Before the start of the season, the Atlanta Braves were the consensus pick to win the NL East. While it wasn’t unanimous – try getting a few dozen writers to fully agree on something – 22 of 25 FanGraphs writers predicted the Braves to win the division for the seventh straight season. Sportsbooks offered odds on Atlanta that had an implied probability of 75-80% for winning the division. ZiPS projected the Braves to win the most games in the majors and gave them a 63% chance to take the NL East crown. But as we approach the end of the first third of the season, it’s the Philadelphia Phillies who are on top of the division with the best record in baseball. The team’s six-game lead over Atlanta isn’t an insurmountable barrier, but it’s still a comfortable cushion for this point of the season. So, how concerned should the Braves be? And how long do they have to overcome their rivals and keep their division streak alive?

Frequently, when I discuss surprise first-place teams at this point of the season, I compare the situation to a hypothetical foot race between Usain Bolt and me. It goes without saying that Bolt is a much faster runner than I am, to the degree that he’d probably beat me in a race hopping on one foot. But what if he gave me a head start so I could get a sufficient lead? How far ahead would I have to be to have a chance to hold off the world’s fastest man? Uhhh, 10 steps from the finish line by the time he starts running might get it done. Obviously, this isn’t the perfect analogy, because even if Bolt is the Braves of running, I certainly am not the Phillies. But you get the idea: At some point in the season, a division race becomes a question of time, not talent.

First things first, let’s take a look at the current simulated ZiPS projected standings, through Thursday night’s games.

Well, at least if you go by the ZiPS projections, Atlanta fans aren’t getting the happiest version of this tale. ZiPS still thinks the Braves are the better team, but the margin has narrowed considerably. What was a 10-win gap in March has thinned to just a hair over a three-win separation per 162 games (20 points of winning percentage, to be exact). In fact, the Phillies are now projected to have an almost identical probability of winning the division as the Braves did at the start of the season, despite Atlanta’s aforementioned 10-game edge; as I remind people, the future is almost always far more uncertain than you think.

This is actually an impressively durable change, which further complicates matters for the Braves. Projections for teams don’t usually move quickly because, well, baseball history says they shouldn’t. ZiPS has been doing team projections since 2005. If all you had to go on to project the last two-thirds of a season was a team’s preseason projection in ZiPS and the team’s actual record for the first-third of the season, the best mix based on two decades of projections is about two-thirds ZiPS and one-third actual record.

The offenses tell much of the story, so let’s start with Philadelphia’s offense. Here are the differences between ZiPS preseason WAR and the current projected final WAR. The latter consists of the WAR already on the books and the rest-of-season projections. Remember, this already includes all those grumpy old regressions toward the mean.

That’s eight players projected to finish with at least a half-win more than at the start of the season. Castellanos is the only Phillies player whose projected WAR is now a half-win worse, but the projection systems didn’t expect much from him going into the season anyway. None of the hitters who are smashing the ball right now are expected to turn into midnight pumpkins. Even Bohm, the infielder ZiPS was most suspicious of, is now in the top 10 for most projected WAR added for 2025. And it’s not shocking that Harper, Realmuto, Turner (who is currently on the IL), and Stott are projected to maintain their strong starts.

As for the pitching, we projected the Phillies to have the second-best rotation in baseball, so their awesomeness is hardly surprising. Philadelphia’s stars have more than balanced out some of the outfield question marks and its depth hasn’t truly been tested yet, except for Turner’s injury — and as Jon Becker noted in his morning column on Tuesday, Turner’s replacements in the lineup, Sosa and Kody Clemens, have excelled in his absence.

As for the Braves, their vaunted offense has come out rather impotent. They rank seventh in the NL in runs scored, which isn’t disaster territory, but Ronald Acuña Jr., Matt Olson, and Austin Riley have all been just barely above league-average hitters this year. Sean Murphy has been out with an oblique injury that he suffered on Opening Day, but that’s been less of an impact because Travis d’Arnaud has been solid as the everyday backstop. Things might be a lot worse right now if not for the performances of d’Arnaud and Marcell Ozuna.

Atlanta’s current place in the standings is the fault of its underperforming stars, not its complementary talent. And that’s what makes it tough for the Braves to turn things around with a few trades, as they did in 2021 before surging to win the World Series. It’d be one thing if the problem were someone like Orlando Arcia, because the Braves wouldn’t think twice about benching or trading him to acquire a better shortstop. But when it comes to Acuña, Olson, and Riley, all Atlanta can do is wait for them to catch fire. What adds to this general feeling of helplessness is that the team’s biggest problem on the pitching side is Spencer Strider’s season-ending UCL injury. Even if the Braves were to try and swing a trade, their farm system is one of the weakest in baseball right now and only a few teams are currently out of contention. Major reinforcements aren’t on the way anytime soon.

