The Angels haven’t changed. It’s Mike Trout who is worse.

The Angels are bad. It’s the truest thing about them. Their hitting is bad, their pitching is bad, their fielding is bad, and everything else is bad, too. This isn’t breaking news. They’ve finished below .500 each year since 2015, the only team not to make the postseason in that time. But expectations have reached a new low as we enter 2026:

I was initially skeptical of these figures, or at least the direction of them. How could the Angels possibly be going backwards? They don’t seem to be rebuilding, and their depth chart looks the same as ever: a few truly good players, a few players who would be good if they were playing a different position (or perhaps in a different organization), a few players who were drafted far too recently, a few aging veterans who were nearly All-Stars at one point, and Trout. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, the Reds sent Hunter Greene for imaging on his throwing elbow. Never a good sign for the no. 1 starter on a team that made the playoffs last season. In those situations, we on the outside are usually conditioned to fear the worst, or at least Tommy John surgery, recovery from which — while all but routine these days — takes more than a year.

Only in that context could Tuesday’s news be taken as positive: Greene will have surgery to remove bone chips from his elbow. (In fact, as you read this, he may have already undergone the procedure.) The recovery time is expected to be on the order of three to four months, but losing an ace until the trade deadline is much better than losing him until 2027.

This is a banner year for bone chips and loose bodies. The Braves alone have two starters — Hurston Waldrep and Spencer Schwellenbach — on the IL after receiving similar treatment. Actually, since we’re talking about bone chips, this feels like a good excuse to talk about Dazzy Vance. Read the rest of this entry »

The baseball season will soon be upon us, which means it’s time for an age-old question: How long until the best hitter’s reign ends? This year, and seemingly every year of late, that means Aaron Judge. You can quibble about who the best overall player is, but Judge is pretty clearly the best offensive player on the planet. Over the last four years, he has a composite 204 wRC+, miles clear of the competition, and he just put up that exact number in 2025. In 2026, we think he’s going to be the best hitter again, obviously.

Will we in 2027, though? It depends, of course. If Judge looks like his usual self this year, it’s hard to imagine anyone taking the crown. I wanted a little bit more rigor than that, however, so I dusted off the Marcel projection methodology. Marcel is what Tom Tango dubbed the minimum sufficient projection system. It’s as simple as taking the last three years of performance, weighting them, and tossing in some league average.

Let’s take Judge’s last few seasons as an example. I grabbed his wOBA and plate appearances for 2023-2025 and threw them into a table. Then I calculated league average across those three years (the exact calculation uses some weighting to match Judge’s playing time by season). That looks like this:

Turning those into a Marcel projection is simple. Multiply the most recent year’s plate appearances by five, the next-most-recent year’s by four, the next by three, and the league average by two. Take a weighted average of these new values. The result is Judge’s 2026 Marcel projection – which works out to a .440 wOBA. That tracks logically, which is the point of Marcel. It’s really close to what you and I would think about a player’s skill. Post a wOBA above .450 for two straight years, and I’ll expect you to come back to the pack a little but still do something outrageous the next year.

Using this methodology, here are the top projected hitters for 2026:

Read the rest of this entry »

A pitcher goes to the mound hoping to record outs without allowing runs. Unfortunately, a lot goes on between the ball leaving the pitcher’s hand and the scoreboard changing. You can’t just toe the rubber, chuck the ball, and say, “God’s will be done,” as you stare glassy-eyed into the distance like Martin Sheen as Robert E. Lee in Gettysburg.

I mean, you could, but you wouldn’t like the results.

A modern pitcher goes to the mound with a plan to influence events much further up the causal chain. Every pitcher is special in his own way, but every plan boils down to this: By changing speed, movement, or location, trick the hitter into swinging somewhere other than where the ball will be. Read the rest of this entry »

The Seattle Mariners boast two of the game’s most promising young arms. Second and third respectively in a highly regarded farm system, Ryan Sloan and Kade Anderson also reside in the front half of our 2026 Top 100 Prospects list. Sloan, a 20-year-old right-hander, ranks 20th, while Anderson, a 21-year-old southpaw, comes in at no. 50.

