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 Tuesday, February 11.

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’ll cover the American League today before getting into the National League tomorrow.

Right away, when glancing at the projections, you can see the theme of the American League: There are no dominant teams. The AL East is a good example to remember that the 50th-percentile projections don’t mean that the top team will actually win the division. Neither the Orioles or Yankees are projected with an over/under of 90 wins, but either team would need to win 96 games to have a 50% chance at taking the division.

Once again, ZiPS projects the O’s with the tiniest sliver of an edge over the Yankees. ZiPS thinks there’s a good chance that Baltimore can replace Anthony Santander’s production – or at least what he was likely to do in 2025 – and is a surprisingly big fan of Tyler O’Neill. But losing Corbin Burnes is a very big deal, and a few lower-key pitching signings can’t really replace that. It reminds me a bit of Buzzie Bavasi’s quote nearly 50 years ago that when the Angels lost Nolan Ryan, they could just replace him with “two 8-7 pitchers.” How’d that work out for them? There’s some downside in Baltimore’s rotation, but ZiPS thinks the offense is quite resilient.

The Yankees lost an even more important piece than the O’s did this offseason, when Juan Soto signed the largest contract in sports history to play for the Mets. That said, the Yankees made a number of solid upgrades at other positions after losing the second coming of Ted Williams. I prefer Devin Williams and Cody Bellinger to Clay Holmes and Alex Verdugo, and Max Fried is a very good addition. Paul Goldschmidt is well on the back end of his career these days, but he still represents an upgrade over Anthony Rizzo. Still, they lost Gleyber Torres to the Tigers, and with Jazz Chisholm Jr. set to slide from third base to second, the task of replacing Torres’ production falls to a platoon of Oswaldo Cabrera and the shell of DJ LeMahieu at third base. The Yankees didn’t quite hold serve in the exchange, but the O’s had losses of their own, so the status quo largely prevails.

ZiPS has projected the Red Sox to finish last in the AL East over the last few seasons, but they’ve always been within shouting distance of .500. The last bit stays true in 2025, but on the sunny side this time. Even though you’d be crazy to pencil him in for 180 innings, Garrett Crochet is a big addition to Boston’s rotation, and the bullpen has become sneaky good. The computer really believes in Kristian Campbell, though the question remains how quickly the team will integrate him into the lineup. The Red Sox, of course, would look even better with Mookie Betts, but that’s old news at this point.

ZiPS thinks Tampa Bay’s lineup is rather lackluster, and it doesn’t see a huge offensive upside here, but it does think the Rays have pretty solid depth. The big upside comes from the rotation because of the health questions surrounding Shane McClanahan, Shane Baz, and Drew Rasmussen. If any or all of these three pitchers are healthier than the projections currently expect, even small positive shifts in their workload assumptions would have pretty large effects on the whole AL East race.

Anthony Santander was a necessary addition for the Blue Jays, but was his signing enough? ZiPS is unsure, and while it’s projecting bounce-back seasons from guys like Bo Bichette and Kevin Gausman, there’s no certainty there, and this a tough, tough division. This is one of the best last place teams I’ve ever projected, so take from that what you will!

ZiPS projects the Guardians to win the AL Central over the Twins, but like in the AL East, the lead comes from the tiniest of mathematical margins. Their bullpen is terrific, but their offense has a bit too much merely OK floating around, and their rotation is adequate at best. Despite being projected as the AL Central leader, ZiPS only projects Cleveland as a coin flip to make the playoffs.

The Twins project to have an elite bullpen and a very good – and probably underrated – rotation. But it’s less than enthralled by the lineup once you get past Carlos Correa and Byron Buxton during their healthy moments, and it gets really hard, as with the Guardians, to see a scenario in which Minnesota gets far above 90 wins.

I don’t want to harp too much on Kansas City’s offense, since I did that at length last week, but the fact is it’s a very Bobby Witt Jr.-reliant lineup with a ton of holes. This might be the best projected Royals pitching staff in ZiPS history, and that may be enough for Kansas City either to keep pace with the Guardians and Twins or outright topple them. There are benefits to playing in a division with no truly ambitious teams.

