12:03

Dan Szymborski: Greetings all!

12:05

Dan Szymborski: I’m OK with it!

12:05

Dan Szymborski: I mean, I would have preferred Valdez

12:05

Dan Szymborski: but given no Valdez, I’d rather have additional starter depth than not

Read the rest of this entry »

One of the things that people like to ask me about when it comes to the ZiPS projections is how they change over time. While knowing what the projections are now is, of course, highly useful, it’s also interesting to see who has changed the most in the algorithms, since they basically represent the players who we should feel differently about compared to how we did before. Knowing how changes in a player affect performance models can also reveal an interesting fact or two about how players develop and age.

After running through the hitters who have gained and declined the most in my piece yesterday, today I’ll look at the pitchers who have done the same. The methodology I’ve chosen here is a simple one: I’m ranking the difference in 2026 WAR as it’s projected now compared to what it was as of Opening Day 2025. For the decliners, I didn’t include the off-the-radar types. While it’s good to know if a fringe High-A prospect hit a wall at Double-A, it’s more impactful to see the declines among the more roster-relevant players than the poor fellow who saw his -1.0 WAR projection slip to -2.5 WAR. Also left out were guys whose decline in WAR is mostly the result of a major arm injury. It’s worth noting that there will be slight differences between ZiPS WAR and the WAR recorded here on FanGraphs. There are a few methodological differences that can move a few runs here or there, with the most notable being that ZiPS doesn’t purely use FIP, but rather estimates how much of an ERA-FIP discrepancy is attributable to the pitcher based on their history of outperforming or underperforming their defenses.

I’ll start with the gainers, diving deeper on a few of the standouts:

In 2024, I included Hunter Brown in my annual Booms and Busts column, and while he did break out that season, he has basically experienced a second breakout last year, going from a good pitcher to a legitimate Cy Young contender. There’s a lot to love about Brown — he misses bats, he doesn’t walk guys, and he’s difficult to hit hard — and nothing really to dislike. There are no hidden spiders lurking in the Statcast data to give you a jump scare, either. At this point, Brown is probably the most irreplaceable member of the Houston Astros, and if he doesn’t fit your definition of a legitimate ace, then there might only be one or two of them in baseball:

Jacob deGrom is the only pitcher who made this list primarily due to improved health, but I’m going to allow it, as we shouldn’t ignore what a few good late-career seasons would to do to buttress his Hall of Fame chances. Honestly, just adding some bulk to his stats and innings would do a lot; while the electorate has changed greatly in the last decade and will continue to do so, I’m not sure 75% of the voters would want to induct a starting pitcher with fewer than 100 wins. I mean, I still would have voted for him, but I’m weird. deGrom has dialed things back slightly in order to stay healthy, and so far it has been a good tradeoff; plus, he’s still throwing harder than the vast majority of pitchers out there:

The 2025 season saw Cristopher Sánchez take over as the ace of the Phillies’ rotation. Sánchez’s improvement was fairly consistent across the board, and it was supported by Statcast data. Especially interesting was his contact rate, which could support an even higher K/9 rate than the career-high 9.45 he posted last year, and didn’t come at the expense of anything else:

Garrett Crochet put up a Cy Young-esque season in 2024, but naturally, a projection system is going to be a bigger believer in a pitcher when he does something like that twice. Pitchers always come with injury risk, but getting through two healthy seasons does have real predictive value for guys coming off of serious injuries. By the end of his Red Sox contract, ZiPS thinks that Crochet will be around the level of Jon Lester and Mel Parnell in the Red Sox southpaw pecking order:

After a phenomenal debut for the Pirates in 2024, Skenes basically did it again in 2025, in 50 more big league innings, and with basically no meaningful regression toward the mean. ZiPS never hated Skenes or anything, but now it loves him even more than it did a year ago. Add in his age and contract situation, and he’s the most valuable pitcher in baseball:

While ZiPS doesn’t think Andrew Abbott is a potential ace, it’s fairly confident that he’s a reasonable no. 2 starter, with some upside remaining in his strikeout rate. He has been the ninth-best pitcher in the majors the last two seasons (minimum 200 combined innings) in hard-hit percentage against, which has enabled him to survive in a very good home run-hitting park and without a great offspeed pitch to befuddle righties:

