CJ Abrams does not wait patiently. That’s never been his thing. He rampaged his way to the major leagues in 2022 at age 21, on a playoff contender no less. Now, should he have been in the majors that year? It’s easy, in retrospect, to question San Diego’s decision to call him up. He was below replacement level as a rookie with the Padres before they sent him to the Nationals in the Juan Soto trade, and then he was also below replacement level with Washington that year. But doing things even before they make sense has always been Abrams’ game.
To wit: You wouldn’t teach a major leaguer to swing like Abrams does. He’s one of the most aggressive hackers in the sport. His 53.1% swing rate – and 34.2% chase rate – are both among the highest marks in the league. And this isn’t some case of premeditated, Corey Seager-style aggression, either. Everyone who swings more frequently than Abrams swings at more strikes than he does. Seager chases seven percentage points less frequently and swings at strikes seven percentage points more frequently. Abrams isn’t playing six dimensional chess when he swings. He’s trying to do this:
That’s absurd (complimentary). As fate would have it, I was watching that game on TV when it happened as part of an article I hoped to write on the opposing pitcher, Hayden Birdsong. I made a strange sound when Abrams hit that ball, somewhere between a laugh and a gasp. Look at his contact point again:
Second base is the bass guitar of a baseball team. If you’re there, most people will assume that you don’t have the chops to play lead or rhythm guitar (shortstop and third base in this metaphor). And unless you’re truly exceptional, those same people will immediately forget you exist. Most of the time, it’s a thankless, anonymous job. But while most four-piece rock bands can plug along with a mediocre bassist, an exceptional bassist can elevate the group’s sound, and indeed come to define it.
Unless one of the youngsters listed below really pops in 2025, “exceptional” will probably be difficult to come by at this position. But competence abounds. Some 15 teams are projected for 3.0 WAR or more at this position, with 24 teams projected for 2.5 WAR or better. You could count on one hand the teams that have neither a solid regular at second base nor a prospect with that upside waiting in the high minors. Read the rest of this entry »
The 2025 Major League Baseball season began at 6:10 a.m. Eastern on Monday in the Tokyo Dome. After tuneups against NPB teams, the Cubs and Dodgers played a game that counted, though it still featured telltale signs of mid-March rust. Below, some notes on the game (and, more importantly, managerial eyewear).
First Inning
The first pitch of the game, Shota Imanaga to Shohei Ohtani, is a four-seam fastball for a called strike. The K-Zone graphic says it’s way too high. Statcast says it’s perfectly located at the top of the zone. Ohtani doesn’t challenge. This isn’t spring training anymore.
Both the Chicago and Los Angeles broadcasts have the crowd noise dialed way down, which is a shame. For all the talk of the electric atmosphere, the crowd registers as faint background noise, an oscillating fan in the other room.
Second Inning
In the top of the second, Imanaga walks the first two Dodgers and shakes his head in anger. In the dugout, Craig Counsell reaches for his spectacles.
Yoshinobu Yamamoto is having trouble locating too. In the bottom half, Dansby Swanson stays back and drives a curveball back up the middle. It’s the first hit of the season. Miguel Amaya doubles him home with a liner to right center. It’s the first run of the season. Yamamoto gets out of the inning by dotting a curve at the bottom of the zone to freeze Jon Berti. It doesn’t quite seem fair.
Third Inning
Imanaga leads Ohtani off with a high, hanging sweeper. It stays inside, and Ohtani tries and fails to let his elbow drift into it. “This has gotta be a splitter right here,” says Clayton Kershaw up in the booth when the count gets to 2-2. It’s another high sweeper, and Ohtani smashes it right at the second baseman for a lineout. Kershaw feels vindicated; he didn’t predict the pitch correctly, but the pitch he didn’t predict got crushed.
Ian Happ chops Yamamoto’s first pitch straight into the ground. A backpedaling Yamamoto reaches up and biffs it with the tip of his glove, slowing it down just enough that the second baseman can’t catch Happ.
