Last week, Jake Mailhot wrote about the complete overhaul that has turned Keibert Ruiz from one of the worst players in baseball to, as of now, the 12th-best catcher in the game according to WAR. I’m particularly jazzed about this success story because I wrote about Ruiz’s chance to do something like this last year. It’s not often you come across a six-year veteran with a wRC+ of 65 and see real potential for improvement, but Ruiz was demonstrating some gifts that sure seemed like they could start bringing some value.

In an article about players who pull the ball significantly more often specifically when they square it up, I noted that Ruiz ran some of the highest pull and contact rates in the game, up with José Ramírez, Alex Bregman, and Isaac Paredes. He didn’t fit in with that group, though, because he mainly used those great contact skills to pull weak grounders. I figured that he was caught in between. He might be able to find success following the path of Luis Arraez and Steven Kwan, using his contact skills to wait back and shoot line drives the other way, or he could follow the lifter-pullers and start trying to do some actual damage with all that pull-side contact. The Nationals chose the latter path, increasing his bat speed and encouraging him to do damage, and it sure seems like it’s working so far.

Jake’s article went hand in glove with a deep dive from The Athletic’s Spencer Nusbaum that described the all-hands-on-deck nature of the turnaround: “This season, the Nationals have started to implement ‘player plan’ meetings, an individual gathering with every member of the roster every six weeks. First, they tell players how they’re being evaluated by the organization. Then, they talk through a plan to tweak their routines accordingly.”

Between executives, coaches, and trainers, Nusbaum reported, these individual player meetings have nearly 20 people in them. His article also mentioned the specific areas of improvement the Nationals identified for Jacob Young, Curtis Mead, José Tena, and Luis García Jr. Today, we’re going to talk about Nasim Nuñez, who went unmentioned in the article and is one of the few Nationals hitters who isn’t having a career year.

Nuñez is a 25-year-old switch-hitting middle infielder. This is his third major league season, and it will be his first full one. To some degree, things are going as expected for him. In 2024, Eric Longenhagen and Travis Ice wrote that Nuñez possessed “virtually no power,” but predicted a “John McDonald-esque career” based on “his incredible hands, range, athleticism, and infield versatility.” Last year, Ben Clemens echoed that sentiment, calling Nuñez “the platonic ideal of the light-hitting utility infielder.” This season, Nuñez is getting everyday reps at second base with occasional days at shortstop. He possesses blistering speed, and that part of his game is going great. He leads the majors with 22 stolen bases and his 3.4 baserunning runs rank fifth. He’s also running a tidy 11% walk rate thanks to good plate discipline and a league-average contact rate. Lastly, his defense isn’t lighting up the advanced metrics just yet, but it is grading out as solidly above average.

That’s it. Those are the things that are going right for Nuñez, and if he were posting something approaching the 93 wRC+ he put up across the 90 games of his career entering this year, they would be enough to make him an above-average second baseman. Great baserunning and middle infield defense along with a good walk rate really should really be enough. Unfortunately, the rest of Nuñez’s offensive profile is dragging him way, way down. He is batting .193 with a 50 wRC+, second worst among all qualified hitters. I made a list of 12 categories where Nuñez ranks in the bottom octile of all qualified players, and another list of 10 categories where he ranks dead last, but I think just telling you about the two lists is enough to get the point across. He has looked like the worst hitter in baseball, and as a result, he’s been sub-replacement level so far this season.

As you’d expect for anybody hitting this badly over a relatively short sample, Nuñez has been the victim of some bad luck. His .270 xwOBA, execrable though it is, is still 30 points above his actual wOBA. Likewise, his DRC+ of 84, while dreadful, at least pushes him up out of the bottom 30 among qualified hitters. Still, a lack of power is the main thing dragging Nuñez down, and it’s hard to argue that he’s getting jobbed in that department. He is at or near the bottom of the league in every exit velocity metric. He has not yet homered. He has not yet notched a barrel. He’s last among all qualified hitters in both doubles and triples. In fact, I put all of his extra-base hits in the GIF below. Anytime you can put a player’s entire highlight reel for two months of a season into a single GIF, that’s definitely a bad sign.

