Since one of the original driving forces behind sabermetrics was to shine a light on the game’s underappreciated players, to give them their own place in the annals, I’ve always had an attachment to third basemen. Throughout baseball’s history, the hot corner has been one of the “tinker of all, master of none” positions. The best third basemen often don’t put up the gaudy Triple Crown stats of first basemen and corner outfielders, and only a few generate the sort of attention for their fielding that the top shortstops or center fielders do. Sabermetrics generally, and measures like WAR specifically, have helped to remedy some of this. Ron Santo and Dick Allen have both now gained entry to the Hall of Fame — though, sadly, both were elected after passing away — and Scott Rolen had a far quicker path to Cooperstown than I ever expected when he retired. Read the rest of this entry »

12:02

Dan Szymborski: It’s a chat!

12:02

Dan Szymborski: It’s a chat!

12:02

Dan Szymborski: ZiPS at least loves him

12:03

Dan Szymborski: I think there’s serious daylight between them

Read the rest of this entry »

If the winter is a time for dreams, the spring is a time for solutions. Your team may have been going after Juan Soto or Aaron Judge or Shohei Ohtani, depending on the offseason, but short of something going weird in free agency (like the unsigned Boras clients last year), if you don’t have them under contract at this point, they’ll be improving someone else’s club. However, that doesn’t mean that spring training is only about ramping up for the daily grind. Teams have real needs to address, and while they’re no doubt workshopping their own solutions – or possibly convincing themselves that the problem doesn’t exist, like when I wonder why my acid reflux is awful after some spicy food – that doesn’t mean that we can’t cook up some ideas in the FanGraphs test kitchen.

This is the final piece in a three-part series in which I’ll propose one way for each team to fill a roster hole or improve for future seasons. Some of my solutions are more likely to happen than others, but I tried to say away from the completely implausible ones. We’ll leave the hypothetical trades for Bobby Witt Jr. and Paul Skenes to WFAN callers. Also, I will not recommend the same fix for different teams; in real life, for example, David Robertson can help only one club’s bullpen. I wrote about the teams in the two East divisions last Wednesday, and then covered the Central divisions on Friday. Today, we’ll tackle the 10 teams in the West divisions, beginning with the five in the AL West before moving on to their counterparts in the NL West. Each division is sorted by the current Depth Charts projected win totals.

Texas Rangers: Reunite with Kyle Gibson
Look at the Rangers in our Depth Charts projection and glance down at the pitchers. Do you see a problem? We project the Rangers to have a decent rotation, right at the back of the top 10, but that also relies on a lot of innings from pitchers who have not been able to throw many in recent years. Jacob deGrom and Tyler Mahle are both projected to throw more innings apiece than the two of them have thrown combined over the last two years. I’d love to see 270 innings from deGrom and Mahle, but to count on that is just begging for a sad story. I probably believe in Kumar Rocker and Jack Leiter more than most, but neither of them should be counted on to solidify an injury-depleted rotation in 2025.

The Rangers need a reliable innings-eater, and old friend Kyle Gibson is still out there. He has made at least 30 starts in five of the last six full seasons, with the one time he didn’t reach that threshold coming in 2019, when he made 29 starts, appeared in 34 games, and put up 2.6 WAR across 160 innings — the fewest innings he’s thrown in that span, excluding 2020. He’s probably never again going to be as good as he was in 2021, when he was an All-Star with Texas before getting traded to the Phillies and finished with a 3.71 ERA, a 3.87 FIP, and 3.1 WAR, but Gibson comes with a fairly high floor. His performance last year with the Cardinals (4.24 ERA, 4.42 FIP, 1.5 WAR, 169 2/3 innings) was his least-productive campaign during that 2018-2024 stretch, but even that would benefit the Rangers right now.

Seattle Mariners: Add some Tork to the lineup
The Mariners have gotten more out of Luke Raley than they’ve had any right to, but he remains a platoon first baseman, with a .575 OPS in the majors against lefties. Even if he can do better than that — ZiPS thinks he’ll put up about a hundred more points of OPS in 2025 — he’s not David Ortiz against righties, so it’s hard to just give him a full-time job at first. The likely candidates to pair with Raley are thoroughly uninteresting, so why not look at Spencer Torkelson, a player who is just begging for a change of scenery? The Tigers have clearly soured on him; otherwise, they likely would not have signed second baseman Gleyber Torres and moved Colt Keith to first base to start there over Torkelson. He’s still young enough to have some upside and get things back on track, but even if he doesn’t ever reach his full potential, he ought to at least beat up on lefties. The Mariners could use more power, and I doubt the price tag will be high.

Houston Astros: Add a very boring arm
The Astros dug themselves a hole early on in 2024, in large part because of a spate of pitching injuries that tested their depth to the breaking point. Houston’s rotation ought to be good, but there still are a number of pitchers with injury concerns, once again leaving the team vulnerable to some bad health luck. The Astros could use some veteran depth to preemptively reinforce the rotation just in case someone goes down, and I think for them, Lance Lynn is the most interesting free agent still available.

The Astros are skilled at refining pitch arsenals, for both prospects and veterans, and Lynn has the weirdest repertoire of the remaining free-agent starters. Rather than the standard fastball-breaking-offspeed mix, Lynn basically throws a bunch of slightly-to-moderately different fastballs, making him the type of pitcher who could benefit from Houston’s wizardry. A sweeper could cause some additional tension for batters compared to his cutter, and he’s never really had a refined offspeed offering to use as a putaway pitch against lefties. The specifics would be for the Astros to figure out. Lynn also has expressed a willingness to pitch out of the bullpen after teams started inquiring about using him as a reliever, so even if Houston’s rotation remains in tact for the whole season, Lynn could still have a role.

Athletics: Get Sandy before heading to the desert
The good: The A’s actually spent some money this winter. The bad: We still project the A’s to have a losing record. The really bad: Our Depth Charts project the A’s to have a worse starting rotation than the White Sox. The Marlins are clearly in the shopping mood, having already sent away Jesús Luzardo, and with teams likely waiting to see how Sandy Alcantara fares after returning from Tommy John surgery, the A’s have an opportunity to jump the 2022 NL Cy Young’s trade market and steal a march on the better wild card contenders. A potential wrinkle here: The Yankees may be in the market for Alcantara now that Gerrit Cole is going to miss the 2025 season while recovering from Tommy John surgery. Still, the A’s shouldn’t let that deter them from targeting an ace at a time when he could be relatively affordable.