The good news for Atlanta is that its stars are capable of breaking out of their funks at any moment, but the longer it takes them to turn things around, the more time the Phillies have to pull away. To get an idea of how much time the Braves have left, I took the current projected standings and had ZiPS simulate the rest of the season with both teams posting the same record going forward (for the sake of the example, I’m going with a 94-win pace) to see how quickly the divisional probabilities would change. Without picking up ground but also not losing any, Atlanta would slip to two-to-one divisional underdogs by June 10, and hit the three-to-one spot on the last day of the month. If this continues to the morning of the trade deadline, the Braves would find themselves with only an 18% projected chance to win the NL East, while the Phillies’ divisional odds would climb to 81%. (The Mets would still retain a few tenths of a percentage point.)

Let’s be clear: Despite the relatively gloomy outlook for Atlanta, a six-game deficit heading into Memorial Day Weekend is not insurmountable. In fact, the Phillies have the same divisional odds now as the Braves did two months ago. That said, for the first time since 2011, the NL East is the Philadelphia’s division to lose.

12:01

Dan Szymborski: Greetings!

12:02

Dan Szymborski: I’m sad to report that the chili I was making last week when we chatted did not turn out well.

12:02

Dan Szymborski: I got careless with the salt and the whole thing was way too salty.

12:02

Dan Szymborski: So I had to eat it with VERY improper cheese and sour cream added in to mute the saltiness.

12:04

Dan Szymborski: Both are certainly making their cases. Pitching development is weird, so when a guys’ working out a lot of the time it’s just him working out

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One of my menagerie of cats, a black cat named Cassiopeia, has a mortal enemy. Not the vacuum cleaner or an empty food bowl like my other cats, but a bright red cardinal that has been hanging around my backyard for quite a while. Cassie’s bête noire survives because she’s an indoor cat, but if for some reason Cassie ever gained access to the cardinal, that bird would be toast. The St. Louis Cardinals are in a not-dissimilar position. A stable, secure franchise for two decades, their careful planning and prudent measures have kept them away from the cat. But as things have gone wrong for the Cardinals over the last year, they’ve found themselves on a precarious perch, short of options other than unpleasant ones.

I don’t think I’m going out on a limb when I talk positively about the long-term stability of the Cardinals. Before last year’s dreadful 71-91 campaign, the franchise had not been under .500 since 2007, and to find a season with more losses, you have to go all the way back to 1990, when this grumpy aging Gen X’er was a grumpy 12-year-old. Last year’s 4.54 ERA doesn’t sound particularly unusual for a lousy team, but it was for the Cards. The pitching staff’s 114 ERA- was the worst for the franchise in a full season (1994 was an even worse disaster, but a truncated one) since 1913.

All in all, this is an organization that even in rough years could never be described as a dumpster fire. And then last year happened. If we go through the Cardinals’ history of ZiPS projections, we can see a team that was a titan of above-average competence.

This year, the Cardinals were projected to have a bit of a bounceback from 2023, but 83-79 should have served as a bit of a red flag, as only once had ZiPS projected a Cards team to finish with a worse record. The NL Central is one of the weakest divisions and the Cards are not a team in the middle of a rebuild, but one trying to win now. This was an organization that tried to go back to its usual playbook and retool carefully and conservatively. Sonny Gray was the highlight of the winter, signed to a three-year, $75 million contract, but the other signings were one-year stopgaps, either to patch holes in the rotation with no. 4 starters (Lance Lynn, Kyle Gibson) or fill out the back of the depth chart (Brandon Crawford, Matt Carpenter, Keynan Middleton).

Staying the course may work as a long-term strategy when you’re dependably winning 87-93 games a year and your farm system is steadily reinforcing the parent club’s depth with unheralded prospects that end up being real contributors, like Lars Nootbaar, Tommy Edman, Brendan Donovan, and Harrison Bader, among others. This strategy basically involved pretending 2023 didn’t happen, and it ignored a key aspect that also needed addressing: the team’s offense. While the lineup didn’t collapse as drastically as the pitching staff, the team finished 10th in the National League in runs scored, with three of its key contributors in their 30s (Nolan Arenado, Paul Goldschmidt, and Willson Contreras). Yet the most significant move the Cardinals made with their position players this offseason was a subtraction, when they traded left fielder Tyler O’Neill to the Red Sox. The Cardinals certainly couldn’t have counted on the oft-injured O’Neill to stay healthy enough to be one of the most productive power hitters in the league, as he is right now with the Red Sox (.255/.366/.540, 11 HR, 146 wRC+, 1.1 WAR in 38 games entering Tuesday), but just to shed $6 million in salary, the trade cost St. Louis depth and upside that it no longer had to spare.

It was certainly within the realm of probability that the pitching triage would be effective and Arenado and Goldschmidt would play more like they had in 2022 than last year, but so far, that hasn’t been the case. And now the Cards face a serious problem: The expectations of their talent are simply a lot lower than they were a year ago, or even two months ago. To try to demonstrate this in a straightforward manner, I started with everyone projected to make one plate appearance or throw one inning in the majors the rest of the season. To me, that’s a realistic definition of the short-term talent a team intends to use. Then, I grouped each of these players by team. From there, using these groupings, I looked at each of the 30 teams’ projected WAR for 2025, as of Tuesday morning, and compared it to the 2025 outlooks from before the 2023 season and before the 2024 season. This list doesn’t make any accounting for free agents; I’m simply trying to get a feel for the trajectory of the talent each team has access to at this moment.

