmetry of a six-round bracket that gets whittled down over three weeks.
That basic shell began in 1985, with only slight tweaks, the latest of which came in 2011 when it was upped to 68.