Los Angeles Angels: Hire a team of archaeologists to design a very complex treasure hunt that convinces Arte Moreno to sell the team so that he’s free to go on an Indiana Jones adventure
I admit it, I’m at a loss for words with the Angels. In some ways, they’re actually worse off than the White Sox, in that Chicago at least has a reasonable long-term plan while the Angels keep teetering between strategies that are either unclear, unrealistic, or both. Their moves reflect their extreme short-term thinking, leaving the organization without a coherent path to winning now or winning later. Leadership has to come from the top, and Moreno continues to show he is incapable of fixing things. Case in point: The Halos spent this offseason adding veteran depth pieces. These would’ve been smart moves if the Angels were already a good team and looking to patch up their few remaining areas of weakness. That, of course, is not the case. The Angels need to accept that they’re lost before they can move forward and begin to assemble a winning team while Mike Trout is still around. But as long as they keep following an ineffective leader, they’re going to keep walking in circles.

Los Angeles Dodgers: Find a weird reclamation project
This one was a struggle because the Dodgers, while not having the highest median win projection of any team in ZiPS history (that’s still the 2021 Dodgers), they have the highest floor, with no obvious weaknesses anywhere. I guess the one thing the Dodgers are missing is that random broken-down reliever that you forget still plays baseball until they inevitably fix him. I’d love to see if Daniel Bard has another improbable comeback left in him, or maybe Adam Cimber, because a star in the sky disappears whenever a sidearmer loses his job.

Arizona Diamondbacks: See if the Yankees are interested in Jordan Montgomery
As I mentioned in the A’s section, Cole’s Tommy John surgery is a massive blow to the Yankees as they look to defend their American League pennant in 2025. Will Warren has a good shot at being a pretty solid rotation fill-in, but with Luis Gil also out for a while and Nestor Cortes now on the Brewers, the team now has just about zero starting pitching depth left. Jordan Montgomery and the Yankees have a good history, and there’s an obvious need now. Montgomery really struggled in 2024, to the point that Arizona owner Ken Kendrick said publicly that adding the lefty was a “horrible signing.” The Diamondbacks also have plenty of rotation options, so many, in fact, that RosterResource currently projects Montgomery to pitch out of their bullpen. They surely won’t get much in return for him, and they should be prepared to eat a good chunk of his remaining salary, but if they want to move on from him and maybe even get a prospect or two in return, this is the way to do it.

San Diego Padres: Sign David Robertson
The Padres’ bullpen is hardly a dumpster fire, but it is kind of top-heavy, and we project everybody after the fifth option (Yuki Matsui) to be at or below replacement level. There’s not a lot of financial flexibility right now in San Diego for various reasons we won’t go into here, but if the Padres are looking for marginal gains on a budget, David Robertson is by far the best move they could make. They shouldn’t have to spend much to get him, considering he’s 40 years old and remains unsigned in the second week of March, but he is coming off a very good season and is comfortable pitching in a variety of bullpen roles.

San Francisco Giants: Inquire about Jesús Sánchez
The Giants are likely a tier below the Diamondbacks and Padres in the NL Wild Card race, but they’re still close enough that short-term improvements matter. San Francisco’s designated hitter spot is bleak, and the player we have getting the most plate appearances there, Jerar Encarnacion, was in an indie league for much of last season and put up a .277 on-base percentage in the majors. The Giants should see what it would take to get Jesús Sánchez from the Marlins. He’s never developed into a big home run hitter despite solid hard-hit numbers, in large part because he’s never generated much loft. He’s also a spray hitter, and last season, 13 of his 25 doubles were line drives hit the opposite way. It’s the type of game that could be better suited for the spacious Oracle Park. Sánchez would provide a left-handed complement to Encarnacion, and he’s good enough to play all three outfield positions if needed.

Colorado Rockies: Find the next Nolan Jones and Brenton Doyle
Since the departure of former GM Jeff Bridich, the Rockies have made quite a bit of progress in no longer treating prospects as annoyances, and they now give internal, lesser prospects chances to surprise them. The last bit is important, as the Rockies of five or six years ago would never have given someone like Nolan Jones or Brenton Doyle enough playing time to break out in the majors. Doyle hit 23 homers and stole 30 bases in 2024 while winning his second Gold Glove in as many seasons, and although Jones struggled last year, he was hurt on and off and should be expected to at least split the difference between that performance and his 2023 production.

Considering this, the Rockies should go full-carrion bird as the season approaches. Colorado ought to be in on any and all mildly interesting players who are shut out of major league opportunities in 2025. Among the guys the Rockies should target are Mickey Gasper, Edouard Julien, Addison Barger, Shay Whitcomb, Curtis Mead, and Leo Jiménez. They may never develop into stars, but the Rockies need to be willing to throw everything at the wall and hope to find at least a few productive players.

If the winter is a time for dreams, the spring is a time for solutions. Your team may have been going after Juan Soto or Aaron Judge or Shohei Ohtani, depending on the offseason, but short of something going weird in free agency (like the unsigned Boras clients last year), if you don’t have them under contract at this point, they’ll be improving someone else’s club. However, that doesn’t mean that spring training is only about ramping up for the daily grind. Teams have real needs to address, and while they’re no doubt workshopping their own solutions – or possibly convincing themselves that the problem doesn’t exist, like when I wonder why my acid reflux is awful after some spicy food – that doesn’t mean that we can’t cook up some ideas in the FanGraphs test kitchen.

This is the second piece in a three-part series in which I’ll propose one way for each team to fill a roster hole or improve for future seasons. Some of my solutions are more likely to happen than others, but I tried to say away from the completely implausible ones. We’ll leave the hypothetical trades for Bobby Witt Jr. and Paul Skenes to WFAN callers. Also, I will not recommend the same fix for different teams; in real life, for example, David Robertson can help only one club’s bullpen. Today, we’ll cover the 10 teams in the Central divisions, beginning with the five in the AL Central before moving on to their counterparts in the NL Central. Each division is sorted by the current Depth Charts projected win totals.

