Matt Chapman came in at no. 3 when our 2015 Oakland Athletics Top Prospects list was published in February of that year. Assigned a 45 FV by our then lead prospect analyst Kiley McDaniel, Chapman had been drafted 25th overall out of Cal State-Fullerton the previous summer. Playing most of his initial professional season in the Low-A Midwest League, the 21-year-old third baseman swatted five home runs and put up a modest .672 OPS over 202 plate appearances.
What did Chapman’s 2015 scouting report look like? Moreover, what does he think of it all these years later? Wanting to find out, I shared some of what McDaniel (now with ESPN) wrote and asked Chapman to respond to it.
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“A standout hitter and pitcher for Fullerton that didn’t have much first-round buzz for reasons I didn’t understand.”
“He was thinking like I do,” Chapman replied. “I thought I was a little underrated. Obviously, the A’s took a chance on me and it all worked out. But that’s funny, because I thought I had all the tools. I just wasn’t getting the love.”
“Chapman, has an 80 arm and has been into the high 90s on the mound, but is mostly an arm-strength guy with a short track record of pitching.”Read the rest of this entry »
Man for man, the quality of starting pitching will never be higher all year than it is on Opening Day. And there were some good performances. Framber Valdez shut out the Mets and their brand-new Juan Soto for seven innings. Zack Wheeler shoved for six innings in a no-decision for the Phillies. Nathan Eovaldi struck out nine with no walks and three hits in six innings of a no-decision for the Rangers. Sean Burke, believe it or not, allowed only three hits in six scoreless frames for the first-place White Sox!
But the best performance on this Day of Aces came from a pitcher most people wouldn’t consider worthy of the title: MacKenzie Gore. The 26-year-old lefty was once the best pitching prospect in the game, but expectations settled down some. Around this time last year, I was happy he’d developed into a reliable mid-rotation starter.
For the Tampa Bay Rays, it was the fearsome power of nature; for the Athletics, the whims of a greedy doofus. But while the cause may vary, the outcome is the same: Both teams will play all 81 of their home games this season in minor league parks. The A’s will set up shop at Sutter Health Park, also known as the home of the Triple-A River Cats; the Rays’ address is now George M. Steinbrenner (GMS) Field, the erstwhile environs of the Single-A Tampa Tarpons. (The River Cats will share custody, while the Tarpons will move to a nearby backfield.)
This is suboptimal and sort of embarrassing for the league. But it does present a compelling research question: How will these parks play? According to the three-year rolling Statcast park factors, the Oakland Coliseum and Tropicana Field both qualified as pitcher-friendly. The Coliseum ranked as the sixth-most pitcher-friendly park, suppressing offense 3% relative to league average, while Tropicana ranked as the third most, suppressing offense around 8%. Where will Sutter Health and GMS Field settle in?
I started by looking at how each park played in their previous minor league season. Over at Baseball America, Matt Eddy calculated the run-scoring environment for each ballpark in the 11 full-season minor leagues. Eddy found that Sutter Health ranked as the most pitcher-friendly Pacific Coast League park by far in 2024, allowing 31% fewer runs than the average PCL park. GMS Field played closer to neutral compared to its Florida State League peers, but it did significantly boost home runs, particularly to left-handed hitters. Read the rest of this entry »
Jayne Kamin-Oncea, Wendell Cruz, Stan Szeto, and Darren Yamashita-Imagn Images
Every year on Opening Day, I ask the FanGraphs staff to predict the season’s award winners, playoff field, and eventual World Series Champion. Those predictions tend to be heavily influenced by our playoff odds, projections, and prospect rankings, and while I appreciate the instinct to lean on data to make our guesses more educated, the results can feel a little chalky at times. That’s why this year, I’ve asked our writers to make another prediction — a bold prediction. One that might be a little spicy, or perhaps a little silly. A prediction that eschews the obvious, but is still grounded in reality, even if only by one foot. Twenty-five of our writers across FanGraphs and RotoGraphs answered the bell, including me. Will any of these predictions prove to be correct? Who knows! Let’s watch 2,430 games and find out. – Meg Rowley
The Marlins Will Be the First Team Ever With Fewer Than 20 Starting Pitcher Wins
In 2023, the A’s went 50-112, the worst record in baseball. Just 20 of those 50 wins were credited to their starting pitchers, tying a record set by the 1899 Cleveland Spiders. Excluding 2020, that’s the fewest starting pitcher wins for any team in AL/NL history since 1888, when the NL moved to a 140-game season. In 2025, the Marlins will break the 20-win barrier.
Starter decisions have been in decline for a while. In the modern era, five of the six teams with the fewest starter wins played in this decade (my sincerest apologies to the 1981 Mets; I promise Dwight Gooden and Ron Darling are coming soon). Accelerating the trend is the continued proliferation of something we don’t yet have a name for: the opposite of the super team. Somebody will break the 20-win barrier and soon. Read the rest of this entry »
The Vernal equinox was last week, but we all know that today, Opening Day, marks the real end of winter. As I’ve done for the last two decades, I’ve had ZiPS crunch the numbers and generate projected standings for the upcoming season. Now, we just wait for reality to destroy all those neat little projections. But first, a quick reminder of methodology.
The big change here is that ZiPS now does include spring training performance. The data is weighted significantly less than regular season performance, but one should treat projections as a constantly moving thing, not one static unchanging number. Every baseball thing has some potential to change a player’s outlook; just because data is harder to use doesn’t mean it’s meaningless. So check out some projections such as Jac Caglianone, Cam Smith, and Spencer Schwellenbach to see some of the players who got significant spring boosts. Read the rest of this entry »
I didn’t expect to be writing about Taijuan Walker this close to Opening Day. I doubt that either he or the Phillies would have expected him to be in the rotation to start the season. Last year, Walker pitched his way out of the best rotation in the National League; three Phillies starters received Cy Young votes, and a fourth, Ranger Suárez, made the All-Star team. Just before Christmas, Philadelphia made an opportunistic trade for Jesús Luzardo and plans to promote Andrew Painter (the team’s top pitching prospect since, I dunno, Gavin Floyd?) around midseason.
