I’m somehow nearing 50 years of age — I’m a little concerned this number seems to be going up by one every 365 days or so — and the position of shortstop has changed a lot since I got into baseball as a small child. Back then, the attitude was defense is what mattered from shortstops, and anything else a team got from the position was gravy. In 1978, the year I was born, only four primary position shortstops with 300 plate appearances had a wRC+ of at least 100: Roy Smalley III, Dave Concepcion, Robin Yount, and the eternally underrated Toby Harrah. Only Smalley and Harrah even hit the double digits in home runs. In 2025, 25 primary position shortstops had double-digit home run totals and 19 finished with a wRC+ in the triple digits. An average player at the position in 1978 slashed .258/.309/.335, a line that would cause teams of today to look for an upgrade unless their shortstop were Ozzie Smith with the glove.

While there were always scattered shortstops who excelled at the plate, they were generally seen as outliers. But that changed as teams became more and more willing in the 1980s and 90s to let their best athletes stay at shortstop until they conclusively proved they shouldn’t be at the position, and larger players like Cal Ripken Jr. and Alex Rodriguez weren’t simply moved to traditional “big dude” positions. Defense remained important, but offense became a really big deal, as many talented hitters demonstrated that previous generations were too quick to move young sluggers down the defensive spectrum. Shortstops are like quarterbacks now; you either have a star shortstop or you’re biding your time until you find one. Read the rest of this entry »

Second base can be a bit of an unglamorous position; what is a second baseman, after all, but a failed shortstop? Indeed, the keystone is light on true superstars but heavy on solid regulars. The difference between third place and 13th, in our projections, is just half a win. A few teams in the bottom half of the ranking are bringing in exciting young players, too, so a low ordinal ranking does not necessarily indicate that the team’s second base situation is a lost cause.

It might please you to learn that second base in 2026 is also a position for interesting players: guys with extreme tool sets, speedsters, glove-only wizards, high-contact/no power dudes. It’s like they put the Statue of Liberty at second to exhort the sport’s most unorthodox hitters to congregate at this position. There’s something for everyone here. Read on, you’ll see. Read the rest of this entry »

Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Bryce Harper, and Freddie Freeman walk into a bar — the same bar, in fact, as the one they walked into last year, and in the same order; the trio and their assorted backups topped these rankings in 2025, just as they do in ’26. But where they towered over the rest of the field last year, with a full win gap between the third-ranked Dodgers and the fourth-ranked Rays, this time it’s only Guerrero who’s separated from the pack. The 0.9-WAR gap between the Blue Jays and Phillies is just 0.1 WAR less than the gap between those Phillies and ninth-ranked Mariners.

It’s not hard to understand what’s happening. Guerrero is 27 years old, and if he didn’t have his best season by the numbers in 2025 — though a half-billion dollar extension and a near-miss of a championship is still a pretty great year — our projections suggest he’ll rebound. Harper, on the other hand, is 33 and Freeman 36, and while they remain championship-caliber players, both are increasingly prone to the aches and pains that can leave a mark on their performances, as explained below.

It’s not just that those older guys are past their peaks — likely future Hall of Famers, but trending down just the same — it’s that an influx of younger talent is pushing the middle of the pack upward. The 23-year-old Nick Kurtz, 27-year-olds Ben Rice and Jonathan Aranda, and 28-year-olds Michael Busch and Josh Naylor all rank among this year’s top dozen; none was the primary first baseman on a team ranked above no. 14 last year. Read the rest of this entry »

This season has the potential to be an odd one for catchers. None of us knows exactly how the ABS challenge system will affect the way they go about their job, but all of us will be paying close attention. We’re a couple years into the one-knee-down revolution, and while the conventional wisdom was that it would help keep them fresher and allow them to play more innings, the top 30 catchers in terms of innings caught actually caught fewer innings in 2025 than they did in 2024.

The top of the list is fun. We’ve got 60-homer Cal Raleigh in his own stratosphere, William Contreras in his shadow, and Patrick Bailey one-tooling his way to the top tier. We have deep teams like the Blue Jays and Yankees, Rookie of the Year Drake Baldwin, rookie Gold Glover Dillon Dingler, and veteran Will Smith, who became an entirely different hitter at age 30. And nobody knows what to expect from Adley Rutschman.

The rest of the rankings come with plenty of questions too. Can J.T. Realmuto and Salvador Perez keep holding on? How many homers will Shea Langeliers hit? How many bases will Agustín Ramírez steal? Even the teams at the bottom of the list have some hope. Harry Ford could finally solve the Nationals’ catching woes. Carlos Narváez and Kyle Teel put up great rookie campaigns for their respective Sox. Joey Bart is… interesting at the plate for the Pirates. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to the 2026 positional power rankings! As is tradition, over the next week and a half, we’ll be ranking every team by position as we inch closer to Opening Day next Thursday. As I note every year, this is something of a funny exercise. You read FanGraphs regularly, after all — a fact for which we are very grateful — and are well-versed in the various signings, trades, and injuries that have occurred over the offseason. You know that Kyle Tucker is now a Dodger, that the Blue Jays signed Dylan Cease, that the Cardinals traded away most of their veterans, and that the injury bug has bit much of the Braves rotation. And yet, you’re still keen to know more about the game and what it might look like between now and October. The positional power rankings are our answer to that impulse.

This post serves as an explainer for our approach to the rankings. If you’re new to the exercise, I hope it helps to clarify how they are compiled and what you might expect from them. If you’re a FanGraphs stalwart, much of this will be familiar, but I hope it’s a useful reminder of what we’re up to. If you have a bit of time, you’ll find the introduction to last year’s series here. You can use the navigation widget at the top of that post to get a sense of where things stood before Opening Day 2025, a spring that saw a number of players who had signed record-setting free agent deals report to their new teams.

Unlike a lot of sites’ season previews, we don’t arrange ours by team or division. That is a perfectly good way to organize a season preview, but we see a few advantages to the way we do it. First, ranking teams by position allows us to cover a team’s roster from top to bottom. Stars, everyday contributors, and role players alike receive some amount of examination, and those players (and the teams they play for) are placed in their proper league-wide context. By doing it this way, you can more easily see how teams stack up against each other, get a sense of the overall strength of a position across baseball, and spot the places where a well-constructed platoon may end up having a bigger impact than an everyday regular who is good rather than great. We think all of that context helps to create a richer understanding of the state of the game and a clearer picture of the season ahead. Read the rest of this entry »