Minnesota Twins: Take Mickey Gasper seriously
Faced with big questions at first base, the Twins made just about the least interesting move possible, signing Ty France to a cheap one-year deal. Over the last two seasons, France has put up 0.4 WAR in 1,200 plate appearances, but Minnesota seems content to run him out there in at least a timeshare with Jose Miranda. Instead, what the Twins should do is let Mickey Gasper take the majority of the playing time at first against righties, with Miranda getting the nod against lefties. Of course, the Twins probably won’t get rid of France after signing him to a guaranteed deal, but Gasper offers positional flexibility and should be on the roster anyway. In addition to first base, he also has experience at second, third and catcher. While in the minors with the Red Sox last year, Gasper posted a 165 wRC+ across 380 plate appearances, with a 179 mark over his 204 PA at Triple-A. Those numbers are more than good enough for him to deserve a chance in the majors.

Detroit Tigers: Do something weird with Javier Báez
If not for his salary, Javier Báez probably wouldn’t be guaranteed a place on this roster based on his production over the last two seasons. I think his inability to make contact is here to stay, so the Tigers are going to have to take him for what he is now instead of the player they thought they were signing three offseasons ago. At this point, he’s nothing more than a short-side platoon partner for shortstop Trey Sweeney, but if he’s going to be on the roster anyway, the Tigers might as well try some things with him. Why not get weird and give him some bullpen innings this spring? Báez has always had a strong arm, so if he’s down with the idea, maybe this is another way to justify his presence on the roster. After all, that two-way player designation is a thing now! Sure, it’s unlikely that Báez would transition into a usable relief pitcher at age 32, but the team doesn’t have much to lose here. At the very least, Detroit should give Báez reps in a super-utility role, but I like dreaming big, or at least dreaming odd. I’ve always felt spring training was the time for teams to embrace their weird impulses because it’s the only time they can truly experiment with their major league roster.

Kansas City Royals: Give Drew Waters a fair shake at a starting corner outfield job
The Royals missed an opportunity to upgrade their corner outfield positions this winter, but that doesn’t mean they should run it back with the group they had last year. Drew Waters certainly didn’t excel with a semi-regular role for a long stretch in 2023, but his wRC+ of 81 that year wasn’t much different from the 85 mark that MJ Melendez posted in 2024, and Melendez’s rough line came in three times as many plate appearances. Maybe Melendez has more offensive upside, but that isn’t enough of a reason for Kansas City to keep running him out there in left field, where he is a defensive liability. Waters is the more well-rounded player, and even if he doesn’t improve at the plate, his defensive value should make up for at least some of his lack of offense. Moreover, both players are 26, so this isn’t an age-related thing. Playing Waters in left doesn’t mean the Royals should give up on Melendez altogether; there will still be opportunities to get him plate appearances without having him wear a leather glove.

Cleveland Guardians: Stretch out a reliever for short starts
The Guardians look to have a terrific, deep, exciting bullpen, but the rotation doesn’t have that same rizz. Am I using that word right, fellow kids? I talked more about starter-reliever ambiguity with the Orioles in the first part of this series, but it’s relevant here for Cleveland, too. Triston McKenzie is no sure thing, and Shane Bieber isn’t likely returning until midseason, so another starter would be a nice thing to have. Since the Guardians don’t like to spend money, I won’t give them one of the remaining inning-eaters still available in free agency. Instead, I’ll pitch the idea of stretching out one of their relievers to start some four-inning specials. The deep bullpen gives them both the opportunity to lose someone and cover for a starter with a light workload, even by 2025 standards. Hunter Gaddis broke out in the bullpen in 2024, but he was one of their least dominant relievers in terms of punching out batters. Gaddis isn’t exactly a failed starter, because he hasn’t gotten enough run in that role, but he has refined his approach and become a better pitcher during his time in the bullpen. He’s now throwing more first-pitch strikes than he ever did in the minors. If he can keep that up, he’ll probably be the team’s best option for this starter-lite role.

Chicago White Sox: Embrace riskiness on offense
The White Sox have no hope of making a playoff run, so they have nothing to lose by taking chances with their roster. And right now, their lineup is full of veteran role players who don’t offer them much future value. Guys like Mike Tauchman, Michael A. Taylor, Austin Slater, Andrew Benintendi, and Joey Gallo won’t be around by the time this team is ready to contend again, and Chicago probably won’t be able to flip them for much at the trade deadline. So what’s the point in giving them regular playing time? Instead, the White Sox should be chasing upside right now, even if that upside comes with risk.

At this point in the offseason, the Pale Hose won’t find high-upside hitters on the free agent market, but they have plenty of them in their farm system. Really, the White Sox should be extremely aggressive with their prospects and non-prospect minor leaguers this spring, and give them as many opportunities as possible to snatch a starting spot away from the veterans. Let Chase Meidroth push Lenyn Sosa; offer Bryan Ramos every chance to knock Miguel Vargas permanently off the hot corner. Even less-heralded guys like Cal Mitchell, Andre Lipcius, or the recently outrighted Zach DeLoach have a better chance of one day contributing to a good White Sox team than Benintendi or Slater do.

Chicago Cubs: Explore a trade for Germán Márquez
ZiPS is highly optimistic about the Cubs entering 2025, but that’s largely due to a very bullish outlook on the bullpen, rather than a great deal of sunshine radiating over the pitching staff. The Cubs feel like a team that could use one more starting pitcher, with our Depth Charts having them just ahead of the Cardinals for the worst projected rotation in the NL Central, and ZiPS liking them only slightly better.

My inclination here was to effect a reunion with Marcus Stroman, but the Luis Gil injury seems to have put the kibosh on that. With that no longer an option, I’d love to see the Cubs swing a deal with the Rockies for Germán Márquez. A legitimate Cy Young contender at one point, Márquez has seen his last two seasons more or less wiped out due to elbow problems. That means there’s real risk, but as Michael Baumann wrote last week, Márquez’s velocity is back, and there’s a great deal of upside here if he’s healthy, similar to Jack Flaherty entering 2024. If there’s room for Márquez to make his hard sinker a larger part of his game, there are few better places to allow some extra grounders than in front of Nico Hoerner and Dansby Swanson.

Milwaukee Brewers: Trade with the Nats for Andrés Chaparro
The Brewers love low-key additions, and one player who fascinates me at the moment is Andrés Chaparro, a former “sorta” prospect with the Yankees and Nationals. He destroyed Triple-A pitching last year, but Washington’s additions of Nathaniel Lowe and Josh Bell complicate his path to playing time. The Brewers already had Rhys Hoskins when they signed Mark Canha this offseason, meaning it might be tough for Chaparro to make the Opening Day roster as a first baseman, but at the very least he would be an interesting Triple-A stash. ZiPS is probably overrating Chaparro in projecting him to be an adequate defender at third base, but the probabilistic location-based system that ZiPS uses for minor leaguers thought he took a big step forward last year, and this methodology frequently spots some surprisingly solid fielders. I don’t think the Nats would ask for much in return, and Milwaukee ought to be adding anyone who could at least theoretically play third base, especially now that the team appears to have soured on Tyler Black at the position.