The absolute numbers don’t really matter here, so don’t read too much into them. Few teams, if any, will use the same number of players this season, so these projections are based on a varying amount of players for teams, depending on how each club deploys its roster. What does matter is the change in these numbers.

And, as you can see, the Cardinals have the third-largest dropoff in baseball, from before the 2023 season and before Opening Day this year to now. What’s going on here? The simple answer is that many of the players the Cardinals are relying on the most (Arenado, Goldschmidt, the injured Contreras, Gray, Lynn, and Gibson, among others) are in the decline stage of their careers.

Meanwhile, quick reinforcements from within are unlikely. Of the 11 pitchers who have thrown at least 20 innings at Double-A or Triple-A, only Connor Thomas has a translated ERA in ZiPS under four. Perhaps more concerning, Thomas is the only one of the 11 whose projected 2025 ERA is better now than it was before this season began.

The story is the same for the hitters. Entering Tuesday, 21 players in the high minors have at least 60 plate appearances, and even in that really small sample size, only two of them (José Fermín and Jimmy Crooks) have a translated OPS north of .750. More than half the players (12) have OPS translations below .600.

Two-thirds of the hitters have seen their projections for 2025 get worse. Even more troubling is how few of these projected numbers are actually useful to a major league club. Only two hitters project with a .700 OPS in the majors in 2025, and only then just barely.

Further complicating matters is that the diminished projections haven’t been limited to veterans like Goldschmidt. Rather, they’re also the case for pretty much all of the core hitters on the roster who were expected to be “the next generation” of Cardinals. The departed O’Neill may have resuscitated his career with his 2024 so far, but after two injury-affected seasons, he had dropped in status from a player who was eighth in the NL MVP balloting in 2021 to one the Cardinals were happy to see go to save a little cash. Jordan Walker was demoted to Triple-A Memphis before the end of April, and while he’s hit somewhat better since then, a wRC+ of 111 down there is not impressive for a player whose contributions will almost entirely come on offense. Nolan Gorman’s hits this year have been softer than an erotic thriller edited for network television, resulting in 10 points shaved off his projected 2025 wRC+ (115 to 105). Dylan Carlson bears less responsibility for 2024 given the shoulder injury that cost him a month, but after bursting into the majors with a solid rookie season in 2021, he now looks like a fourth outfielder — if that.

Here’s what makes things even trickier for the Cardinals: Despite their 21-26 record and third-place standing, they’ve won six of their last eight games entering Wednesday — their game Tuesday night against the Orioles was suspended due to rain in the sixth inning with the score tied, 1-1 — and have an 19.1% probability to make the postseason, per our Depth Charts playoff odds. That certainly isn’t a great chance, but considering the lack of options to turn things around in time for short-term future seasons, it might be more appealing for the organization to stay the course with the hope of making an unlikely, but hardly impossible, playoff push than it would be to make a drastic decision now that might be more beneficial in the long run.

It’s worth mentioning that, as of Tuesday morning, ZiPS projected St. Louis to have a 15.3% playoff probability because ZiPS is normally more optimistic about the Cardinals than is Depth Charts. ZiPS generally factors in organizational depth more than DC does, and the Cardinals typically have excellent depth. This year, that is not the case. Additionally, even with the expectation that Goldschmidt and Arenado are likely to better the rest of the way than their early season performance, as well as the assumption that Contreras will come back strong from his brutal arm fracture, ZiPS projects the Cardinals to have the 11th-best offense in the National League for the remainder of the season. And the rotation projects no better, at 12th of the 15 NL teams. Amusingly, the bullpen may be the team’s strongest asset, a reversal of fortune from previous years.

In other words, the Cards could very well win 85 games and sneak into a wild card spot. But that’s the hope of a mediocre team, not a top contender. It’s a risky one, too; the prospect of having some chance of making the playoffs may keep the team willing to tread water, again trying to filibuster the decision of whether to push in all their chips or to fold their hand. If the Cardinals decide to punt, some of their players would still have value to other teams in a trade. Closer Ryan Helsley, lefty setup man JoJo Romero, Nootbaar, and Goldschmidt, assuming he starts to hit again, all could fetch significant prospects for the farm system. The 33-year-old Arenado would also net a nice return so long as the Cardinals would agree to pay a chunk of his remaining salary. (After this season, he’ll make $52 million over the final three years of his contract.) Or, if St. Louis wants to double down and try to win in 2025 without selling before the deadline, there are some enticing players who will be free agents after the season, such as Corbin Burnes, Max Fried, Pete Alonso, and – dare I say – Juan Soto. But the organization’s track record suggests that neither of these approaches is likely; the Cardinals don’t tear everything down, and they don’t play at the top of the free agent market.

