For the 22nd consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction, as well as MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the next team up is the Kansas City Royals.

Batters

For the Royals, 2025 was about the season that was expected. Bobby Witt Jr. was amazing and the starting rotation was very good, but the team was held back as a result of getting pretty much no production out of the second base, outfield, and designated hitter positions. ZiPS projected the Royals for 83 wins, and they won 82. Normally, that would make a team a real contender in the AL Central, but the Tigers played like an elite team in the first half and the Guardians did the same in the second half, leaving the division always too far out of reach for the Royals.

While Kansas City had some serious problems, especially in those trouble spots mentioned above, it was generally encouraging how the team dealt with it. I stand by every word I said about the outfield back in February. The idea to just roll with Hunter Renfroe and MJ Melendez after their terrible 2024 seasons was a massive missed opportunity. But the good thing is that the Royals were quick to jettison both and get looks at other players who showed a lot of promise (Jac Caglianone) or at least had some upside (Drew Waters). Now, these moves didn’t actually pan out in the short term, but it’s always better to try something that might work over something that almost definitely won’t.

ZiPS doesn’t really like the outfield this time around either, but it does think that there are enough defense and platoon advantages in the various players slated to man the grass that the Royals could eke out respectable production from the group, certainly quite a lot more than they got last year. And this is important, because every win for a team with a projected total in the low-to-mid-80s, especially a team in a Central division, has tremendous value. Even better would be a much bigger acquisition to boost at least one of the positions, but failing that, ZiPS doesn’t see either left or right field as unmitigated disasters this time around (though Steamer is less optimistic).

Witt Jr. is the straw that stirs the drink, of course, but beyond that, this was the season I think Maikel Garcia clearly established himself as an All-Star level third baseman. He finally turned that good plate discipline and hard-hit numbers into real production, and he’s Gold Glove-worthy at the hot corner. Expect both players on the left side of the infield to keep things up in 2026. Another positive: The Royals could see some improvement at second base. ZiPS thinks that Michael Massey is better than his 2025 performance indicates. My inclination might be to use Massey as a super-sub type, and just stick Jonathan India at second and leave him there; there’s no reason to pretend India’s a corner outfielder, as the team did at times this past season.

I was a big advocate for the Royals’ being aggressive with Caglianone’s promotion, and I still think it was the right thing to do. It remains to be seen if he can contribute defensively anywhere, but he ought to hit better than he did in his debut campaign; it’s hard to imagine he could do worse than his horrifying 46 wRC+. The problem is the Royals can’t afford to just stick Cags at DH every day. They need to leave that open for Salvador Perez to get spot starts when he’s not wearing a glove in some sort of timeshare with Carter Jensen behind the plate and Vinnie Pasquantino at first. You shouldn’t be alarmed by the top comp for Caglianone. Costen Shockley didn’t hit for the Angels initially, and after a dispute about whether or not they told him they weren’t going to demote him, they sent him to the minors; in response, after having just moved his family out to California, he peaced out from baseball at age 23.

And you better not be upset about the Witt top comp. Dickie Thon was absolutely terrific until a Mike Torrez fastball shattered his face; he was never the same after that. Don’t worry, ZiPS isn’t forecasting Witt to suffer the same fate!

Pitchers

In the projection table, the rotation tops out at 2.2 WAR, from Cole Ragans. However, this understates the quality of this group of starters, as ZiPS is understandably squeamish about projecting big innings totals from Ragans and Kris Bubic. A full season for Ragans would put his WAR safely over three. The same is true for Bubic, though rotator cuff injuries always make me a bit worried.

The rest of the rotation, Seth Lugo, Noah Cameron, and Michael Wacha projects out as comfortably average-plus, and I don’t think it’s a stretch to put Kansas City’s starting staff at the back of the top 10 in baseball. Ryan Bergert and Stephen Kolek won’t scare anyone, but they’re perfectly reasonable emergency replacements, and both Bailey Falter and Daniel Lynch IV are at least plausible options if injuries plague the starting five.

The bullpen projects as a middle-of-the-pack unit at the moment. ZiPS remains a fan of Hunter Harvey, but injuries ruined his 2025 season, and he’s currently a free agent. Otherwise, ZiPS pegs the Royals as having a quintet of B+ relievers in Carlos Estévez, Lucas Erceg, John Schreiber, Angel Zerpa, and Alex Lange, but doesn’t think they have a true lights-out closer. Overall, this pen comes out aggressively mid, and a depth addition or two would be welcome.

