For the 22nd 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, as well as MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the first team up is the Philadelphia Phillies.

Batters

The Phillies offense kept right on rolling for another season, once again scoring nearly 800 runs, and finishing with a wRC+ of 109, the team’s best total during this era. As expected, Philadelphia’s rotation was terrific, but the offense contributed more than its fair share to the team’s 96 wins, the second most in baseball.

There are worries lurking on the horizon, however. Trea Turner had what was certainly his best season in Philadelphia, but he’s entering his mid-30s, a very dangerous time for a middle infielder. I was actually surprised to see the drop-off in the ZiPS projection for Turner, but noticed that Steamer was basically projecting the same thing. Also entering his mid-30s is Bryce Harper, who has solidified his chances of a plaque in Cooperstown, but appears to now be off his peak years. Kyle Schwarber and J.T. Realmuto are free agents, and I think both stand a real chance of returning to Philadelphia, though both are also entering the likely decline phases of their careers; indeed, Realmuto probably already has. Read the rest of this entry »

As soon as one story in baseball ends, another begins. And so, with the 2025 season dissipating into silence as the champions hoist the World Series trophy, its remnants seed the next phase of the sport’s existence out from the quantum foam. The four months between now and Opening Day feel like an interminable gap, but we have the Hot Stove League to keep the MLB baseballmatic universe rolling. That means, as has been the case for nearly a quarter of a century now, it’s time for me to start rolling out the ZiPS projections for next season.

For those new to my projections, ZiPS is a computer projection system I initially developed in 2002–04. It officially went live for the public in 2005, after it had reached a level of non-craptitude I was content with. The origins of ZiPS are similar to Tom Tango’s Marcel the Monkey, coming out of discussions I had in the late 1990s with Chris Dial, one of my best friends (our first interaction involved Chris calling me an expletive!) and a fellow stat nerd. ZiPS quickly evolved from its original iteration as a reasonably simple projection system, and it now both does a lot more and uses a lot more data than I ever envisioned it would 20 years ago. At its core, however, it’s still doing two primary tasks: estimating what the baseline expectation for a player is at the moment I hit the button, and then estimating where that player may be going using large cohorts of relatively similar players.

So why is ZiPS named ZiPS? At the time, Voros McCracken’s theories on the interaction of pitching, defense, and balls in play were fairly new, and since I wanted to integrate some of his findings, I decided (with his blessing) that the name of my system would rhyme with DIPS (defense-independent pitching statistics). I didn’t like SIPS, so I went with the next letter in my last name. I originally named my work ZiPs as a nod to CHiPs, one of my favorite shows to watch as a kid, but I mis-typed ZiPs as ZiPS when I released the projections publicly, and since my now-colleague Jay Jaffe had already reported on ZiPS for his Futility Infielder blog, I chose to just go with it. I never expected that all of this would be useful to anyone but me; if I had, I would surely have named it in less bizarre fashion. Read the rest of this entry »

Just in time to push back the withdrawal symptoms from the lack of baseball, it’s awards week! We started, as usual, with the Rookie of the Year awards, and in the National League, Drake Baldwin earned the hardware, finishing with 21 first-place votes to Cade Horton’s total of nine. Baldwin was the only candidate to appear on all 30 ballots. Horton finished second, followed by Caleb Durbin, Isaac Collins, and Daylen Lile.

Did the BBWAA members entrusted with this task make good picks? That’s for you to decide. I’m here for my usual task of explaining/justifying/defending how I voted in my award this year, the NL Rookie of the Year award. I like to think I do a pretty good job, but I personally feel my responsibility for addressing my vote ought to go beyond the confidence I may have in my own competence. This is ostensibly an expert panel, not a federal election, so a vote here isn’t a question of my right to have one but my duty to exercise it thoroughly. People in the baseball community, from the most casual fans to the players themselves, ought to know why I voted for someone and not others. This is especially true when many disagree with me, such as my past first-place votes for Jackson Merrill last year and Trevor Rogers in 2021. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re a baseball fan — and presumably most people reading this are — Game 7 of the 2025 World Series was like the best buffet you’ve ever been to. There were no hotel pans full of lukewarm highlights sitting atop Sterno cans. This one had dramatic home runs, crazy defensive plays, a series of starting pitcher relief cameos, and even some questionable baserunning for flavor. Even Will Smith’s 11th-inning home run, which was the eventual difference, might have only been the fifth-most exciting moment in one of the best World Series games I’ve seen in my near half-century of existence.