As things stand, time is not on the organization’s side. When I project the results for the NL Central in 2025 and 2026, using each team’s in-system talent and therefore not accounting for potential future moves, the Cardinals continue to slide relative to the other teams in the division. In fact, St. Louis is the only one of the five teams that has a worse projection for 2026 projection than it does for 2024. The system-only projection for 2025 pegs the Cardinals to win only 79 games, followed by 77 wins for 2026. In these projections, the young pitching in the high minors would replace the team’s current starters, except for Gray, but Hence is the only one who projects to have a high ceiling. Meanwhile, on offense, ZiPS projects the team to continue to get almost nothing from the farm. That’s a problem for many reasons, but one of the most immediate ones is that Goldschmidt, who turns 37 in September, will be a free agent after the season. Even if he isn’t as bad as he’s looked so far this year, it’s unlikely that he’ll be as good as he once was in the future; recognizing this, it would make sense for the Cardinals to move on from him. Except, because of their uninspiring hitting prospects, the Cardinals don’t have a good option to replace even a diminished version of Goldschmidt. Walker and Gorman are natural third basemen, so one of them could take over for Arenado if the Cardinals trade him, but that would open up a hole somewhere else on their roster that would need to be filled by players who aren’t good enough to replace the lost production.

The Cards have long been one of the most competent organizations in the league. But at the moment, steadiness looks like indecision and conservatism looks meek. My cat Cassie will never get the chance to catch her cardinal, but there’s a very real possibility that the predators in the NL Central have successfully captured theirs.

12:01

Dan Szymborski: There’s a time for every purpose under heaven, even SzymChat

12:03

Dan Szymborski: One thing is I’m not sure taht wRC+ is working correctly on the FG page at the moment

12:04

Dan Szymborski: But it’s still an extremely small sample

12:04

Dan Szymborski: and full fat ZiPS isn’t that much more negative

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Statcast released bat tracking data to the general public this week, and having looked at the numbers in full, it’s hard not to have Giancarlo Stanton on the brain. It’s also hard not to have some mixed feelings about the gargantuan slugger. His power is awe-inspiring, whether it results in line drives that the cameras have trouble keeping up with, casual bombs that touch the clouds, or (and this is my personal favorite) the 121-mph quarantine-era blast that went along with one of the loudest expletives uttered on television in baseball history:

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Shohei Ohtani has a tendency to make absurd things happen. When he came over to the United States, some were skeptical that his offense would hold up as well as his pitching. Then, he came over and did just fine. Whether it’s being a two-time MVP as a two-way player or making it seem plausible that he could have a 10-WAR season as only a designated hitter, Ohtani has a knack for turning fiction into fact. Now, leading the league in batting average and not trailing by much in home runs and RBI, he has a real chance at another rare feat: winning a Triple Crown.

Going into last season, Ohtani appeared to be an excellent hitter, but we always couched that excellence as partially being due to his ability to also pitch. It’s true that he chased 50 homers in 2021, but his triple-slash line from 2018-2022 of .267/.354/.532 (137 wRC+) had the look of a very good hitter, not one that could claim transcendence on that basis alone. But in 2023, he hit .300 for the first time en route to setting career highs for each of the three triple-slash stats (.304/.412/.654), wRC+ (180), and position player WAR (6.5). He was also on a 51-homer pace when an oblique injury in early September ended his season prematurely; he finished with 44 dingers in 135 games. Projection systems were naturally skeptical about last season establishing a new baseline of offensive performance, generally seeing that as a peak-type season, with a more “normal” 140-150 wRC+ likely in 2024. In fact, ZiPS’ zStats – its equivalent of Statcast xStats with a few more ingredients in the stew and more explicitly designed for predictive purposes – saw Ohtani’s expected 2023 line at .289/.377/.590 with 38 homers. A great season to be sure, but still a 99-point dropoff in OPS from his actual numbers.

And 2024? Well, that’s a horse of a different color. Ohtani’s taken another step forward, entering play Friday slashing .355/.425/.678. But this time around, zStats sees Ohtani’s performance as completely warranted by his Statcast, plate discipline, speed, and spray data. In fact, as of Thursday morning, ZiPS thinks that his 2024 line very slightly underrates him! ZiPS thinks that he ought to be hitting .354/.442/.708 considering how he’s played. I cannot possibly overstate how unusual it is for a player to be having this strong a season and still be underperforming. Usually, for even the most talented players, at least a small part of their career-best OPS can be attributed to luck. Ohtani’s 1.103 OPS, a career high, appears to be the result of some slight misfortune. His zOPS is 1.150. That’s ridiculous!

The first thing to look at it when it comes to Ohtani’s Triple Crown chances is his BABIP, to see if his current average is sustainable. Because of the volatility of BABIP, especially across smaller samples, you should bet on a hitter’s BABIP to regress toward his mean over time as luck balances out.

A career BABIP of at least .350 is incredibly rare; only 13 players in MLB history have done that over a minimum of 5,000 plate appearances, and most of those are from the early days of baseball, when BABIP was much higher than it is today. Looking just since the start of the divisional era, only 16 players have a lifetime BABIP of .340 or higher, topped by Rod Carew at .362 and Derek Jeter at .350. All of this is to say that there’s some justified skepticism when someone’s BABIP is pushing .400, and Ohtani currently has a .391 BABIP. There must be a lot of luck involved, right? Perhaps not! At .401, Ohtani’s zBABIP laps the field, and zBABIP is more predictive of future BABIP than actual BABIP. Here are the zBABIP leaders this season, along with their BABIP marks (minimum 100 PA).

