If you’re a team in the market for a top starting pitcher this winter, cross one of the best off your holiday list. The Dodgers, a team desperately in need for dependable starting pitchers whose arms are fully connected at the shoulders and elbows, signed Blake Snell to a five-year contract worth $182 million. The deal also includes a $52 million signing bonus. Snell, one of last year’s big name free agents who signed a shorter-term deal after not getting the offer they wanted, started 20 games for the Giants in 2024, putting up a 3.12 ERA, a 2.43 FIP, and 3.1 WAR in a season that was marred by an adductor strain. Compared to last winter, when Snell’s fate went unanswered until he signed in late March, you might as well start calling him Blake Schnell. Wait, don’t do that, that’s a terrible joke even by my standards.

Left-hander Blake Snell and the Los Angeles Dodgers are in agreement on a five-year, $182 million contract, pending physical, sources tell me and @jorgecastillo. The World Series champions get the two-time Cy Young winner in the first nine-figure deal of the winter.

— Jeff Passan (@jeffpasan.bsky.social) 2024-11-27T04:00:23.933Z

One of the biggest risks a team winning the World Series faces is complacency. It’s a perfectly natural thing to feel pleased with the moves that led to your team winning a championship, but a team that believes it can mostly stand pat and run it back is planting the seeds of its own demise. Even with all the talent on their team, the Dodgers still have significant roster holes to fill this offseason, and it’s a good sign for those hoping for a repeat that less than a month after hoisting the trophy, they’ve already addressed one of those weaknesses. Whatever one thinks of Dave Roberts as a manager, it’s difficult to deny that he did a convincing job this past postseason managing a pitching staff that basically had two healthy and reliable starting pitchers. The Dodgers won the World Series despite their injury-thinned rotation, not because of it.

Now, Snell isn’t the type to give you seven or eight innings per start. Who is in 2024, really? What Snell brings to the table – outside of being a really good pitcher – is that he has a pretty solid record when it comes to injury. That’s not to say that he doesn’t get hurt. On the contrary, only twice has he made at least 30 starts in a season. However, what he has avoided are the serious injuries that cause pitchers to miss months or entire seasons. His IL stints are generally for short-term nagging ailments, frequently adductor strains. His worst elbow injury was a procedure to remove loose bodies in his elbow about five years ago, not major reconstructive surgery. The Dodgers will be happy to get their five or six innings from him 25 or so times a year.

Given what the Dodgers have faced injury-wise these last few years, that may be especially valuable to them. Bad luck has to figure into some of these injuries, but their problems in October was the downside of the approach they’ve taken toward the pitching staff in recent seasons. The Dodgers haven’t really prioritized certainty among their pitchers. Instead, they’ve depended on high-upside, high-risk guys such as Tyler Glasnow, late-era Clayton Kershaw, and any of the young flamethrowers who dominate upon arrival before blowing out their arms. For the most part, the Dodgers have made this work because they’ve kept enough of these pitchers around to put together a capable rotation of four or five pitchers at any given moment. Generally, this has proven an effective strategy for the Dodgers, but this time, they rolled snake eyes a few times in a row, and ended up in a difficult situation at the most crucial time of the year. They made it work, but they are smart enough to recognize they might not be able to thread the needle through such a narrow margin for error again.

So, what about Snell himself? Let’s run the projections for him with the Dodgers.

The Dodgers are projected as one of the absolute best teams for Snell to end up with, and ZiPS projects performance that it would value at five years, $144.2 million. That’s a bit below the actual $182 million deal he received, but then again, so is the actual contract itself! As with Shohei Ohtani, the top dollar figure becomes a bit less sexy when you consider how the deal is structured. Some of the money is deferred, to the extent that it drops the present value enough so that the deal is worth more in the neighborhood of $160 million instead.