St. Louis Cardinals: Start talking about non-Arenado trades
The Cardinals are coming off one of the quietest offseasons I ever remember from them, with nearly all their effort this winter going toward a Nolan Arenado trade that hasn’t materialized. St. Louis seems to have accepted that Arenado will be its starting third baseman come Opening Day, but that doesn’t mean the team should turn off its phone. There are other trades to make. Free agency has few treasures remaining, and I’d argue that this is a seller’s market. Only handful of teams lack a realistic shot at the postseason in 2025, and I’d argue that the Cardinals should be considered among that group, even if the playoff odds say otherwise. Put it this way: If they were truly determined to contend this year, they would’ve made more of an effort this winter to improve their roster. Sonny Gray and Brendan Donovan are players that contending clubs would probably be eager to acquire if they were available.

Cincinnati Reds: Talk megadeal with Elly De La Cruz
The Reds have basically no long-term contracts bogging down their payroll, as Hunter Greene is the only player with a guaranteed deal past 2026. They haven’t made a splash in free agency to bolster their roster of cheap talent, but instead of pocketing that money saved, they should invest it in their spectacular shortstop to make sure they can keep his utter awesomeness around for the 10-15 years. Yes, Elly De La Cruz is a Scott Boras client, and Boras clients tend not to sign extensions, but that doesn’t mean the Reds shouldn’t try to work out a deal, especially now when his free agency is a long way off.

Pittsburgh Pirates: Release Andrew McCutchen
There’s nothing wrong with saying goodbye when it’s time. It was fun to see Andrew McCutchen back in Pittsburgh and be reminded of what a wonderful player he was from 2009 to 2015, good enough that I’ll have to ponder sometime in the early 2030s whether his peak was enough to make my Hall of Fame ballot. But the decision to re-sign him for $5 million for 2025 was a terrible one because using the DH spot for a no-upside 38-year-old with no defensive value is a waste of resources. I think the Pirates are far better off using those plate appearances to give Jack Suwinski a clearer bounce-back chance or to serve as a friendly home for Henry Davis at some point this season if they haven’t already given up on him. No, the Pirates won’t actually do this, but they really should. The $5 million is gone no matter what, and the Pirates are a team that actually could make the playoffs if they had a better lineup.

If the winter is a time for dreams, the spring is a time for solutions. Your team may have been going after Juan Soto or Aaron Judge or Shohei Ohtani, depending on the offseason, but short of something going weird in free agency (like the unsigned Boras clients last year), if you don’t have them under contract at this point, they’ll be improving someone else’s club. However, that doesn’t mean that spring training is only about ramping up for the daily grind. Teams have real needs to address, and while they’re no doubt workshopping their own solutions – or possibly convincing themselves that the problem doesn’t exist, like when I wonder why my acid reflux is awful after some spicy food – that doesn’t mean that we can’t cook up some ideas in the FanGraphs test kitchen.

This is the first piece in a three-part series in which I’ll propose one way for each team to fill a roster hole or improve for future seasons. Some of my solutions are more likely to happen than others, but I tried to say away from the completely implausible ones. We’ll leave the hypothetical trades for Bobby Witt Jr. and Paul Skenes to WFAN callers. Also, I will not recommend the same fix for different teams; in real life, for example, David Robertson can help only one club’s bullpen. Today, we’ll cover the 10 teams in the East divisions, beginning with the five in the AL East before moving on to their counterparts in the NL East. Each division is sorted by the current Depth Charts projected win totals. Read the rest of this entry »

The new year in baseball resets everyone back to zero, meaning that every team gets a chance to avenge their disappointments from 2024. Since this is a hopeful time, I asked the ZiPS projection system to crunch the numbers for the biggest bounce-back candidates for the 2025 season.

Determining what exactly constitutes a bounce-back season is a bit of a philosophical exercise, and since I can’t ask a complex bucket of algorithms to read the vibes, I narrowed down the list of candidates with a few qualifiers. I didn’t want any stone-cold sample size flukes, so I only looked at hitters who received at least 200 plate appearances in 2024, and limited the pitchers to those who threw at least 90 innings for those who started at least a third of their games, with a 30-inning threshold for relievers. I also only wanted to include players who were 2025-relevant, so I required the same minimums for projected playing time this year, based on our Depth Charts. Read the rest of this entry »

In a generally bleak 2024 season for the Toronto Blue Jays, one of the few bright spots in that Kafkaesque wasteland was the return of Vladimir Guerrero Jr. as a force to be reckoned with in the lineup. Guerrero followed up his MVP-caliber performance in 2021 with a solid-but-underwhelming 2022 season and a below-average 2023, and there were real questions about his value as a player as he neared his expected free agency after the 2025 campaign. His .323/.396/.544, 165 wRC+, 5.5 WAR line last year was a dramatic demonstration that his 2021 season was a lot more than a stone-cold fluke. Free agency beckons, and the Blue Jays are down to the last year of his services before he reaches the open market. Guerrero set the deadline to work out an extension with Toronto for February 17, and that date has come and gone without an agreement.

My colleague, and notable non-pitcher, Mike Baumann wrote about the risks and rewards of signing Guerrero to a long-term deal from the perspectives of both parties, so you ought to read that for further exposition on the topic. We’re hear to put the fear into numbers, the numbers into dollars, and the dollars back into fear! Read the rest of this entry »

12:00

Dan Szymborski: And away we go!

12:02

Dan Szymborski: I think the closer we get to the season, the more the Padres will hang onto him.

12:03

Dan Szymborski: The Mets would certainly have to give up something real. YOu can probably fatten the offer a bit with guys the Padres have more reason to like than the Mets.

12:04

Dan Szymborski: Like Clifford, who is probably more useful to San Diego, but you’re not going to land him with JUST Clifford

12:04

Dan Szymborski: I kinda get the idea that the mets are happyw ith their rotation, and not likely to meet a rich price

Read the rest of this entry »

For the 10th time in 11 years (there was no 2019 list), we’ve reached the point in the winter where I oil up the gears, fill the tank with kerosene, and fire up the computer to run the ZiPS Top 100 Prospects list. In case this is the first time you’ve ever encountered ZiPS, it’s a computer projection system that uses a whole lot of algorithms (and a depressing amount of linear algebra) to arrive at a forecast of how players will perform in the future and, according to some, to express my personal disdain for your favorite team — and, sometimes, my favorite team!