We’re less than a quarter of the way through the season, and ZiPS already thinks that only 13 of the 210 players with 100 plate appearances have earned a .350 BABIP. Yet there’s Ohtani over .400, with only a single player within 30 points. As such, factoring in zBABIP, the full model of ZiPS projects Ohtani to be a .318 hitter the rest of the way, rather than the .276 hitter that the current rest-of-season model — which does not use zBABIP — expects him to be. That .042 range is easily one of the largest differences between the full and in-season models that I can remember.

In the end, ZiPS projects a 22% chance that Ohtani will win the batting title, which is almost half the battle for the Triple Crown because home runs and RBI are highly correlated with each other.

I probably don’t need to tell you about Ohtani’s power credentials at this point, but I’m going to do it anyway. Remember that word “transcendent” from above? Well, that’s Ohtani as a power hitter in 2024. His Statcast hard-hit rate is over 60% and he’s crushed more barrels than Carrie Nation, with 30 already this season. Since the debut of Statcast in 2015, only a single player, Aaron Judge in 2022, has hit 90 barrels in a season (106). Ohtani is currently on pace for about 120, hitting one at nearly a 25% clip, which is an absurd rate. ZiPS projects Ohtani to finish this season with 45 homers and a 52% chance of leading the National League.

The trickiest part of the trio is RBI, as Ohtani currently sits 11 behind NL leader Marcell Ozuna. But the full model of ZiPS gives Ohtani a solid 22% chance of leading the NL in RBI; the model is skeptical that Ozuna is this good. He’s probably not going to slug .864 with runners in scoring position for the rest of the year, as he has so far, nor will Ohtani continue to slug .275 in such situations.

In the 52% of simulations in which Ohtani leads the NL in homers, he also leads in RBI 70% of the time – remember, they’re highly correlated – giving him a 36% chance to lead the league in both homers and RBI. Add in batting average and ZiPS puts Ohtani’s odds at winning the NL Triple Crown at 14.6%. (And, for what it’s worth, ZiPS projects Ohtani to have a 5.2% probability to lead the majors in all three three categories.)

Throughout his career, Ohtani has expanded our understanding of what is possible, so much so that accomplishing something with 15% odds seems easy for him. And that’s a pretty good description of greatness: making the nearly impossible seem ordinary.

At 21-16, the Texas Rangers are first in the AL West standings, but it hasn’t been an easy stroll so far. They have an entire rotation of quality starting pitchers on the injured list, and while their offense has remained relatively intact, it has not yet been at full strength. Third baseman Josh Jung had wrist surgery in early April, first baseman Nathaniel Lowe missed the first three weeks of the season with a sore oblique, and shortstop Corey Seager has started slow after a sports hernia surgery in January kept him out for most of spring training. And on Monday, rookie Wyatt Langford, a first-round pick last June who rocketed to the majors to start this season, landed on the IL with a right hamstring strain, retroactive to Sunday. He’s expected to miss three to four weeks, which should keep him out until the end of the month.

Rangers will place Wyatt Langford on IL with a hamstring strain, slightly more severe than Grade 1, Bruce Bochy says. It will be 3-4 week absence

— Evan Grant (@Evan_P_Grant) May 5, 2024

Langford started Saturday’s game, a 15-4 win over the Royals, in left field but was removed in the fifth inning with what was initially diagnosed as hamstring tightness; an MRI later revealed the strain. Texas called up infielder Jonathan Ornelas from Triple-A Round Rock to fill out the 26-man roster.

Mired in a 1-for-15 slump following his first major league homer, an inside-the-parker on April 28, Langford has a brutal 68 wRC+ over his first 31 big league games. Things were bad enough that it was fair to wonder if the Rangers would temporarily send him to the minors to work things out — as the Orioles did recently with Jackson Holliday — but despite Langford’s woes, Texas doesn’t exactly have a better option than him for its lineup.

The Rangers offense is so thin that when Lowe missed the start of the season, the best player they could replace him with at first base was Jared Walsh, last seen hitting .125/.216/.279 for the Angels in 39 games in 2023. Before Ornelas was called up, the Rangers had only three hitters in the organization who were on the 40-man roster and not in the majors; Ornelas, catcher Sam Huff, and outfielder Dustin Harris, who currently sports a 79 wRC+ with Round Rock. Realistically, Langford was the team’s only viable option at DH.

That said, he definitely deserved his place in the Opening Day lineup. Langford was an advanced college hitter when the Rangers drafted him, probably doing so with the expectation that it wouldn’t be long before he reached the majors. He spent just three games at Rookie Ball last year, climbed to Double-A a month later, and after another two weeks, he finished the season at Round Rock. His .349/.479/.657 line across four levels of the minors comes out to a spicy 199 wRC+, basically meaning that Langford did as much damage to minor league pitchers last year as Mookie Betts is inflicting upon major leaguers so far this season. Hitting .365/.423/.714 in spring training did nothing to dissuade the Rangers of the notion that he was ready to play in the majors less than a year out of college.