In some respects, Snell’s 2024 season was more impressive than the 2023 campaign that earned him the second Cy Young award of his career. Snell allowed a lot of walks in 2023, but he survived it because he was excellent with runners on base. That’s the kind of thing that’s hard to sustain, but he didn’t have to in 2024, as he shaved off the extra walk per game he’d added the year before. Snell’s strikeout rate was the best of his career, and it was powered by a career best in contact percentage. Snell has been a successful starter in the majors for years, but he has more varied tools now than he did before. Most notably, his changeup has become more of a weapon against righties, especially with two strikes.

With Snell under contract, the Dodgers rotation looks something like this: Snell, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Glasnow, and Shohei Ohtani, along with whichever one or two other starters are healthy at any given time. At least in the way-too-early ZiPS positional projections for 2025, Snell’s arrival leapfrogs the Dodgers over the Phillies, Mariners, and Braves for the top rotation in the majors, though things can change a bit depending on how your distribute the innings. And the Dodgers might not be done adding to their rotation, either. They are expected to be serious contenders to sign Roki Sasaki, and they could still bring back Kershaw on another one-year deal.

Does adding Snell fundamentally change the outlook for the Dodgers? Not really; they were always going to be a contender in 2025. However, what signing Snell does is give the Dodgers a better chance to get through the season with fewer surprises and go deep into the playoffs again. Not since the 1999-2000 Yankees a quarter century ago has a team won consecutive championships. Snell puts the Dodgers in a strong position to alter that factoid.

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 next team up is the Texas Rangers.

Batters

If you were looking to assign blame for the Rangers going from being World Series champions to having a 78-84 season, you’d have a bounty of targets. From a Pythagorean standpoint, the collapse from one year to the next was even worse; the 2024 Rangers bled 12 wins compared to 2023, but in terms of run differential, they dropped an impressive 21 wins. Given the widespread nature of their disappointing season, the latter number is probably closer to the “true” decline.

The offense’s contribution dropped in half, from 34.1 WAR in 2023 to 16.9 WAR in 2024. And unlike the 2014 squad, the last Texas team to so dramatically underachieve, the 2024 Rangers can’t really put the lion’s share of the blame on injuries, at least on the run-scoring side of the equation. Evan Carter missed most of the season with a back injury, but he also only played in 23 regular season games in 2023. Corey Seager typically misses a couple dozen games a year, and while Josh Jung’s fractured wrist was a stroke of bad luck, Josh Smith was a very good replacement. A lot of the lost performance came from healthy, established players, and even worse, a good number of those players are veterans on the back end of their respective career trajectories. 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 next team up is the Philadelphia Phillies.

Batters

The quick exit in the postseason at the hands of the New York Mets was a disappointing finale for the 2024 Phillies, but the season as a whole still has to be considered a successful one. Cristopher Sánchez convincingly evaporated any questions about whether his late-2023 performance was a fluke, Bryce Harper stayed healthy and proved to be a more-than-competent defender at first, and the bullpen stayed strong despite a few veteran losses from the year before. But that’s not to say there wasn’t some good fortune involved. I don’t mean that to diminish the Phillies; most great teams have more things go their way than not. The preseason NL East favorite, the Atlanta Braves, saw some of their best players lose most or all of the season with serious injuries, and along those lines, the Phillies didn’t have their depth tested to the same degree. Read the rest of this entry »

12:01

Dan Szymborski: Welcome!

12:01

Dan Szymborski: Since it decided not to post in the queue for some reason at 11:40 and I had to force it at 11:57, there’s no queue built up, so feel free to ask any question, no matter how ridiculous

12:02

Dan Szymborski: And there’s a good chance I’ll be able to answer it, since asking me about how I evaluate pretzels or how many weird AIs I’ve made of Lindsey Graham is way better than awkward silence

12:03

Dan Szymborski: As a default, ZiPS will project a player based on their recent usage. It looks at the last four years and VERY heavily weights recent play.

12:04

Dan Szymborski: However, I have clickboxes for “full-time starter” or “full-time reliever” which will cause ZiPS to go back and translate the past baselines for a pitcher into full-time starter or full-time reliever lines, and then make a new projections

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 next team up is the Atlanta Braves.