Bringing back Jack Flaherty was a necessity for the Tigers, and they got him at a cheaper price than necessities tend to cost. They still project just behind the top three teams, but this division remains quite unclear. I would not want to be paying Alex Bregman in 2029 or 2030, but I’d seriously consider it if I were a team like the Tigers, with so much to gain by having him around the next few years.

The White Sox are projected to have one of the largest improvements in baseball, but a lot of that is simply because winning only 41 games in a season requires many things to not go your way. They are good bet to veer toward “ordinary awful” territory, even if they may not have hit rock bottom yet. Whatever happens, don’t mistake any win-loss improvement as organizational competence. Chicago’s most interesting pitchers will likely start the season in the minors, and the big question for the offense is how many of the aging role players the team signed will somehow be stuffed into the lineup for no particular reason.

The Astros are a lot less likely to be a juggernaut than they were a few years ago, but they’ve handled the myriad star departures well. ZiPS thinks Isaac Paredes and his pull-happy power will feel quite at home in Minute Maid Daikin Park, and Christian Walker is a far better idea to fill their gaping hole at first base than José Abreu was a few years ago. Yordan Alvarez is an absolute beast offensively, and ZiPS projects Jose Altuve to continue to age gracefully. The Astros aren’t really lousy anywhere, and that’s basically what quality team building in a 12-team playoff league looks like.

The common perception of the Mariners is they have a bad offense, but that’s been demonstrably untrue, and playing in a poor offensive park is the big culprit here. What is true, though, is that after Cal Raleigh and Julio Rodríguez, they’re just not amazing anywhere in the lineup, and they’ve been particularly unambitious there. The rotation, however, is dynamite, and though ZiPS is unimpressed with Seattle’s depth, if this team generally remains healthy, it can challenge Houston.

ZiPS likes the Rangers’ offense a lot. The rotation? Not so much. Jacob deGrom naturally projects very well, but given his extensive injury history, both ZiPS and I are coming way under the 132 innings that Depth Charts currently projects for him. He’s not the only Texas pitcher with injury concerns, and as a result, ZiPS sees this rotation as having one of the deepest downsides in baseball, which holds the Rangers’ projections down quite a bit.

Congratulations, A’s, you’ve moved up to a fourth-place projection! Their lineup is actually pretty decent, though not at first base, where ZiPS is bearish on Tyler Soderstrom. OK, the computer’s not quite as high on Jacob Wilson or JJ Bleday as is Depth Charts, but it wouldn’t be shocking to see a team with a lineup like this be a Wild Card contender. Where ZiPS has its doubts is the rotation, and though Luis Severino and Jeffrey Springs give this starting five some real upside, the other three guys are far less exciting.

I suspect the Angels think they’re better than this, but ZiPS really isn’t seeing it. The team’s been active this offseason and added a ton of familiar names, but largely ones that are familiar because of things they accomplished a long time ago. Getting a healthy Mike Trout would be fun for the Angels, and certainly for fans, but it probably wouldn’t be enough.

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 AL West to have, on average, 94.4 wins, but 20% of the projected AL West winners finish with only an 89-73 record.

By all reasonable accounts, the 2024 Kansas City Royals had a successful season. Fortune usually frowns upon a 100-loss team that makes a bunch of low-key free agent signings, but that was not the case for the Royals. The veterans starters they added, Seth Lugo and Michael Wacha, joined Cole Ragans to make up one of the best top-of-the-rotation trios in the majors, and Bobby Witt Jr. ascended from promising young star to MVP candidate. They made some smart deadline moves to bolster their bullpen, and they benefitted from some pleasant surprises along the way. Thanks to all of these things, the Royals won 30 more games in 2024 than they did the year before, and as a result, they made the playoffs for the first time since they won the 2015 World Series. While there was no improbable dash to the World Series this time, the Royals did at least eliminate the Baltimore Orioles, and although they fell to the Yankees in the ALDS, all four games were close. Moral victories may not count for much in professional sports, but Kansas City fans ought to be delighted with what this team accomplished last season.