ZiPS prospect projections are not designed to replace traditional scouting. These should be thought of as a supplement to scouting lists, my best attempt to harness all the data that is available to get a numbers-based understanding of how good a prospect is. There’s a lot of uncertainty in lower-level minor league stats that isn’t present at the upper levels. As such, non-statistical information about players takes on added value. ZiPS doesn’t seek to be the one-ring-to-bind-them-all-unified-field-theory-giant-Katamari-Damacy-ball of prognostication; it aims to give the very best data-generated predictions possible, for people to use, ignore, mock, or worship according to their personal tastes.

How does it work? Let’s dial back a decade and see how the 2015 list fared:

Ninety-five of the 100 players here made the majors, and all told, 71 currently have a positive career WAR total. Comparing ZiPS to the other major prospect lists, the system gave the best rank to Francisco Lindor, Aaron Judge, Trea Turner, J.T. Realmuto, Rafael Devers, Brandon Nimmo, and Trevor Story, among others. But it also gave the best rank to Franklin Barreto, Aaron Blair, José Rondón, Rosell Herrera, Alen Hanson, and Andrew Susac, a considerably less impressive group! The top 100 have combined for 959.7 WAR in the majors, with the top 50 responsible for 656.7 WAR.

OK, that’s enough of an intro — let’s get into this year’s Top 100:

ZiPS tends to be higher on high-floor/low-ceiling prospects than scouts are, but I’ve minimized that tendency in recent years by using the average of the 80th and 20th percentile projections, resulting in Triple-A players who are projected to be safe, middling role players, but who don’t have big upside, ranking lower on the list. Michael McGreevy is an example of how this change affects the rankings; by projected career WAR, he ranks 59th, but the 80th/20th percentile methodology drops him to 108th.

Unsurprisingly, there’s a lot of agreement between the ZiPS and the FanGraphs Top 100 lists, with 63 players appearing on both lists (this includes River Ryan and Ricky Tiedemann, who ranked 101st and 102nd on Eric’s list, but were both 50 FV prospects). That’s a little below the historical average of 65, but doesn’t constitute a drastic divergence. There are always going to be a handful of players who ZiPS doesn’t consider at all, such as Jesus Made, who has only played in the Dominican Summer League. And while ZiPS will use college stats when it has to, as it did with Chase Burns, college pitchers take a pretty big hit due to the lousiness of college translations; it was enough to knock Burns out of the ZiPS Top 100 when he’s obviously a top prospect.

From a team standpoint, here’s how many prospects each club has among the top 50, 100, 200, and 500 prospects. I’ve highlighted the leaders in each category:

Like last year, the Cubs are once again tied for the most Top 100 prospects, joined this time by the Guardians and the White Sox. ZiPS is a fan of the Garrett Crochet haul, with both Kyle Teel and Chase Meidroth ranking in the top 50, and that’s before considering Braden Montgomery, who has yet to make his professional debut.

Looking at a big list of 100 players is a daunting task, so let’s break it down by position, and dig into the players ZiPS does or doesn’t like. We’ll start with the first basemen.

Bryce Eldridge is the highest ranked first base prospect seen in ZiPS in some time. Last year, the top-ranked first base prospect was Nolan Schanuel, all the way down at no. 57! Eldridge burst through the Giants’ system in 2024, combining for a 137 wRC+ across four levels, and he doesn’t turn 21 until this year’s playoffs. He already has a 97 wRC+ projection right now at age 20, and while ZiPS doesn’t actually assess things this way, he certainly looks like a first baseman! Not all of his comps ended up working out, but two of the top ones are Boog Powell and David Ortiz — I’m sure the Giants would be very happy with either!

ZiPS had Xavier Isaac 155th last year, which was a bit of a wait-and-see as he moved up the minor league ladder. A 143 wRC+ age-20 season that saw him reach Double-A bounced him all the way up to being just outside the top 10. Ryan Clifford and Tyler Locklear return from last year’s list, with Clifford jumping 200 places, though with the return of Pete Alonso, I suspect he’ll most likely end up playing first base for another team in the next year or two. A lot of fans are excited about Deyvison De Los Santos, but ZiPS is pumping the brakes a bit; his 26 Triple-A homers (he hit 40 on the year) came in some mighty fine hitters’ environments, leaving him with an untranslated Triple-A wRC+ just over 100.

If his power develops further, Tre’ Morgan is another player who could progress quickly, though ZiPS thinks Isaac has the more interesting upside, at least at first. Jac Caglianone is another player who could advance quickly once he has more than a month of regular season pro baseball under his belt. I also really like saying his name, though that’s not part of the rankings. Now on to second base.

The top 100 is usually short on second basemen, typically because a large percentage of the guys who end up playing second base in the majors are still shortstops at this point in their careers. After all, it doesn’t make sense to move a guy off of short until you’re really sure he’s not going to be a solution there.

A 2023 fourth-rounder out of Georgia Tech, Kristian Campbell blew up in a good way in 2024, crushing it in the minors and already projecting as a good starter. ZiPS doesn’t think his ceiling is as high as some of the guys who rank ahead of him on the Top 100, but he’s a pretty low-risk prospect. I’m kind of curious where the position shift leaves Campbell. He’s definitely a player I’d bring up in trade talks with the Red Sox, but he’s not an under-the-radar guy, so they’re not going to give him away.

Travis Bazzana ranks high here on the strength of a decent debut and a .911 slugging percentage his last year at Oregon State. Termarr Johnson and Orelvis Martinez basically hold their ranks from last year, with performing about as expected in 2024. Of course, Martinez was suspended 80 games for PEDs, but I haven’t found PED suspensions to be useful in making projections more accurate, so ZiPS isn’t concerned about that. ZiPS thinks Michael Arroyo’s combination of power and speed could make him a decent role player right now, though it has him as a slightly below-average defensive player at second. As you’ll see when you scroll down to the shortstops, he’s not the only Mariners infielder who ZiPS likes much better than the consensus this year.

Will Wagner cracked the Top 100, though he is unlikely to be used at second this season. He got Edgar Martinez as a top comp at a similar stage of his career, but as I said in the ZiPS projections for the Blue Jays, don’t get too excited; Edgar Martinez was a Ken Phelps All-Star and projected to be a solid hitter, but he didn’t become ALL CAPS EDGAR until later. To the shortstops!

