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I spend a lot of time saying the word “April.” It’s a convenient excuse to wave away any notion of changing my mind drastically on a player after two or three weeks of the season. But April isn’t actually meaningless, and as we head toward June, we’re already nearly a third of the way through the season. A lot of the stuff we’ve seen isn’t just a rough patch or a freak BABIP, but career trajectories changing, and that has consequences for the players and their teams. One of the most common questions about players I get in chats is some variation of “What does ZiPS think now?” I can’t answer them all, mainly because “doughy middle-aged nerd talks to his magical baseball box for an hour” sounds like the worst episode of Black Mirror ever. That said, because I do full in-season runs of ZiPS in the middle of every month, now seems like a good time to get some projectionist changes of heart for the overachieving and underperforming players.

So whose changing fortunes are most likely to lead to changed destinies? Well, to get an idea of which trajectories have changed the most, I took the current 2026 projected numbers for each player and compared them to the 2026 ZiPS projections from before this season began. We’ll start with the good news, because I’m a Baltimore native and an Orioles fan, so I need something sunny first. These are park-neutral projections, and I eliminated anyone who is projected as below replacement level, since we’re focusing on major league-relevant players. Today, we’ll cover the position players before moving on to the pitchers tomorrow.

Here are the players whose 2026 ZiPS projections have improved the most since the beginning of this season, sorted by the greatest gains in projected WAR:

Coming into the season, Jonathan Aranda looked merely like a decent option through his prime years, a player whose employer didn’t quite trust his glove to stick at second and third or his bat to produce enough for him to play first base. He always hit hard, however, and he’s taken that to a new level this year, with a hard-hit percentage that blew through the 50% threshold and has peeked into the high 50s. As a result, Aranda has put up a 162 wRC+ across his first 43 games and 160 plate appearances this year. No, he’s probably not going to keep his batting average above .300, but he’s elite at smashing baseballs and has just enough plate discipline to leverage that skill. He’s not scheduled to reach free agency until after the 2029 season, so he may be Tampa Bay’s longest fixture at first base since Carlos Peña.

A thumb injury ruined Jordan Lawlar’s 2024 season, but his early performance in Triple-A this year eliminated any lingering concerns that the injury would hinder his play. In fact, Lawlar was mashing PCL pitchers so hard that the Diamondbacks basically had no choice but call him up, even though they didn’t have a clear full-time starting job for him. Because of Andy Pages’ disappointing power production in the majors last year, ZiPS dropped off his bandwagon after hanging out there for several years. But now that Pages has nine homers in 44 games this season, the computer is quietly trying to sneak back on.

I was asked recently if Geraldo Perdomo’s contract was the biggest steal for a team this year. I said no, but only because the biggest steal is almost always a star who has less service time than Perdomo has now. Nobody will mistake Perdomo for prime Giancarlo Stanton, but the Arizona shortstop is hitting for more power than he ever has in the majors. Combine that sudden pop with his arguably Votto-esque pitch recognition and elite contact skills, and Perdomo now looks like an extremely valuable offensive talent. With a .309 BABIP, he’s not even getting lucky!

It appears that Wilyer Abreu is going to outproduce his breakout season from 2024. Between him and Jarren Duran, you have to give the Red Sox an unbelievably high stat for Turning Fourth Outfielder Types Into Stars in the upcoming RPG FanGraphs Advanced Dungeons & Data. OK, that does not actually exist, but if you bother David Appelman enough maybe it will! Jacob Wilson is a shockingly retro type of player, in the best possible way, and as long as he doesn’t get tempted to be more aggressive at the plate, he should be able to contact his way to stardom.

I’m fairly surprised that Iván Herrera got so much of a boost considering he missed more games with a bone bruise this season than he has played, but it’s hard to ignore the fact that he’s OPSing 1.299. Kyle Stowers has given the Marlins a pretty good thumper, and after some uncertainty back in March, ZiPS now gives him a legitimate chance to be a starting first baseman for a while.

Going down the rest of the list briefly, I’m convinced that Trent Grisham’s revival has to do with mustache power. Fernando Tatis Jr. is finally back hitting at his pre-suspension levels, and while Tyler Soderstrom has slumped a bit over the last few weeks, ZiPS is more bullish on him than it was previously. I have no idea what Spencer Torkelson is going to do from here on out in the majors, to the extent that I’m wondering if I should try leaving him out of the projections next year and hope nobody notices. Shoot, I said the quiet part out loud.

Some may be surprised to see Pete Crow-Armstrong this low. Truth is, ZiPS was already astoundingly high on him coming into the season, basically projecting him to be an All-Star in 2025. He’s been better than that, but there was simply less room for his projection to jump.

Now, let’s move on to the players whose projections have dropped the most, sorted by the greatest declines in projected WAR.