We certainly started off with an entertaining matchup of starting pitchers. For the Dodgers, we got Shohei Ohtani, the player who has defined the 2020s. While Tyler Glasnow’s three-pitch save in Game 6 didn’t disqualify him — he appeared later in this game — Ohtani is tricky to use as a relief option since the Ohtani DH rule only works when he’s starting. On the other side, Max Scherzer got the start for the Blue Jays, and while the future Hall of Famer is nearing the end of his career and is no longer an ace, I wouldn’t dare get between Mad Max and a Game 7.

Ohtani started things off in the first with a liner to center, advancing to second on a Smith grounder after a terrific diving play by Vladimir Guerrero Jr. to prevent the Dodgers from getting two on with no one out. Ohtani then advanced to third on a Freddie Freeman fly out, but he was stranded after a Mookie Betts groundout to Andrés Giménez. Read the rest of this entry »

When it comes to this World Series, determining which team is the favorite and which is the underdog is a fairly easy exercise. The Blue Jays won one more game during the regular season than the Dodgers did, but Dodger Blue has tended to be strongly favored over Labatt Blue. The Vegas odds for the Dodgers opened at -215, implying a better than two-in-three chance of a Los Angeles championship; per the research of CakesRacer522 on Reddit, only the 2019 Astros started off with better odds. For our part, the FanGraphs World Series odds were nearly as lopsided going into the series, projecting a 66.3% chance of the Dodgers prevailing. The ZiPS projections weren’t quite as bullish, but the computer’s 60/40 split isn’t quiet a coin flip. The Dodgers also spend money like they have their own currency, and won the World Series in both 2020 and 2024, while the Jays, though themselves a top five payroll team, haven’t sniffed the Fall Classic in more than 30 years.

So are the Blue Jays doomed? That’s a preposterous question in a game as coin-flippy as baseball tends to be; after all, if the Dodgers were fated to win, the projections would sit at 100%, not 68% or 66% or 60%. That said, if the Blue Jays do come out ahead, it’ll be an especially big plaudit, because they’re not just facing the 2025 Dodgers, they’re facing the best version of the 2025 Dodgers.

As is their wont, the Dodgers suffered more than their share of injuries in 2025. As of mid-September, I had them losing the third-most potential wins due to injury in the majors. In 2024, they were the “champions” of this sad category. Last winter, the Dodgers spent nearly $400 million on free agents, most notably Blake Snell, Teoscar Hernández, and Tanner Scott, after having signed Shohei Ohtani the prior offseason. It fueled some pretty crazy projections before the 2025 season, such that the 98 wins forecast by ZiPS actually got a lot of pushback for being too negative about the team’s hopes. But as I said before Opening Day, the Dodgers are so good that they’re at the point where signing great players comes with increasingly diminishing returns, because those guys are covering for a good number of plate appearances and innings that were already much better than replacement level. Indeed, the team’s biggest improvement — at least as ZiPS saw it — was in making their floor absurdly high rather than their ceiling. Read the rest of this entry »

Hey kids, there’s a substitute teacher today! But I’ve been given the lesson plan, so we’re going to go ahead and talk about Milwaukee Brewers manager Pat Murphy — no spending the day watching old episodes of The Simpsons that I have on VHS, even though this classroom still has a functioning VCR for some reason. As your normal teacher, Mr. Clemens, would do, I’m going to grade Murphy based on his overall performance in the playoffs, rather than scrutinize every single micro decision made. If you’d like to see Mr. Clemens’ reports on the managers who lost in the various Division Series, you can find the American League write-up here, and the National League write-up here.

I find the Brewers fascinating, both because I’ve always appreciated them having the best logo in sports, and because I’m really bad at projecting them. While I had a better time of it than some others did this year, and at least only had them two wins short of the Cubs, the preseason ZiPS standings have repeatedly underestimated the Brew Crew. I’d love to be able to directly blame the computer for this phenomena, but ZiPS has actually done a solid job of projecting individual Milwaukee players. The problem is that when it comes time to guess exactly who will see the field, I’ve been giving them short shrift. In each of the last five seasons, if I had known precisely who would end up getting playing time, the preseason projections would have gone up by an average of just under four wins per year. It’s not simply that they’ve been healthier than expected, either; the Brewers tend to promote interesting players at a much faster pace than I expect them to, are very quick to understand what’s not working, and deploy role players extremely effectively.