That’s right. Nuñez has two doubles and both of them were hustle doubles. The one and only time this season he has hit the ball past the defense, it was on a fly ball with a 60% catch probability. Luckily Nuñez hit it toward Matt Wallner, whose -9 defensive runs saved rank last among right fielders. A decent right fielder catches that ball, and most non-Wallner right fielders avoid misplaying it into a triple.

Nuñez’s slugging percentage is 50 points below his expected slugging level, but that’s almost entirely because of singles not falling in. He’s hit just four balls this season with an expected slugging percentage above 1.000. One was the first double in the GIF above, where he lined the ball toward (but not all the way into) the right field corner against the Brewers. Three were little bloopers that always go for singles and occasionally get stretched into doubles. This is the ball with the highest expected slugging percentage he’s hit all year.

It’s also the hardest-hit ball he has hit all year, but it is the most routine single in the world. You’d expect a speedster like Nuñez to be getting lots of hustle doubles, so is it possible that he’s just been unlucky on that front, getting thrown out trying to stretch singles into doubles? That ain’t it either. He’s only been cut down once trying to advance to second on a single, and amazingly, it was on a freak bunt play where the Brewers tried their best to throw the ball away but were foiled by the wayward torso of the umpire:

So why am I spending so much time showing you that a player we all expected to be light on power is, in fact, light on power? First, because things are so extreme that Nuñez is in danger of making some dubious history. He has an isolated slugging percentage of .023. You won’t be shocked to learn that it’s the lowest mark among all qualified players, but you might be surprised to learn that the next-lowest ISO is more than double Nuñez’s mark. (You might also be surprised to learn that it belongs to Fernando Tatis Jr. What a world.)

Nuñez isn’t just failing to slug, but he’s also been historically bad at it. Among qualified AL/NL position players since 1901, Nasim this year is currently tied for the ninth-lowest single-season ISO, and he has the third-lowest single-season slugging percentage. Of course, the game is very different now, and the names around Nuñez at the bottom of these leaderboards are nearly all from the turn of the last century. (You can tell because the first names include Spike, Spook, Patsy, Rollie, and, of course, Goat.) If we look at plus stats in order to compare Nuñez to the league average for historical context he drops even lower. His 15 ISO+ and 55 SLG+ are the very lowest. In AL/NL history. Since 1901.

Now, it’s not quite fair to compare Nuñez to full-season marks. We’re catching him over a shorter, noisier sample. It’s a long season, and he’s sure to pick up the pace some. He’ll hit better and he’ll get luckier, if for no other reason than that he couldn’t get much worse. But even if we just look at partial seasons from this century, Stathead tells us that only 14 players have ever run a slugging percentage this low over a span of 50 games and at least 190 plate appearances.

My goal in writing this article was not to drag a player who’s having a rough season and who only has 244 career plate appearances under his belt. I really like Nuñez’s game. His true talent level isn’t this low, and even if it were, he could still be a useful player. He’s always been better-suited for a utility role, and on a better team, that’s what he’d be. He’d get to rack up value as a pinch-runner, show off his glove, minimize the percentage of his overall value that came at the plate, and specifically minimize his time facing right-handed pitching. The Nationals are, very understandably, playing Nuñez in front of Jorbit Vivas and José Tena, whose bats aren’t much better and who don’t possess Nuñez’s glove or speed. But I still think Nuñez could be better.

As I hinted at in the previous paragraph, he has some serious splits. Over his short career, he’s got a 42 wRC+ hitting left-handed and a 120 mark batting righty. This season, those marks are 23 and 110. Even in this dreadful, dreadful season, Nuñez has been a legitimately good hitter from the right side. His bat speed is two ticks higher from the right side, his exit velocity is more than three ticks higher, and his strikeout rate is a full seven points lower. It’s very tempting to look at his profile and wonder whether he’s just miscast as a switch-hitter, but I don’t want to go that far. For one, I don’t know him nearly as well as the Nationals do, and they’ve had three years to consider that option. For another, according to Statcast, he actually put up a higher wOBA as a lefty in the minors (at least when the fancy cameras were watching). What I will say is that Nuñez needs to figure out how to unlock his left-handed swing.

