For the 21st 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 and MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the next team up is the Baltimore Orioles.

Batters

Anthony Santander was a lot of fun in 2024. He’s currently a free agent, but the projections suggest that when we talk 2025 and beyond, he’s arguably less impactful to the Orioles than he would be to practically every other team in the majors. That’s because the Orioles have plenty of depth in corner outfield; they should get a full season of Heston Kjerstad in right field and Colton Cowser in left, and it’s possible that Coby Mayo could get some corner outfield reps as well. You can’t expect the O’s to match Santander’s home run count, but they have enough solid players to overcome his potential departure. ZiPS has a surprisingly optimistic view of Daz Cameron as a reserve outfielder, despite his weak showing with the A’s last season. The Orioles must see something there as well, considering they brought him back to the organization after less than a year away; he spent all of 2023 with Triple-A Norfolk.

There’s been a bit of panic among some O’s fans – at least mild panic if that’s not a misnomer – about Adley Rutschman and Jackson Holliday, but it’s far too soon to start worrying that much. Rutschman’s not at an age where decline is likely, and even with a slightly diminished projection, he still looks to be a big plus in the lineup. Holliday struggled in the majors, especially during his initial stint, but this is a player who just turned 21 on Wednesday. This is likely still a story of awesomeness delayed rather than cancelled.

The offense is very solid just about everywhere. Gunnar Henderson is the best player on the team and the new face of the franchise. He was in the MVP conversation early, and even though Aaron Judge, Bobby Witt Jr., and Juan Soto pulled ahead of him, Henderson was still an eight-win player in 2024. If this lineup has a weakness, it’s at 1B and/or DH; both positions still project as adequate, but they’re just not very exciting. I’m admittedly unusure exactly what effect the new dimensions in left field will have on this offense. So, question marks!

There’s probably not much the Orioles really have to do here. It wouldn’t be a problem for them to add a bat on the easy side of the defensive spectrum, but it’s not absolutely crucial.

I’ve already mentioned Mayo, but ZiPS also thinks Samuel Basallo is very close to being big league quality right now, and it gives strong long-term projections for Enrique Bradfield Jr., who is a possible eventual successor to Cedric Mullins in center field. ZiPS is also surprisingly excited about third-round pick Austin Overn, but the long-term error bars are massive because ZiPS uses college translations for players with a lack of professional experience.

Pitchers

The Orioles have most of a solid rotation assembled, which is a good thing. The problem is, of course, that the part missing is the hardest part to find, that guy at the top who you can count on to throw 180 innings and be somewhere in the Cy Young discussion. Perhaps Grayson Rodriguez or someone will take that big step forward and become that guy, but right now, the O’s don’t have anybody to replace free agent Corbin Burnes if they do not re-sign him. Given that this is the difference between a high-80s-win team and a low-90s win team in the projections, this ought to be a crucial issue to address, and it’s going to need investment. This is arguably the moment where you see just how serious new ownership is about not squeezing pennies until they scream. Right now, the starting rotation looks a bit like when you painstakingly restore a cool early-70s muscle car, turn it on, and then realize it’s not working because you totally forget that it needs an engine.

But aside from the missing ace, things look pretty solid. A full season of Zach Eflin is a good thing and Kyle Bradish will eventually return from Tommy John surgery. Rodriguez still has big upside, and ZiPS just can’t quite figure out Dean Kremer. Trevor Rogers certainly isn’t a lost cause yet, and Chayce McDermott received one of the larger one-year boosts from 2024 to his 2025 projection.

Getting Félix Bautista back is a pretty big deal, even if you can’t just assume he’ll be as good as he was before the injury. ZiPS projects the bullpen as kind of the opposite of the rotation; there’s some sizzle at the top with the front four or five guys, but really, Baltimore is in need of some back-end depth. ZiPS just isn’t that interested in the Bryan Baker/Colin Selby/Thaddeus Ward segment of the bullpen, should it come to that in 2025. I thought bringing in Craig Kimbrel was one of the worst ideas the O’s have had in the last few years. It’s not that I think they have a perfect bullpen; I’d just rather Baltimore look at guys based on their likely futures rather than their pasts.