OK, the bell rang, so let’s get going. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the first lessons we learn about life is that it’s rarely fair. Neither the Seattle Mariners nor the Toronto Blue Jays are historical doormats, but both franchises have been plagued over the last three decades by a lack of postseason success, if they reached the playoffs at all.

After the Jays won the 1993 World Series, it was 22 years until they made another postseason. Toronto has a lot of recent October appearances, but finished last in the AL East in 2024 and came into the 2025 playoffs after being swept out of the wild card round in its last three opportunities, including by Seattle in 2022. Aside from that series three years ago, the Mariners have had it even worse: They’ve never won a World Series — never even played in one — and their 2022 postseason appearance snapped a 21-year playoff drought. So the 2025 ALCS is a pretty big deal for both teams, as someone is going to face the Brewers or Dodgers for baseball’s championship. Read the rest of this entry »

The Cubs stayed alive in the National League Division Series on Wednesday, narrowly beating the Brewers in a 4-3 Game 3 squeaker. Neither starting pitcher went long, with both teams needing to go relatively deep into their bullpens to finish out the contest; a combined 10 relievers were used.

Carlos Zambrano threw out the ceremonial first pitch, 13 years after his final game in the majors — Big Z’s former teammate, Rich Hill, appeared for the Royals in 2025 and is older than him — but things got off to an inauspicious start for the Cubs after that, as a lazy curve from starter Jameson Taillon was far less lazily lashed down the first base line into right field for a Christian Yelich double. After a Jackson Chourio groundout, Taillon lost the strike zone a bit, walking Brice Turang to put runners on first and second for William Contreras. Contreras hit an infield single to load the bases. Of course, that’s burying the lede a bit, but you couldn’t see that I was making the air quotes gesture with my fingers while I was writing that sentence. The “infield single” was anything but; it was a popup on the infield that Michael Busch lost in the sun while his sunglasses remained unused on his cap. Both Carson Kelly and Nico Hoerner ran over, but they weren’t in time to salvage the play. Dansby Swanson ran over as well, which became a problem when Kelly picked up the ball but had nobody to actually throw to for an attempted forceout of Turang. Read the rest of this entry »

At this time last year, the Blue Jays faced some serious uncertainty. They’d just finished last in the AL East, and they had only one more season guaranteed with both Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and Bo Bichette on their roster. The future became even murkier during the winter, when the Yankees and Red Sox were both beefing up, the Orioles were still expected to be good, and the Rays were, well, the Rays. Both Guerrero and Bichette became the subject of trade rumors; really, there were questions about whether or not Toronto would just blow it all up.

Oh, how things have changed. In early April, the Jays extended Vladito through the end of the next decade, and then they caught fire. And now, one year after coming in last, they finished tied with the Yankees for the best record in the American League and took the division because they won the season series between the two teams. For that reason, Toronto hosted Game 1 of the Division Series against the New York on Saturday, and after the Jays bludgeoned the Yankees, 10-1, maybe it’s the boys from the Bronx who should be feeling a bit of self doubt.

As a franchise, the Yankees have played 441 postseason games; this loss ranks as one of their worst playoff humiliations ever:

Read the rest of this entry »

Meat + bread + mess are one of the most iconic food combinations known to humanity. Two of my favorites are classics of Philadelphia and Los Angeles, wonderful amalgamations that make a sloppy mess of whiz or jus go down my chin and, too often, the shirt that I’m wearing. I’ve always lived in the eastern part of the United States, so I have more practical experience with cheesesteak locations (I’m partial to Dalessandro’s and John’s Roast Pork). But the French dip is wonderful as well — I have at least gotten to try it at Philippe the Original — and I also love its cousin, quesabirria. Whichever you prefer, you’re choosing from two of the heavy hitters in good, casual food.

I’m not talking about deliciousness because I’m hungry, even though it’s almost dinnertime, but because the Dodgers and Phillies play a similar role in baseball: They’re not everyone’s favorites, but they’re two of the most successful franchises of the last 15 years, and if you’re an NL team, there’s a good chance you’ll have to go through one or both of these teams en route to a championship. Read the rest of this entry »