I have no idea what the Nationals told Nuñez to work on during his player plan meeting. It’s hard for me to imagine they gave him the same Do Damage advice they gave to Ruiz, Young, and García. Nuñez is 5-foot-8 and he’s never given the faintest sign that he possesses the ability to hit for power. Then again, his average bat speed even in this powerless year is higher than Ruiz’s was last year, and he outhomered Ruiz last year despite playing in 19 fewer games. Maybe swinging hard is good advice for everybody.

Hello. While on paternity leave, I kept a journal about baseball and my daughter, who is not named Derek Jr., but who will henceforth be referred to as Derek Jr. This is the third installment of that series. You can read all of the entries here.

April 19
So we have this app on our phones where we track baby things. At our first doctor’s visit, the only things the pediatrician specifically told us to do were to feed Derek Jr. every three hours and to keep an eye on how many times a day she was peeing. That’s enough to make sure she’s not hungry or dehydrated. But several people recommended this app, and now we’re neck deep in it.

We track when Derek Jr. pees. We track when she poops. We track when she boths. We track when and what and how much and how long we feed her. A few days ago, we started tracking her sleep too. You wouldn’t believe what other information the app wants; it has a color palette to choose from for each time your baby goes to the bathroom. I am not sure I like all this. (To be clear, I am very sure that I don’t like the part where the app wants to know what color the baby’s poop is. That’s between her and her god, the Diaper Genie.) We’re new parents. All we do is think about the baby and, specifically, worry about the baby. Now we can feed our anxiety with something that presents itself as hard data. The app has totals and averages and graphs and charts. It all looks very certain and official. It could very reasonably be called inFantGraphs. Read the rest of this entry »

Hello. While on paternity leave, I kept a journal about baseball and my daughter, who is not named Derek Jr., but who will henceforth be referred to as Derek Jr. This is the second installment of that series. You can read all of the entries here.

April 17

Like any new parents, my wife and I spend a lot of time staring at our baby and talking about how beautiful she is. Of course we do. Evolution has programmed us to be completely overwhelmed by the baby’s beauty so that we don’t leave her on the doorstep of the nearest convent when we get fed up with the wailing and the sleepless nights and the relentless, unceasing, never-ending pooping. It has worked. We are ensorcelled. Derek Jr.’s future is wimple-free. But I’m starting to think it has hit my wife harder.

I say this because she has started to insist that Derek Jr. is “an objectively beautiful baby.” Objectively beautiful. You’re familiar with beauty, right? The thing that is, famously, in the eye of the beholder? Apparently one beholder knows better. It’s not enough that she thinks the baby is beautiful, and that everyone tells her all day long how beautiful the baby is. She now needs it to be proven empirically.

I used the word “insist” earlier because I have been pushing back ever so slightly on this one. I spend a whole lot of time analyzing players or trends, and it requires rooting out biases and confounding variables. Call me crazy, but I’m picking up on a possible conflict of interest here. I’m not prepared to get in a fight over this, but I have gently pointed out that the fact that my wife is throwing around the word “objectively” here is — objectively — hilarious. Read the rest of this entry »

After posting an excellent 125 wRC+ over his first two seasons, James Wood is establishing himself as one of the best hitters in baseball this year. The 23-year-old National is running a 169 wRC+, third best among qualified batters, and he’s on pace for 43 homers, 26 stolen bases, and 7.2 WAR. Everybody knows the parameters of Wood’s game by now. He’s 6-foot-6, extremely choosy at the plate, and so spectacularly powerful that his proclivity for whiffs and groundballs barely holds him back. This year, he’s improved on both fronts, dropping nearly 10 percentage points from his groundball rate and adding nearly four points to his contact rate on pitches in the strike zone. It’s huge news – James Wood-huge even – and if he can hold on to even some of those gains, he’s going to live at the top of the leaderboards for a long, long time. Today, however, we’re going to talk about a leaderboard where Wood ranks dead last.

If you head over to Baseball Savant’s new ABS challenge leaderboard, you’ll find Wood all the way at the bottom. A big caveat before we get going: The challenge system is very new, and because each player challenges so few times, the sample sizes are very small. Moreover, everyone involved is still adjusting to the system, so the trends we’re seeing now are likely to change. In this article, I’m going to be overreacting to these early numbers. It’s way too soon for big proclamations. However, I don’t think it’s too soon to look for patterns and draw some early conclusions about players who stand out as starkly as Wood does. End of caveat.

