In football, they say that defense wins championships; in the baseball version of that adage, it’s pitching that leads to rings. The rotation plays a huge part in determining a team’s trajectory over the course of a season; a good one can carry you to October, while a bad one can sink you. To that end, it’s not terribly surprising that only two of the 15 teams in this portion of our power rankings are projected for records over .500; three others are right at .500, while the rest, of course, check in beneath that mark, ranging from the 79-win Padres down to the 66-win Rockies.

Still, pitching is also an avenue to greatly outperform the projections. Injured guys come back stronger than expected, prospects make a leap, established arms enjoy some unforeseen development — it happens every year. And while injuries can end a player’s season, they can also create opportunities for pitchers who are currently stuck further down the depth chart. The teams in the 16-20 range are generally a stone’s throw from winding up in the top half of the rankings, so it wouldn’t be too shocking if one of them made the playoffs. And while the teams at the bottom face a particularly steep climb, three teams in the bottom 10 of last year’s rankings reached the postseason — the Cubs, Guardians, and Blue Jays — and there is a good chance we see something similar this season. In fact, it could be two of the same three teams, with Houston taking the place of the defending AL pennant winners, who have climbed into this year’s top 10. I also wouldn’t be surprised if the Padres made the playoffs from this group, though these projections are a sobering reminder of where they are right now. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the foundational assumptions of the past 10 years in baseball is that the Braves will always figure something out. Their run of six straight division titles from 2018 to 2023 placed them in a conversation with the Dodgers and Astros as the one of the most consistently successful teams in baseball.

The Braves run a big payroll, but not on a level that allows them to outspend their mistakes. And those mistakes have been few. They always make smart trades, always get their star players to sign under-market extensions, always develop their own talent well. You could argue that the Braves have had more success developing undersized right-handed college starters named Spencer than the Orioles have had with their own pitching prospects of any size, name, and origin over the past 30 years.

But as Atlanta tries to bounce back from its first losing season since 2017, that sense of inevitability is fading. Spencer Schwellenbach is out until midseason with bone spurs in his elbow, and as of Monday, Spencer Strider has a strained oblique muscle and will start the season on the IL. Read the rest of this entry »

There are some positions for which a cleaner, wider gap exists between the top teams and the bottom, where we can more definitively say that some teams are better than others. For instance, the talent that the Dodgers and Astros have at DH separates their projections from the rest of baseball in a meaningful way. Relief pitching is not one of these positions. As you digest the forecasts and player details below, make sure to note how thin the margins tend to be from one team to the next. Also know that relief inning sample sizes are small enough that this is where WAR is the least good at properly calibrating impact and value, a dynamic heightened in the playoffs when the remaining bullpens are all turbocharged by the way the postseason schedule allows for rest, or for an elite starter to work an inning on his bullpen day. Things like coherent managerial usage, roster management, and good or bad health luck tend to play a huge role in the way bullpens perform throughout a season, and those are factors we can’t totally control for here. I felt free to point out the situations in which I think the projection is off base. Read the rest of this entry »

Cristopher Sánchez wasn’t going anywhere for awhile. He’s now not going anywhere for even longer. With Ranger Suarez in Boston, Zack Wheeler recovering from thoracic outlet surgery, and Aaron Nola looking his age, the 29-year-old left-hander is the ace of a Phillies starting rotation that led baseball in WAR in both 2025 and 2023 and hasn’t finished below fourth this decade. On Sunday, the Philadelphia signed Sánchez to a contract extension that will keep him around through the 2032 season, with a club option for 2033, when he’ll be 36. The move also comes less than two weeks after the team inked Jesús Luzardo to his own five-year, $135 million extension. Clearly, president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski would like to maintain the status quo.

Robert Murray of FanSided broke the news of the deal. Matt Gelb of The Athletic reported that the contract is worth a guaranteed $107 million, and Francys Romero of Beisbol FR reported that it included more than $13 million in incentives. The club option for 2033, if it’s picked up, would add another $32.5 million. This may well sound familiar. In June 2024, the Phillies signed Sánchez to a four-year extension that contained two more club options for 2029 and 2030. Those first four years bought out all of his arbitration years for $22.5 million. If picked up, the two club options (along with Cy Young incentives) could have increased the maximum value to $56.6 million.