Michael Busch’s bat looks like it’s as old as he is. The black finish is all nicked and scuffed, like he spent the offseason using it to knock the side of the TV when the reception got fuzzy. It’s the only thing on the screen that isn’t shiny and new. He grounds out on a splitter just like everyone else.
Fourth Inning
A giant screen behind home plate advertises a company called dip, all lowercase. If we’re lucky, we will never have to think about this company again.
Imanaga walks two more batters. Pitching coach Tommy Hottovy, a dark horse contender for the best name in baseball, walks out to say hello. Enrique Hernández lifts the first fly ball of the game, a deep out to center field.
Counsell picks up the phone. The Dodgers still don’t have a hit. Imanaga’s night is done.
Fifth Inning
The center field camera is lower than usual. It gives a nice view of the strike zone, and it has the added benefit of making the pitcher look larger than life. Ben Brown appears to be releasing the ball approximately eight inches from home plate.
The action picks up. Strikeout. Walk. Ohtani rips a single into right field. First and third, first hit of the game for the Dodgers. Ohtani and first base coach Chris Woodward lean in close, turn, and gently touch helmets.
Tommy Edman sends a dying liner into left. Happ lays out but can only trap it. First and second, tie ballgame. Teoscar Hernández hits a chopper to Matt Shaw at third. He throws to second to get the force, but Berti makes the turn and throws the ball away, allowing Ohtani to score from second. Will Smith chops one through the left side, and it’s a 3-1 game. Hottovy returns to the mound. Brown has a moustache as fine as cornsilk.
Max Muncy’s bat is painted industrial gray. He chases a big curveball in the dirt, then drops the bat in the dirt.
Yamamoto induces a couple hard groundballs. Miguel Rojas makes a nice play deep in the hole at short. Enrique Hernández makes a nice play deep in the hole at first, which isn’t something you get to say very often. Yamamoto punches Happ out with a fastball on the corner.
Sixth Inning
Yamamoto receives congratulations in the dugout. His night is done after five innings: one run, three hits, four strikeouts, one walk.
Ohtani comes up with two on and two out. You can finally hear the crowd for a moment. Brown strikes him out on three pitches. The crowd gasps.
With lefties due up for the Cubs, Anthony Banda replaces Yamamoto. There’s a little bit of Roy Hobbs in his delivery; it’s the way he swings his arms upward at the beginning. Three up, three down.
Seventh Inning
Brown is still out there, and when the Dodgers aren’t hitting him, he looks unhittable. But he’s profligate, requiring 65 pitches to get through 2 2/3 innings. He issues a two-out walk, and Counsell emerges from the dugout, glasses hooked on the collar of his jersey. Eli Morgan is everything Brown isn’t: short, dark-haired, economical. Muncy chops his first pitch to second base and the inning is over.
The crowd murmurs when Swanson lifts a Ben Casparius fastball into the right field corner, but Teoscar Hernández eventually drifts over to make the play. Pete Crow-Armstrong whiffs and sends his bat cartwheeling back toward the dugout.
Eighth Inning
With one out in the eighth, umpire Bill Miller stops the game because of a fan with a laser pointer in the left field stands. After play resumes, Michael Conforto drives a ball down the left field line for a double. For the third year in a row, the Dodgers are celebrating their doubles with the Freddie Freeman dance. Freeman was a last minute scratch with a rib injury. Attempting his own dance would probably leave him in agony right now.
“Day-O,” sings Harry Belafonte. Halfway through the crowd’s response, whoever’s in charge of the sound mix finally turns up the crowd noise for a moment. They dial down the fun again as soon as the call and response has finished.