However, successful doesn’t mean perfect, and the Royals did have some significant flaws. The most glaring one was a team offense that was full of holes. The Royals scored enough runs to support their excellent pitching, enough to rank a healthy sixth in the American League in runs per game (4.54), but it was an extremely unbalanced effort. Witt carried more than his fair share of the overall load, with his 10.4 WAR accounting for more than half of the total 20 WAR Kansas City got from its position players. From three of the four most offense-heavy positions, first base, the outfield corners, and designated hitter, the Royals received an embarrassing lack of production. First base was fine, if unspectacular, manned by Vinnie Pasquantino and Salvador Perez, but the outfield corners combined for an OPS south of .650 and a brutal -2.5 WAR, and Kansas City DHs combined for a 77 wRC+, the fourth-worst production in the majors from that position. With Witt’s season and a bare level of competence from these three positions, Kansas City’s offense should’ve been one of the top three or four in the AL. Instead, what the Royals got from the two corner outfield spots and DH was — and I’ll put it generously — below a bare level of competence. Read the rest of this entry »

We are now just over a week from pitchers and catchers reporting to spring training, and while there are still a lot of moves left to make, we have a basic idea how teams will be fundamentally constructed for the 2025 season. Our free agent tracker still lists 124 remaining free agents, as of Monday evening, but most of these players aren’t likely to have major impacts on their new teams. Only 15 of the players are projected on our Depth Charts as being worth one win, and only three players are projected at two wins. But one player remaining, Alex Bregman, stands clearly above the pack, at least as the mean old computers judge the situation. (Sorry, Polar Bear.)

A famous Scott Boras client in his early 30s remaining unsigned due to underwhelming offers in free agency has become a common refrain over the last few years. Unlike with some of their departing free agents over the years, the Astros have made more than a token effort at retaining their star, extending a six-year, $156 million offer in December. The general belief around baseball is that the deal is still on the table, and both the front office and his teammates would be very happy to have him return. But from a baseball standpoint, is Houston necessarily the best place for Bregman? And if it isn’t, which teams should be seriously pursuing him?

Fellow Fangraphéen Michael Baumann discussed the Bregman to the Astros scenario recently, and concluded that given the team’s needs and the acquisition of Isaac Paredes, it would be hard to get the maximum value out of Bregman’s return without doing something shocking, like trading Paredes before the start of the season. Since I’ve completed the initial run of ZiPS projections, I’m now equipped to do some (very) preliminary standings projections. I projected the Astros both with and without Bregman, using the normal methodology I use, which attempts to deal with team upside and downside scenarios and injuries.

ZiPS currently projects the league with a level of parity that appears, at first glance, to be greater than in the typical season. While the Dodgers are projected at 97 wins, the Astros are the only other team projected with an over/under number of 90 wins. That doesn’t mean there will be only two 90-win teams – in fact, you should expect quite a few more teams to reach that threshold — just that there’s a lot of uncertainty in a baseball team’s performance, and currently only two clubs have enough depth across their rosters to avoid the disastrous downside scenarios that are built into this projection system.

At 90.2 wins on average, reconfiguring a healthy Astros team to play Bregman at third, Paredes at second, and Jose Altuve in the outfield (the latter has been discussed), adds 2.8 wins (again, on average) to the bottom line in the ZiPS projections. That’s enough to bump the team’s playoff probability from 69.9% to 78.0%. A gain of just over eight percentage points is solid, to be sure, but how does that compare with the rest of the league?

To answer that question, I redid the simulation an additional 29 times, adding Bregman in turn to each team to see how his presence would change its playoff probability. It’s a bit more complex than simply replacing a team’s existing third baseman because in most cases, Bregman would cause a significant reshuffling of the roster roles. I tried to keep Bregman at third base wherever possible and shift others around him, and I completely avoided implausible scenarios, such as a team signing him to be its starting catcher. So, how’d it shake out?

There are basically two questions here for projection systems to answer: 1) How many wins would Bregman add? 2) What are the utility of those wins? Bregman would represent a massive upgrade for the White Sox, but they are extremely unlikely to be relevant enough for those wins to actually matter. (Bregman would help the Pale Hose avoid rounding to zero, skyrocketing their playoff probability to 1-in-1,455!) Their rivals on the North Side, the Cubs, also rank very low on this list for the opposite reason: ZiPS already sees the Cubs as having a very strong offense. Sure, marginal wins are valuable for any team, but it’s hard for the Cubs to really leverage Bregman without one of those downside scenarios occurring, such as underperformance from guys like Matt Shaw or Seiya Suzuki, or a rash of injuries to key players. If there were a pitching equivalent of Bregman available, the Cubs would likely be at the very top of this list.