Nor were the Rangers alone — 16 of the 25 FanGraphs staffers and contributors who made preseason picks predicted that Langford would win the AL Rookie of the Year, myself included. Those of us of fleshy construct were joined by the computers; entering the season, ZiPS projected him to post a 118 wRC+ this year, and Steamer was more bullish, at 125. Even the biggest Langford skeptic around, THE BAT overestimated him with its 92 wRC+ forecast. The betting world was in on him as well, with most books giving Langford the third-best preseason odds to win the ROY, behind teammate Evan Carter and Holliday.

Despite all this doom and gloom, there are some positive nuggets buried within Langford’s rough start. His plate discipline has remained intact; he was still better than league average at not chasing, making contact, and getting to 1-0 counts. His hard-hit percentage (38.6%) is a close enough neighbor to league average (44th percentile) that it could be borrowing its lawn mower. And although his .388 xSLG, per Statcast, is a number that would thrill few players other than Nick Madrigal, it is a huge leap from Langford’s actual mark of .293.

Running the xStats equivalent in ZiPS (zStats), you get an estimated line of .237/.326/.378 with four homers from his Statcast, plate discipline, pull/spray, and speed data. That is hardly good, but it looks like merely mediocre rather than disastrous.

What effect does his sluggish start have on his long-term outlook? I fired up the full ZiPS model to get an idea about how his 2024 so far has impacted his projections for the next six seasons.

Those projections are a good bit lower than his preseason ones, which had his WAR from 2025 to 2027 at 3.5, 3.8, and 3.6, respectively. This is unsurprising; Langford’s professional stats history was far shorter than most players and ZiPS had to use the much less accurate college translations as part of his projections, so these were always going to be more sensitive to 2024 play than they would’ve been for other major leaguers. Even so, Langford still projects as a solidly above-average bat who ought to be a long-term fixture in the Rangers’ lineup.

Langford’s breakout has been delayed by his struggles and now his injury, but his day is still coming. That’s encouraging for him, and it certainly bodes well for a Rangers offense that sure could use him.

It’s a great time to be a fan of the Baltimore Orioles. This is now the third season since their emergence from the dark basement of the AL East, and they no longer retain their tatterdemalion appearance. The O’s, at 20-11, have been winning by the very straightforward method of beating their opponents into submission, not by collecting more than their fair share of extra-inning and one-run victories. While the pitching staff has been a big part of the team’s success, what has made the Orioles so dangerous is a lineup that leads the American League in runs scored and wRC+. Even better for an O’s fan, they’re terrorizing opposing pitchers with a lineup that’s largely made of players that came up with the franchise and are several years away from hitting free agency. And there’s more on the way, giving the team a rather novel first world problem: having too many hitters and not enough lineup spots.

That the O’s have some of the best young offensive talent in the majors should not be lost on anyone who is into baseball. Adley Rutschman was the runner-up for AL Rookie of the Year in 2022, Gunnar Henderson took the award last year, and Jackson Holliday was the heavy favorite before his poor debut. Holliday could very easily come back and win it in the end, but if he doesn’t, one of the current favorites is yet another young Baltimore left-handed hitter, Colton Cowser. Through Thursday’s games, Cowser stands with the top WAR among AL rookies, with a .277/.351/.578, 164 wRC+ line. I haven’t even mentioned Jordan Westburg, who has an .890 OPS while splitting time between second and third base.

Even with Holliday falling flat in his first 10 games in the majors – something I expect him to rectify in the not-too-distant future – the O’s are leading the league in WAR from players younger than the traditional peak age of 27.

In franchise history, including its first year as the Milwaukee Brewers in 1901 and through decades as the St. Louis Browns, the 2023 team ranked seventh in WAR (12.2) from position players younger than 27, and this year’s team is already within shouting distance of halfway to that mark. So naturally, my question is how this team is likely to end up by the end of the season, and whether it would stack up to the best young offensive teams ever. For this, I’ll use our Depth Charts playing time to give plausible estimates of how the O’s will use their lineup for the rest of the season.

Even with Depth Charts projecting a much more conservative promotion schedule for Holliday than expected at the start of the season, the O’s have a mean projection of 21.7 WAR from this group of players. That would be the best in team history, edging out the 1973 club with Bobby Grich, Don Baylor, Earl Williams, and Al Bumbry as the headliners. And yes, it’s significant on a historical level as well.

Their 21.7 WAR would be enough to put the Orioles in the top 25, and there’s an argument that this undersells the group. The vast majority of the teams with the most 26-and-under contributions come from the pre-World War II era, when players were called up at younger ages and there was no ticking service time clock. Looking at just the divisional era – which now covers more than half a century – the Orioles rank impressively among recent stables of young talent.

There are some mighty impressive teams on that list, most notably the Big Red Machine and the early 1970s Athletics before free agency.

And even this perhaps underrates Baltimore’s offensive talent. It wouldn’t be surprising to see Holliday destroy in the minors and get a quick call back up, and if he does, he would slide right into the everyday lineup. Otherwise, though, the Orioles are now up to the practical limitation of roster and starting lineup spots. Cowser is an example of this: It would have been hard to get him regular playing time if not for Austin Hays’ dreadful start to the season. (Hayes is now on the IL). Heston Kjerstad was called up to replace Hays on April 23, after hitting .349/.431/.744 at Triple-A Norfolk, yet the former first rounder has gotten only eight plate appearances total in three games — the O’s have played 10 games with him on the roster.

