12:01

Dan Szymborski: Oh thank goodness, there are questions in the queue

12:04

Dan Szymborski: I think so, but it may be closer than they’re comfortable with, especially if they have a quiet deadline

12:04

Dan Szymborski: I’m not *highly confident* the Phillies are five games better than the Braves, but I think that it’s not unlikely

12:05

Dan Szymborski: If that makes sense

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One of the things I try to emphasize when I talk about projections is that they’re not numbers written in stone, but an array of estimates that’s always moving. Each individual plate appearance or inning pitched, while not a needle-mover on its own, adds to our knowledge of a player and very gently changes his career trajectory. Forecasting a player isn’t all that different from forecasting a hurricane, but thankfully, players cause a lot less mayhem. Except maybe Len Koenecke.

It’s been three months since the start of the season, and we have a lot of new information about players. Since we’re approaching the halfway point of the season, and the fact that I’m getting a few dozen chat questions a week about which players have seen their projections change the most, I thought this would be an appropriate time to do an in-season ZiPS run with the full-fat model that is too compute-intensive to run every day. To keep the list relevant to 2026 MLB goings-on, I narrowed it to players who either have played in the majors this year or are one of the 1,232 prospects on The Board. So my apologies to players such as Peyton Alford, who has seen his 2027 ERA+ projection jump from 88 to 110.

I’ve also separated starters from relievers, with pitchers projected to start in at least a third of their appearances landing with the starters. Since relievers tend to be more volatile than starting pitchers, I wanted to make sure the latter were represented. After all, a bump of 10 points of ERA+ in 180 innings is more impactful for a team than 15 points of ERA+ in 60 relief innings! Read the rest of this entry »

One of the things I try to emphasize when I talk about projections is that they’re not numbers written in stone, but an array of estimates that’s always moving. Each individual plate appearance or inning pitched, while not a needle-mover on its own, adds to our knowledge of a player and very gently changes his career trajectory. Forecasting a player isn’t all that different from forecasting a hurricane, but thankfully, players cause a lot less mayhem. Except maybe Len Koenecke.

It’s been three months since the start of the season, and we have a lot of new information about players. Since we’re approaching the halfway point of the season, and the fact that I’m getting a few dozen chat questions a week about which players have seen their projections change the most, I thought this would be an appropriate time to do an in-season ZiPS run with the full-fat model that is too compute-intensive to run every day. To keep the list relevant to 2026 MLB goings-on, I narrowed it to players who either have played in the majors this year or are one of the 1,232 prospects on The Board. So my apologies to players such as Tre Richardson III, whose projected 2027 OPS+ has improved from 54 to 74. I’ve ranked the players by the largest changes in projected 2027 OPS+ compared to what it was in the preseason. Read the rest of this entry »

Late last week, Major League Baseball proposed to drastically change the game’s player developmental system. Beginning in 2028, the domestic draft would be cut from 20 rounds to 12, and eliminate eligibility for high schoolers — players would need to be at least 20 years old and two years removed from high school to be drafted. Players who choose to play for a JUCO school would need to do so for both seasons, rather than the one-year requirement currently in place. Most players at a four-year college would become draft eligible a year earlier under MLB’s new proposal; right now, they are not eligible for the draft unless they turn 21 by August 1 of their draft year or until after their third year a four-year college. MLB’s proposal would move the age cutoff date back to September 1. More than 40% of the dollars would be pared from the draft pool, with the most recent $358.7 million available slashed to $200 million.

On the international side, MLB proposed instituting a new draft, an idea originally discussed during the last set of CBA negotiations. The draft, which would begin in 2027, would require players to be at least 18 years old by September 1 of their draft year. The draft pool would stay mainly intact otherwise, with the same $200 million available for international draftees as domestic ones, pretty close to the nearly $199 million that was in the final draft bonus pool in 2025.

We don’t need to do any detective work to figure out where the savings go. As was the case with the league’s parallel salary cap proposal, which management disingenuously promoted as a way to improve competitive balance, this proposal is part of the ever-continuing quest of owners to transfer money from the players’ pockets to their own. Based on pretty much every example ever, the money saved will not offset consumer costs, and I’d be shocked if it was redirected to improve the pay of team staffers, who tend to take in reduced salaries for the privilege of working in baseball, or minor leaguers.

J.J. Cooper covered the proposal in greater detail over at Baseball America, so I won’t go too in the weeds on it here today. Instead, I want to spotlight how much money the proposal would cost the game’s top players. Read the rest of this entry »

Top prospects like Jesús Made and Leo De Vries are among the game’s most exciting potential call-ups this season, but most of the players who make the majors in the next couple of months won’t be in the same galaxy as those guys when it comes to their potential. Some may be fringe prospects, others former standouts who fell off team lists — some may have even already been labeled journeymen or organizational players. Nevertheless, a good number of them will contribute in the big leagues down the stretch. Some of last year’s impact rookies, like Caleb Durbin, Isaac Collins, Joey Cantillo, Justin Wrobleski, and Chad Patrick, weren’t Top 100 prospects — most would have struggled to make a Top 500 list. Yet their production mattered, and you can point to a dozen players like that every year.