The Astros are only in the middle of the pack in terms of playoff improvement with Bregman. But two other teams that have been rumored at times to be in the mix would see a major surge in their postseason odds if they were to sign him: the Detroit Tigers and Boston Red Sox. The Tigers are in a position where the extra wins they’d get from Bregman would translate into a huge playoff probability boost, and though ZiPS thinks Jace Jung would be solid at third, signing Bregman would trigger a roster shuffle that would tighten up right field and the short side of Detroit’s DH platoon — the team’s two weakest positions, according to ZiPS. There’s been some speculation that Bregman could play second base for the Red Sox, but as ZiPS sees it, Boston would get more value from keeping Bregman at third, moving Rafael Devers to first, and letting Triston Casas and Masataka Yoshida fight it out at DH. This alignment would require prospect Kristian Campbell to be on the roster and filling the team’s current hole at the keystone.

But the best place for Bregman, at least in the ZiPS projections, is another AL Central team: the Kansas City Royals. While the corner outfield scenario is absolutely brutal, especially if MJ Melendez and Hunter Renfroe get the vast majority of the playing time in left and right field, respectively, ZiPS sees merit in shifting Maikel Garcia or Michael Massey into one of the corner spots on the grass, with Bregman taking over at third. ZiPS also thinks Bregman would provide a terrific resolution of the hot corner questions in Cincinnati, though there’s probably even less of a chance the Reds would actually do this than the Royals. The Padres likely don’t have enough payroll flexibility even to offer Bregman a short-term deal with an opt out, but if they could find room in their budget, sell him on playing second base, and shift Jake Cronenworth to left field — or even convince Bregman to play left — there would be more high-end scenarios in which San Diego could make the Dodgers uncomfortable.

My gut says the Tigers will be the team to land Bregman, and likely very soon if it happens. They just shored up the rotation with the signing of Jack Flaherty at an extremely reasonable price, and as the projected fourth-place team in the AL Central right now, they have a lot to gain by adding a legitimate All-Star. There’s a way, but is there a will?

A key piece of the 2024 Detroit Tigers reunited with the team on Sunday, as starting pitcher Jack Flaherty signed a two-year deal worth $35 million. Flaherty excelled for the Tigers last year, putting up a 2.95 ERA and a 3.12 FIP in 106 2/3 innings over 18 starts, good for 2.1 WAR. With the Tigers seemingly out of the playoff race in July, he was shipped to the Dodgers, with whom he won the World Series. He was respectable over 10 regular-season starts with Los Angeles, but his performance was decidedly mixed in the postseason.

Like many short-term contracts for solid players, this deal comes with its own ifs, ands, and buts. Flaherty’s guaranteed money is front-loaded, structured as a one-year, $25 million deal with a player option for $10 million in 2026 that increases to $20 million if he starts 15 games in 2025. Whether one sees the deal as a two-year contract with an opt-out or a one-year contract with a player option is a “potato, po-tah-to” issue that really doesn’t matter here; in this case, they’re the same functional thing.

What does matter is that Flaherty’s market appears to not have developed as much as that of some of the other top pitchers available. While it shouldn’t raise an eyebrow that Blake Snell and Corbin Burnes got much bigger contracts, Flaherty also received a lighter deal than Sean Manaea, Nathan Eovaldi, and Luis Severino. While Flaherty didn’t miss any significant time due to injury last year — he skipped only a single start with lower back pain in July — questions about his back were enough for the Yankees to have second thoughts about trading for him at the deadline. The Dodgers were happy enough to acquire him, and though his strikeout rate dropped off (32% to 26%), he was certainly a net plus for an injury-thinned starting staff down the stretch. Read the rest of this entry »

For the 21st consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction and MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the final team this year is the San Diego Padres.