Admittedly, I am taking Marcus Semien’s decline very personally. I got a lot of pushback from ZiPS projecting him as a top-10 rest-of-career shortstop entering the 2015 season. Since analysts like being right, I’ve felt vindication that he’s been a damn good player over the last decade. Since the start of 2015, among players FanGraphs classifies as shortstops, he’s had the sixth-most WAR in baseball. But everything comes to an end, and it’s looking like that day is rapidly approaching for Semien, as middle infielders in their mid-30s who collapse don’t tend to have particularly strong second winds.

Statcast is kinder to Bryan Reynolds than reality, and while ZiPS expects his power to bounce back as a result, it doesn’t think his batting average will return to previous levels. Trout’s decline in OPS+ is actually larger than that of Semien or Reynolds, but because ZiPS doesn’t know how long Trout will be out with his knee injury, it actually is projecting him to take a handful more plate appearances next year thanks to his staying healthy throughout April. Trout has underwhelmed at various times during the injury phase of his career, but never like this; he was downright awful in April.

Tyler O’Neill and Vinny Capra both enjoyed some Opening Day heroics, but neither has done much since. It’s not good to see Yordan Alvarez on this list, but ZiPS was already starting off at a very high place for him. So despite his projected decline, he’s the only player on this list that ZiPS expects to perform at an All-Star level next season. Three Braves make this list — Bryan De La Cruz (now in Triple-A with the Yankees), Matt Olson, and Ozzie Albies — which says a lot about how Atlanta’s season has gone, though the team has bounced back well otherwise. Anthony Santander apparently has enough Orioles residue on him to struggle this year, but a .333 xSLG and a .352 zSLG (the ZiPS version) are abysmal numbers for a player whose main purpose is hitting for power.

I really wanted to figure out how to make a Nick Cimillo’s Sense of Snow joke, but believe me I tried. He’s the highest minor leaguer on this list, an unheralded 22nd-rounder who was slowly getting into prospect territory by merit in the Pirates system. But he hit a wall last season after being promoted to Double-A Altoona, and the wall’s hit back this year; he has a .539 OPS while repeating a level. That’s a pretty big deal.

I didn’t use players with sub-replacement projections on the main list, but I did feel I should give consolation prizes to the three minor leaguers who have seen their 2026 WAR projections go up by at least a full win. Unlike Cimillo, Bolte has dominated in his repeat stint at Double-A, and at 21, it’s nowhere near as concerning that he had a tough promotion last year. He’s far from a big-deal prospect in the Athletics organization, but he’s at least worth watching. It’s just too bad his last name isn’t pronounced like lightning bolt, because it limits the scope of his nicknames. Mets prospect Jacob Reimer has slashed .341/.433/.652 in the South Atlantic League, which has a league-wide .360 slugging percentage, so he’s got to be nearing a promotion. Human Walk Machine George Lombard Jr. was recently promoted to Double-A despite being young for the level. That means he has plenty of time to develop into more than just a player who gets most of his value from walks, a minor league archetype that doesn’t do well in the majors.

When we last checked in on the Twins, they had stumbled out of the gate, losing eight of their first 12 games — a start that looked particularly dismal given last September’s collapse, which cost them a playoff berth. But times have changed, with the offense heating up and the pitching staff emerging as one of the league’s stingiest. Thanks to a just-ended 13-game winning streak, the Twins now own the American League’s fourth-best record (26-21, .553), though injuries to players such as Byron Buxton and Carlos Correa threaten to stall their momentum.

On May 3, the Twins beat the Red Sox 4-3 in Boston, ending a four-game losing streak that had dropped them to 13-20 and had included two walk-off wins by the Guardians. They beat the Red Sox to close out a road trip, then went home and pulled off three-game sweeps of the Orioles and Giants, punctuated by a 10th-inning walk-off victory. Back on the road, they swept three from the hapless Orioles in Baltimore before taking the first two from the Brewers in Milwaukee, running their record to 26-20. On Sunday, they finally lost again, falling to the Brewers 5-2.

The final three wins of the Twins’ streak were all shutouts, starting with a 4-0 blanking of the Orioles by starter Chris Paddack and two relievers on Thursday, continuing with a 3-0 whitewashing of the Brewers behind Joe Ryan and three relievers on Friday, and concluding with a 7-0 drubbing of Milwaukee highlighted by the work of Pablo López and three relievers on Saturday. In all, the Twins shut out their opponents for 34 consecutive innings (the longest since the franchise moved to Minnesota in 1961), beginning with the fourth inning of Wednesday night’s game, after the Orioles had scored six runs; they extended that streak until the second inning on Sunday. Read the rest of this entry »

12:01

Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks! It’s a gorgeous day here in Brooklyn, and while that may not make a difference to you if you’re staring at a computer screen, it’s lightening my mood just a bit.