Now let’s go to the leaderboard and sort by either Net Overturns or Net Runs. There’s Wood, dead last. According to Statcast’s reckoning, an average batter who saw the same pitches Wood has seen would have made 4.8 more successful challenges and netted their team 1.4 more runs. No player has been worse, and even if you ignore the advanced numbers for a moment, Wood’s record tells you all you need to know. He’s made 13 challenges. He’s won three of them and lost 10. For those of you keeping score at home, that stinks. The average batter has won 47% of their challenges, twice as many as Wood. Read the rest of this entry »

On Monday night, the Astros celebrated Memorial Day by no-hitting the Rangers. Throwing to catcher Christian Vázquez, pitchers Tatsuya Imai, Steven Okert, and Alimber Santa combined for the 18th no-hitter in a franchise history that dates back to 1962. According to the great Sarah Langs, not only is that the most no-hitters over that period, but the second-place Dodgers are a full five no-nos behind with 13. Imai was making just his sixth major league start. Santa was making his major league debut. There must be something in the water in Houston.

I didn’t catch any of the game live. I saw a supercut that shows all 27 outs the Astros got. This is it. You don’t have to watch it to enjoy this article, and it’s seven minutes long, but I at least wanted to give you the chance to experience the game the way I experienced it.

Several things jumped out at me at the beginning of the video. It starts with an establishing shot of Imai. He’s toeing the rubber before he throws his first pitch, and his stats are overlaid on the screen. They are yucky. He’s 1-2 with an 8.31 ERA, a 1.79 WHIP, a 3:2 walk-to-strikeout ratio, and a 4.64 xFIP. With the Seibu Lions in NPB, Imai ran an ERA below 2.50 in each of the last four seasons. He was unhittable. But his first five-start stretch stateside was abysmal. He hit the IL with arm fatigue after three outings, got lit up in his first Triple-A rehab start, then got lit up again in his first start back with the big club. In the start after that one, on May 18, Imai put up a game score of 41. Somehow, it was his second-best mark of the season. He previously threw a curveball, splitter, and regular changeup, but he seems to have abandoned them entirely. “Command,” wrote The Athletic’s Chandler Rome, “has been somewhere between spotty and nonexistent.” All of this is to say that, to this point in his short MLB career, Imai has not looked like a guy with no-hit stuff. Read the rest of this entry »

Hello. While on paternity leave, I kept a journal about baseball and my daughter, who is not named Derek Jr., but who will henceforth be referred to as Derek Jr. This is the first installment of that series. The introduction can be found here.

April 13
It’s somewhere around 9:30 PM and Derek Jr. is asleep. I am, briefly, watching baseball for the first time since she was born two weeks ago. The Mets and Dodgers are in the eighth inning. The main thing I notice is Joey Gerber’s delivery. I’ve never heard of Gerber before, but my daughter is wearing a Gerber brand onesie, and I sincerely hope he’s the heir to that particular fortune. His leg kick is a joy to behold:

It would be a grave understatement to say that Gerber has a high-energy delivery. Brendan Gawlowski called him funky. Eric Longenhagen said he had an “odd, chicken wing arm action.” I’m inclined to go with Ricky Conti, who called the delivery “violent, with tons of effort and recoil.” When you think of a pitcher’s leg kick, you think of, say, Justin Verlander smoothly raising his knee up toward his chest, his lower leg pointed straight down toward the rubber. Even Juan Marichal’s legendary leg kick started roughly the same way. He raised his knee, and at first, his lower leg merely came along for the ride. What made the leg kick famous was that Marichal’s foot just kept on rising long past the point where other pitchers’ stopped. He reared way back, intimidating the batter with the bottom of his spikes, and catapulted down the mound, the ultimate tall-and-fall delivery. Read the rest of this entry »

Hello. I have missed you. I have been on paternity leave for the past two months because — and I’m told this is the most common reason people go on paternity leave — my wife and I had a baby. Mostly, my wife had the baby while I said things like “You’re doing great,” and “I’m so proud of you,” and “Hey look, a baby,” but this is very much a team sport. Our free agent acquisition arrived loaded with tools like spiky hair, world-weary eyes, and a trapezoidal mouth with a cute little dimple just beneath it, but she’s a little short on big league experience. We’ll have to coach her up.