Before we turn to the decliners, some rapid fire thoughts on the remaining gainers. Nolan McLean probably won’t match the numbers he put up in his first eight starts with the Mets this year, but that’s no reason to be skeptical of him. He improved across a full season in the high minors, facing little resistance from opposing hitters at Triple-A. We could very well be talking about McLean as a Cy Young contender in short order, mirroring Hunter Brown’s trajectory. Shane Smith was one of the highlights on a White Sox team that you probably didn’t watch much otherwise. With his velocity ticking up another notch in his first professional season as a full-time starter, and a changeup that seems almost cruel when it’s working, he’s a legitimate no. 2 starter with room to improve even further. Jesus Lúzardo’s sinker has become a real weapon, and his stats bounced back after an injury-riddled 2024 season. He looks set to get a pretty sizable pay day a year from now, lockout willing.

A sudden dip in strikeout rate from an older pitcher frequently spells imminent misfortune, but Merrill Kelly arrested that decline a bit, and should have at least another year or two as a decent mid-rotation option. ZiPS would still like to see Jacob Misiorowski lose another walk per nine off his stat line, and he may do just that; his 42% first-strike percentage improved to 51% at Triple-A in 2025, and then averaged nearly 58% for the Brewers. ZiPS sees a command collapse as a lot less likely than it did a year ago. Matthew Boyd was shockingly good in eight starts for the Guardians at the end of 2024, and though he didn’t post 10 strikeouts per game again in 2025, he was still good enough be a phenomenal bargain for the Cubs on a two-year, $29.5 million deal. If you believe ZiPS, he’s also pretty important, as the computer sees the Cubs’ rotation depth as one of the things that could stop them in their attempt to knock off the Brewers in the NL Central.

ZiPS knows enough to look at a minor league command pitcher with a healthy dose of skepticism, but Mitch Bratt’s control is so good, and he does miss bats, so the computer thinks there’s a decent chance that he’ll be its next control pitcher obsession after Dean Kremer. Adrian Houser is probably the most puzzling guy on this list for me, as he seems to struggle with a lot of the things ZiPS cares about; he doesn’t throw hard or miss bats, and he can get hit pretty hard. But ZiPS is designed to be more accepting over time when players consistently outperform their peripheral data, as Houser has done in all but his 2024 season. Jack Leiter didn’t dominate last season by any means, but he showed he’s a reasonable mid-rotation option, and he’s still kind of raw, meaning there’s upside left here.

I’m going to talk more briefly about the decliners than the improvers. After all, spring should be about hope, not depression, and there really aren’t any big surprises on this list:

ZiPS was holding out hope for Walker Buehler after a so-so comeback in 2024, but after a 2025 season in which he lost another strikeout per game, added another walk, and saw another tick of velocity evaporate into the Jered Weaver great beyond, ZiPS has gotten to the point where it’s noping out of expecting big things from him in 2026. You know you’re not having a good season when your team cuts you loose in the middle of a hot postseason race. Buehler’s numbers were so poor that I’m not sure he’s going to even have an easy time getting a pillow contract for 2026:

Unlike a lot of the pitchers on this list, ZiPS still believes in Quinn Mathews’ future, and his higher percentile projections are still very good. He remained damned hard to make contact against in 2025, but it’s very difficult to survive walking nearly 20% of the batters you face. With a first-strike percentage down in the low 40s, that brutal walk rate wasn’t flukey, either:

ZiPS always had Roki Sasaki done for a less sterling forecast than fellow NPB transplants Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Shota Imanaga, but he turned out to be even more raw than the projections expected. There’s still a great deal of upside here, but it might take a while for the Dodgers to really find it:

After a successful initial return from Korea, the Cardinals hoped Erick Fedde would continue to be a solid no. 2/3 starter who could eat 160-180 innings. Instead, Fedde’s 2025 was an almost unmitigated disaster, with his strikeout rate plummeting and his walk rate nearly doubling. The Statcast data don’t offer any silver linings:

Sandy Alcantara has the privilege of being the best projected pitcher on the decliners list, as the computer still expects him to be league average in 2026. While he was a lot better than his 5.36 ERA indicated, Alcantara’s return from Tommy John surgery did not go smoothly, so there is significant risk here. I’m actually hopeful that he can comfortably beat his projections. He’s still a target to be traded, but I’m not sure a contender is the best fit for him, at least not one that would really need him to return to his form from a few years ago:

I’ll close with a few thoughts on a few of the more interesting remaining decliners. The computer was hoping that Davis Daniel would develop into a solid, back-of-the-rotation innings-eater given his decent history in the high minors, but he couldn’t even get Triple-A hitters out, which is kind of a useful prerequisite for big leauge success of any kind. Cal Quantrill leaving the Mile High City didn’t do anything to salvage him as an innings-eater, and he only landed a minor league deal this offseason. ZiPS was already projecting a big disappointment from Alexis Díaz in 2025, and he more than fulfilled those expectations, even walking seven batters a game in Triple-A. Neither the Dodgers or Braves had any success fixing him after the Reds threw in the towel, but he’s got at least one more chance remaining after signing a one-year deal with the Rangers.

One of the things that people like to ask me about with the projections is how they change over time, rather than what they are. While knowing the actual projections is, of course, highly useful, it’s also interesting to see who has changed the most in the algorithms since they basically represent the players we should feel differently about than we did before. Knowing how changes in a player affect performance models quite often reveals an interesting fact or two about how players develop and age.

The methodology I’ve chosen here is a simple one: I’m ranking the difference in 2026 WAR as projected now against the 2026 projected WAR as of Opening Day in 2025. For the decliners, I didn’t include the off-the-radar types, because while a fringe High-A prospect hitting a wall at Double-A is good info to have, it’s more impactful to see the declines among more roster-relevant players than some poor fellow who saw his -1.0 WAR projection become a -2.5 WAR one.

I would have been very surprised if you had told me before last season that Jakob Marsee was going to snag a spot on my Rookie of the Year ballot, but he hit .292/.363/.478 (133 wRC+) in 234 plate appearances for the Marlins while playing solid defense in center field, good for 2.2 WAR. Though he wasn’t anywhere near as good in the minors prior to his call-up, his 2025 Triple-A wRC+ of 126 translates into a major league performance that would still be quite positive for a competent defensive center fielder, even if he doesn’t maintain the elite offensive output he showed with Miami. Naturally, Marsee does project to regress considerably, into about a league-average hitter, but all the projection systems still see him as a legitimate starter, which was not the case heading into last season.

Jacob Reimer gives the top of this list two Jakes, and I swear I really tried to make a joke involving the 1990 Chinatown sequel starring Jack Nicholson and Harvey Keitel, but was sadly unable to do so. The Mets may not feel too happy with the ending of their 2025 season, but Reimer’s breakout performance as a prospect is one of the positives they can take away. The presence of Bo Bichette and Brett Baty means that Reimer doesn’t have a clear path to playing third base for the Mets in the majors, but there’s room for him to grab a corner outfield spot, though I think that’s more likely in 2027 than this year.

Obvious AL Rookie of the Year Nick Kurtz has the third-most-improved projection, but unlike Marsee, I had at least an inkling that this might happen. He was one of those players I dread projecting, because when a player has almost no professional experience but an obvious role in the majors, I have to project largely based on college data, which are quite volatile even when you make corrections for conference quality. I noted this in the A’s ZiPS rundown for 2025.

I have no idea if the Nick Kurtz projection is too high, too low, or just right given he has played almost no professional baseball. ZiPS does know his Wake Forest numbers, but college translations are more speculative than crypto currency with meme names.

People have made big sums of money on speculative investments (though I wouldn’t recommend trying to do so), and Kurtz paid off wonderfully for the A’s. After 2025, there’s little doubt about his ability to hit major league pitching. True story: Kurtz is one of only two players I have analyzed under penalty of perjury. I was called for jury duty last October — annoying, during the first few games of the playoffs — and since having “journalist” on your jury questionnaire appears to be something that leads lawyers and the judge to check up on you, I got directly called upon by the defense attorney during voir dire to give my analysis on Roman Anthony’s chances of winning the AL Rookie of the Year award. Strangely, after 90 seconds of my baseball analysis and another question which involved responding to the judge that I couldn’t claim that I wouldn’t be at least slightly distracted with baseball playoff thoughts, I ended up as Juror #2. Hopefully, I was less distracted than Jack Warden’s character in a similar situation. At least I can confidently say that, unlike Nicholas Hoult’s character in Clint Eastwood’s film Juror #2, which was released just before my selection, I was not directly involved in the case.