How do the two compare in terms of repertoire and approach? Both are profiled in the write-ups that accompany the aforementioned rankings, but what about how the pitchers see themselves? Moreover, how are they viewed by a catcher who knows them well and a prominent member of the organization’s pitching brain trust? Wanting to find out, I spoke to Anderson and Sloan, as well as to Luke Stevenson and Trent Blank, at Seattle’s spring training complex late last month.

Before we get to those perspectives, here are brief snapshots, augmented with quotes from our prospect analyst team of Eric Longenhagen, Brendan Gawlowski, and James Fegan:

Drafted third overall last year out of LSU, Anderson, who threw his first professional pitch this spring, was described as follows: “Maybe the best pitcher in the 2025 draft, [he] projects as a quick-moving mid-rotation starter with a great breaking ball.”

Sloan, who was drafted 55th overall in 2024 out of York Community High School in Elmhurst, Illinois, debuted professionally last season and logged a 3.73 ERA, a 3.18 FIP, and a 27.0% strikeout rate over 82 innings between Low-A Modesto and High-A Everett. “The upside is sky-high here,” wrote our prospect analysts, “and it’s not too early to say Sloan is one of the best pitching prospects in baseball.”

Blank serves as Seattle’s director of pitching strategy, so let’s start with his thoughts. Read the rest of this entry »

This is Ryan Blake’s first piece as a contributor for FanGraphs. He is a former newspaper reporter in the Inland Northwest and a current writer for Lookout Landing, where his work on the batter’s eye at T-Mobile Park was nominated for a 2026 SABR Analytics Conference Research Award.

A bottom-ranked pitching staff got a little deeper this weekend.

Zack Littell and the Nationals have agreed on a one-year contract, as several outlets reported Sunday. The price tag is currently unknown, though the deal includes a mutual option for 2027. Littell, 30, ranked next-to-last on our Top 50 Free Agents list this offseason. As it happens, he is also next-to-last to sign (only Lucas Giolito remains available).

Littell threw a career high 186.2 innings in 2025 across 32 starts for the Rays and Reds. Only 10 pitchers threw more innings last year. His 3.81 ERA was above average among qualified starters, and his 4.2% walk rate was the best in the majors. On the other hand, his 4.88 FIP, 17.1% strikeout rate, and 1.74 HR/9 each ranked in the bottom five. It was a mix of strengths and weaknesses that, taken together, made him the 88th-most valuable starting pitcher by WAR — useful depth for most organizations. Read the rest of this entry »

This offseason, I’ve taken high-level looks at the offseason decisions made by the New York Mets and the Boston Red Sox. It’s been a popular series, so today, I’m going to use the same framework to offer a holistic evaluation of the Brewers. As a refresher, here’s how I’ve been thinking about the exercise:

“How should we evaluate a front office, particularly in the offseason when we don’t have games to look at? I’ve never been able to arrive at a single framework. That’s only logical. If there were one simple tool we could use to evaluate the sport, baseball wouldn’t be as interesting to us as it is. The metrics we use to evaluate teams, and even players, are mere abstractions. The goal of baseball – winning games, or winning the World Series in a broad sense – can be achieved in a ton of different ways. We measure a select few of those in most of our attempts at estimating value, or at figuring out who “won” or “lost” a given transaction. So today, I thought I’d try something a little bit different.”