ZiPS uses a probability-based coordinate method for estimating minor league defensive performance, and it thought Carson Williams was absolute dynamite in 2024. Given that ZiPS also thinks that Williams can contribute offensively right now (104 wRC+ projection) and is a candidate to steal 20 bases (and he’s just 21), it isn’t surprising to see him rank ahead of every prospect on the list who hasn’t honed his craft in NPB. If Jackson Holliday were still considered a prospect, Williams would still have ranked higher.

ZiPS already liked Cole Young a lot last year, ranking him 17th overall, and him hitting .271/.369/.390 at Double-A in his age-20 season did nothing to lessen its affection. He’s not projected in the same realm as Williams or Jordan Lawlar on defense, but he projects to at least be somewhere near average, and the computer doesn’t think he needs to be moved off shortstop. Lawlar returns to this list, though he drops in the rankings due to the time he missed with a hamstring injury. Still, if you liked him before 2024, you should still like him now.

Leodalis De Vries was one of the players ZiPS couldn’t really consider last year, but he played about as well as you can expect a 17-year-old to manage, and the Padres think he’s advanced enough to spend time in major league camp this spring. ZiPS isn’t enthused by Aidan Miller’s defense, but it is excited by his power/speed potential, so he debuts on this list. Cooper Pratt is likely the biggest surprise on this list, with ZiPS thinking he has significant offensive upside. The computer also views him as an above-average defender at shortstop, though I’m not sure scouts would share that opinion.

The projections see Chase Meidroth as a below-average shortstop defender, but he’s already hit at Triple-A, which raises his floor considerably, and he’ll get plenty of opportunities in Chicago unless the White Sox do something bone-headed, which is always a possibility one has to consider. Colson Montgomery is far more likely to stick at the position, and I’m actually a little surprised that ZiPS didn’t really ding him for his rather meh 2024. Trey Sweeney just missed the Top 100, but Kevin McGonigle made it, though there’s some risk here in that he gets a lot of his offensive value from drawing walks, which isn’t necessarily what you want to see from a prospect. Every time I hear his name, I think of this clip. Next, let’s pivot to the hot corner.

Coby Mayo keeps hitting — though not in his very limited cup of coffee — and ZiPS still doesn’t share the worries about him as a third base defender that everyone else in the baseball world appears to have, so he maintains a very high ranking here. Matt Shaw is a big gainer from last year’s list (when he was still ranked as a shortstop); ZiPS likes him enough that it though that the Cubs were one of the teams with the least to gain by signing Alex Bregman. Jace Jung’s path to playing time got a whole lot clearer this week after the Tigers failed to land Bregman, and though Brady House doesn’t have a very good 2025 projection, ZiPS sees him as having big power upside and an above-average glove.

ZiPS is less keen on Brayden Taylor’s offense, but saw him as one of the best defensive third basemen in the minors, along with Ben Williamson, Kyle Karros, and Gage Workman. The glove is also what gets Williamson up to no. 120 in the rankings. Bryan Ramos makes this list for the umpteenth straight season, but ZiPS gets a little less enthusiastic about him each time. Eric Bitonti might be the most “out there” candidate on this list, mainly because “out there” is where he might hit a lot of baseballs. ZiPS also thinks he’s a pretty awful third baseman, which dampens the excitement a bit. He could very well show up on this list as a top first base prospect in the next few years. Now, the catchers!

If Samuel Basallo is ready for the majors and forces the Orioles to figure out what to do with him and Adley Rutschman on the roster, well, that’s a pretty nice headache to have. He’d nudge out Carson Williams in the overall rankings if not for the fact that young catchers tend to have strange development patterns, and some of them just go splat out of nowhere, even the elite prospects. The White Sox have other options at catcher, but it’s in their best interest to give Kyle Teel as much of an opportunity to shove aside the competition as they can.

Ethan Salas is a terrific prospect, and along with De Vries, he’s someone the Padres really need to work out when they’re paying Manny Machado and Xander Bogaerts $64 million a year for not a lot of WAR four years from now. He projects very well defensively, but the biggest risk here is age: There’s a lot that can happen to an 18-year-old catcher between the low minors and the majors. ZiPS doesn’t worry at all about his rather mediocre offensive performance at High-A, simply because he was an 18-year-old.

The Tigers traded Jack Flaherty for Trey Sweeney and Thayron Liranzo, made the playoffs without Flaherty, and then got Flaherty back, making that trade the Platonic ideal of eating your cake and having it, too. It’s an open question whether Liranzo will stick at catcher — 92 stolen bases allowed in 57 games last year is quite a lot — but he may not need to if his bat continues to develop. He could end up being Victor Martinez, which I’m sure the Tigers would be satisfied with. Last but not least among the position players, the outfielders.

I like to look at the outfielders as a group, simply because the lines between center fielder and corner outfielder aren’t quite as rigid at this point in their careers. Whether a player can at least fake center field is one of the key factors that determines how they’re used in the majors, after all.

The top chunk of outfield prospects all graduated to the majors last year, several spectacularly, so this year’s list is headed by Roman Anthony, who likely has a clearer path to immediate playing time in Boston than either Campbell or Mayer. He raked at Triple-A last year while still a 20-year-old, and frankly, even though I think Ceddanne Rafaela is an adequate option in center and the better defensive player, I think Anthony just being the starter gives the Red Sox the best chance at making the playoffs in 2025. ZiPS wanted to see more of Dylan Crews at this time last year, and it saw enough him in 2024 to move him near the front of the outfielder pack.

Which prospect does ZiPS give the highest OPS+ projection to at any point in their career? As you probably guessed, since you can read the order on the chart, the answer is Emmanuel Rodriguez. And he can play center field! Once the Twins are satisfied that his thumb is fully healed, it would be in their best interest to get him back out there on defense as quickly as possible. If you had both Byron Buxton and Rodriguez in the outfield at the same time, the Twins’ fly ball pitchers might name their firstborn children Emmanuron. Or, maybe not.

Max Clark remains on target to fill a real need for the Tigers in the outfield, and continuing its theme of falling in love with all the Cubs hitters this offseason, ZiPS ranks Owen Caissie as the best prospect to not make the FanGraphs list. Jasson Domínguez did nothing to hurt his rank in 2024, and ZiPS does not share the Yankees’ angst over whether he was a better player than Alex Verdugo. Kevin Alcántara ranked as one of the best defensive center fielders in the minors in 2024, though ZiPS isn’t as bullish about his bat — yet. Finally, we close with the pitchers.