So now we have this baby girl. It’s unclear whether she’s a bouncing baby girl — we haven’t dropped her yet — but she certainly seems healthy enough. I’m looking at her right now. She’s sleeping in her crib all swaddled up like a salami. She is, as babies tend to be, adorable. She is also — and again I’m informed that this is standard — somewhat labor intensive.

While laboring over this novel life-form for the past two months, I have watched precious little baseball. I have done precious little anything other than care for my wife and child (or, as I am still getting used to calling it, my family). As a result, I am wildly underinformed about the latest developments in my field of expertise. The stray missives that reached my ears often left me with more questions than answers. Did somebody Monstars the NL East? Are we sure this is the same Ildemaro Vargas? When did all these bodies get so loose? Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, we got a mailbag question from James, whose glimpses of Luis Arraez during the World Baseball Classic left him looking for one weird trick to vault the three-time batting champion back up to his previous heights. I had so much fun answering the question that its word count moved it out of mailbag territory (non-Jay Jaffe division, anyway) and into regular article territory. The question was on the longer side, but here’s an abridged version:

If [Arraez] could wear a ribbon on his wrist to deter a bad hitting habit, would he be able to avoid something that drags him down?

My first idea was swinging on 3-1 counts… If he spit on 3-1 pitches habitually, until opposing pitchers caught on, what percentage of them would have landed him on first? What impact would that have on his OPS & WAR, and how would that impact his value and employability?

Could there be other commonplace opportunities that may be similarly exploited?

I realize James is asking for a more specific answer here, but I want to start with the overview, because at this point, I think people may have forgotten that once upon a time, Arraez actually had great plate discipline. From 2019 to 2022 he ran a 24% chase rate and a 9% walk rate. That walk rate was 5% higher than the league average. From 2023 to 2025, he had a 34% chase rate and a 4% walk rate. That walk rate is now a staggering 45% below the league average! Over the same period, Arraez’s swing rate on pitches inside the zone fell from 65% to 62%. He wasn’t just chasing more; he was making worse swing decisions all around. That’s a lot of shifts in the wrong direction, and even though Arraez also cut his strikeout rate nearly in half, his wRC+ dropped from 123 to 109. Read the rest of this entry »

At this time time last year, I made a series of predictions. I explained why each team might make it to the promised land, as well as why each team might find itself dead in a pit. We’re running it back this year. Will your favorite team win it all? Will it perish in a factory fire? Here’s how it might go down. Consider these the first- and 99th-percentile projections. If you missed the National League edition yesterday, you can check it out here. Today we’re on to the American League.

Baltimore Orioles
Why They’ll Win It All: After two years of struggle, Adley Rutschman will come back and play like a star again. He’ll be a six-win MVP candidate. He’ll instantly look like he did in 2022 and 2023. Where has that guy been the past two years? The answer is simpler than you think. He’s been hiding in the basement while his secret twin, Badley Rutschman has limped to league-average performance. That’s right, he uses a double. This two-years-on, two-years-off gambit used to work well enough. Badley was more than capable of tearing up the Pac-12 and the high minors, but the big leagues are another story. Badley couldn’t quite hack it, but Adley will return and Badley will be back in the basement. (Don’t worry, it’s a nice enough basement.) The secret twin life is a tough one, but it’ll bring the O’s back into the first division.

Why They’ll Lose It All: Playing behind Alex Bregman in the World Baseball Classic will mess with Gunnar Henderson’s head. Do you know the last time Gunnar Henderson was a backup? Neither does Gunnar Henderson. He’s not meant to play third base second fiddle. He’s feeling like a second-class citizen for the first time. Number two’s supposed man the six, not bat seventh. By the Fourth of July, he’ll be striking out a third of the time and batting fifth and seven ate nine. Read the rest of this entry »

At this time time last year, I made a series of predictions. I explained why each team might make it to the promised land, as well as why each team might find itself dead in a pit. We’re running it back this year. Will your favorite team win it all? Will it perish in a factory fire? Here’s how it might go down. Consider these the first- and 99th-percentile projections. Check back for the American League tomorrow.