We’re still a month away from the trade deadline, but relatively few top-tier players are available and the ones who are won’t come cheaply, meaning many teams will have to look internally as they work to improve their rosters. Below, I’ve chosen seven players, either fringe prospects or guys who’ve fallen off the big league radar, who have some combination of projection, performance, improvement, or a pressing team need that makes them intriguing over the rest of the 2026 season. Naturally, this leaves out top prospects like Kade Anderson, who I absolutely adore, and even pretty good ones, like James Tibbs III. Let’s dig a little deeper. Read the rest of this entry »

11:59

Dan Szymborski: We seem to be having technical issues

11:59

Dan Szymborski: Nobody can log in and ask questions.

11:59

Dan Szymborski: And I tried it myself!

12:00

Dan Szymborski: Unless there’s a fix, we may need to 86 the chat this week. Unless people want to hang around as I share my idle musings about whatever stupid thing I’m thinking about currently.

12:01

Dan Szymborski: (And no, people should not want to hang around for that)

12:02

Dan Szymborski: If you’re reading this, hit refresh and it shoudl work now!

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Once in a while, a player gets to walk off into the sunset at the height of his game. Ted Williams and David Ortiz are two examples of Hall of Famers who retired while still stars. But most players, even many greats, don’t see their careers end on a high note. That much larger list includes Andrew McCutchen, who was released by the Texas Rangers in late May after hitting .197/.277/.260 in 37 games as a part-time designated hitter/outfielder. There’s still a possibility that McCutchen catches on with another team this season as a spare bat off the bench, but in any case, we’re likely seeing the last throes of his career. Time always wins in the end, so this discussion was inevitable, but a decade ago, it looked like this conversation would have Cooperstown-related content.

Going back to early 2016 in the time machine, Andrew McCutchen was a very different player. Still in his 20s, he was a five-time NL All-Star coming off four consecutive Silver Slugger awards and four top-five finishes in the NL MVP balloting, including a win in 2013. It was a better time for the Pittsburgh Pirates as well, having just made the playoffs for the third straight season, winning 98 games in 2015 before being unceremoniously eliminated by the Cubs in the Wild Card game. Always at risk of losing their stars to teams more willing to pay them, the Pirates didn’t have to worry about that yet with McCutchen, who still had three more years to go in Pittsburgh, thanks to the six-year, $51 million extension (with a team option for a seventh year) that he had signed before the 2012 season.

At this stage, McCutchen appeared to be on a pretty good Hall of Fame trajectory. After seven seasons, Cutch was entering his age-29 campaign having already tallied 41 WAR with a .298/.388/.496, 144 wRC+ career line while playing center field. On a historical level, these numbers were quite competitive with some of the best young center fielders in MLB history. Look at how prominently he featured on the leaderboard through his age-28 season:

Note that Mike Trout would eventually move up to third on this list; 2015 was only his age-23 season! It’s also weird to see Rickey Henderson here, but he played mostly center field for the Yankees in 1985-1987, and so he qualified in our database.

Anyway, that’s impressive company, and the vast majority of these players are Hall of Famers or will end up there eventually. ZiPS at the time saw no reason to be particularly suspicious of McCutchen’s performance, and without any red flags, was happy to project him with a fairly typical decline phase for a star outfielder.

As it turned out, 2015 was McCutchen’s last 4-WAR season, and in only one season was he better than 2 WAR (3.6 WAR, 2017) over the next decade. While ZiPS didn’t have any illusions that McCutchen would stay a superstar for another decade, it didn’t expect him to hit a more drastic decline until the early 2020s. Sticking in center for a few more years, with a projected 2,600 hits, 72.7 WAR, and 333 home runs, when combined with his peak, I think this McCutchen would’ve made the Hall of Fame, though it probably would’ve taken him several years on the ballot to creep over the 75% line.

It’s hard to point to the obvious reason for his premature decline. The 2016 campaign was his worst season in the majors at that point, marred by a down June/July while he was playing through a severely jammed thumb. But that wasn’t thought to be a long-term problem, and his offense did bounce back to a degree for the next few seasons. His defense was already trending downward, but he was hardly slow, and, except for 2020 when he was coming back from a torn ACL that prematurely ended his 2019 campaign, he stayed above the 90th percentile in sprint speed through the 2022 season. His contact rate declined, but he still maintained his solid plate discipline and his hard-hit rate remained steady.

I don’t believe McCutchen’s going to do well when he hits the Hall of Fame ballot, but I think the version that we got might be too easily dismissed. He only ranks 30th in Jay Jaffe’s JAWS for center fielders, a place where most players do not get into the Hall. He does fare better using FanGraphs WAR, however, both in seven-year peak fWAR and in fJAWS. McCutchen ranks 13th in peak fWAR among center fielders, compared to 24th in Baseball Reference’s version.

