This is my first We Tried Tracker update since December, and I have missed you. I have missed who we were in that simpler, infinitely less cruel time of, you know, two months ago. A lot has happened on the We Tried front, far too much to cover in one article, but with Alex Bregman and Nick Pivetta coming off the board this week, all but one of the first 45 entries on our Top 50 Free Agents list have been signed. (No. 33 Andrew Heaney is the exception.) It’s time to reflect on the state of effort in major league front offices. First, I need to beg for your help once again. I have missed some We Trieds. I’m sure of it. If you see any out there in the wild, or if you notice any omissions in the tracker, please let me know on Bluesky or email me at WeTriedTracker@gmail.com, a real email address that I really check. (I even check the spam folder, which today contains an email from the daughter of the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. She needs a trusted investment manager/partner for her $27.5 million fortune. I’m about to be so rich, you guys.)

From the very beginning of this exercise, the Red Sox have paced the league. As of Thursday, I have them credited with 12 different We Trieds in nine different categories. That’s nearly 18% of all We Trieds! No other team has notched more than six. The Red Sox are fully lapping the field. And until Wednesday evening, what did they have to show for all that effort? A trade for Garrett Crochet and a couple of one-year deals for pitchers in various states of recovery from Tommy John surgery. Well, all that has changed. Apparently, practice really does makes perfect, because the Red Sox have landed Bregman, our third-ranked free agent, on a three-year, $120-million deal with two opt-outs (and enough deferred money to lower the total present value to $90 million). Amazingly, Bregman is the first position player Craig Breslow has signed to a major league deal since the Red Sox hired him in October 2023. That’s why we keep trying. You never know when lucky number 13 is going to pay off. If you just stick to your guns, keep lowballing free agent after free agent, one of them will eventually be so beaten down by the process that he will accept your terms. It’s truly an uplifting tale of hope in these bleak times.

The moment Bregman signed, we got two very detailed We Trieds. Evan Petzold of the Detroit Free Press reported that the Tigers had offered six years and $171.5 million, including some deferred money, while USA Today’s Bob Nightengale reported that the Cubs offered four years and $120 million. MLB.com’s Jordan Bastian clarified Chicago actually offered $115, with opt-outs after the 2026 and 2027 seasons. Regardless of which Cubs offer is more accurate, Detroit’s and Chicago’s offers involve a lower AAV than what Bregman got from Boston, but more money and more years. The Red Sox offered something those two teams didn’t: the ability to leave immediately. If Bregman has himself a big 2025 in Boston, he can try again next offseason. If he doesn’t, he’ll have 120 million reasons not to feel too bad about how things turned out. Sometimes trying the hardest to sign a player means being the most willing to let him leave.

With nearly every notable free agent spoken for, I should probably reflect on what I learned during this exercise. I’ve never paid attention to the hot stove season this intently, and certainly not with this kind of odd, specific focus. I guess the biggest lesson is what a We Tried can tell you about how a team wants to be perceived. Unless I missed something, nine teams haven’t notched a single We Tried: the Astros, Brewers, Cardinals, Dodgers, Marlins, Pirates, Rockies, Twins, and White Sox. That’s a very eclectic group. The Dodgers haven’t felt the need to leak it to a reporter when they failed to land a player, because why would they? They’re actually improving their team, so they don’t need to keep up appearances. The White Sox, Marlins, Pirates, and Rockies are barely playing the same sport. They’re not competing for impact free agents and would never want their fans to get that impression, lest it raise expectations above their current level of negative infinity. The Twins and Brewers have spent the offseason trying to pull off a balancing act: trying to remain competitive without raising payroll. Unfortunately, they came into the offseason with a solid team and real expectations, and the silence has been deafening.

As for the Cardinals, I don’t really know where to begin. They are, in theory, starting a rebuild, but if there’s been any progress on that front, they’ve done a great job at concealing it. They haven’t signed a major league free agent. They haven’t even hinted that they’ve spent a moment considering the possibility of signing a major league free agent. Instead, they have tried so, so hard and so, so publicly… to get a little bit worse. The Cardinals have spent the entire offseason absorbed in an ill-fated attempt to trade Nolan Arenado, despite the fact that doing so wouldn’t make the team better in the short run (because Arenado is still a solid player) or in the long run (because his contract is so underwater that it’s not worth real prospect capital). The Cardinals were engaged in the noblest attempt of all: saving a few million dollars for the purpose of saving a few million dollars. On Thursday, lame duck president of baseball operations John Mozeliak essentially admitted that this lofty dream was dead. The Cardinals will spend the 2025 season furious that Arenado is still — if the projections are right — their second-best player, rather than what he could have become: a medium-sized pile of money.

Then there are the teams that have been out there trying like crazy. The top four teams are all in the AL East: the Red Sox with 12, the Orioles with seven, the Blue Jays with six, and the Yankees with five. The Cubs and Padres each have four. To some extent, this is just a reflection of reality. The AL East is a monster division where winning is expected. The Yankees play in the biggest media market in the country. They have the loudest fans in the country, and those fans expect them to sign everyone. Silence probably isn’t an option. The Red Sox have similarly demanding fans, and their front office has been publicly promising to break the bank for two straight offseasons now. They didn’t deliver at all during the 2023-2024 offseason, and until the Bregman signing, the only multi-year deal they’d handed out this offseason was still, in a sense, a one-year deal, as it went to Patrick Sandoval, who will be recovering from internal brace surgery for most of the 2025 season. In retrospect, it’s easy to see their We Trieds as assurances that they were acting in good faith.