If Kurtz is as good this season as he was in 2025, he might find his way onto this list again next year!

Sal Stewart crushed it in the minors last year, and was more than respectable for the Reds, and I think there’s a reasonable chance that he fully seizes the job at first base from Spencer Steer fairly early in the season. ZiPS never hated Geraldo Perdomo, but he would’ve been a legitimate MVP candidate last year in a world without Shohei Ohtani, and I’m still a bit flabbergasted that a lot of baseball didn’t seem to notice.

ZiPS thought Ben Rice would hit well entering last season, but his projection took a pretty big dip from his defense at first base, stemming from some really poor minor league defensive numbers. (ZiPS uses ball location data and estimates a catch probability for minor league players.) His glove at first was fine in 2025, so that worry didn’t come to pass, and he beat his offensive projections anyway, meaning we should be even more excited about his bat now. He’ll likely add some WAR to this projection depending on how many stray appearances he gets behind the plate; ZiPS is seeing him here as solely a DH.

ZiPS projected Cal Raleigh to be a star in 2025, but even that turned out to be an undersell, as he put up one of the greatest seasons for a catcher in the history of baseball. Naturally, that has bumped his projection quite a bit, and unless something bad happens or his decline is steeper and earlier than expected, Raleigh has surprisingly started to build a legitimate Hall of Fame case. It’s certainly helpful that he’s a real catcher, not a DH engaging in some baseball-equipment-fetish cosplay.

Zach Cole was hardly a big name prospect, but he destroyed the high minors in 2025, and seemingly has solidified a fourth outfielder job in a Houston position group that’s shallow enough that he could conceivably grab a full-time spot if he works out well. Getting to run with the full-time job at third for the Rays, Caminero busted out for 45 homers and a spot in the middle of the lineup written in permanent marker. Yeah, it’s too bad he didn’t end up a shortstop in the majors, but let’s not be too greedy.

Dylan Jasso and Zach Ehrhard are the two most obscure names on the list, and while they have the weakest projections, they both now have a pretty good shot at being useful role players in the majors. Jasso is probably not going to hit enough to play first base regularly, but if his defense plays at second or third in the majors, he could be a Joey Wendle-esque Useful Dude.

Every year that Aaron Judge decides to skip the whole aging thing and instead put up a historically great season, he’s likely to end up this list the following February. Time always wins in the end, but I’m always happy to see someone give it a good thrashing on the way.

Carson Roccaforte is an interesting outfield candidate for the Royals, and while we should be suspicious of high-walk, low-contact minor leaguers, he’s also fast enough and a good enough defensive center fielder that he could escape being one of those walk-heavy prospects that just don’t work out. After a dynamite first full professional season, Twins first-rounder Kaelen Culpepper has quickly become one of the projection system’s favorites, and he will appear prominently on the ZiPS Top 100 next week.

Many were disappointed in Drake Baldwin’s projection going into the 2025 season, and I assured people that it could go up quickly if he had a big season. He earned his Rookie of the Year award, and since my pants are not on fire, his projection did in fact improve quickly.

And now, the frowny portion of our proceedings.

ZiPS had been banging the Eguy Rosario drum for a while. It didn’t think anything crazy like he’d be a superstar, but he was an infielder in his early 20s with experience at all four infield positions who had shown impressive power in the high minors, even after making proper adjustments for the Pacific Coast League. In a few cups of espresso in the majors, he wasn’t overmatched either, with a .783 OPS and five homers in just 100 plate appearances. But after not making the Padres roster at the start of 2025, he had a disaster of a season, with his bat first disappearing so quickly that he was sent down to the Arizona Complex League for a spell, and finished the season with a combined .192/.266/.297 line across four minor league levels. Quite shocking for a guy coming off a .900 OPS season for Triple-A El Paso! Naturally, that has sent his stock collapsing faster than any market crash I can compare it to in order for this analogy to work. Rosario was recently designated for assignment, and despite this, he’s probably worth a pickup for a rebuilding team.