I won’t be offering a single grade. Instead, I’m going to assess the decisions that Matt Arnold and the Brewers made across three axes. The first is Coherence of Strategy. If you make a win-now trade, but then head into the season with a gaping hole on your roster, that’s not a coherent approach. It’s never quite that simple in the real world, but good teams make sets of decisions that work toward the same overarching goal. Read the rest of this entry »

If there’s something even more satisfying than spending your hard-earned money, it’s spending someone else’s money that you didn’t earn. When we’re talking baseball, unless you’re an extremely high-net-worth individual who can casually spend hundreds of millions of dollars — if this describes you, call me and we can totally hang out or something — you only have the option to spend other people’s cash. I mean, I haven’t technically asked American Express to up my credit limit to $300 million, but I’m guessing the answer would be no. Every year around this time, I make a whole piece out of it, naming seven players I think teams should attempt to sign to long-term contracts now, rather than waiting until later. There are some additional complications, of course, with a lockout likely coming after this season, but teams and players could be willing to act with more urgency to sign contracts now before all the uncertainty ahead of them.

I’ve (hopefully) chosen seven players whose possible extensions would benefit both the player and the team, as all good contracts ought to do. I’ve included the up-to-date ZiPS projections for each player, as well as the contract that ZiPS thinks each player should get, though that doesn’t necessarily mean I think the player will end up with that figure or even sign an extension. Read the rest of this entry »

Collin Snider is with Chicago looking to recapture what he had two seasons ago with Seattle. Currently in camp with the Cubs, the 30-year-old right-hander was a pleasant surprise for the Mariners in 2024, logging a 1.94 with a 27.8% strikeout rate over 42 relief outings comprising 41-and-two-thirds innings. Last year was a different story. Hampered by a flexor strain and unable to get back on track, Snider struggled to the tune of a 5.47 ERA across 24 appearances in the majors, then posted an even uglier 8.06 ERA across 25 games with Triple-A Tacoma. Cut loose by Seattle in November, he subsequently inked a deal with the Cubs in December.

Despite the dismal results, Snider wasn’t without suitors. He had options — every team can use more pitching — and in the case of the Cubs, he also had connections. Tyler Zombro, the NL Central club’s Vice President of Pitching Strategy, previously worked at Tread Athletics, where Snider trained in previous offseasons. As the erstwhile Vanderbilt Commodore put it, “That really steered my decision. I like the way the pitching development is here.”

Asked about his poor 2025 performance, Snider pointed to how his injury contributed to bad mechanical habits that resulted in a drop in velocity, as well as “pitch shapes that weren’t the same.” He knew what was happening, but correcting it was another matter.

“I was very rotational, throwing too side-to-side, whereas I need to be north-south,” Snider said. “Side-to-side made the velo go down, because I couldn’t get behind the baseball. I was aware of what was going on, but I didn’t know why I was doing it, or how to make the adjustment quickly. It ended up being one of those things where I needed the offseason to straighten it out.”

Snider averaged 92.5 mph with his four-seamer last season, whereas in the prior two years that number was 94.2 and 95.3. His sweeper was also impacted by his delivery being out of sync. Read the rest of this entry »

After slipping from 89 wins and a trip to the National League Championship Series in 2024 to 83 wins and the short straw in a tiebreaker for a Wild Card berth in 2025, the Mets have a new look to their outfield thanks to an active offseason, some position changes, and an astute draft pick. While the right field job has yet to be settled, several players battling for time at the position have put their best foot forward during the first two weeks of exhibition season, with the two who figure most prominently in the team’s plans homering earlier this week. On Wednesday, top prospect Carson Benge hit his first home run of the spring in an exhibition game against Team Israel, and on Thursday, Brett Baty went deep against the Nationals while making his debut in right field, a continuation of his effort to expand his defensive repertoire.

Meanwhile, MLB.com beat reporter Anthony DiComo summarized last week’s highlights:

It's been quite the week for the Mets' right-field competition.

Tuesday: Mike Tauchman homered in his first Grapefruit League at-bat.

Thursday: Carson Benge went 3-for-3, and Tyrone Taylor hit a three-run homer.

Friday: MJ Melendez hit a pair of opposite-field homers. pic.twitter.com/Tnti901ZLa

— Anthony DiComo (@AnthonyDiComo) February 27, 2026

No spring training result should be taken at face value given the varying levels of competition, and that’s especially true before people have been warned about the Ides of March, but the whole situation is worth a closer look. Read the rest of this entry »