As I hinted above, the Orioles right now project in ZiPS to win somewhere between 85 and 90 games, depending on how some of the playing time assumptions shake out. That’s basically the 2024 squad without Burnes and the lesser impact of losing Santander. So… not surprising? The Orioles are finally at a place where you don’t want surprises, so this is a pivotal offseason for them. Until the Orioles actually start to sign some of their young stars to extensions, I’m not going to lose my uneasy feeling about the mid-to-long-term future of this franchise.

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 2025 due to injury, and players who were released in 2024. So yes, if you see Joe Schmoe, who quit baseball back in August to form a Norwegian Ukulele Dixieland Jazz band that only covers songs by The Smiths, he’s still listed here intentionally. ZiPS is assuming a league with an ERA of 4.11.

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.

For the 21st 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 and MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the next team up is the San Francisco Giants.

Batters

Well, the Giants have solved at least one problem: finding another Buster Posey. Not in the form of Joey Bart, as was the original intention for a few years, but rather in Patrick Bailey. Now, Bailey isn’t quite peak Posey, an unreasonable expectation to have of anyone, but he has become a legitimate star behind the plate. Bailey also doesn’t exhibit the same distribution of talent as Posey did, as Bailey is arguably the most valuable defensive player in baseball with just enough bat to make that drool-worthy. To make a reference that’s even too old for me, Bailey’s a bit like a reboot of The Six Million Dollar Man in which they had the technology to build the cyber-Platonic ideal of Austin Hedges.

Bailey isn’t the only high spot in the lineup. Matt Chapman, who it seems the projections were not too high on in 2024 after all, should have at least a few good years left in him, and the Giants are generally at least average-ish elsewhere. ZiPS is higher than the other systems on Tyler Fitzgerald, and both the computer and I are hoping to see what Jung Hoo Lee can do after injuries cost him the opportunity to make good on what was shaping up to be a middling-at-best debut in the US. Read the rest of this entry »

For the 21st 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 and MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the next team up is the Los Angeles Angeles.

Batters

For the first month of the offseason, the Angels have been one of the most active teams, acquiring Jorge Soler and the apparently-still-in-baseball Scott Kingery in trades, claiming Ryan Noda off waivers, and signing Travis d’Arnaud, Yusei Kikuchi, Kyle Hendricks, and Kevin Newman in free agency. Doing this tightens up the team’s secondary talent and adds to its depth.

The larger question is what the Angels actually intend to do with these moves. These are the types of things that should have been done back in the days when they had a healthy Mike Trout or were getting 8-10 wins a year from Shohei Ohtani. From 2018 to 2023, all the Angels had to do to contend was build a 75-win team around Trout and Ohtani, something they never succeeded at doing. Now, it looks like they have that 75-win team, except Ohtani isn’t around anymore and Trout is aging and injury prone. (ZiPS is projecting Trout to have around 300 plate appearances in 2025.) Read the rest of this entry »

For the 21st 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 and MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the next team up is the Miami Marlins.

Batters

Building a good offensive team on the cheap is something that can be done, but it’s definitely not anything the Marlins have ever been able to do consistently. In the franchise’s more than 30 years of existence, it has had a wRC+ of at least 100 exactly twice, in 2007 and 2017. The Marlins did come close during their two championship seasons (wRC+ of 99 in both 1997 and 2003), but putting together a great lineup from within just has not been in the organization’s DNA.

That’s not likely to change in 2025. In Miami’s defense, its projected lineup – with some optimism in the health department – isn’t truly dreadful anywhere. There’s a real lack of zero-point-somethings on the depth chart graphic below, which is a nice thing. But if there’s a real lack of zeroes, there’s also a critical shortage of twos and threes, let alone the fours and fives that drive teams to division titles and playoff spots. Read the rest of this entry »

For the 21st 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 and MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the next team up is the Athletics.

Batters

In the race for the worst franchise in baseball, the White Sox easily took the title in terms of sheer incompetence. But their out of touch owner who legitimately wanted to win can’t match up with the A’s John Fisher, who probably thought while watching Moneyball that Rachel Phelps was way too generous with her team spending. The A’s won 69-93 games, a respectable number as far as terrible teams go, but it left them in an awkward limbo: They’re not good enough to pretend to be playoff relevant, but not bad enough for young fans to someday tell tales to their grandchildren about the team’s notoriety.