We’ll get back into the mechanics of the deal and what they mean soon. We’re not going to spend more than a few paragraphs on why the Phillies decided Sánchez was worth all this. That part should be obvious. Sánchez is quite simply one of the best pitchers in the world. He finished 10th in the National League Cy Young voting in 2024 and second in 2025. He has a career ERA of 3.24 and a FIP of 3.15. By any standard, the lefty found an entirely new level in 2025, running a career-high 26% strikeout rate. His 2.55 FIP was nearly half a run better than his previous career best, and his 63 DRA- was nearly 20 points lower than his previous best. Read the rest of this entry »

I love relievers. Sure, starters are the belles of the ball, making the big bucks and responsibly scaling back their velocity and throwing six pitches. They’ve got it all together. Not relievers. Relievers are freaky. They’ll throw it crazy-style. They’ll spam a million breaking balls. They’ll have 20-grade command, or an 85-mph fastball, or a pitch you’ve never seen in your entire life. They will burn bright and fast, and then you’ll never see them again.

These are not the best bullpens in baseball. In fact, they are the worst. But every single one has something fascinating going on inside of it. Usually, it’s more than one something. So come along with me on a journey into the deep, dark wilderness of baseball’s mediocre bullpens. This one is for the sickos. Read the rest of this entry »

During the championship game of the World Baseball Classic, a Nolan McLean sweeper made me jump off of my couch. It wasn’t even a strike; it just moved so much from such an innocuous starting point that I reacted instinctively. I clearly wasn’t alone; Davy Andrews wrote about how nasty McLean’s pitches look last week. “Dang,” I thought to myself after I’d calmed down. “It’s too bad someone hasn’t gotten PitchingBot to take a look at that one.”

Then I thought about that slightly longer and chuckled. That someone is me. PitchingBot lives in the cloud, but I have a duplicate copy isolated in a sandbox on my computer. MLB records Statcast data for WBC games. I have a machine that ingests Statcast data and turns it into pitch modeling grades. This wasn’t rocket science (give or take how you feel about the machine learning algorithms powering the model) – I took the data, fed it into the machine, and tinkered with the exact settings until I got model grades to come out.

The tournament features a wide variety of skill levels, from Paul Skenes down to semipros and high schoolers. Setting the population average equal to the average quality of WBC pitching would mean that the grades aren’t comparable to the ones we’re all used to looking at. Thus, I ran the PitchingBot model for every pitch in the WBC, but instead of using the WBC average to mean a 50 grade, I used the 2025 MLB average. That means the model is calibrated to how you’d expect the pitches thrown in the WBC to perform against average major league opposition. Read the rest of this entry »

Trey Yesavage profiles as a strong Rookie of the Year candidate, but he won’t have a chance to begin building his case in the near term. The 22-year-old Toronto Blue Jays right-hander landed on the injured list due to shoulder impingement and won’t be ready when the season gets underway later this week. His return is expected to come sooner rather than later — fingers are crossed throughout Canada — but for now, Yesavage is on the shelf.

Five months ago he was turning heads in the World Series. With just six MLB outings under his belt — three in the regular season, and three across the ALDS and ALCS — Yesavage bedeviled LA batters with an array of high-riding heaters and diving splitters. He was especially dominant in Game 5, fanning a dozen Dodgers while allowing three baserunners and a lone run over seven frames.

His meteoric rise and eye-popping postseason performances raised his public persona, but the Pottstown, Pennsylvania native hasn’t otherwise changed since being drafted 22nd overall in 2024 out of East Carolina University. He’s still polite and unassuming, and his overpowering arsenal has remained in place.

“I’m pretty much the same dude,” Yesavage told me at Blue Jays camp last week. “The pitches are the same. The velocity and movement are the same. I also don’t look at [the metrics] all that much. Whenever Trackman is up on the board, all I really look at is the vert on my heater, and the velo. The only questions I’ll ask my pitching coach are to make sure that my most-used pitch is in line.”