Right now, ZiPS projects the Royals to finish with somewhere between 82-86 wins or so, depending on the assumptions. That makes them relevant in the AL Central and a second-tier wild card contender. There’s still time for them to do more to get over the hump.

Ballpark graphic courtesy Eephus League. Depth charts constructed by way of those listed here. Size of player names is very roughly proportional to Depth Chart playing time. The final team projections may differ considerably from our Depth Chart playing time.

Players are listed with their most recent teams wherever possible. This includes players who are unsigned or have retired, players who will miss 2026 due to injury, and players who were released in 2025. So yes, if you see Joe Schmoe, who quit baseball back in August to form a Ambient Math-Rock Trip-Hop Yacht Metal band that only performs in abandoned malls, he’s still listed here intentionally. ZiPS is assuming a league with an ERA of 4.16.

Hitters are ranked by zWAR, which is to say, WAR values as calculated by me, Dan Szymborski, whose surname is spelled with a z. WAR values might differ slightly from those that appear in the full release of ZiPS. Finally, I will advise anyone against — and might karate chop anyone guilty of — merely adding up WAR totals on a depth chart to produce projected team WAR. It is important to remember that ZiPS is agnostic about playing time, and has no information about, for example, how quickly a team will call up a prospect or what veteran has fallen into disfavor.

As always, incorrect projections are either caused by misinformation, a non-pragmatic reality, or by the skillful sabotage of our friend and former editor. You can, however, still get mad at me on Twitter or on Bluesky. This last is, however, not an actual requirement.

For the 22nd consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction, as well as MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the next team up is the New York Yankees.

Batters

The Yankees aren’t the flashy spenders they used to be, but they still put very good teams on the field year after year, and the memory of their rather down 2023 is now another season further back in the rear view mirror. Most fanbases would be happy with a 94-68 season, but with New York no longer the big dogs when it comes to payroll, there’s an odd portion of the faithful who have come to believe that the team is fundamentally broken and needs to bunt a lot more and stop using analytics, which is a bit like wanting to fix your constantly running toilet by converting your toolshed into an outhouse. In reality, the Yankees are just a normal really good franchise these days.

The offense, of course, starts, ends, and runs through Aaron Judge. I don’t think I need to spend too much time cataloguing his merits, other than to note that he’s already passed the bus test for me — as in, if he got hit by a bus tomorrow, he’s already done enough in his career to be Cooperstown bound as far as I’m concerned. It is a little odd, though, that when we talk about players who have established their Hall of Fame credentials, we always seem to have them meet their demise via some mishap with mass transit. Read the rest of this entry »

For the 22nd consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction, as well as MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the next team up is the San Francisco Giants.

Batters

The 2025 season was an odd one for the Giants, as they lurched in and out of playoff contention at various points. A solid start kept San Francisco in the mix in the early months, lurking just a few games out in the NL West for a surprisingly long time. The team’s high water mark came in mid-June, when a victory over the Dodgers briefly got them into a first place tie, but just a few weeks later, they found themselves nine games out and falling to .500 faster than Bitcoin prices in 2014. It only took a week to trim that deficit down to four games, but a couple of significant losing streaks wiped out that work going into the trade deadline. The Giants traded Camilo Doval, Tyler Rogers, and Mike Yastrzemski at the deadline, and the team treaded water just enough to find themselves in the Wild Card race at the very end of the season thanks to the New York Mets really Metsing it.

After that kind of season, finishing at .500 feels like the universe getting the exact right result for a change. ZiPS does see a lot of sources of optimism in the offense, and thinks the Giants likely underperformed their actual talent level in 2025. Both Matt Chapman and Willy Adames finished the season with All-Star-caliber numbers, especially impressive for Adames considering how much he struggled in the early going. ZiPS actually thought both of them underperformed their peripheral statistics, a pretty decent divergence from Statcast, which wasn’t quite as optimistic. ZiPS has been high on Chapman and Adames in recent years anyway, and sees both as leading All-Star contenders next season. Read the rest of this entry »

For the 22nd consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction, as well as MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the next team up is the Milwaukee Brewers.