In truth, there’s actually a lot to like about this set of projections, even if it’s distributed among things you don’t. Brent Rooker not only demonstrated that his 2023 breakout wasn’t a fluke, but he also had a second breakout this season that was even better than the first. Considering he ran a .362 BABIP, he’s likely going to give back at least some of the gains he made. How much he regresses is a source of disagreement between ZiPS and Steamer, but he’s conclusively proven that he’s not just some DH-type player who’s going to put up a 110 wRC+ and 1.7 WAR. Rooker is not young, so hopefully the A’s will trade him to a team with games that matter before he advances too far into his thirties.

Jacob Wilson gets a very solid projection, and ZiPS sees a bit of a bounceback campaign for Zack Gelof. I wouldn’t call ZiPS a full believer in Lawrence Butler or JJ Bleday, but it at least grants them adequacy, which is a step up for both from last year’s projections. ZiPS is decidedly negative on the mulligan stew in left field, and it isn’t buying Tyler Soderstrom as a first baseman, either. 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.

One can argue the most disappointing parts of these projections aren’t the players on the parent club, but the minor leaguers. Past Wilson and maybe Kurtz, ZiPS just doesn’t see anyone in the system having major upside. I mean, Tommy White might suddenly become the offensive beast he was hoped to be, but the computer isn’t banking on it.

Pitchers

Eep. You know a team’s pitching projections aren’t going well when the player with the best projected ERA+ (Mason Miller) has a nearly 50-point edge over everyone else. One thing that used to keep the A’s from falling too far out of the pennant race was that, for a long time, this was a team that could churn out nondescript soft-tossing mid-rotation starters as if it owned a patent on the process. For the third consecutive season, however, the 2024 A’s didn’t have a single pitcher who started 20 games with an ERA+ of at least 100. This is hardly a filter for finding a Cy Young candidate! JP Sears had his moments in 2024, but at the end of the day, he’s simply a soft-tossing lefty without a strikeout pitch who can’t keep the ball down all that well, not any respectable team’s ace. Mitch Spence is interesting, but he isn’t missing bats in the majors yet. Our prospect team wrote that Joey Estes needed to develop a good secondary pitch, and that criticism rings true; he has a mediocre slider and changeup, meaning that his decent command hasn’t meant all that much.

I find J.T. Ginn and Osvaldo Bido more interesting. If Ginn keeps working with his sinker, he might have success in the majors for a while, and Bido at least makes it seem like there’s some adventure happening on the mound; his control is spotty, but he’s got a hard two-seamery sinker that I think could be a real weapon if he ever gets the hang of it. Most pitchers like Bido don’t work out in the long run, but I can squint my eyes and see a Bido breakout as a more tangible idea than what a Sears or Estes breakout would look like.

The bullpen is… not good. Miller projects for all of the bullpen’s WAR, which is fine if you think you’re going to use him for 500 innings. After Miller, there’s not a lot of correlation between spot in the pecking order and the ZiPS projection; Michel Otañez gets a decent projection in ZiPS, while Brady Basso probably doesn’t make the team, at least not in April.

The A’s have almost no guaranteed contracts, the only two right now being the recently agreed one-year pacts with Seth Brown and T.J. McFarland. Normally that would give a team some flexibility to fill some holes in free agency, but we all know that’s not going to happen. The Athletics will likely win somewhere between 65 and 72 games or so, and very little will be remembered about the season outside the weird stadium situation they’re in.

Speaking of that situation, projecting Sutter Health Field is a bit of a problem without data from past MLB games. It’s a pitchers’ park in the Pacific Coast League, but that’s not exactly telling given that the average park in the PCL would likely be a hitters’ park in the majors. I have a rough estimate of it as basically average, though I expect some outfielders might have a few adventures getting used to the caroms as the fences have some corners. The foul territory is much reduced, however, and that might mean something at the margins, considering you might be able to park a 747 in the Coliseum’s foul territory. Hopefully, by the time the A’s move again, I will have stopped calling the park “Sutter Home” after the winery.

Sutter Health Field graphic made by Szym. Depth charts constructed by way of those listed here. Size of player names is very roughly proportional to Depth Chart playing time.