Even with two years and $36 million left on his contract, the phrase “surplus to requirements” was invented for people in Walker’s position.
But when the end of March actually arrived, Suárez’s back was giving him problems. He’ll start the season on the IL, and back into the rotation goes Walker. Read the rest of this entry »
All hail Chris Sale and Tarik Skubal! Last year, both southpaws dominated opposing hitters, winning the Pitching Triple Crown by leading their respective leagues in wins, ERA, and strikeouts. They also topped their circuits in both the FanGraphs and Baseball Reference flavors of WAR, and took home their first Cy Young Awards. It was just the second time that AL and NL hurlers won the Pitching Triple Crown in the same year, after Justin Verlander and Clayton Kershaw in 2011. Like that pair in 2012, they’re both slated to usher in the 2025 season by taking the ball on Opening Day, with Sale facing the Padres in San Diego at 4:10 p.m. ET on Thursday and Skubal going up against the defending champion Dodgers (who already had their Opening Day on March 18 in Tokyo against the Cubs) in Los Angeles at 7:10 p.m. ET.
This will be the sixth Opening Day start for Sale, who turns 36 on March 30, but his first since 2019, as a variety of injuries limited him to just 31 starts from ’20–23. After being traded from the Red Sox to the Braves in December 2023, he went 18-3 with a 2.38 ERA and 225 strikeouts as well as 6.4 fWAR and 6.2 bWAR, and reinvigorated his long-dormant Hall of Fame case along the way. The only down note to his season was that he didn’t pitch after September 19 due to back spasms and was left off the roster for the Wild Card Series (also against San Diego, coincidentally), which the Padres swept. As for the 28-year-old Skubal, he went 18-4 with a 2.39 ERA and 228 strikeouts as well as 5.9 fWAR and 6.4 bWAR. His breakout helped the Tigers reach the postseason for the first time since 2014, which they did thanks to an improbable 24-10 sprint to the finish; according to our Playoff Odds, at 62-66 on August 22, they had just a 0.8% chance of making it.
Setting the historic nature of the dual Triple Crowns and the rest of those story lines aside, having both reigning Cy Young winners starting on Opening Day marks a return to normalcy. For as commonplace as such assignments may seem, last year neither of the 2023 winners, Gerrit Cole and Blake Snell, were available, with the former sidelined by nerve inflammation and edema in his elbow and the latter not built up yet after signing with the Giants on March 19. As I noted at the time, the absence of both Cy Young winners from the slate was more or less a once-every-couple-decades occurrence. Prior to 2024, the last time neither reigning Cy Young winner started on Opening Day was in ’05, when both Astros right-hander Roger Clemens and Twins lefty Johan Santana yielded to longer-tenured teammates. Before that, one had to flip the calendar back to 1982, when Dodgers southpaw Fernando Valenzuela held out in a contract dispute, and Brewers righty Rollie Fingers was a reliever. Read the rest of this entry »
After an offseason marked by big free agent deals, ballpark and RSN uncertainty, and a whole lot of handwringing concerning the Los Angeles Dodgers, the 2025 season is almost upon us; we made it. And on this, the morning of Opening Day, we engage in our annual tradition of asking our staff to open themselves up to public ridicule by trying to predict the year in baseball. Some of these predictions will prove to be prescient; others will make their forecaster feel a little silly. Such is the prognostication business.
I asked the staff to predict the playoff field, as well as the pennant and World Series winners, and the individual award recipients. Folks from FanGraphs and RotoGraphs weighed in. Here are the results. Please note that the tables at the end showing the full writer ballots are sortable. Read the rest of this entry »
Welcome back, baseball! Opening Day is here. Most teams have reason to be optimistic this time of year, but there are a handful of clubs facing significant hurdles as the season gets underway. Below, I’ll layout what the best- and worst-case scenario looks like for every team in 2025.
Last year, we revamped our power rankings using a modified Elo rating system. If you’re familiar with chess rankings or the MLB predictions at the now defunct FiveThirtyEight, you’ll know that Elo is an elegant solution that measures teams’ relative strength and is very reactive to recent performance. For these Opening Day rankings, I’ve pulled the Depth Charts projections — which are powered by a 50/50 blend of the 2025 Steamer and ZiPS projections, and RosterResource’s playing time estimates — and calculated an implied Elo ranking for each team. The two-game Tokyo Series between the Dodgers and Cubs has been taken into account in these rankings. The delta column in the full rankings below shows the change in ranking from the pre-spring training run of the Power Rankings I did back in February. Read the rest of this entry »
Daphne Lemke/USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin-USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images
Every year, most teams hold some sort of team bonding, social event during spring training. The specifics of the event vary from team to team, but frequently they include renting out a movie theater and showing some cloying, inspirational movie like The Blind Side, Cool Runnings, Rudy, or better yet, a documentary like Free Solo. Regardless of the team’s outlook on the year, the goal is to get the players amped up for the season and ready to compete on the field, even if the competition in question is for fourth place in the division.
But what if instead of taking the clichéd route, teams actually tried to select a movie that fits their current vibe, one that’s thematically on brand with the current state of their franchise? They won’t do this because spring training is a time for hope merchants to peddle their wares, even if they’re selling snake oil to sub-.500 teams. But spring training is over. It’s time to get real. So here are my movie selections for each American League team, sorted by release date from oldest to newest.