Batters

Over the last five or six years, the ZiPS projected standings have tended to underrate the Brewers, but not because of the projections themselves. Instead, this has mostly been because of me. ZiPS is neither systemically high nor low on Brewers players, but I tend to be way too conservative when making depth charts for the simulations in the spring. Typically, when ZiPS spits out a bunch of interesting projections for fringy guys on Milwaukee, I tell myself, “Sure, but no way the Brewers actually gamble and play those guys.” And then, well, they do. So when ZiPS has projected Joey Ortiz to get 2.3 WAR per 600 plate appearances, tabbed Isaac Collins and Caleb Durbin to be roughly league-average starters given full-time play, and liked a whole bunch of random fifth-starter types as relievers, I’ve chickened out and knocked the team down a peg, only for the Brewers turn out to be braver than I thought. So this time around, I’m going to go all in on the interesting guys! And hopefully, this won’t be the year the Brewers get boring.

As for 2025, Milwaukee didn’t get to the World Series, but the team did outlast all but one National League club. For much of the summer, the Brewers were flaming hot, prematurely ending what looked like an interesting NL Central battle with the Cubs, and winning the most games in baseball.

Will they win 97 games again? Probably not. But at the risk of facing the wrath of fans, these Brewers look a lot like one of the good Cardinals teams, in that while they’re not loaded with stars, they’re absolutely rock-solid almost anywhere. At eight of the nine lineup positions, ZiPS projects them at league average or better, usually on the side of “better.” What makes this lineup especially fascinating is that the floor is pretty high because the Brewers generally have pretty respectable plan B options. The outfield is jugglable, and the platoon splits and bat/glove pairs match up really well. ZiPS thinks Andruw Monasterio or Eddys Leonard — recently signed to a minor league deal — are good infield depth, and that Cooper Pratt and quite possibly Jesús Made could be ready surprisingly quickly. (ZiPS thinks Pratt’s 2025 was better than it looked.)

Now, William Contreras would be the hardest player to replace if he were to go down with an injury, but Jeferson Quero gets a pretty decent projection behind the plate. The only starter ZiPS doesn’t really like is Andrew Vaughn, but it’s certainly possible that the projection system isn’t giving him enough juice for being free of the White Sox, who never really appeared to know what to do with him after he didn’t debut to instant stardom. The Brewers won’t have an elite offense, but they ought to have a good one that’s fairly dependable.

Pitchers

The rotation projections aren’t quite as exciting, partially due to the relatively low number of projected innings. But even if there’s no Tarik Skubal or Garrett Crochet at the top, there’s nothing wrong with a starting five of Freddy Peralta, Quinn Priester, Brandon Woodruff, Chad Patrick, and Jacob Misiorowski. ZiPS thinks you could easily slot in basically any of Logan Henderson, Robert Gasser, or Tobias Myers without damaging the rotation. That’s good depth, and I’d normally be skeptical about the Brewers giving much time to Coleman Crow, but as I said up top, I’m switching things up this year and being more open to the possibility that maybe the organization sees the same thing that the projections do.

Milwaukee’s bullpen is the best projected so far this ZiPS season, edging out that of the Phillies. The worst projected ERA (as a reliever) for any of the 12 pitchers with 30 bullpen innings on the current depth chart is Rob Zastr…z…err…something (hey, my last name is Szymborski so I get to make that joke) at 4.19. ZiPS even thinks that a few of the less talked about starting pitching prospects, most notably Tate Kuehner and Tyson Hardin, could finish with an ERA in the threes as full-time relievers. If the Brewers think that’s a possibility, given their history, I wouldn’t be against them.

Like the classic good Cardinals teams, the Brewers could win somewhere between 86 and 94 wins or so, and I wouldn’t bat an eye at any of that. But I also think they have one of the lowest chances of any team to be lousy. Your Toyota Camry may not be flashy, but it’s going to probably still be a usable car in 15 years while your neighbor’s Audi is slowly bankrupting them. This is a good team with a high floor, and I hope this is the year I’m finally smart enough to trust in Milwaukee’s creativity.

Ballpark graphic courtesy Eephus League. Depth charts constructed by way of those listed here. Size of player names is very roughly proportional to Depth Chart playing time. The final team projections may differ considerably from our Depth Chart playing time.