Kjerstad is far from the only Orioles farmhand who likely would have gotten more playing time on a team with a thinner roster. At Triple-A, Coby Mayo is hitting .333/.397/.683 with 11 homers while mostly playing third base, a position at which the Orioles are already overflowing. Connor Norby has split time at second base and the outfield with an .829 OPS at Norfolk, but there’s no obvious place for him to get playing time unless the team decides to cut Ramón Urías. Using up-to-date minor league translations for Kjerstad, Mayo, and Norby, we can get an idea, via some up-to-date ZiPS projections, at what this trio could do if they O’s had playing time to give them.

All three players project as league average or better if they started in the majors right now.

While this represents a pretty enviable problem for the Orioles to have, it also can be an opportunity. The organization is deep in hitters, but its farm system does not have anywhere near the same depth when it comes to pitching. We don’t yet have a 2024 farm system ranking up for the Orioles, but in the updated 2023 list, the top 15 prospects featured just two pitchers, Cade Povich and Seth Johnson. Corbin Burnes was a great acquisition, but it doesn’t have to end there; as teams fall out of contention, the possibility exists for Baltimore to add a pitcher who can not only pitch down the stretch or in a possible playoff series or three, but in 2025 and beyond. The surplus of offensive talent should give the Orioles the ability to offer more for the right pitcher than practically any other team in baseball can, and if they do swing a trade, they’d still have so many other hitters in the pipeline that such a move likely wouldn’t make a dent in the team’s long-term outlook in a meaningful way.

Whether Baltimore gets to the World Series after a drought of more than 40 years is still uncertain. But this is the Orioles team that looks the most like the ones of the early Earl Weaver years: It’s a club that’s built mostly from within and overflowing with young stars. That worked out pretty well the first time around.

12:03

Dan Szymborski: G’day!

12:03

Dan Szymborski: It is a time for chats.

12:03

Dan Szymborski: THATS A STATEMENT NOT A QUESATION

12:04

Dan Szymborski: I think so, it wasn’t even a stretch coming into the season either

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Spending money can be a lot of fun, but spending someone else’s money is even better. And that’s exactly what we’re doing today!

About a month into the season is typically when I look at some of the players who are prime extension candidates and the possible deals they might work out with their teams. As usual, the contracts here are not necessarily what I would offer the players or what they will get, but what the mean, cold-hearted projections think would amount to a fair agreement. For each player, I’ve included their ZiPS projections with the latest model updates.

Elly De La Cruz, Cincinnati Reds (Nine years, $192 million)

It’s going to be a long time until Elly De La Cruz is eligible for free agency, but if the Reds wish to signal to the fans that the best players they develop will be in Cincinnati for longer than their middle arbitration years, ownership is going to have to make a real commitment to one of them at some point. And who is a better option than De La Cruz? I would have said Matt McLain a few months ago, but his major shoulder surgery makes it a risky time for both team and player to come to a meeting of the minds on a future dollar figure. De La Cruz still has issues making contact, but his plate discipline has continued to improve since his debut. He’s drawing a lot more walks this year and he’s actually been better than the average major leaguer at not chasing pitches. And with better plate discipline should come more power because a greater percentage of his swings will come against pitches that he can actually drive.

As you can see below, he wouldn’t need to exceed his 50th percentile projections for home runs by much to secure a 40/40 season. In fact, after hitting his eighth home run of the year Monday night, De La Cruz is currently on pace for 45 homers and an absurd 101 steals this season — and he still has a lot of polishing left to do. He’s also showing he’s far from a defensive liability at shortstop, even though a healthy McLain is still probably preferable there. This contract buys out some of De La Cruz’s early free agency years and gives him a big wad of guaranteed dough.

Corbin Burnes, Baltimore Orioles (Eight years, $210 million)

If you’ve been following my work for a while now, you surely know I’m an Orioles fan. And like many other Baltimore fans, I remember the moment when I became unhappy with the ownership of the late Peter Angelos. My feelings toward him soured because of how he and the Orioles handled their free agent negotiations with Mike Mussina. After Moose had previously taken a hometown discount, the O’s assumed he would continue to pitch for them at a below-market rate, and as a result, they lowballed him the next time he was eligible for free agency. He declined, leading to the second-best pitcher in team history finishing his career wearing Yankee pinstripes and ensuring that his Hall of Fame plaque wouldn’t have an ornithologically correct bird on the cap.

While I still think the team should lock up Grayson Rodriguez long term, it’s far more urgent< for the O’s to extend Corbin Burnes, given that he hits free agency after the season. No better pitcher will be available this winter, and nobody in the minors anywhere, for any team, is a safe bet to be better than Burnes over the next five or six years. New owner David Rubinstein has said all the right things, and he made a nice gesture when he bought everyone at Pickles a round of drinks, but the best way to show that he’s serious about building a perennial contender is to not let his team’s ace sign elsewhere. Given the O’s have just about nothing in the way of financial obligations, there’s no reason not to extend him. If that means paying more than that figure above, so be it.