Batters

This past year was a bit of a trainwreck for the Braves, but an unusual one, in that with so much going wrong, they still won 89 games and made the playoffs, if by the skin of their teeth. The lineup still looks fundamentally similar to the one that everyone liked going into the season, just one that’s a bit riskier with an extra year of age and an extended recent history of significant injuries. The depth chart graphic below is a bit too generous for my taste with some of the playing time for the injured players, with Austin Riley, Michael Harris II, and Ozzie Albies all with current projections above 650 plate appearances and Ronald Acuña Jr. just below 600. However, even with being a bit more conservative about health, Atlanta should have a lot of dangerous weapons. In other words, even if expectations should be tempered slightly, there’s nothing fundamentally broken about this offense.

ZiPS shares Steamer’s optimism when it comes to Harris. I was a bit surprised by the projection too – and surprised to see Steamer also very high on him – but it’s easy to forget that Harris only turns 24 in March, so there’s still a realistic possibility that he improves, perhaps significantly, and projections do have to account for that. Interestingly enough, both projection systems think there’s some power upside remaining from him, too.

Honestly, there’s not much in the way of actual surprises in the offensive projections. The only significant loss is Sean Murphy’s catching sidekick, Travis d’Arnaud, but this is one of the places where the Braves could afford to let someone walk. Drake Baldwin and Chadwick Tromp may sound like 80s movies antagonists who head up the rich kids’ summer camp across the lake, but they’re more than suitable caddies for Murphy. Baldwin in particular didn’t come out of nowhere, either; he was the no. 30 prospect in baseball in our updated 2024 prospect rankings.

Nacho Alvarez Jr. already projects as a viable replacement for Orlando Arcia when the time comes (probably after 2025), but the projections aren’t bullish on the farm once you get past Baldwin and Alvarez. Atlanta would be smart to be active in the non-roster invitee sweepstakes this winter.

Pitchers

Subtracting Max Fried is a pretty big deal, so adding a pitcher – perhaps Fried himself – should be the team’s top priority. Chris Sale returned to form in a big way in 2024, winning the NL Cy Young award and leading all pitchers with 6.4 WAR, but one can’t be too confident in his health; he turns 36 at the end of March, and the 177 2/3 innings he pitched this year were easily his most in a season since 2017. Reynaldo López as a full-time starter went better than anyone could have reasonably expected, but he’s probably going to give back some of that ERA in 2025. With Strider returning from internal brace surgery sometime early in 2025 and Schwellenbach getting a surprisingly spectacular projection, the Braves should be pleased that Spencers will make up two of the top four in their rotation. I’m just not excited, especially given the injury concerns in the rotation, about not having another option better than Griffin Canning or Ian Anderson for the last slot. From a prospect standpoint, ZiPS doesn’t see a whole lot of upside in the minors beyond AJ Smith-Shawver.

The problems that faced Atlanta elsewhere this season mostly spared the bullpen, which finished the season ranked third in WAR and second in FIP in the majors. It’s still a unit that’s in pretty good shape, with five of its six relievers used in the highest leverage situations already under contract for 2025. (A.J. Minter is the free agent.) But free agent departures have thinned out the bottom half of the ’pen considerably, and Joe Jiménez will miss most, if not all, of the 2025 season, so the Braves are probably going to have to do more than stand pat here. That said, because they’re looking for depth, they don’t necessarily have to fish in the deep end of the free agent pool.

So, where are the Braves now? They ought to enter the season with one of the best win projections in baseball, somewhere in the mid-90s. A healthy Strider and Acuña alone would have been more than enough to get the relatively disappointing 2024 squad to that level. This is a top franchise, but there’s a little more risk this time around.

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.

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.

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 year’s introduction and MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the next team up is the Seattle Mariners.