Blake Treinen hits Berti on the forearm and the ball ricochets into Smith behind the plate for good measure. All of a sudden, the Cubs have the tying run at the plate. Berti steals second easily. Seiya Suzuki, 0-for-3 on the night, comes to the plate with two outs. He could be the hero. The crowd roars when Suzuki fouls a fastball into the stands on the first base side, but Treinen catches him way out in front on a sweeper, resulting in a weak liner to third.
“Thank you,” says Treinen to his God as he walks off the mound. Miller meets Treinen on the third base line and chats him up as he pats his pitching hand.
Ninth Inning
Ohtani hooks another base hit down the line, this one a line drive double off a Ryan Brasier slider. As is so often the case, Ohtani looks awkward, completely off balance, like he just reached out to poke the ball, but it comes off the bat at 107.8 mph. An Edman groundout and a Teoscar Hernández single bring Ohtani home, extending the lead to 4-1. Brasier gets into more trouble, gets out of it.
The Dodgers have chosen to forgo the gold trim with which World Series champions are allowed to accent their uniforms. The only gaudy touch is the MLB logo on the back of the jersey, which has had its white negative space gilded.
The other indicator of the Dodgers’ dominance, the addition that takes them from great to downright decadent, comes in from the bullpen. Tanner Scott sets the Cubs down in order, and just like that, Los Angeles is in first place once again.
First base talent isn’t distributed as evenly as many of the other positions you’ll read about in this exercise. There’s a clear top tier, just like everywhere on the diamond, but things drop off quickly after that. The top few teams have situations that any contender would be happy with, but the landscape turns shockingly flat just afterwards. A whopping 17 teams project for between 1.5 and 2.5 WAR at first base, an enormous tier that starts in the top 10 and stretches nearly to the bottom of the list.
What’s behind that talent distribution? I like to call it the first base dead zone, a concept I’ll be talking about quite a bit today. It works like this: The major leagues are full of hitters who can manage a line that’s around 5-15% better than league average. They tend to disproportionately be limited to first base, DH, and the outfield corners. In 2024, only three primary first basemen managed a wRC+ of 135 or better (minimum 200 PA). There were 25 players between a 100 and 120 wRC+, though. No other position has a distribution that even approaches that rare peak and broad middle. Read the rest of this entry »
I don’t know everything about baseball, but I know this: When a player’s name is in a headline that ends with the phrase “Stares Down Oblivion,” that’s not a good sign. That happened to Joey Gallo four weeks ago, as Michael Rosen wrote a lovely tribute to a popular player whose career seemed to be nearing its end. If the headline weren’t ominous enough, little of what followed augured good things: A table that showed Gallo posting the two highest single-season whiff rates of the decade; a comparison to Ken Griffey Jr. and Andruw Jones, but only during their time with the White Sox; a metaphor about hanging off a cliff by one’s fingertips.
Gallo went 2-for-20 for the White Sox in Cactus League play, and while a minute batting average is nothing new, Gallo’s secondary skills — the talents that made him an impactful big leaguer — were not in evidence. Both of his hits were singles, and he drew just one walk.
The man might swing from his heels, but he’s smart enough to read the signs. So on Sunday, he posted a video of old defensive highlights to X with the caption, “It’s been fun outfield,” with a peace sign emoji. A retirement announcement, perhaps? It seems Gallo also realized he’d been ambiguous, so 11 minutes later he sent a follow-up post: “Just to be clear, I will be pitching.” Read the rest of this entry »
SCOTTSDALE, ARIZONA — For the Los Angeles Dodgers, being able to pay so many stars comes with a hidden value that one general manager has called “the unseen part of spending.”
The Dodgers have impact players like Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts, Freddie Freeman, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, and Blake Snell on big contracts. As their luxury tax bill goes up, and as they sign free agents with qualifying offers attached to them, the Dodgers lose out on draft picks and bonus pool money for international free agents.
But they’ve made up for some of the future value that they’ve lost. The Dodgers are known for their buying moves, but they can also sell with the best of them.
