For the Atlanta Braves, the 2025 season is a disasterpiece. Last season had its share of disappointments, but the long stretches of middling play still left the Braves in a playoff spot by the tiniest of margins. After 2024, it was reasonable to stay the course; no need to smash the red panic button like an unsupervised child in an elevator. This time around, however, the Braves are likely to finish the season with somewhere around 90 losses, making simply battening down the hatches and waiting for sunnier weather a lot riskier of a strategy. I cranked up ZiPS to see how much tinkering the computer thinks Atlanta needs to do in order to compete in 2026.

The Good

On the plus side, the Braves aren’t trying to build a winning team out of nothing. Much of the offensive core remains intact and is actually functioning quite well. Ronald Acuña Jr. has made a successful return from a second torn ACL and has been playing at a 7-WAR pace. Of course, he’s out at the moment with another Achilles injury, but this appears to be a minor issue, relatively speaking, and given his history and Atlanta’s position in the standings, there’s no real reason not to be conservative with his recovery. ZiPS is understandably down on his injury risk, but he still gets his usual dynamite projection for 2026, even if it’s a little diminished from a playing time perspective:

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12:01

Dan Szymborski: It is noon!

12:01

Dan Szymborski: CHEATING!

12:01

Dan Szymborski: trying to get some early projections! tsk tsk

12:01

Dan Szymborski: sorry

12:01

Dan Szymborski: Wetherhold ought to have a big number

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For most of the first two months of the 2025 season, Cincinnati Reds right-hander Hunter Greene looked liked one of the NL Cy Young favorites. Alas, similar to the fate of protagonists in funny YouTube videos, groin injuries came to pass, and after first missing two starts in May before returning for three, Greene has been on the shelf since the start of June. In yet another example of correlation not meaning causation, the Reds played their best ball of the year without their ace, going 33-26 since Greene’s last start. While they wouldn’t make the playoffs if the season ended today, the New York Mets, one of the teams Cincinnati is looking up at, have been reeling since the trade deadline and proceeded to lose seven games in a row. The Reds are just two games behind the Mets in the standings, so now is as good a time as any to get Greene back in the rotation. And would you look at that? He is scheduled to start on Wednesday against the Phillies.

Now in his fourth season, Greene has developed from a gifted, but relatively raw prospect into a bonafide ace. His repertoire is generally unchanged, and he remains a mostly fastball-slider pitcher; the biggest difference is he’s phased out his changeup in favor of a nasty splitter, though he uses that pitch rather sparingly. How terrific is his stuff? Well, if you’re not convinced by watching him for yourself, his three pitches rank so highly in Stuff+ that you might think he were secretly sending Eno Sarris truckloads of exotic beers to try to tip the scales in his favor. Of the 138 pitchers with 150 innings since the start of 2024, Greene’s slider ranks fourth in Stuff+, his splitter ninth, and his fastball 11th. His arsenal has an overall Stuff+ rating of 116 — the highest in the majors. Pitchingbot is not quite that complimentary of Greene, but it also holds him in high regard; his botStf of 57 ranks 21st during that same span (min. 150 innings).

The slider is not only a particularly nasty pitch, but he uses it a bit differently than most starters. Despite having a viable splitter, Greene aggressively uses his slider against lefties. With its velocity and bite, he almost uses it like a cutter that threatens to take out the batter’s lead kneecap. There have been 106 starting pitchers since the start of 2024 who have thrown at least 100 sliders, and none of them has had a more whiffable one in cross-platoon situations than Greene.

This slider is what has enabled Greene to survive as a very heavy fastball-slider pitcher, something you see far more often with relievers. In this way, he is comparable to Kevin Gausman — though swapping splitter and slider — who also relies heavily on two pitches, happily using his splitter against righties, locating it in the same way another pitcher would use a slider. But Greene appears to have mastered this even more quickly than Gausman did.