Roki Sasaki doesn’t have his official ZiPS projection in the system yet — hopefully I’ve changed that by the time you’re reading this — but I can assure you, it’s real and it’s spectacular. He’s already succeeded at a higher level of play than any other pitching prospect, and though he’s not quite as “finished” a pitcher as Yoshinobu Yamamoto or Shota Imanaga were at this time last year, there’s no particular reason to worry about him. That is, except for health, but what pitcher doesn’t have that question mark lurking in the shadows?

Noah Schultz may still have some setbacks against Triple-A hitters, but so far is so good for the White Sox prospect, and if he doesn’t push his way into that rotation quickly, something’s gone horribly wrong. Something did go horribly wrong for Andrew Painter, but he was so excellent before missing two years with injury that ZiPS is giving him quite a lot of leeway, ranking him as the third-best pitching prospect even with big projection hits from the lost seasons.

Caden Dana gets a rather ho-hum 2025 projection, but ZiPS likes him a lot long-term, and if his walk rate this year looks more like it did in the minors in 2024, and hitters continue to have a hard time driving the ball against him, his projection ought to shoot up very quickly. ZiPS didn’t give Bubba Chandler an aggressive projection, but as I noted when responding to outraged Yinzers, Chandler has good long-term projections and upside, as evidenced by his ranking here. Jackson Jobe moved up as expected compared to last year, and Carson Whisenhunt is one less walk per game from being an elite prospect, at least as ZiPS sees it; it already likes him better long-term than last year’s San Francisco graduate, Kyle Harrison.

Tink Hence and Quinn Mathews both make the list as well, and as advanced prospects, they carry somewhat less risk than most pitchers. Interestingly enough, ZiPS actually slightly prefers McGreevy when talking just about 2025. Tekeah Roby, like McGreevy, didn’t miss the list by much (no. 119), so hopefully in what looks like a rather unambitious season for the Cardinals, they can at least answer a few questions about their future rotation.

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There’s still more winter to go, but this week gave us a sign of spring that’s way more promising than any silly groundhog in Pennsylvania. Pitchers and catchers have reported to Florida and Arizona for spring training. As usual, this is also the best time to do the first mega-run of ZiPS projected standings, to gauge where every team stands at the prelude to the 2025 season. Naturally, these are not the final projected standings, but they’re accurate through every bit of knowledge ZiPS and Szymborski have as of the morning of Thursday, February 13.

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

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

The result is a million different rosters for each team and an associated winning percentage for each million of them. After applying the new strength of schedule calculations based on the other 29 teams, I end up with the standings for each of the million seasons. I promise this is much less complex than it sounds.

The goal of ZiPS is to be less awful than any other way of predicting the future. The future is tantalizingly close but beyond our knowledge, and if anyone figures out how to deflect the astrophysicist Arthur Eddington’s arrow of time, it’s probably not going to be in the form of baseball projections. So we project probabilities, not certainties. If this does not satisfy you, just assume that any deviation from the actual results are due to flaws in reality.

Over the last decade, ZiPS has averaged 19.2 correct teams when looking at Vegas preseason over/under lines. I’m always tinkering with methodology, but most of the low-hanging fruit in predicting how teams will perform has already been harvested. ZiPS’ misses for teams from year to year are uncorrelated, with an r-squared of one year’s miss to the next of 0.000541. In other words, none of the year-to-year misses for individual franchises has told us anything about future misses for those franchises.

We published the ZiPS projected American League standings on Wednesday, so unless you’re accidentally here looking for the air flow data of Vornado vs. Honeywell desk fans, you guessed correctly that we’ve got the National League installment for today. Please note that the World Series probabilities across the two pieces will not add up to precisely 100%, thanks to the Nick Pivetta signing, the Alex Bregman signing, and some of the minor Wednesday transactions.

As far as bad seasons go, Atlanta had a darn good one, given the team still managed 89 wins and a brief playoff appearance despite significant injuries to Spencer Strider and Ronald Acuña Jr.. They both are expected to be back for most of the 2025 season, and even though their injuries have curbed their projections a bit, their returns are a major boon to the Braves — as good as any free agent signings made this winter. With guaranteed health on all fronts, the Braves would have a much more impressive projection, even taking into consideration the loss of Max Fried, but ZiPS expects there to be at least some injuries, and Atlanta’s depth these days isn’t terribly robust. The Braves also addressed their most glaring position of weakness, left field, with their signing of Jurickson Profar, who is coming off a career year with the Padres. ZiPS doesn’t expect Profar to repeat that performance, but considering Atlanta left fielders were below replacement level last season (77 wRC+, -0.3 WAR), his projected 110 wRC+ and 1.4 WAR represent a fairly sizable upgrade.

Not a lot of surprises here for the Phillies. Like the Braves, they had a very quiet offseason. As has been the case for the past few seasons, Philadelphia’s offense is quite solid, and incoming outfielder Max Kepler is a reasonable fill-in. The main concern for the Phillies here is simply that so many of their key contributors are now on the wrong side of 30. There is some risk that comes with new starting pitcher Jesús Luzardo, whom they acquired from the Marlins, but he offers quite a lot of high-end outcomes. But the truth is, this rotation probably would project to be a top-five staff in baseball even if Philadelphia had signed Steve Carlton instead, without the use of a time machine.

The Mets, on the other hand, had an action-packed offseason. Just signing Juan Soto and then mic-dropping likely would have made for a successful winter. To my utter shock, they were able to pull off the feat of not having to say goodbye to Pete Alonso or pay him a ludicrous amount of money. Yes, he’s declining, but the team is better with him at first and Vientos at third than with Vientos at first and Brett Baty at third. Now, I think people are underrating Baty based on his early career performance, but a contending team ought to be far more interested in the Polar Bear! ZiPS is not particularly enthused by the rotation, but it’s enough to pull the Mets into just about an even projection with the Braves and Phillies.

The Nationals are improving incrementally, and you can see that offensive core of James Wood, Dylan Crews, CJ Abrams, and Luis García Jr. coming together. First baseman Nathaniel Lowe is a solid trade pickup, and he came cheap enough that I can hardly protest too loudly that he’s a much better fit on a contending team. But ZiPS thinks about half this lineup is awful, and feels this pitching staff might be a little worse that the offense. Washington is better than the Marlins, but ZiPS doesn’t believe this team is ready for a breakthrough in 2025.