Using FanGraphs WAR, McCutchen ranks 19th among center fielders in JAWS rather than 30th, and that ranking is strong enough that I think you at least need to have a conversation about his Hall of Fame suitability. As noted above, I’m not optimistic; the writers gave very little attention to Jimmy Wynn (19th), Kenny Lofton (12th), and Jim Edmonds (11th), while it took nine ballots to induct Andruw Jones (eighth). McCutchen had a huge peak, but the freshest memories of him will not be of that peak, but of his decade as a middling DH/corner outfielder.

If this is actually the end for Andrew McCutchen, he shouldn’t be remembered for coming up short of Cooperstown. For the better part of a decade, he was one of the very best players in baseball, the biggest name in a Pirates revival that briefly made Pittsburgh feel like a big baseball city again. The second half of his career didn’t dazzle like the first, but he did more than enough to be remembered as something greater than merely a very good player who got old quickly.

The 2026 season has not gone the way the Houston Astros envisioned. After Sunday’s loss to the Athletics, the Astros are 30-37 and in fourth place in the AL West. The only reason they’re even within shouting distance of first place is because the entire division has been mediocre so far. However, that doesn’t mean that everything’s gone wrong for them. One thing that has gone decidedly right for Houston is Yordan Alvarez’s comeback season. A fractured hand cost the three-time All-Star nearly four months of the 2025 season and, combined with a sprained ankle in September, limited him to a total of 48 games, his fewest since a torn patellar tendon wiped out all but two games of his 2020 campaign. But now he’s back with a vengeance, hitting .316/.431/.650 in 65 games for 3.3 WAR. He also leads the American League in home runs, RBI, and is second in batting average, behind only Yandy Díaz, at .325. We’re well into the third month of the season, which means the Triple Crown discussion is more than just silly speculation. Not that I’m above that, of course.

It’s true that two of the three Triple Crown stats have lost a significant amount of their analytical heft in recent decades, but it’s still a rare achievement for a player to finish the season leading his league in batting average, home runs, and RBI. More than that, though, Triple Crowns are cool. In the nearly 60 years since Red Sox legend Carl Yastrzemski won the AL Triple Crown in 1967, only Miguel Cabrera has managed to pull it off, in 2012 with the Tigers. No NL player has secured a Triple Crown since Joe Medwick in 1937.

For better or worse, Alvarez has tended to be overshadowed by Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani when the masses talk about baseball’s most feared sluggers. It’s hard for a huge power hitter on a successful franchise to be underrated, but I’d argue that Alvarez is actually one of those few examples. His 165 wRC+ ranks 11th in baseball history and fourth in the expansion era among players with a minimum of 3,000 plate appearances, and while that is bound to come down during his eventual decline phase, he’s set himself up nicely to be one of baseball’s all-time-great sluggers. He offers little defensive value, but he’s an incredibly well-rounded offensive player; he’s not a swing-and-miss hacker like many huge power hitters, and his production doesn’t diminish against left-handed pitchers. In fact, as Matt Martell explained in a Members-only mailbag column in January, Alvarez is the best left-on-left hitter since Barry Bonds. And even when we lower the minimum to 1,000 plate appearances, Alvarez is fifth in batting average among active players. Read the rest of this entry »

The Cincinnati Reds went 10-17 during the month of May, dropping from first in the NL Central to last, making this a terrible time for them to lose their most important player. Unfortunately, that’s precisely what happened on Monday, when shortstop Elly De La Cruz landed on the injured list for the first time in his career after straining his hamstring on Sunday. Now in his fourth big league season, De La Cruz was hitting .280/.346/.509 with 12 homers and a 134 wRC+ in 58 games, and looked to be on his way to making his third consecutive All-Star team. His 2.7 WAR was enough to lead all National League shortstops and rank second in the majors at the position, behind Bobby Witt Jr.. Minor league infielder Edwin Arroyo was called up from Triple-A Louisville to take De La Cruz’s place on the roster.

While it’s never good news to see your superstar miss time, the silver lining is this is not a season-risking injury. After limping while running the bases on a fifth-inning single on Sunday against the Braves, De La Cruz immediately came out of the game and underwent an MRI the next day. Manager Terry Francona described the results as “kind of between a Grade 1 and a Grade 2” strain. For those without the weirdly specific knowledge of muscle strain terminology, Grade 1 typically refers to a mild strain and Grade 2, a partial tear. So this is more than just a “Rub some dirt on it and get back in the game” thing, but less than a “Crap, do we have to look up Jose Iglesias’ phone number?” diagnosis. The initial prognosis is that De La Cruz will be out for two-to-four weeks. Read the rest of this entry »

12:01

Dan Szymborski: And heeeere we go

12:03

Dan Szymborski: There are some rules, though I’m not sure precisely WHERE they’re written down

12:03

Dan Szymborski: 15 seconds, no inappropriate lyrics, themes, etc.

12:03

Dan Szymborski: and it has to be licensed

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