Of course, Greene has done more than just survive. He has knocked another walk per nine off his numbers this year, something consistent with his elite 74.3% first-strike percentage. His FIPs over the last two seasons (3.47 in 2024, 3.42 this year) back up his development into a frontline starter, and the Reds would surely be happy enough if that’s where his actual outcomes ended up, too. However, you’ll notice that his ERAs (2.75 last year, 2.72 in 2025) are even better than that. Some of that, of course, has been fueled by low BABIP numbers, but in his case, we shouldn’t be all that skeptical of the legitimacy of his performance. The Reds have ranked 25th in FRV since the start of 2024, so he’s running those low BABIPs despite having a shoddy defense behind him.

Immediately after the trade deadline, the ZiPS projection system saw the Reds as having a 12.5% chance of making the postseason. The division appeared out of reach — and it definitely is now with the Brewers surging — and ZiPS saw Cincinnati’s competition for the three Wild Card spots, the Padres, Mets, and Cubs, as clearly stronger clubs overall. Despite the Mets’ struggles, ZiPS has only pumped the Reds’ playoff probability up to 14.2%. The thing is, even though these projections reflect Greene’s pending return, there is still room for their odds to rise if he comes back smoothly; the full ZiPS model is particularly skeptical of the workloads that pitchers will carry coming off an injury, so this projection assumes Greene will throw only 31 innings over the rest of the season. However, if we also include the 11 additional innings that our Depth Charts projects for Greene, and use his ZiPS projected performance as of May 1, just before he first hurt his groin, Cincinnati’s playoff probability jumps to 21.3%. That may seem relatively modest in absolute terms, but that difference is a larger playoff boost than any team got for any trade deadline acquisition this year. The Reds are right at the cusp of the playoff picture, where additional wins are most important, and his return could be the most impactful in the league.

Having Greene at full strength would be similarly crucial for the Reds in the postseason if they get there. ZiPS sees Cincinnati as a below-average playoff team regardless of whether Greene is healthy and performing well, but at his best, he boosts the club’s projected postseason winning percentage by seven points. Elly De La Cruz is the only Reds player who makes a greater effect with his presence alone.

The return of Greene also provides the Reds a little more insurance in the event that Nick Lodolo, who landed on the 15-day IL with a blister on his index finger last week, takes a bit longer than expected to recover, as blisters can sometimes be difficult to shake in the short term. Also, ZiPS remains down on the Cincinnati offense. It expects the lineup to be below average (95 wRC+) the rest of the way. In all likelihood, the Reds will go only as far as their pitching can take them.

The Mets probably won’t go winless the rest of the year — I say “probably” because of how often their seasons end similarly to a German fairy tale — so the Reds have an uphill battle to play some bonus baseball this fall. If that’s going to happen, they’ll need Greene to return at the top of his game.

Friends, Red Sox fans, FanGraphs readers, lend me your ears,
I come to analyze the contract extension, not to bemoan it.
The free agency status that teams despise lives after them,
The good is oft interred with their luxury tax penalties.

Here, under leave of Meg and the rest,
For they are honorable editors,
Come ZiPS to speak at Anthony’s signing,
It is my computer, faithful and just to me.

While the Red Sox have quite the mixed record of letting players leave in free agency or trading them before they can sign elsewhere, the organization has been fairly aggressive at signing players with limited service time in order to buy out free agent years in advance. Brayan Bello is signed through 2030, at least if a club option is picked up, and both Kristian Campbell and Ceddanne Rafaela, well short of arbitration status, are under club control into the 2030s. When the Red Sox acquired Garrett Crochet, they didn’t muck around either, making sure he’d be kept in town on a six-year, $170 million contract extension that he signed a few months after the trade.