Arizona Diamondbacks
Why They’ll Win It All: Geraldo Perdomo is just getting started. The shortstop had an ugly rookie season at the plate, then jumped to right around league average in 2024. In 2025, he exploded, running a 138 wRC+ and knocking 20 home runs, a 143% improvement over his career mark. He combined that quantum leap in offense with his trademark excellent defense and baserunning, ending up with 7.1 WAR and finishing fourth in the NL MVP voting.

In 2026, Perdomo’s going to make another 36-point jump in wRC+. He’s going to finish with a wRC+ of 174, sock 34 dingers, put up a 12-win season, and dethrone Shohei Ohtani. I mean that literally. He’ll win the MVP, yes, but Perdomo will also walk into the Dodgers clubhouse on Opening Day and yank the ergonomic swivel chair from under Ohtani’s versatile posterior.

Why They’ll Lose It All: Everything I’ve just described will come to pass, for a while. Perdomo will unseat Ohtani and get off to a scalding start, spraying homers all over the greater Phoenix area. Then the Dodgers will come to town for a four-game set in June. For four days, Perdomo will watch Ohtani, just returned from the injury list (coccyx), limp around the bases. After the rubber match, Perdomo will stay in the clubhouse long after everyone has left. He’ll take a look in the mirror. “Who are you?” he’ll ask (though he’ll be munching a protein bar, so it will come out sounding more like, “Froowroo?”). He won’t like the answer. He’ll decide that he liked the old Geraldo Perdomo better. The one who led the league in sac bunts every year. The one who put up league-average seasons like clockwork. The one who never broke any butts. He’ll never hit another home run.

Atlanta Braves
Why They’ll Win It All: Michael Harris II is finally going to come out of the gate strong. The 2022 Rookie of the Year has never been an All-Star because despite a career 134 wRC+ in the second half, his first-half mark is a disastrous 80. It’s the most extreme split in major league history. All that will change in 2026. Harris will put up a 134 wRC+ in the first half, and then he’ll still undergo his usual 50-point jump. He’ll be an All-Star, then he’ll be All-World in the second half. The rest of the Braves will get injured. It won’t matter.

Why They’ll Lose It All: In a desperate bid to recapture the glory of the 2021 World Series championship squad, Alex Anthopolous will wheel the soft-serve ice cream machine back into the Atlanta clubhouse. This will prove a mistake, because as it turns out, you have to clean those things. The machine, which had been sitting in a closet since the fall of 2022, will be full of microbiota that qualify as neither toppings nor mix-ins. The entire 26-man roster, the entire coaching staff, and two clubbies will wind up on the IL with tummy trouble. Everyone at Triple-A Gwinnett will get called up at the same time, crucially, before the soft-serve machine is identified as the culprit. They, too, will fall victim to the swirl sickness. Neither the Braves, nor the pipes will recover.

Chicago Cubs
Why They’ll Win It All: Because it was foretold in Back to the Future, again. What, didn’t you ever watch Back to the Future Part IV? It was straight-to-video, so I understand if you missed it, but Marty McFly, played by a guy who looked at least a little bit like Michael J. Fox, ends up in 2026, and he can’t come home until his son, Arthur, gets help for his debilitating gambling addiction. It’s quite accurate and thoroughly depressing. Anyway, the Cubs win the Series again, and Arty McFly loses everything and lives out the rest of his life skateboarding across the great Pacific garbage patch.

Why They’ll Lose It All: Some time in May, Pete Crow-Armstrong will go back on a ball and disappear into the ivy. Like, he’ll just be gone. The Cubs will send dozens of people out there after him, poking and prodding the wall, shouting his name. They won’t find a trace of him. A bereft Seiya Suzuki will try to walk through the ivy and join PCA, wherever he is. He’ll just bonk his head on the bricks over and over again. The Feds will shut down Wrigley Field while they conduct their investigation, and the Cubs will play their home games at Rate Field. With PCA on indefinite leave and Suzuki on the IL with a concussion, they’ll post the worst outfield WAR in the league

Cincinnati Reds
Why They’ll Win It All: Do you know what Matt McLain has been doing during spring training? He’s batting .529. He’s hit seven home runs in 17 games. He’s got a 301 wRC+. Guess what? He’s going to keep it up. McLain will transition from spring training to the regular season without so much as a hiccup. He’ll never slow down. He’ll hit .700 in the playoffs. Elly De La Cruz will be pretty good, too.