Batters

After an extremely disappointing 2023 with Juan Soto in tow, the Padres bounced back to punch above their weight without him in 2024, thus giving less analytically inclined observers ample ammunition to reach spectacularly wrong conclusions about cause and effect. Losing Soto didn’t help the Padres, but a phenomenally successful move to the rotation for Michael King, a rebound season from Fernando Tatis Jr., and a stunning rookie campaign from Jackson Merrill did a lot to make up for his absence. (It also helped that they didn’t underperform their Pythagorean record by 10 wins like they did in 2023.) Read the rest of this entry »

For the 21st consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction and MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the penultimate team is the St. Louis Cardinals.

Batters

The 2024 St. Louis Cardinals experienced a bit of a bounce back from the team’s worst season in decades, but in a year where it took 89 wins to grab the final NL Wild Card spot, the Red Birds were still well short of being able to squeeze back into the playoffs. While things were sunnier than they were the year before, the Cardinals were outscored on the season, and neither of the stars in the lineup, Paul Goldschmidt and Nolan Arenado, returned to their 2023 form. It doesn’t appear as if the Cards feel like they’re on the precipice of an October return, as they’ve largely spent the offseason trying to trade Arenado.

Might Arenado actually be underrated at this point? While his offensive production has come down quite a bit from its peak, his 149 wRC+ in 2022 was likely always a late-era outlier, and a 102 wRC+ is hardly lousy for a third baseman. He’s no longer a star without a resurgence at the plate, but he was at least a good player in 2024, amassing 3.1 WAR thanks to very good defense at the hot corner. I think the perception of Arenado’s 2024 might be a lot worse than his season actually was. When I posted the depth chart graphic on social media, it led to a couple of conversations about ZiPS projecting a comeback season, even though the 2.9 WAR it forecasts is below his 2024 number!

With two glaring exceptions, ZiPS mostly thinks that the Cards are adequate to good around the diamond. Masyn Winn projects as the lineup’s second-best player, and though ZiPS isn’t crazy about Thomas Saggese, it likes Brendan Donovan enough to end up with a good second base WAR number, assuming the latter gets the plate appearances projected on our Depth Charts. The system projects that Willson Contreras will be good enough offensively that he could be a reasonable first baseman, and though it pulls back considerably on Iván Herrera’s rookie offense, the tandem of him and Pedro Pagés also looks solid.

Where ZiPS is unhappy is in the non-Lars Nootbaar portions of the outfield. In center field, Victor Scott II’s defense isn’t enough to completely cancel out a bleak offensive projection, and the computer doesn’t see Michael Siani as providing much of a shove. Scott’s a weird one to project in that he actually hit pretty decently in Double-A in 2023, but he was absolutely horrific in the minors last year, putting up a 59 wRC+. Note that that’s not the translation, but his actual number. Scott hit somewhat better in July after changing his stance, putting up a .711 OPS for the Triple-A Memphis Redbirds, but that hint of production disappeared in the majors and he earned a demotion in mid-September.

As for the other exception, Jordan Walker, ZiPS actually thinks he improved his defense somewhat in 2024, to the point that he’s not a pure designated hitter, just a fairly lousy right fielder who could play if he hits. But that’s kind of the problem. Walker now has about 500 PA of not hitting Triple-A pitchers. If Scott had a 93 wRC+ at Triple-A, it would be cause for optimism, but it’s completely inadequate for someone who is supposed to be valued entirely for his bat. Walker isn’t old, and you can squint and still kind of see his upside, but the odds are against him being a real contributor in 2025.

Pitchers

I’m not sure why ZiPS is suddenly reminded of a couple of knuckleballers, Phil Niekro and Tom Candiotti, when it looks at Sonny Gray, but removing them from the large cohort doesn’t change Gray’s projection, which makes him the favorite to represent the Cardinals at the All-Star Game this summer. It’s hard to tell how seriously the team really considered trading Gray, but he does have some pretty decent value with two years left on his contract. Of course, that assumes that his forearm tendinitis isn’t something darker, but really, you could say that about every pitcher who has ever existed.