The gamble for the Marlins was that if they could get enough of their dynamic young pitching to stay healthy, they could compete for a wild card spot even with their lineup looking like the equivalent of a Chevrolet Citation that’s been sitting in your weird cousin’s barn for 30 years. When that roll of the dice didn’t work out, they were out of ideas. Now, their rotation projects to be a bottom-five staff, and as for the lineup, I think I’d rather put my money on the car.

As has been noted, ZiPS really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really likes Chicago’s lineup, even though Kyle Tucker isn’t as good a fit for Wrigley Field as he was for that park in Houston with the new name I just forgot again. Daikon? Dovahkiin? Dank? (Editor’s note: It’s Daikin Park.) ZiPS is not excited about the rotation, especially if a few injuries work their way into the mix, but it’s not enough to keep the Cubs from projecting at the top of the division.

The Cubs shouldn’t rest too easy, though, with the Brewers projected to finish just a couple games behind them. Milwaukee bleeds an elite bullpen arm every year it seems, but it pumps out new dominant relievers at a faster rate than I churn out Simpsons references from 1995. The offense has stabilized a bit, with Christian Yelich getting his offense back on track, and though the Brewers didn’t go big and bold this offseason, most NL Central teams didn’t either. ZiPS gives Nestor Cortes a nice little bounce-back season, which should ease the pain of the loss of Devin Williams.

I thought the Cardinals would come out a few games better than this, but ZiPS clearly is not buying their offseason of inaction. It was surprising not because I think the Cardinals are good, but because ZiPS rarely projects them to mediocre, let alone bad. This is only the second time ZiPS has clocked them as a sub-.500 team. The first time was 2008, when St. Louis won 86 games. Perhaps this projection is a bit counterintuitive because the Cardinals were worse in 2023 than they were in 2024, and they entered last season with an 83-win projection, but ZiPS simply saw last year’s team as having a lot more opportunity for upside. That makes sense when you consider the Cardinals didn’t sign a major league free agent before camps opened, lost Paul Goldschmidt and Andrew Kittredge to free agency, and declined their options for current free agents Lance Lynn and Kyle Gibson. All four of those guys are in the twilight of their careers at this point, but the Cardinals didn’t replace them externally, and their internal options don’t represent much of an improvement. Really, it feels like the Cardinals are just waiting around for John Mozeliak’s tenure to end.

The Reds boast some upside, but they also have some serious depth concerns, and an uninspiring group on the offensive side of the defensive spectrum. ZiPS kind of likes the rotation, but not the Plan B options after the projected starting five, and it’s decidedly lukewarm about the bullpen. There’s a lot of value tied up in comparatively few players: Elly De La Cruz, Hunter Greene, and a hopefully healthy Matt McLain.

Pittsburgh is a far less depressing team then you’d expect from its projected record, but it has far too many positions that are just screaming for more offense. Signing Anthony Santander would have been a much better idea than simply relying on Andrew McCutchen firing up the member berry invocations of a decade ago. Sure, a slugger like Santander wouldn’t come cheap, but now is precisely the time for the Pirates to spend. The top three in the rotation are terrific, and the Pirates are the type of team that if they could sneak into October, they could really surprise some people.

The curve for the Dodgers’ projections is actually pretty funny. You don’t quite see it with the 80/20 splits, but their 10th-percentile projection only drops another a third of a win and their first-percentile projection is 86 wins. Contrary to what people think, the sum of the Dodgers’ adding very expensive depth isn’t really on the high end, because they’re already pushing into diminishing returns territory. With good health, the Dodgers will have a hard time getting maximum value from all their players because they have so many good ones. The biggest benefit of all this is that the team is Marianas Trench deep, down at the depth where you start to see these fish things that look like Eldritch abominations. For the Dodgers to have a truly lousy season, it would probably take someone on their roster doing gain-of-function research on smallpox in the dugout, which is probably against the rules.

The Diamondbacks are absolutely solid everywhere except designated hitter, though ZiPS isn’t as keen on some of their replacement options. Adding Corbin Burnes is huge, and even if Jordan Montgomery ends up getting a lot of innings, he has to be better than he was last year, right? I actually thought Arizona would come out a few games better than this, but ZiPS really doesn’t like what happens in the event of a Gabriel Moreno or Ketel Marte injury, and the lackluster DH projection reflects the team’s lack of spare bats.

The Padres could be very good, but this is also a really delicate team. Bringing in Nick Pivetta is more helpful in the projections than what people might’ve expected because the back end of San Diego’s rotation looked pretty bleak to ZiPS. However, the wins that were giveth could be taketh away if the Padres trade Dylan Cease, something they seem determined to do, but that hasn’t happenedeth yet. The sudden changes in team revenues because of Diamond Sports’ bankruptcy and team ownership turmoil have really hurt the Padres, as they’re likely nearing the end of their current run. ZiPS really likes prospects Ethan Salas and Leodalis De Vries, but they won’t impact the 2025 roster, so you’ll have to wait until the ZiPS Top 100 Prospects next week for more on them!

The Giants successfully retained Matt Chapman, but they were below .500 with him last year. The big addition here is Willy Adames, but Justin Verlander is far less exciting than he was five years ago. There’s just too much meh all around for ZiPS to project San Francisco to be anything more than a third-tier candidate, though far from a hopeless one.

This may come as a shock to you, but the Rockies are acting with far more competence lately. Over the last two offseasons, they haven’t done anything crazy in free agency — like sign Kris Bryant to play the outfield — and they’ve stopped their usual practice of treating prospects as annoyances. It’s nice that Colorado is going to give Nolan Jones every chance to have a bounce-back season rather than plotting to replace him with, say, Andrew Benintendi, as the Jeff Bridich-era Rockies may have done. But just because they are a better-run organization doesn’t mean they are good. The hole is so deep that it will take quite a while to get out of it, and they basically still have to find an entire pitching staff. A healthy Germán Márquez and a miraculous resurgence from Bryant still wouldn’t make this team a contender.

As usual, I’m including the ZiPS playoff chart, which shows what the chances are that a number of wins is achieved by the division and Wild Card winners. For example, ZiPS projects the team that wins the NL East to have, on average, 95.6 wins, but just under 20% of the time, the eventual NL East champ will win at least 101 games.