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 »

The deafening quiet of this year’s July trade market was disturbed on Thursday night with the announcement that the Seattle Mariners were acquiring first baseman Josh Naylor from the Arizona Diamondbacks. Naylor has provided more than respectable offense for the Snakes this year, hitting .292/.360/.447 with 11 homers, good for a 123 wRC+ and 1.4 WAR. Heading to the desert in return are two minor league pitchers, lefty Brandyn Garcia and righty Ashton Izzi.

While the Diamondbacks have generally disappointed in 2025, little of the fault can be placed at Naylor’s feet. The team expected to compete in 2025, but lost Christian Walker to the Astros in free agency, so the hope was that Naylor would fill the hole for a year before hitting the open market himself. He was never going to be an elite defensive first baseman like Walker, but the expectation was that he would at least provide a similar level of offense. Naylor is likely to fall well short of his career-high 31 homers from 2024, but he’s compensated for that by adding nearly 50 points of batting average, meaning his 123 wRC+ is actually slightly higher than his 119 mark from last season.

If the season ended today, the Mariners would make the playoffs as the second AL Wild Card, and the five-game separation between them and the division-leading Astros is not an insurmountable distance. Houston’s edge in the AL West seems even smaller when you consider how much of its lineup is currently out hurt. The injured quartet of Yordan Alvarez, Isaac Paredes, Jeremy Peña, and Jake Meyers would represent a huge chunk of any team’s offensive value. First base has been a particular source of trouble for the M’s this year, with their first basemen ranking in the bottom third in baseball with a combined 0.4 WAR. The original plan had been for Luke Raley to get the lion’s share of the playing time at first, mostly against righties, with fill-ins around him to take care of the southpaws. However, injuries to Mitch Haniger and Victor Robles thinned out Seattle’s corner outfield and DH depth and pushed Raley mostly to right field. As a result, the team was forced to give a lot of playing time to Rowdy Tellez; he posted an execrable .249 on-base percentage with the Mariners before they dropped him in June.

Naylor is not a superstar, so naturally, his acquisition doesn’t dramatically change the face of the AL West race. After last night’s win over the Angels, ZiPS gave the Mariners a 76% chance to make the playoffs and a 24% probability to win the division. These numbers would be 72% and 21% without the trade.

So, what’s the cost for their new first baseman? Neither Garcia, nor Izzi was torching up the prospect lists, but then again, Naylor is a free agent after the season, making this trade is a pure short-term rental. The 25-year-old Garcia has already made a brief major league debut, and since I don’t believe the Diamondbacks are going to go full rebuild, that has a lot of allure over the compensation draft pick they would have gotten if they’d held onto Naylor and he’d signed elsewhere this offseason. Garcia is a hard-throwing lefty sinkerballer with a three-quarters delivery who predictably induces a lot of grounders. My colleague Eric Longenhagen gave him a 40+ FV when Seattle’s top prospects list was published last month.

The ZiPS projections see Garcia as a solid, though unspectacular, mid-bullpen arm with at least some upside.

As a 21-year-old in High-A ball, Ashton Izzi has more developing to do than Garcia, but even with decidedly mixed results, the righty showed enough upside for Eric to also give him a 40+ FV. According to Eric, Izzi boasts a four-seamer that sits around 94 mph with solid movement. He gets “near elite” extension with his fastball, but it doesn’t generate many whiffs. Izzi also has a usefully average two-seamer, Eric says, as well as a sweeper and a cutter; the sweeper is a big swing-and-miss pitch for him. His changeup is mediocre, and Eric is concerned that Izzi will struggle to develop a good weapon to wield against lefties. Overall, per Eric, if Izzi can clear his developmental hurdles, he can make the majors as a starter.

In all, I think getting two real prospects, one who can impact the parent club immediately, is an absolutely fair return for Naylor. The Mariners have only two playoff wins over the last two decades, and now is the time to go all-in to add to that total. Their offense is better this season than in previous years, but they still needed to fill their hole at first base, and Naylor represents a major upgrade over what they had before.

12:09

Dan Szymborski: I’m here, sorry, got caught up in Hulk Hogan news!

12:12

Dan Szymborski: Solidly above average speed, while he’s not a grounder machine, he hits a lot of *hard* grounders

12:14

Dan Szymborski: Theres’ the hope he got his crap together after an AWFUL April. He’s actually been solid since

Read the rest of this entry »

The midseason is a good point to catch up on one’s mistakes, to see where reality has crushed your predictions. We’re nearly half a year from the most recent iteration of the ZiPS Top 100 Prospects, and with a flurry of trades likely to happen in the next week, it seems to be time to check in on how the algorithms which have seized my life and crushed all traces of humanity ZiPS projection system is doing in the prospnostications for 2025.

For each of the top 100 prospects, I’m including a chart of their 2025 minor league translations and how their 2026-2030 WAR has changed since February. Last year was my first midseason review of the prospect list, and some of my charts just made things confusing, so I’m making them less dense/opaque this time around, in the hopes of communicating the data better. The translations and projections are through Monday’s games. As a quick reminder, ZiPS ranks prospects by the average of their 20th-percentile and 80th-percentile career WAR projections, and explicitly leaves out players for which it has nothing to bring to the table, so no high school hitters or pitchers without professional experience.

ZiPS is naturally a bit down on Carson Williams given his struggles offensively this year, but he still has the glove, and a 102 wRC+ in Triple-A for an excellent defensive shortstop isn’t so bad that it would send him tumbling down the ranks. If February ZiPS had known about the first half of the 2025 season, it would have had Roman Anthony hurdle over Williams, Roki Sasaki, and Samuel Basallo to be the no. 1 prospect in baseball. Unlike Williams, Basallo has been very good, it’s just that Anthony has been even better. Read the rest of this entry »

We’re now two weeks from the trade deadline, and so far, not much has happened since the mid-June Rafael Devers trade. At least, that is, if you’re not the world’s biggest fan of Adam Frazier, just acquired by the Kansas City Royals. Unless we have the most boring deadline season ever, there’s a lot more to come as this is every organization’s last, best chance to improve their teams for the homestretch and the playoffs. So, who has the most to gain by being a buyer?

We could just say “teams near the playoffs” and peace out, but given I have access to a projection system that comes with a season simulation attached, that would be kind of lazy. So to get some hard numbers on the possible benefits beyond just saying Good Player Make Wins Go Brrr, I ran the rest-of-season simulation 60 times — adding one win to each team once, and then two wins to each team once — and hit the red run button. (I actually have one.) Yes, that means even the White Sox and Rockies get the opportunity to add wins, though you can judge whether this is being complete or being cruel.

In the chart below, which gives the results for all 30 teams, “+1” and “+2” represent the scenarios in which we added either one or two wins to that team’s bottom line. The table ought to be sortable, unless I messed it up, which is a thing that does happen. (Editor’s Note: Dan did not mess this up. Happy sorting!) Read the rest of this entry »