ZiPS still likes Brayden Taylor’s glove quite a lot, but his struggles upon promotion to Double-A has caused his chances of hitting well enough to start in the majors to take a big hit, especially since he wasn’t young for the level. My colleague David Laurila wrote about Taylor’s season on this very website last week.

Thayron Liranzo was acquired by the Detroit Tigers in the 2024 Jack Flaherty trade with the Dodgers (along with Trey Sweeney), and the hope was that he would be pushing for a catcher/DH role-player spot at this point, but he struggled to hit at Double-A, a bad sign for a catching prospect who is far from a guarantee to be able to handle the position in the majors. The only silver lining is that catching prospects tend to have fairly odd developmental patterns, as catcher is the position where the physical aspects of playing the position defensively appear to have a real effect on offensive development.

Jarred Kelenic’s projections get notably worse every season, and this year isn’t an exception. It’s bad enough that he’s barely hit at all in the majors, but he’s struggling a bit more every year against minor league pitching. Kelenic’s Triple-A wRC+ by year: 147, 127, 116, then after a full year in the majors in 2024, a 62 in 2025. He turns 27 this summer, so the once-reasonable “don’t panic, he’s just 22!” arguments no longer hold water. I’m not sure he can even crack the White Sox roster on merit.

I was hopeful that Enrique Bradfield Jr. would be the eventual successor to Cedric Mullins in Baltimore, but while he’s fast and can handle center field defensively, he can’t afford to be a middling contact hitter, since he needs to put the ball in play to leverage his speed effectively. He’s certainly not compensating his whiffs with power.

If you’re still wondering why the Orioles aggressively brought in Pete Alonso and Taylor Ward, note how many of them are here. Alongside Bradfield, there are four more O’s, giving them a third of this list. Joining Bradfield are Jackson Holliday, Heston Kjerstad, Colton Cowser, and Alfredo Velásquez. If this list stretched out to 30 players, we’d also add in Payton Eeles (acquired in November), Coby Mayo, and Tyler O’Neill. I can’t say whether or not the Orioles pay any attention to the ZiPS projections, but I wouldn’t be surprised if their methods had similar concerns about their non-Henderson offensive players.

The biggest name remaining in free agency is now off the board, as Framber Valdez agreed to a three-year, $115 million contract with the Detroit Tigers on Wednesday night. The 32-year-old lefty, who ranked fourth on our Top 50 Free Agents list, hit the open market for the first time in his major league career this winter after parts of eight seasons with the Astros. In his final season in Houston, Valdez put up a 3.66 ERA and a 3.37 FIP in 31 starts over 192 innings, good enough to reach the 4.0-WAR mark for the third time in his career. His new deal with the Tigers comes with an opt out after the 2027 season, $20 million of the deal in the form of a signing bonus, and some unknown amount of deferred money, which will reduce the overall value of his contract by, well, an unknown amount.

For the Tigers, the benefits of adding Valdez to the rotation are quite clear. Of course, he would improve any team, since having too many good pitchers has been an actual problem zero times in baseball history, but he fits Detroit’s needs like a glove. The Tigers have managed to get their rotation through the season successfully over the last two years despite a lack of depth, but come playoff time, they have basically gone with a starting staff of Tarik Skubal and a trio of shrug emojis. Don’t believe me? Detroit has played 15 games across the last two postseasons, and I will now run down the full list of five-inning starts by Tigers pitchers with last names that aren’t Skubal:

[…]

[…]

Oh, sorry, I was eating tacos. There aren’t any players on that list. Signing Valdez gives the Tigers a dependable no. 2 starter, one who is better and with a better health record than Jack Flaherty. While I’m chaotic-neutral enough to get a thrill out of A.J. Hinch’s admitting in press conferences that he and the front office were basically coming up with the pitcher assignments as they went along, I’m sure that’s not an ideal scenario for making decisions. Read the rest of this entry »

One of my favorite sports movie tropes is the Scrappy Underdogs Who Discover the Power of Friendship. While there are myriad variations on the theme, the basic template involves a group of lovable losers facing off against some big baddie and initially being humiliated. As the movie goes on, the various underdogs unite against their common foe, and through determination, grit, moxie, and typically some shenanigans, they meet their antagonists again, only on more even footing. Ideally, our ragtag band emerges victorious, but even if they don’t, they’ve at least learned something about themselves and friendship, often earning the grudging respect of their rivals along the way.