12:01

Jay Jaffe: Yesterday I wrote about the Braves’ outfield situation with the return of Ronald Acuña Jr. finally on the horizon https://blogs.fangraphs.com/as-the-braves-recover-from-their-sluggish-…

12:01

Jay Jaffe: Today I’ve got a piece on the Twins’ just-completed 13-game winning streak. That’s in the pipeline and should go up shortly.

12:04

Jay Jaffe: Tomorrow evening at 7 PM ET, I’ll be participating in a SABR roundtable on the subject of the recently reinstated Pete Rose and Shoeless Joe Jackson, along with Keith O’Brien (author of the recent Rose bio Charlie Hustle) and ESPN’s Don Van Natta Jr., who has reported on the reinstatement efforts regarding both Rose and Jackson. Jacob Pomrenke, an expert on Jackson and the 1919 Black Sox scandal, will serve as moderator. https://sabr.org/latest/this-week-in-sabr-may-16-2025#shoelessjoe

12:05

Jay Jaffe: It was just after last week’s chat wrapped up that all hell broke loose with the Rose news. My coverage of it is here: https://blogs.fangraphs.com/say-it-aint-so-commissioner-manfred-posthu…

12:05

Jay Jaffe: And with that housekeeping out of the way, on with the show!

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“The reason the Royals are so far down this list is that they don’t have an obvious back of the rotation yet.” That’s what Ben Clemens wrote when the Royals turned up at no. 13 on our Positional Power Rankings back in March. Until Saturday, the lack of depth hadn’t held them back at all. Their five starters, Seth Lugo, Cole Ragans, Michael Wacha, Michael Lorenzen, and Kris Bubic, had started 45 of the team’s 46 games. As Michael Baumann wrote last week, Bubic, the biggest question mark of the bunch, has instead pitched like an exclamation point. After taking a no-hit bid into the seventh inning in San Francisco last night, he’s 5-2 with a 1.47 ERA and 2.72 FIP. Put it all together, and the Kansas City starters have a 2.93 ERA and 3.45 FIP, good for the third- and fourth-best marks in baseball, respectively. But that depth is finally going to be tested. On Saturday, the Royals announced that they’d sent both Lugo and Ragans to the injured list.

Lugo and Ragans, who respectively finished second and fourth in the AL Cy Young voting in 2024, have been on opposite sides of the process-results spectrum thus far this season. Lugo is rocking a 3.02 ERA with a 4.52 FIP, while Ragans has a 4.53 ERA and a 1.99 FIP. The good news is that neither injury sounds too serious (with the obvious caveat that because they’re pitchers, either player could spontaneously combust at any moment). Both had been dealing with nagging injuries in recent weeks and seemed to reach the point where it was time to back off rather than risk something more serious. Read the rest of this entry »

Austin Riley was relatively raw when our 2017 Atlanta Braves Top Prospects list was published in February of that year. Six weeks short of his 20th birthday, he was coming off of a Low-A season in which he logged 20 home runs and a 124 wRC+, but also fanned 147 times. With lingering concerns about both his contact profile and conditioning, Eric Longenhagen conservatively ranked Riley no. 28 in a then-strong Atlanta system.

Riley has obviously gone on to have a highly successful career. Since debuting with the Braves in May 2019, Riley has put up a 124 wRC+ and 19.9 WAR across parts of seven seasons, slugged 30-plus homers in three different years, and made a pair of All-Star teams. A mainstay in the middle of Atlanta’s lineup, the 41st-overall pick in the 2015 draft out Southaven, Mississippi’s DeSoto Central High School has developed into one of the senior circuit’s top sluggers.

What did Riley’s 2017 FanGraphs scouting report look like? Moreover, what does he think about it all these years later? Wanting to find out I shared some of what our lead prospect analyst wrote and asked Riley to respond to it.

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“Riley began the year struggling with any sort of velocity and then improved the timing of his footwork, quieted his hands and started hitting. Late in the year, he was turning on plus velocity.”

“Very accurate,” Riley said. “Coming out of high school, I hadn’t seen velo a lot, and I kind of had a lot going on with my swing. I needed to make some adjustments. Being a bigger guy, a power guy, it was kind of, ‘All I have to do is touch the ball, get a barrel to the ball.’ It was one of my first steps in learning how to shorten everything up and just get a barrel to it. From there, good things happen.”

“He has plus raw power (at least) and has improved his body composition since high school (when he was a heavy 230). But at just 19, with some general stiffness to his actions, Riley is pretty likely to kick over to first base as he matures.” Read the rest of this entry »

As we get further and further into the month of May, signs of summer are popping up all around us. Allergies are flaring, you can start to trust the major league stat leaderboards, and colleges across the country are wrapping up their spring semesters.