Why They’ll Lose It All: McLain will only be pretty good. De La Cruz will only be pretty good, too. In fact, everyone on the Reds will be pretty good. As it was foretold, Cincinnati will be a medium place. You might think that would make the Reds a medium team, but it’s not that simple. Every inning they play will end in a tie. They’ll never finish a game, except by way of suspension. The whole damn system will break down. They’ll be cast out from the league, and then the sport.

Colorado Rockies
Why They’ll Win It All: In a brilliant bit of outside-the-box Moneyball thinking, Paul DePodesta will sign the Rocky Mountains to a contract. “His defect is that he’s literally a mountain range,” he’ll say as he pitches the scheme to Dick Monfort. “Nobody in the big leagues cares about him, because he mountains funny.” Colorado will go from an extreme hitter’s park to an extreme pitcher’s park overnight, since every ball that lands on the ground will have technically been caught by Colorado’s right fielder, literally the Rocky Mountain range. (Brenton Doyle will still keep his job as the center fielder, because have you seen him out there?) The Rocky Mountain range will strike out quite a bit, but nobody will mind it much when it’s holding opponents to a BABIP of zero.

Why They’ll Lose It All: Even with a BABIP of zero, Rockies starters will give up enough homers to end up with 105 losses.

Los Angeles Dodgers
Why They’ll Win It All: Inertia.

Why They’ll Lose It All: Entropy.

Miami Marlins
Why They’ll Win It All: It turns out that calling pitches from the dugout is a winning strategy after all. The Marlins’ front office quants will read “The Purloined Letter” 15 times in a row, then develop an unbeatable algorithm that calls the perfect pitch for every situation based on the count, the game situation, the pitcher, the catcher, the weather, the time of day, and an extensive psychometric profile of the batter. They’ll stick it in the dugout disguised as a quality control coach and let it cook. Opposing batters will be constantly off-balance. They’ll flail wildly at pitches in the dirt. Their knees will buckle at get-me-over curveballs. They’ll start to think the Miami pitchers can read their minds. They’ll grow paranoid. They’ll second-guess themselves and third-guess themselves. They will have struck out before they even step into the batter’s box.

Why They’ll Lose It All: Some time in April, the other teams will get wise. That coach in the Marlins dugout – the one with the boxy head and boxy torso, who never moves a muscle but whose eyeballs flash a sequence of bright colors after each pitch – isn’t really a coach. The opposing manager will finally ask the umpires to check him out. “That’s just Jerry!” manager Clayton McCullough will shout. “He has a condition!” But the jig will be up. The umpires will tap on Jerry’s hollow cube of a head, and the left side of his mustache will come unglued and flutter in the light breeze. He’ll never call another pitch.

Milwaukee Brewers
Why They’ll Win It All: The Bratwurst won’t just win the first 15 runnings of the sausage race. It’ll destroy the other sausages. It’ll keep on running around the entire warning track and lap them. Pat Murphy will sign the Brat to a contract and start it out as a pinch-runner. After a week or two, the Brat will stand alone atop the Baserunning Runs leaderboard. It’ll swipe bases left and right. It’ll tag up on popups. It’ll steal home and slide across the plate before the pitch even arrives. And it’ll do all this in full costume. Murphy will make the lederhosen-clad Bratwurst his everyday center fielder, and it will reward him with thrilling diving catches, a surprisingly accurate arm, a .275 batting average, and 25-homer pop. Jackson Chourio will be pretty good, too.

Why They’ll Lose It All: Just after the Bratwurst earns All-Star Game MVP honors, the Brewers will celebrate with a sausage appreciation night: sausage-making competitions, grilling competitions, bratwurst-eating contests, kids in sausage costumes, the whole nine yards. But while handing out an award to a local sausage-maker right in front of home plate, the sure-footed Bratwurst will trip and tragically stumble directly into a running sausage grinder. To the horror of 41,900 celebrants, it will return to its previous state, an unformed pile of meat (with veins of lederhosen mixed in there, too). The crowd will watch in stunned silence as all of the sausage-makers on hand try in vain to put the Bratwurst back together again. The entire state of Wisconsin will go into mourning. The Brewers will play out the string lifelessly. Murphy will take a flier on the Polish sausage, but it’ll keep getting doubled off because it doesn’t understand the tag-up rule.