He projects as having lower long-term upside than either Quinn Mathews or Tink Hence, but ZiPS is increasingly a fan of Michael McGreevy, who has good control and keeps the ball down, which has value in front of what ZiPS projects to be an above-average infield. Both Mathews and Hence project as legitimate starters right now, with ZiPS a little more confident about the former for 2025. ZiPS isn’t expecting quite as good a year from Erick Fedde, but it remains comfortable with the back of St. Louis’ rotation, both in terms of its non-horrendous quality and its reasonable depth.

It might be a stretch to say that ZiPS sees the Cardinals bullpen as “Ryan Helsley and some other guys,” but their hard-throwing closer is the only reliever who the computer can summon any excitement about. Helsley lost a couple of strikeouts per game coming back from his 2023 injuries, but ZiPS isn’t worried about that, as his velocity is intact and his contact rate is consistent with that of a whiffier pitcher. Ryan Fernandez, JoJo Romero, and John King all project as a bit above average, and the computer would put Matthew Liberatore in that group as well. ZiPS is rather meh on the low-leverage portion of the bullpen, and while the Cardinals could certainly add an arm or two there, this doesn’t appear to be a team that intends to make so much as a ripple in free agency.

Unlike most seasons, ZiPS does’t see the Cardinals as being in the same tier as the Brewers and Cubs. St. Louis has better projections than the Pirates and Reds, at least for now, but even then, only barely. It has been an incredibly quiet offseason in St. Louis outside of the constant Arenado rumors, with the team doing just about nothing, and we’re now only a few weeks from the opening of spring training. The team’s biggest signing this winter? Ryan Vilade. Even throwing in the towel would be more interesting, and probably more helpful than cosplaying as the heat death of the universe.

Ballpark graphic courtesy Eephus League. Depth charts constructed by way of those listed here. Size of player names is very roughly proportional to Depth Chart playing time. The final team projections may differ considerably from our Depth Chart playing time.

Players are listed with their most recent teams wherever possible. This includes players who are unsigned or have retired, players who will miss 2025 due to injury, and players who were released in 2024. So yes, if you see Joe Schmoe, who quit baseball back in August to form a Norwegian Ukulele Dixieland Jazz band that only covers songs by The Smiths, he’s still listed here intentionally. ZiPS is assuming a league with an ERA of 4.11.

Hitters are ranked by zWAR, which is to say, WAR values as calculated by me, Dan Szymborski, whose surname is spelled with a z. WAR values might differ slightly from those that appear in the full release of ZiPS. Finally, I will advise anyone against — and might karate chop anyone guilty of — merely adding up WAR totals on a depth chart to produce projected team WAR. It is important to remember that ZiPS is agnostic about playing time, and has no information about, for example, how quickly a team will call up a prospect or what veteran has fallen into disfavor.

As always, incorrect projections are either caused by misinformation, a non-pragmatic reality, or by the skillful sabotage of our friend and former editor. You can, however, still get mad at me on Twitter or on BlueSky.

For the 21st consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this years introduction and MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the next team up is the Kansas City Royals.

Batters

The Tigers got a bit more attention simply because they seemed so dead in the water in July, but Kansas City’s 30-win improvement from the year before – and the even more impressive 35-win improvement in Pythagorean wins – was damn impressive. Victory may have a thousand fathers, but Bobby Witt Jr. was the big daddy of this feat, missing out on an MVP award only because he plays in the same league as peak Aaron Judge. ZiPS isn’t keen to project 7- or 8-WAR seasons as the baseline expectation based on a single season, but Witt’s projection still is that of a serious MVP candidate, and among players over the next five years, his WAR projection is less than those of only Juan Soto and Shohei Ohtani. His nearly $290 million deal with the Royals is, in the early days, looking like one of the best team investments of all time.

ZiPS is naturally excited about Witt, but that excitement doesn’t carry over to the rest of the team. This probably isn’t a surprise considering that other than Witt, only Salvador Perez finished with 2 WAR among Royals hitters in 2024. If you rank Kansas City’s hitters from last season, and add up the five best after Witt, they still add up to a full win short of the franchise shortstop.