Now it’s Roman Anthony’s turn. The guaranteed portion of the contract calls for $130 million over eight years, beginning next season, with $125 million total in salary through the 2023 campaign and a $5 million buyout on a $30 million club option for 2034. If the Red Sox pick up the option, the total value of the deal would be nine years and $155 million. There is also a Halloween bucket full of various incentives that could net Anthony a maximum $230 million over the next nine years. However, that high-end figure will be quite hard to meet. As MassLive’s Chris Cotillo points out, for Anthony to earn that $230 million maximum, he would have to finish top two in the Rookie of the Year voting this season, make the All-Star team in all eight seasons of the extension and also in the option year, and win the next nine MVP awards — one for every year of the extension, plus the option season. Nobody has ever won nine MVPs; Barry Bonds has the most, with seven. So, in order to hit every incentive in his new contract, Anthony would have to become, without exaggeration, the best baseball player ever. If, in the pretty-much-impossible event that this happens, the Red Sox would be getting literally the greatest of all time for less money than the Angels are paying Anthony Rendon. Read the rest of this entry »

While he went 0-for-3 in New York’s shutout loss, the Yankees breathed a sigh of relief last night as Aaron Judge returned from the IL after a mercifully short stint. Since debuting in the majors, Judge has been an offensive powerhouse, but one who got off to a relatively late start and endured plenty of injury misfortune. Go back five years, and the big question was whether he could stay healthy enough for the Yankees to plan around him, not what the numbers on his Cooperstown plaque would be should he manage a long big league career. Now, the idea of him not making the Hall of Fame seems like a charmingly naïve anachronism, a bit like wondering if Netflix would be able to survive the shift to streaming.

In the last four-plus seasons, Judge has hit 233 home runs, almost tripling his career total, and has seemingly destroyed what appeared to be the modern ceiling for obtainable WAR from a hitter who doesn’t also pitch in his spare time. It now looks like Judge may be up to 400 career homers well before the end of next season. So just where is his ceiling now? And can anyone challenge him as the Chief Justice of the Longball for this generation?

Let’s go back to 2020 for a minute. I fired up the ZiPS projection system and asked the computer to provide me with Judge’s career projections after that season. While he had always been a feared hitter, winning AL Rookie of the Year honors in 2017, he was just finishing his age-28 season and had only played one actual full season in the majors. And despite having a 52-home run campaign in his rear view, his career total of 119 homers was relatively pedestrian, behind players like Maikel Franco, Rob Deer, and Randal Grichuk through the same age. Judge didn’t do any better by the fancy-pantséd numbers, ranking 488th all-time in WAR through age 28, and that’s just the position players. The ZiPS projection for him at the time told the tale of an extremely talented slugger who couldn’t stay on the field, one who, if he proved especially unfortunate in the years to come, might not get the 5% of the vote necessary to stay on the Hall of Fame ballot. Read the rest of this entry »

And so ends another action-packed trade deadline. It came in with a whimper, with a quiet Adam Frazier trade to the Royals, but it ended in an exciting crescendo during which seemingly every reliever in baseball moved to a new team in a 45-minute period. Whoever said comparison is the thief of joy had never heard of the ZiPS projections, here to distill that bullpen beauty pageant (and the rest of deadline period’s action) into some cold hard numbers estimating what all these moves actually mean in the big picture.

Deciding who “won” or “lost” the trade deadline is a fairly tricky philosophical question, since different teams come into deadline day with different goals. So instead, I’ll focus on a simpler question: Who helped their 2025 chances the most? That’s a more straightforward inquiry, one a projection system can assess. For this, I used my usual methodology, first projecting the league as it currently stands using the full-fat ZiPS projections, and then re-projecting the league as it stands, but having unwound every transaction made since the Frazier trade on July 16. Read the rest of this entry »

As Thursday’s 6 PM deadline approached, the New York Yankees finally made their big bullpen moves, first trading for closer David Bednar from the Pittsburgh Pirates and sending back catcher Rafael Flores, catcher Edgleen Perez, and outfielder Brian Sanchez. Bednar, with a year of arbitration remaining next season, has allowed a 2.37 ERA and a 1.96 FIP while striking out 51 batters and walking only 10 in 38 innings this year.