Batters

For the third time in the last four years, the Mariners hung around the playoff race for most of the 2024 campaign, before falling just short by the season’s denouement. When it comes to winning 85 to 90 games a year like clockwork, Jerry Dipoto’s ship is airtight and his sailors always on the ball. But so far, St. Louis Cardinals: Pacific Northwest hasn’t been quite as effective as the original series — the Mariners aren’t going to have as easy a time stealing division titles as the Cardinals did, playing as they do in a harder division. While the Mariners aggressively add players and make trades, there’s a basic conservatism here that limits the team’s ultimate upside; despite seven winning seasons in the last 11 years, Seattle has maxed out at just 90 wins. This isn’t a new thing either — the franchise only has one 95-win-or-better season in its history (the 116-win 2001 season, of course). Read the rest of this entry »

Baseball’s awards season is in full swing this week. Tonight, the National League Rookie of the Year award, officially known as the Jackie Robinson award since 1987, was awarded to Paul Skenes, who was impressive enough to also be a finalist in the NL Cy Young award voting. Skenes finished with 23 first-place votes to Jackson Merrill’s seven.

I’m not here to praise or criticize the results. Instead, I’m here to perform what I see as my journalistic duty. I was an NL Rookie of the Year voter this year (my sixth time voting for the award), and I have always felt that it’s important to give a detailed explanation of the reasoning behind my choice. As usual, I spent most of the final weekend of the season agonizing over my choices, because while being asked to vote for one of these awards is admittedly really cool, it’s also a weighty responsibility that demands care as well as candor. Offering a breakdown of my vote hasn’t always been fun — in 2021, my decision to vote for Trevor Rogers over Jonathan India resulted in my social media mentions being inundated with a combination of threats and insults — but I think I owe it to the fans and the players involved to explain myself. (OK, some of the brouhaha in 2021 was fun, like the suggestion that the Cincinnati Reds should fire me, a notion that still amuses me on many levels.) 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 next team up is the Colorado Rockies.

Batters

Are the Rockies a good team? No, they are not. Are the Rockies even a middling team? Again, no. But things may slowly be getting better. Colorado will still have a lousy offense in 2025, but you can at least see the light at the end of a (very) long tunnel, most obviously when looking at the lineup. No one would confuse the Rockies with the Rays in terms of the cleverness with which they construct their roster, but the utter disaster that is the Kris Bryant signing does appear to have to had some kind of effect on their organizational decision-making. Since the start of 2023, they’ve done some very un-Rockies things. Jumping on the opportunity to snatch up an upside play like Nolan Jones isn’t something this team would have done in the late 2010s. The old Rockies would have found a way to play a mediocre veteran over Ezequiel Tovar, and there’s no way Brenton Doyle would have been given anywhere near enough rope to stick around for a possible breakout. Can you imagine past Rockies teams being patient with fringy prospects like Michael Toglia, giving an opportunity to a veteran journeyman like Jake Cave, or releasing Elias Díaz, a veteran catcher who made the All-Star Game the year prior, to find playing time for a prospect? Now, it hasn’t all worked out, but it at least represents some movement away from the strategies that slammed the competitive window of the last good Rockies team closed. You can’t get out of a hole until you stop digging. 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 first team up is the Arizona Diamondbacks.

Batters

Last year in this space, ZiPS was optimistic about the Diamondbacks bettering their 2023 win total. A big part of that was the computer predicting that the offense would be somewhere around average or (mostly) better everywhere except designated hitter. That’s generally what happened, and they even improved on that projection a bit, signing Joc Pederson at the end of January. The Snakes did, in fact, improve on their won total, going from 84 to 89 wins even though that wasn’t enough to squeeze into the postseason this go-around. Arizona actually led baseball in runs scored, edging out the Dodgers, and the team wasn’t even really aided by Chase Field, which is a much more neutral offensive environment than it used to be. Read the rest of this entry »

12:01

Dan Szymborski: I don’t see a reason the Royals COULDNT go after Santander. Or at least Joc Pederson

12:01

Dan Szymborski: and welcome to SzymChat! With me finally done the ZiPS prep and it rolling out, chats are back

12:02

Dan Szymborski: Sadly, I do not expect a clean CBA agreement and I think it’s more likely than not that we miss games

Read the rest of this entry »