New York Mets
Why They’ll Win It All: It turns out that right field was the problem for Juan Soto all along. After a career of unrelenting defensive ghastliness, he’ll be great in left field. He’ll be… well, he still won’t be elite out there. But he’ll be quite good, and all of a sudden, his game will have no weaknesses at all. He’ll have an average Juan Soto season at the plate, steal another 35 bases, and all of a sudden, that 158 wRC+ will put him in line for a nine-win season. He’ll carry the Mets into the playoffs.

Why They’ll Lose It All: Francisco Lindor will miss his hamate bone. The surgery won’t hinder his performance at the plate – at least not physically. He’ll just miss it, you know? He once had a whole hand full of bones, and now he’s got a missing piece. He’ll feel incomplete, distracted, and the rest of the Mets will follow their leader. They’ll never quite get it together. They’ll always feel like something’s missing, even if they can never quite name it.

Philadelphia Phillies
Why They’ll Win It All: The Lord will look down upon Philadelphia, see a team that just agreed to devote a quarter of a billion to pitchers named Jesús and Cristopher, and the Lord will smile.

Why They’ll Lose It All: Measles and listeria will sweep through the clubhouse. No one will say out loud who’s responsible for it, but everyone will know.

Pittsburgh Pirates
Why They’ll Win It All: Because they might actually be good. Maybe? Possibly? They might, like, just have a good team. With good players? I know, I know. But it’s possible. Maybe.

Why They’ll Lose It All: At a certain point, Paul Skenes will decide that he’s sick of losing at baseball and go back to the Air Force Academy.

San Diego Padres
Why They’ll Win It All: Welcome to the Nick Castellanos Revenge Tour. Castellanos will work his way into the starting lineup by hook or by crook, and he will unleash unholy fury upon the baseball for the sole, spiteful purpose of making sure the Phillies know exactly what they’re missing. He’ll slug hellaciously, and he’ll step up as a clubhouse leader to lift the rest of the Padres with him. It’ll be like that scene in The Natural where the New York Knights actually look like a baseball team during practice. His defense will still be pretty bad.

Why They’ll Lose It All: Joe Lacob, owner of the Golden State Warriors, is known to be in the running to purchase the Padres, and he’ll have the winning bid. San Diegans will rejoice now that the man who oversaw a dynasty in Oakland (then promptly moved it to San Francisco) has just purchased their team. But Lacob will have learned all the wrong lessons from the success of the Dubs. He’ll trade what little is left of the farm for Trayce Thompson. He’ll sign Xzavion Curry. He’ll hire Draymond Green to manage the Padres, and that will go exactly as well as you might expect it to go. He’ll move the team to LA.

San Francisco Giants
Why They’ll Win It All: Remember when Luis Arraez played in Miami and put up a career-high 131 wRC+ dumping weak liners into that enormous outfield? Well, he’s finally landed in San Francisco and found himself another big old outfield. He’s going to go back to hitting .350, and he’s going to teach Jung Hoo Lee all his tricks. Matt Chapman and Rafael Devers are never going to come to the plate without a couple runners on base.

Why They’ll Lose It All: Logan Webb can’t start every game.

St. Louis Cardinals
Why They’ll Win It All: The Cardinals will try something new in the outfield. They’ll turn Victor Scott II loose. “Any ball you can reach, you go get it,” Chaim Bloom will tell him. This newfound freedom will strike Scott as a revelation. He’ll finally realize that the artificial boundaries separating center field from left and right are just that. Artificial. Limitations keeping him from unlocking his true potential. The scales will fall from his eyes and he’ll range through the outfield like a holy wind, catching everything there is to catch. Jordan Walker and Lars Nootbaar will take to positioning themselves directly on the foul lines, content to steal outs on the occasional would-be foul ball while Scott takes care of the rest. The Cardinals will have the best defense in the league.

Why They’ll Lose It All: They’ll still need some hitters.

Washington Nationals
Why They’ll Win It All: Pass.

Why They’ll Lose It All: In an odd mathematical quirk, it turns out that it’s really hard to have a successful season while losing more than 90 games. Let’s just give Paul Toboni some time.