That last point is important, because summer is the season of study abroad. Every year around this time, thousands of American undergraduates get on planes, learn to navigate a foreign country, meet new people, and discover that their Spanish gets way better after three or four beers. It’s a marvelous experience, and I want to bring it to you, the FanGraphs readers.

Welcome to the 2025 FanGraphs Fan Exchange Program.

For one week, I want you to put your favorite team on the shelf and follow a different one. Do whatever you do in the normal course of being a fan, but do it for another ballclub. Read the rest of this entry »

Cal Raleigh has a lot of power. That’s always been his calling card, at least on offense. In each of his three full major league seasons, he’s posted a below-average OBP and an above-average offensive line. In cavernous T-Mobile Park, the hardest place to hit in baseball, his 34 home runs and .436 slugging percentage in 2024 were downright titanic. This year, though, he’s tapped into something new.

Or, well, his results are absolutely something new. One very interesting thing about Raleigh’s spectacular 2025: It hasn’t come from more raw power. Maximum exit velocity? Nothing new for Raleigh. Neither is his average exit velocity, nor his hard-hit rate, both of which are broadly in line with 2024. His bat speed is the same. When he’s trying to hit a home run, he’s doing it the way he always has.

But while his ability to hit baseballs hard might be the same as it’s always been, he’s demonstrating that ability more often than ever before. He’s both putting the ball in the air and pulling his elevated contact more frequently, and more of his batted balls are barrels, too. He’s striking out less frequently, with a career-high contact rate and career-low swinging strike rate.

Nothing is ever so simple that it’s driven by one thing, but I think there’s one important change driving Raleigh’s surge. It’s something he’s been working toward for a few years, in fact. When Raleigh is ahead in the count and pitchers throw him meatballs over the heart of the plate, he’s swinging less than ever before:

Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks to a big upset during MLB’s inaugural Rivalry Weekend, the Dodgers are out of the top spot in these rankings. In their place? The Gritty Tigs.

Last year, we revamped our power rankings using a modified Elo rating system. If you’re familiar with chess rankings or FiveThirtyEight’s defunct sports section, you’ll know that Elo is an elegant solution that measures teams’ relative strength and is very reactive to recent performance. To avoid overweighting recent results during the season, we weigh each team’s raw Elo rank using our coin flip playoff odds (specifically, we regress the playoff odds by 50% and weigh those against the raw Elo ranking, increasing in weight as the season progresses to a maximum of 25%). The weighted Elo ranks are then displayed as “Power Score” in the tables below. As the best and worst teams sort themselves out throughout the season, they’ll filter to the top and bottom of the rankings, while the exercise will remain reactive to hot streaks or cold snaps.

First up are the full rankings, presented in a sortable table. Below that, I’ve grouped the teams into tiers with comments on a handful of clubs. You’ll notice that the official ordinal rankings don’t always match the tiers — there are times where I take editorial liberties when grouping teams together — but generally, the ordering is consistent. One thing to note: The playoff odds listed in the tables below are our standard Depth Charts odds, not the coin flip odds that are used in the ranking formula. Read the rest of this entry »

I sometimes worry about overusing the words “for a catcher” in my writing. I don’t like overusing words. Case in point, I hate that I have already overused the word “overusing” (and the word “words”) in the first two sentences of this piece. Yet the “for a catcher” qualifier is often necessary. Catchers aren’t as fast as other position players. He runs well… for a catcher. They aren’t as agile as other position players. He’s athletic… for a catcher. They need more time off than other position players. He plays a lot… for a catcher. Above all else, they tend not to hit as well as other position players. Say it with me now: He hits well… for a catcher.

Catcher is the most demanding defensive position, and as a result, offensive standards for backstops are lower. The average wRC+ at catcher is typically about 10% worse than the big league average. That means that a team whose catchers produce a 100 wRC+ will usually rank among the majors’ top third, even though you wouldn’t want to see those catchers batting higher than the bottom third of the order. This is so often the case that most of us take it for granted. For instance, if I were chatting in a sports bar instead of writing for FanGraphs, I might say that Austin Wells (101 wRC+), Bo Naylor (99 wRC+), or J.T. Realmuto (102 wRC+) has hit “pretty well for a catcher” this year, without even bothering to check how well the average catcher has actually performed. Unfortunately for those guys, I’m far more comfortable sitting behind a computer than sitting in a bar, so I did look into how well catchers have hit in 2025. What I discovered is that, at least for now, I’m at no risk of overusing the phrase “for a catcher” after all. Just past the quarter mark of the 2025 season, catchers have a 101 wRC+.

With a .246/.318/.396 slash line, catchers are slightly outperforming the league average in all three triple slash categories. If they can keep this up, the 2025 season will be the first since at least 2002 (as far back as our positional splits go) in which catchers outperformed the league average in any one of the triple slash statistics, let alone all three. Read the rest of this entry »