The Yankees were once baseball’s Evil Empire, but these days, the Dodgers reign supreme. They’re rich, they’re smart, they play in a ritzy city, and they would definitely look down on the kids at the ramshackle summer camp across the lake. As it has in most recent seasons, ZiPS projects the Dodgers to be the best team in baseball, and the newly-released FanGraphs Playoff Odds agree. But baseball needn’t accept its projected fate. It’s time to fight back! It’s time to unite some scrappy underdogs — at least on a spreadsheet. And so, with a tip of the hat to Tom Tango, whose theoretical inspired me to put together this piece, to the computer!

To construct our ragtag squad, we’ll start with the worst projected team in baseball, the Rockies, and ask ZiPS to build the best 26-man roster it can to square off against the Dodgers in a fictional seven-game World Series. I’m looking for two probability thresholds here: A Fighting Chance (a one-in-three shot of winning the series) and the Hunter Becomes the Hunted (the underdogs pass the 50% mark). If a roster made entirely of Rockies fails to meet these thresholds, then the players from the next-worst projected team will join the pool. We’ll keep repeating the process until our heroes emerge victorious. Read the rest of this entry »

12:03

Dan Szymborski: Greetings friends! I am enjoying a balmy 14 degrees now, a full 24 degrees of warming in the last four hours!

12:03

Dan Szymborski: If only my mazda was a convertible so I could go enjoy the day

12:03

Dan Szymborski: ZiPS doesn’t necessarily see them as better

12:03

Dan Szymborski: It already liked PCA a ton. Sees Bregman/Tucker swap a wash. No more excited about the rotation and nobody has a projection as good as Steele last year. Likes bullpen a bit better

Read the rest of this entry »

In case you missed them, the 2026 ZiPS projections are now officially in the site’s projection database for your delight (or disdain), and reflect all of the signings and trades that have transpired this offseason. There’s still a week and a half to go before pitchers and catchers report, but with the full set of projections available, and it being so cold and snowy outside that I have little desire to leave my house, this seemed like a good opportunity to run the first set of ZiPS projected standings for the 2026 season. These, of course, aren’t the final projected standings, as there are likely to be significant changes between now and Opening Day. Instead, think of them as the “state of the preseason” projections.

These standings are the result of a million simulations, not results obtained from binomial or even beta-binomial magic. The methodology isn’t identical to the one we use for our Playoff Odds, which will launch soon. So how does ZiPS calculate the season? Stored within ZiPS are the first- through 99th-percentile projections for each player. I start by making a generalized depth chart, using our Depth Charts as a jumping off point. Since these are my curated projections, I make changes based on my personal feelings about who will receive playing time as filtered through arbitrary whimsy my reasoned understanding of each team. ZiPS then generates a million versions of each team in Monte Carlo fashion.

After that is done, ZiPS applies another set of algorithms with a generalized distribution of injury risk that changes the baseline plate appearances or innings pitched for each player. ZiPS then automatically and proportionally “fills in” playing time from the next players on the list to get to a full slate of plate appearances and innings. 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 ultimate team is the St. Louis Cardinals.

Batters

If you looked up “.500 team” in the dictionary, you’d find, well, nothing. THAT’S NOT HOW DICTIONARIES WORK. But if they did have extensive listings of colloquialisms and an editor obsessed with baseball, you might see the 2025 Cardinals. Despite not falling behind by double digits in the NL Central race until late in the season, the Cardinals certainly never felt like they were ever realistically in any playoff race. At the same time, they were also never enough of a doormat team to be interesting out of ineptitude. The Cards spent the season basically playing out the string, in baseball limbo while fans waited out the swan song year of executive vice-president John Mozeliak, with most of the interest surrounding when/if various veterans would be traded.