That would be his four-seam fastball, which averaged 94.7 mph and 19.5 inches of induced vertical break across his smattering of regular season outings. Thrown at a 45.2% clip, the offering was augmenting by a slider (28.4%) and a splitter (26.4%), the last of those offerings being the righty’s most lethal weapon. A quintessential complement to his well-elevated heaters, Yesavage’s splitter induced a 57.1% whiff rate and a .111 BAA against big-league hitters.

He began tinkering with his signature pitch in the middle of his three collegiate seasons, but it wasn’t until his draft year that the efforts bore fruit. Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes, we fail to appreciate the vastness of the mysterious forces behind projections systems. The data speak to each other and sometimes combine in unexpected ways to form unexpected outcomes. Regarding the question of how to rank each team’s designated hitters, what you see here is based not only on projections about player performances but well-informed speculation about how each team will line up. Put it all into the kettle and, well, shock of shocks, there’s an unexpected upset at no. 1 on this list.

Actually, no, it’s Shohei Ohtani and the Dodgers again, by more than two wins. I don’t even know why I bothered setting up that gag, no one believed me, even for a second. Read the rest of this entry »

I love the spring training leaderboards. Anything can happen in spring training. Did you know that Trevor Story, who is 33 years old and has spent a significant portion of his adult life on the injured list, is tied for the spring lead with three triples? Story hasn’t hit a regular-season triple since he quit working at the triples factory knows as Coors Field, but here he is atop the leaderboard because it’s spring training. Did you know that Luis Matos leads the world with four hit-by-pitches? He’s been plunked just three times during the regular season, but here he is in spring training with an HBP rate higher than his career walk rate. None of this means anything, but that’s part of the fun.

Shea Langeliers and Matt McLain are tied at the top with six home runs. Langeliers is certainly not a surprise. He’s a genuine power hitter with 60 combined homers over the past two years. McLain’s got plenty of power, but only once before has he hit six in a span of 15 games. This is at the very least a notable outcome for him, and as I went down the leaderboard, I found some seriously surprising names. How does 33-year-old Ben Gamel, owner of 41 career homers in 723 career games, find himself tied for sixth in baseball with four spring-training homers in just 11 games? Today we’re hunting for players with even more extreme splits. We’re looking for guys who have hit more home runs in spring training than in the regular season. We’ve got spring stats going back to 2006, so I pulled them along with major league stats going back to the 1990s. Let’s find some guys who peak really early.

We need to ask our question more specifically, though, because plenty of players who didn’t stick in the majors (or who haven’t yet stuck in the majors) will have more plate appearances in spring training, and thus more home runs during spring training, than in the regular season. Bryce Brentz is the runaway leader in this category. Brentz was a power-hitting outfielder who played parts of the 2014 and 2016 seasons with the Red Sox. He launched 161 homers across 10 minor league seasons and another 12 across nine different spring trainings. But he only got into 34 major league games and hit just one home run. That’s a differential of 11 home runs! The top of the leaderboard is all players like Brentz who hit more homers during spring training because they played more during spring training. It’s great to recognize them, but it’s not quite what we’re asking. Read the rest of this entry »

When you run a lot of projections, one thing you have to get used to is being very wrong, very often. The ZiPS projections generally run about 4,000 players every year, meaning you should expect around 800 players to either achieve their 90th-percentile projection or fall short of their 10th-percentile projection. Those hundreds of results will invariably be quite a distance away from the standard midpoint projections that you see.

As is my ritual, it’s time to run my two articles discussing my favorite booms and busts of the upcoming season, starting with the hitters today and concluding with the pitchers next week. But just to keep the ritual of humiliation fully transparent, we’ll start by looking at last year’s booms and busts.

Oof, ritual humiliation indeed! The booms did not pan out well in 2025, even if you give me generous credit and mark my picks of Joe Mack and Gage Workman as incomplete. The busts worked out much better — from my point of view, at least — but it’s a lot less fun to be right about the bad stuff. Well, let’s get to 2026, and remember to give your picks in the comments so that you can join me in this exercise! Read the rest of this entry »