That being said, it’s not exactly a Darryl Strawberry-playing-with-Springfield-Nuclear-Plant-employees situation. ZiPS expects the Royals to get around 2 WAR at most positions, with projections for Perez, Jonathan India, and Maikel Garcia crossing the two-win line in 2025. And if Michael Massey and Vinnie Pasquantino end up playing in more games than the 120-something that ZiPS projects for them, they each would also be worth more than 2 WAR. Witt may stand alone as a superstar in this lineup, but the Royals do have some solid talent here.

What is disappointing, given how competitive the projections are for the Royals as a whole and how close they are to the Guardians and Twins, is that Kansas City didn’t make a more vigorous attempt to upgrade its corner outfield spots. MJ Melendez hasn’t done anything that ought to entitle him to be the default option in left field, even if you look at his sunnier Steamer and OOPSY projections. If you subscribe to the ZiPS projection for Melendez, the Royals, as of now, look to enter the season as a reigning playoff team with a replacement-level corner outfield. Kansas City is projected to get positive value from its left fielders overall, but only because our Depth Charts is factoring in some time for India out there, and ZiPS doesn’t like right fielder Hunter Renfroe much more than it does Melendez. Right now, it looks like the value of four of Witt’s wins will do nothing more than offset the roughly replacement-level production of those two outfielders. Then again, that’s kind of what happened last year; while Witt posted a 10-win season, Royals corner outfielders combined for about -1.0 WAR. At the moment, ZiPS is projecting their corner outfielders to be worth about 1.3 WAR. That’s an improvement, yes, but as I mentioned up top, ZiPS projects Witt to be worth about four wins less than he was last season. That’s still a six-win season, but as things stand, the Royals are projected to get about two fewer wins of total value from the three positions — shortstop, left field, and right field — this year (7.3) than they did last year (9.4).

Pitchers

ZiPS may think that the Royals have the offense of a 68-win team plus Witt, but it thinks they have a rotation that’s in the top third of the league, a more bullish outlook than the other projections. It’s not shocking that ZiPS projects Cole Ragans to have a 4-WAR season, based on Depth Charts’ projected innings for him. (Below, you’ll see ZiPS has him at 2.9 WAR, but that’s only because it projects him to throw fewer innings.) But what might be surprising is how little Seth Lugo is projected to drop off from his superb 2024 season, when he finished second in the Cy Young voting. If Witt makes up for some of the sins for the offense, the Ragans-Lugo one-two punch covers up some more of them. Michael Wacha projects as a solid no. 3 starter, and though ZiPS doesn’t love Alec Marsh, it does like Kris Bubic quite a bit. It also thinks that pitchers like Michael Lorenzen and Kyle Wright are more than capable of filling out a decent rotation.

From a projection standpoint, Noah Cameron might be the most interesting Royals starter. He’s a soft-tosser, with a fastball in the low 90s, but he has excellent command and, most importantly, he avoided getting his brains beaten in by Triple-A hitters, which is a frequent fate of pitchers of this type. Instead, opposing batters had a very low average exit velocity against him (under 83 mph). And thanks to his changeup and curveball, which are both plus pitches, he also struck out 29% of the Triple-A batters he faced. A control pitcher who can avoid hard contact and knows how to get some strikeouts is someone worth watching.

ZiPS projects the bullpen to be right around league average, thanks in large part to Lucas Erceg and Hunter Harvey, both picked up last July for the pennant race (and beyond). Considered just as a reliever, Angel Zerpa would have a projected 3.65 ERA, an slight improvement over his solid 2024 season. John Schreiber gets a fairly good projection as well, but after that, ZiPS is less impressed with Kansas City’s relief options. If the Royals are not going to fix their outfield in free agency – and they may not be able to do that anymore because most of the quality guys have already signed — they might want to get another arm or two to improve their bullpen.

From a preliminary standpoint, ZiPS projects Kansas City to finish with 82-85 wins in 2025. That’s tantalizingly close to competing on equal terms with the Twins and Guardians, close enough that the Royals should keep adding this offseason to pull ahead of their division rivals and make a run at another postseason appearance.

Ballpark graphic courtesy Eephus League. Depth charts constructed by way of those listed here. Size of player names is very roughly proportional to Depth Chart playing time. The final team projections may differ considerably from our Depth Chart playing time.