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 Athletics.

Batters

In the race for the worst franchise in baseball, the White Sox easily took the title in terms of sheer incompetence. But their out of touch owner who legitimately wanted to win can’t match up with the A’s John Fisher, who probably thought while watching Moneyball that Rachel Phelps was way too generous with her team spending. The A’s won 69-93 games, a respectable number as far as terrible teams go, but it left them in an awkward limbo: They’re not good enough to pretend to be playoff relevant, but not bad enough for young fans to someday tell tales to their grandchildren about the team’s notoriety.

In truth, there’s actually a lot to like about this set of projections, even if it’s distributed among things you don’t. Brent Rooker not only demonstrated that his 2023 breakout wasn’t a fluke, but he also had a second breakout this season that was even better than the first. Considering he ran a .362 BABIP, he’s likely going to give back at least some of the gains he made. How much he regresses is a source of disagreement between ZiPS and Steamer, but he’s conclusively proven that he’s not just some DH-type player who’s going to put up a 110 wRC+ and 1.7 WAR. Rooker is not young, so hopefully the A’s will trade him to a team with games that matter before he advances too far into his thirties.

Jacob Wilson gets a very solid projection, and ZiPS sees a bit of a bounceback campaign for Zack Gelof. I wouldn’t call ZiPS a full believer in Lawrence Butler or JJ Bleday, but it at least grants them adequacy, which is a step up for both from last year’s projections. ZiPS is decidedly negative on the mulligan stew in left field, and it isn’t buying Tyler Soderstrom as a first baseman, either. I have no idea if the Nick Kurtz projection is too high, too low, or just right given he has played almost no professional baseball. ZiPS does know his Wake Forest numbers, but college translations are more speculative than crypto currency with meme names.

One can argue the most disappointing parts of these projections aren’t the players on the parent club, but the minor leaguers. Past Wilson and maybe Kurtz, ZiPS just doesn’t see anyone in the system having major upside. I mean, Tommy White might suddenly become the offensive beast he was hoped to be, but the computer isn’t banking on it.

Pitchers

Eep. You know a team’s pitching projections aren’t going well when the player with the best projected ERA+ (Mason Miller) has a nearly 50-point edge over everyone else. One thing that used to keep the A’s from falling too far out of the pennant race was that, for a long time, this was a team that could churn out nondescript soft-tossing mid-rotation starters as if it owned a patent on the process. For the third consecutive season, however, the 2024 A’s didn’t have a single pitcher who started 20 games with an ERA+ of at least 100. This is hardly a filter for finding a Cy Young candidate! JP Sears had his moments in 2024, but at the end of the day, he’s simply a soft-tossing lefty without a strikeout pitch who can’t keep the ball down all that well, not any respectable team’s ace. Mitch Spence is interesting, but he isn’t missing bats in the majors yet. Our prospect team wrote that Joey Estes needed to develop a good secondary pitch, and that criticism rings true; he has a mediocre slider and changeup, meaning that his decent command hasn’t meant all that much.

I find J.T. Ginn and Osvaldo Bido more interesting. If Ginn keeps working with his sinker, he might have success in the majors for a while, and Bido at least makes it seem like there’s some adventure happening on the mound; his control is spotty, but he’s got a hard two-seamery sinker that I think could be a real weapon if he ever gets the hang of it. Most pitchers like Bido don’t work out in the long run, but I can squint my eyes and see a Bido breakout as a more tangible idea than what a Sears or Estes breakout would look like.

The bullpen is… not good. Miller projects for all of the bullpen’s WAR, which is fine if you think you’re going to use him for 500 innings. After Miller, there’s not a lot of correlation between spot in the pecking order and the ZiPS projection; Michel Otañez gets a decent projection in ZiPS, while Brady Basso probably doesn’t make the team, at least not in April.

The A’s have almost no guaranteed contracts, the only two right now being the recently agreed one-year pacts with Seth Brown and T.J. McFarland. Normally that would give a team some flexibility to fill some holes in free agency, but we all know that’s not going to happen. The Athletics will likely win somewhere between 65 and 72 games or so, and very little will be remembered about the season outside the weird stadium situation they’re in.

Speaking of that situation, projecting Sutter Health Field is a bit of a problem without data from past MLB games. It’s a pitchers’ park in the Pacific Coast League, but that’s not exactly telling given that the average park in the PCL would likely be a hitters’ park in the majors. I have a rough estimate of it as basically average, though I expect some outfielders might have a few adventures getting used to the caroms as the fences have some corners. The foul territory is much reduced, however, and that might mean something at the margins, considering you might be able to park a 747 in the Coliseum’s foul territory. Hopefully, by the time the A’s move again, I will have stopped calling the park “Sutter Home” after the winery.

Sutter Health Field graphic made by Szym. 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.

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.