While roughly a .500-looking team has some wild card upside, St. Louis has the look of a team with an incredibly low ceiling in the short term, like on the level of that room near the start of Willy Wonka’s factory tour. Only Masyn Winn is a high threat to put up a 4-WAR season, and he’s already at that level, not someone who can break out to that level. But except for right field, since ZiPS has long since thrown in the towel on Jordan Walker, the Cardinals also aren’t bad anywhere in their lineup, either. Brendan Donovan is extremely versatile, but he could be traded sometime during the season, if not before then, and players like Nolan Gorman and JJ Wetherholt can also collect plate appearances playing a variety of positions. Wetherholt’s first full professional season was a dynamite one, and he gets a strong projection entering his first year in the big leagues. ZiPS at least sees him as an upgrade on the departed Nolan Arenado in 2026.

ZiPS thinks Lars Nootbaar is still young enough to bounce back from a real down season in 2025. When that may happen, though, is an open question. Last fall, he had surgery to shave down his heels to remedy his Haglund’s deformities, and reading the first half of this sentence makes me wonder if my brain has actually finally lost its last connection with reality. Nootbaar’s lack of ability to do much against lefties limits his upside, but like most of the rest of the team, he’ll be… fine. Also in that wide range of adequacy is Victor Scott II, who plays defense well enough these days to carry his abysmal offense, and Alec Burleson at first, who needs a lefty-crushing platoon partner, though he did improve some against southpaws last season. The Cardinals’ catching situation could be really interesting, depending on when and if Iván Herrera gets back to playing catcher. Even if he doesn’t, he’s shown he’s a good enough player to have value as a DH, and Pedro Pagés hits just enough that he’s not a problem starting behind the plate.

Luckily, the mid- and long-term outlooks for St. Louis are sunnier. Wetherholt has already been mentioned, but ZiPS thinks both Jimmy Crooks and Leonardo Bernal could hold their own as major league catchers. Joshua Baez has a strong long-term ZiPS projection, and the computer sees him as someone who could (and should) replace Walker if/when the former top prospect doesn’t come around.

Pitchers

As with the starting lineup, the Cards look like they’re going to have a very deep rotation, but one that’s almost mindblowingly average. Michael McGreevy has the best projected ERA of the starters, which ought to tell you a lot about the state of the rotation. If you believe ZiPS, St. Louis could field about three major league rotations of starting pitchers with an ERA+ somewhere in the 90s. So there’s not a lot of difference between the guys we have as getting the bulk of the innings on the depth chart (Matthew Liberatore, Andre Pallante, Dustin May, Kyle Leahy, Richard Fitts), and the guys who aren’t (Quinn Mathews, Tink Hence, Hunter Dobbins, Ixan Henderson, Tekoah Roby if not for the Tommy John surgery). In other words, this group probably won’t crack the top 10 in starting pitcher WAR, but there are enough spares that it likely won’t be an embarrassment, either.

While that’s not great for the team’s chances to contend in 2026, that does suggest a path to long-term benefits. The deep stable of no. 3 and no. 4 starters is decidedly on the young side, all in their 20s, and at least some of them ought to develop into something better. Mathews is probably the best candidate to do so, as is Hence, even though there’s a reasonable chance that the latter pitches out of the bullpen in the short term. Liam Doyle didn’t get an official projection here because of his lack of professional experience, but if I instruct ZiPS to use his college translations, he has a very good long-term outlook, too.

ZiPS projects the bullpen as below average, but not in dumpster-fire territory. The computer only really likes three relievers, JoJo Romero, Matt Svanson, and Gordon Graceffo, and a fourth if you believe the Cards will use Hence in relief in 2026. Outside of that quartet, there are a lot of guys with projected ERAs just above four in relief, firmly in C- territory. It’s probably not quite this bad, as the multitude of starting pitching options means the pen will get some reinforcements if the top starters are healthy, so someone like Leahy could end up here after all. In any case, this is a middling bullpen, one that probably won’t approach the production of last year’s unit, which had the ninth-best relief WAR in baseball.

All told, ZiPS sees St. Louis as, you guessed it, about a .500 team.

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.