“When they go out and acquire players, that makes other good players available,” said Chicago Cubs president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer, who has been a part of one of those deals with the Dodgers. “They’ve done a really good job of going out and getting good prospects.” Read the rest of this entry »
The 2024 season was a strong year for catchers. Altogether, they produced 13.2% of all position player WAR, their largest piece of the pie in 10 years. Their collective 91 wRC+ was also the highest it has been in a full season since 2014. I’d posit that had something to do with starting-caliber catchers taking the field a bit more often, rather than ceding significant playing time to their backups. After watching teams cut back on catcher playing time for several years, we’re finally starting to see that trend reverse a bit. Read the rest of this entry »
Welcome to the 2025 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. This is always 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 Juan Soto is now a Met, that the Diamondbacks signed Corbin Burnes, that the Red Sox traded for Garrett Crochet, and that Gerrit Cole needs Tommy John surgery. 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 2024, a spring that saw a rash of pitcher injuries and a couple of notable free agents remain unsigned until just before the season began.
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 »
Jackson Jobe supplied a quality quote when asked about last weekend’s three-straight-heaters punchout of Toronto’s Vladimir Guerrero Jr..””I’m done with trying to dot a gnat’s ass,” he told a small group of reporters. “It’s, ‘Here’s my stuff. If you hit it, good. Odds are, probably not.”
Jobe is a student of the art and science of his craft, so I proceeded to ask him where he feels he is in terms development. Has the 22-year-old Detroit Tigers right-hander essentially settled into his mound identity, or is there still work left to be done in the pitch lab?
“I’d like to think I got it pretty much all fine-tuned,” replied Jobe, who is No. 9 on our Top 100. “Now it’s just learning the best way to use it, the best way to sequence it. I put my stuff up against anyone in the league on paper, to be completely honest. It’s just a matter of learning how to harness it.”
Asked about any recent changes to his pitch metrics, the rookie of the year candidate cited his slider. Read the rest of this entry »
In his piece on Tuesday, Michael Baumann described a “true sicko” of a baseball fan as one who has strong opinions on players signed to minor league contracts with spring training invites. If simply having an opinion on those players makes me a sicko, having opinions on the demarcation between those who do and don’t make Opening Day rosters means I probably need to be double vaccinated against whatever sickness that is.
Opening Day for all but two teams is less than two weeks away, so that means front offices are soon going to have to start finalizing their major league rosters. Many of the guys who don’t make the big league club will remain with their current organizations, but a good chunk of NRIs who don’t make the cut will have the chance to opt out of their minor league contracts and seek a major league deal with another team.
As stated in the Collective Bargaining Agreement, all XX(B) free agents — those with at least six years of service who ended the year on a 40-man roster — who ultimately sign minor league deals can opt out of their contracts six days before Opening Day (March 20); teams have until the March 22 to add them to the MLB roster or injured list or instead release them. Plenty of non-XX(B) NRIs also have opt-outs, though some of those may have gone unreported. Considering this, and for the sake of convenience, let’s assume that all of the NRIs mentioned in this piece are able to opt out if they do not make the major league roster out of camp.
Today, we’ll run through the NRIs who could end up in a different organization and possibly make an Opening Day roster. Because Baumann covered the NRI players who are projected to make Opening Day rosters, according to RosterResource, I’m going to do the opposite and touch on only the NRIs who, at least for now, are not projected to have a 26-man spot come the start of the season.
At least a few of these grizzled veterans would probably be upgrades over the catchers on some clubs, but even if they are, front offices will have to consider whether the new backstop’s talent outweighs the current one’s familiarity with the team’s pitchers. Catchers are almost never moved at the trade deadline because of the challenges that come with having to learn a new pitching staff on the fly, and while it’s true that the above catchers would have more time to get caught up than they would if they were joining a new team at the end of July, they’d still need to develop relationships with more than a dozen pitchers during the regular season, rather than in February bullpen sessions or exhibition games. A few of these backstops may well opt out of their current minor league contracts, but I wouldn’t expect them to sign a major league deal immediately unless an injury occurs and opens up a spot.