Bo Bichette, Toronto Blue Jays (Seven years, $151 million)

Let’s be clear, despite his uncharacteristic struggles so far this season, I think Bo Bichette will command more than $151 million, and while the Blue Jays may balk any amount greater than that figure, they should still be willing to pay him whatever it takes to keep him around for the bulk of his career. Because of his position and his consistency (again, his first month of this season notwithstanding), Bichette has emerged as the best scion of a baseball family in Toronto, and time’s running out to extend bounty hunter Boba Chette before he hits free agency after the 2025 campaign. I actually think he’ll age better than ZiPS does, at least offensively. Either way, shortstops get super expensive if you wait until they hit the open market. That means that now’s the time for the Blue Jays to extend him if they’re going to keep him, even if that means going over this projected offer to ensure he doesn’t reach free agency.

Alex Bregman, Houston Astros (Four years, $101 million)

The Astros have been able to let some of their offensive contributors walk in free agency — Springer and Carlos Correa among them — mainly because they’ve had pretty solid replacements coming up at the same time, such as Yordan Alvarez, Kyle Tucker, and Jeremy Peña. There’s no similar player on the horizon who can take the place of Alex Bregman. And with Houston already reeling with its pitchers, it would be a lot to ask the front office to fill a gaping hole at third base as well.

Max Fried, Atlanta Braves (Six years, $150 million)

Atlanta has a knack for being able to survive epidemics of pitcher injuries in ways that are fascinating if you’re a fan of the team and maddening if you root for another one. But with Spencer Strider already out for the rest of this season after undergoing internal brace surgery for his damaged elbow, can Atlanta really afford to let Max Fried and Charlie Morton depart this offseason? I like what Reynaldo López has done this season, but you don’t really want to go into 2025 counting on his continued success, Chris Sale’s health, and a full recovery from Strider following his second UCL procedure? The Braves reportedly offered six years, $162 million to Aaron Nola; how could they not make a similar offer to Fried, a similarly valued pitcher who has been a large part of their recent success? Now, all reports I’ve heard suggest Fried’s not keen on discussing an extension during the season, but that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t change his mind if Atlanta gives him a good reason to do so.

Josh Naylor, Cleveland Guardians (Four years, $80 million)

Since the start of the 2002 season, the Guardians have received 10,109 plate appearances from first basemen not named Jim Thome, Carlos Santana, or Josh Naylor. Those 57 hitters have combined to hit .253/.324/.426 for 7.7 WAR, or about 0.5 WAR per 600 plate appearances. This is a franchise that has struggled to find solid fill-in first basemen, so it’s hard to imagine the Guardians would be able to find an an adequate replacement if Naylor walks after 2026. And this is hardly a blockbuster deal; it’s similar to what Kyle Schwarber got from the Phillies coming off the best season of his career (2.7 WAR in 2021). Naylor’s not a superstar, but he’s in his prime years. That should be enough incentive for the Guards to pay for him to stick around, and so long as the deal is fair, the fact that Josh’s younger brother Bo also plays for Cleveland might make him more inclined to stay.

Jackson Merrill, San Diego Padres (Seven years, $95 million)

Jackson Merrill has one of the odder long-term projections according to ZiPS, which expects him to have a long, stable plateau rather than a period of significant growth followed by a steady decline (at least in the years covered below). But ZiPS is increasingly coming around to his reputation as a good bad-ball hitter, and his batting average projections have improved considerably since the winter. Merrill looks to be a solid player, and he’s one the Padres may need toward the end of their long-term deals with infielders Xander Bogaerts, Manny Machado, and Jake Cronenworth.

Pete Alonso, New York Mets (No offer)

Pete Alonso is rightfully a very popular player in New York, and I’ve always had a soft spot for the Polar Bear, both because homers are fun and because ZiPS was in on him very early when he was a prospect (everyone likes looking smart). And with his free agency imminent, this would be a suitable time to extend him on a long-term contract. The problem is, the more I look at the situation, the harder it is for me to think of a scenario in which he and the Mets could come to terms on a deal unless one party was willing to come out of the negotiation feeling very unhappy. ZiPS suggests a four-year, $70 million contract, and I can’t imagine Alonso feeling anything but insulted by an offer like that. I think given Alonso’s place in the organization and the hiccups in the development of Brett Baty and Mark Vientos, the Mets would be willing to pay Alonso more than a projection suggests, but I can’t see them offering him Freddie Freeman or Matt Olson money, either. Because the basic fact is that Freeman and Olson are more well-rounded players than Alonso, who has one amazing dimension. Just to illustrate, below Alonso I’ve included the projections for Freeman and Olson over the next six years.

Alonso projects to be slightly worse than them in the short term and then to be similar in the later years, though that’s likely because he is younger than them. Plus, by the end of 2024, the other players’ contracts already will have covered two additional prime seasons from Olson and three from Freeman. I don’t think any pending free agent has a bigger gulf than Alonso does between the perceived value of his past and the expected value of his future, and as such, this has contract boondoggle written all over it, as big as it was with Kris Bryant a couple years ago. I don’t envy the Mets for the decision they have to make with Alonso, because letting him go, trading him, and keeping him all feel like poor options.