Also donning (non-purple) pinstripes is Jake Bird, whom the Yankees acquired from the Colorado Rockies in exchange for second baseman Roc Riggio and left-handed starter Ben Shields. Bird, in his fourth year with the Rockies, has a 4.73 ERA for the season, but a much sunnier 3.45 FIP, and he has struck out nearly 11 batters per nine innings, easily the best mark of his career.

But that wasn’t quite enough for the Yankees, and as the clock approached the top of the hour, they picked up Camilo Doval from the San Francisco Giants for three prospects: catcher-third baseman Jesus Rodriguez, right-handed starter Trystan Vrieling, and first baseman Parks Harber. Read the rest of this entry »

Not every deadline trade is a dramatic one, but that’s OK — teams need to make low-key moves, too. Do you think James Bond saved the world every day? No! Some days, he had to do paperwork. Some days, he had to go to the dentist, or take the car to the gas station to vacuum up the leftover Cool Ranch Doritos crumbs on the floor after they spilled out on his drive from Baltim… I mean Bristol. So let’s catch up on some of Wednesday’s smaller moves.

The Seattle Mariners acquired left-handed reliever Caleb Ferguson from the Pittsburgh Pirates for right-handed starter Jeter Martinez

The Mariners have been operating with a shortage of southpaws this season, with Gabe Speier mostly being the only lefty on the active roster. Speier’s been good, holding lefties to a .609 OPS this season, but he can’t pitch in every playoff game, and Andrés Muñoz, who handles lefties quite well, generally doesn’t make his entrance before the ninth inning, so a depth-targeted upgrade to give the team another option down the stretch and during October makes a lot of sense. Caleb Ferguson has shed some strikeouts this year as he’s more heavily integrated his sinker into his repertoire, but he’s compensated for that loss by shedding a walk per nine from last season and becoming one of the hardest pitchers in baseball to make good contact against. Of all the pitchers with at least 30 innings this season, only Adrian Morejon has allowed a lower hard-hit percentage. Ferguson gives the Mariners a second lefty in the ‘pen they can count on, something they couldn’t really say about Joe Jacques or Tayler Saucedo. Read the rest of this entry »

The Rays have shuffled up their catchers just a few days before the trade deadline, first sending their starter Danny Jansen to the Brewers along with some cash in return for infielder Jadher Areinamo. Then, Tampa Bay followed it up with a second swap, this time bringing in Nick Fortes from the Marlins for outfielder Matthew Etzel.

While Jansen’s bat has fallen off significantly from his 2021-2023 seasons, when he posted a 120 wRC+ over 754 plate appearances for 6.0 WAR, he’s still an adequate part of a catching tandem and provides the occasional round-tripper. He’s slashing .204/.314/.389 with 11 home runs and a 98 wRC+ this season. His framing numbers have been down considerably the last few years, as well, enough to knock off just under a WAR per season or so from his overall value. Considering the Rays were practically certain to pay out Jansen’s $500,000 buyout rather than pick up their side of a $12 million mutual option, this looks like them getting what they can while the getting was good. Read the rest of this entry »

The trade deadline is nearing, and while we’ve had some recent activity — Josh Naylor is a Mariner! Ryan McMahon and Amed Rosario are Yankees! — the general environment can be best described as “peaceful.” If this is anything like past years, however, that’s about to change as teams face up to their Artificially Designed Roster Construction Deadline anxiety. And while we don’t know exactly what will happen — and if you do, you should probably use that time machine for purposes better fit to benefit humanity — it doesn’t mean that we can’t do some fantasy tradecrafting. As usual, I’ve conjured up some possible trade scenarios, trying to construct packages that are at least within the realm of plausibility. So get out your Hugwatch foam finger, read along, and maybe add your own ideas in the comments section!

For each player in the high minors or the major leagues, I’ve included their post-2025 projections while under contract — you can find their rest-of-2025 projections on their player pages. Read the rest of this entry »