Teams That Could Come Calling: Rockies, Padres, Red Sox, Marlins
Most of the players in this group have had strong showings this spring; all except Chavis and Rodgers have posted a 125 or better wRC+. To what extent that matters, well, that’s up to you, but the point is that there’s at least a little bit of intrigue and plenty of experience. Rodgers was a somewhat surprisingly non-tendered by the Rockies this offseason, and it was even more surprisingly that had to settle for a minor league deal and an NRI, but he may yet find the MLB deal he should have earned all along despite an iffy small-sample Grapefruit League performance. Lopez and Ahmed have a long track record of fantastic glovework, too, especially useful for teams scrambling to find bench help in response to injuries or demotions.
Teams That Could Come Calling: White Sox, Angels, Yankees, Mets
There’s a range of defensive competence here — Marisnick and Almora can play a mean center field, but even in the corners you really don’t want a ball hit Rosario’s way these days — but they all have some sort of intriguing skill. Gallo, as has always been the case, has massive boom-or-bust potential; it’s been far more bust than boom lately, a trend that’s continued this spring training — he’s struck out over half the time. Thompson has probably been the MVP of the Grapefruit League with six (!) homers and has the best shot of making the roster of his current team.
Teams That Could Come Calling: White Sox, Tigers, Mariners
Managers wouldn’t want these guys playing the field much, but every member of this trio has mashed in the not-too-distant past. Despite his inconsistency, Bauers was a threat in the middle of the Brewers order at times last year. Cooper was an All-Star in 2022 and hit a career-high 17 home runs in 2023. If Jiménez is healthy — a big if but still — he boasts more upside than any other hitter in this article. Teams with open time at DH could do worse than sign one of these bats.
Teams That Could Come Calling: White Sox, Yankees, Mariners, Blue Jays, Padres, Giants
Have a last-minute injury at any one of seven positions? Not liking how your existing options are performing on either side of the ball? One of these players might be your savior, albeit the most modest savior in human history. Hampson, Biggio, and Vargas all saw a lot of MLB action last year, and Hampson played everywhere besides catcher. (He even pitched a scoreless inning!) He and Haggerty also have plus speed and can steal a base or two off the bench if needed.
Teams That Could Come Calling: All of the clubs mentioned above, as well as some others, should be interested in the versatility that these players offer.
Teams in need of 25-plus starts should just see if they can work out a late deal with Kyle Gibson or Lance Lynn. But the benefit of signing one of the above arms for a handful of starts is that they’ve been in camps, pitching in games, staying on schedule and in their routines. By contrast, Lynn and Gibson almost certainly won’t be ready to open the season in a rotation. Houser specifically strikes me as an intriguing option; his fastball velocity is up this spring compared to last year with the Mets, but the only way I can see him making the Rangers’ rotation to start the season is if one or more of their starters gets hurt. Sure, some of those pitchers are injury prone (hello, Jacob deGrom and Tyler Mahle), but if they remain healthy through the end of camp and Houser opts out for a major league deal elsewhere, another club could scoop him up before a Texas starter goes down.
Teams That Could Come Calling: Athletics, Rockies, Red Sox, Braves, plus any team who wants a multi-inning reliever.
I saved the best for last, and not just because it’s the longest list of players by far. Look at those names! I bet you didn’t even know Neftalí Feliz was still kicking around in affiliated ball. Heck, even I didn’t know that until I saw he signed with the Mariners. Jesse Chavez is hoping for yet another one last hurrah. (Justin Verlander is the only active player older than Chavez.) Meanwhile, a lot of the arms in their early 30s or late 20s are just trying to extend their careers for as long as possible or recapture successes from earlier this decade.
Teams That Could Come Calling: Take your pick of any of the 30 clubs. Teams always need relievers!