The Orioles and Blue Jays are in a similar position: They want it to be known that they’re out there attempting to improve their teams. If they’re not trying as hard as fans might like, at least they’re trying loudly. However, there’s an insidious undertone, as all this trying comes while owners are publicly softening up the ground for a death march toward a salary cap. They’re getting ready to lock out the players, and toward that end, they’re getting an early start on painting the players as greedy millionaires. Through that lens, it’s easy to see each We Tried as an attempt to portray the billionaire ownership class as generous and benevolent, willing to go out and sign all those players you want them to, if only those players weren’t quite so expensive.

Rather than end on such a cynical note, let me tell you about my favorite We Tried. It came from Anne Rogers, the Royals beat writer for MLB.com. On February 4, Rogers reposted an MLB Trade Rumors article about Randal Grichuk’s signing with the Diamondbacks. “Royals tried to get Grichuck (sic) but he returns to Arizona,” she wrote. I clicked on the link to the article to find the part about the Royals trying. But when I read the article, I saw that the part about the Royals trying was just a link to that same post from Rogers. You can just keep clicking back and forth between the two links forever. It’s a We Tried ouroboros, and crucially, of the 69 We Trieds I’ve recorded so far, it’s the only one that uses that exact terminology. There’s no “We were in on,” or “We were in the mix,” or “We made a competitive offer.” It’s pure and simple: “Royals tried,” with absolutely zero further information.

This is also the funniest We Tried of the offseason simply because of the terms. Grichuk signed for one year and $5 million (technically it’s $2 million, with a $3 million buyout on a mutual 2026 option). Every other player who was the subject of a We Tried signed a contract that was at least twice as big as Grichuk’s. At least one player I can think of signed a contract that is 153 times bigger than Grichuk’s. There is no such thing as a major league team that can’t afford a one-year, $5 million contract. Hell, several little league teams could probably swing that deal if the right 12-year-old should come along. The Royals truly lowered the bar here. This is what minimum effort looks like.

There’s still more winter to go, but this week gave us a sign of spring that’s way more promising than any silly groundhog in Pennsylvania. Pitchers and catchers have reported to Florida and Arizona for spring training. As usual, this is also the best time to do the first mega-run of ZiPS projected standings, to gauge where every team stands at the prelude to the 2025 season. Naturally, these are not the final projected standings, but they’re accurate through every bit of knowledge ZiPS and Szymborski have as of the morning of Thursday, February 13.

These standings are the result of a million simulations, not results obtained from binomial or even beta-binomial magic. The methodology isn’t identical to the one we use for our playoff odds, which we recently launched to both acclaim and dismay. So how does ZiPS calculate the season? Stored within ZiPS are the first- through 99th-percentile projections for each player. I start by making a generalized depth chart, using our Depth Charts as a jumping off point. Since these are my curated projections, I make changes based on my personal feelings about who will receive playing time as filtered through arbitrary whimsy my logic and reasoning. ZiPS then generates a million versions of each team in Monte Carlo fashion.

After that is done, ZiPS applies another set of algorithms with a generalized distribution of injury risk that changes the baseline plate appearances or innings pitched for each player. ZiPS then automatically and proportionally “fills in” playing time from the next players on the list to get to a full slate of PAs and innings.

The result is a million different rosters for each team and an associated winning percentage for each million of them. After applying the new strength of schedule calculations based on the other 29 teams, I end up with the standings for each of the million seasons. I promise this is much less complex than it sounds.

The goal of ZiPS is to be less awful than any other way of predicting the future. The future is tantalizingly close but beyond our knowledge, and if anyone figures out how to deflect the astrophysicist Arthur Eddington’s arrow of time, it’s probably not going to be in the form of baseball projections. So we project probabilities, not certainties. If this does not satisfy you, just assume that any deviation from the actual results are due to flaws in reality.

Over the last decade, ZiPS has averaged 19.2 correct teams when looking at Vegas preseason over/under lines. I’m always tinkering with methodology, but most of the low-hanging fruit in predicting how teams will perform has already been harvested. ZiPS’ misses for teams from year to year are uncorrelated, with an r-squared of one year’s miss to the next of 0.000541. In other words, none of the year-to-year misses for individual franchises has told us anything about future misses for those franchises.

We published the ZiPS projected American League standings on Wednesday, so unless you’re accidentally here looking for the air flow data of Vornado vs. Honeywell desk fans, you guessed correctly that we’ve got the National League installment for today. Please note that the World Series probabilities across the two pieces will not add up to precisely 100%, thanks to the Nick Pivetta signing, the Alex Bregman signing, and some of the minor Wednesday transactions.

As far as bad seasons go, Atlanta had a darn good one, given the team still managed 89 wins and a brief playoff appearance despite significant injuries to Spencer Strider and Ronald Acuña Jr.. They both are expected to be back for most of the 2025 season, and even though their injuries have curbed their projections a bit, their returns are a major boon to the Braves — as good as any free agent signings made this winter. With guaranteed health on all fronts, the Braves would have a much more impressive projection, even taking into consideration the loss of Max Fried, but ZiPS expects there to be at least some injuries, and Atlanta’s depth these days isn’t terribly robust. The Braves also addressed their most glaring position of weakness, left field, with their signing of Jurickson Profar, who is coming off a career year with the Padres. ZiPS doesn’t expect Profar to repeat that performance, but considering Atlanta left fielders were below replacement level last season (77 wRC+, -0.3 WAR), his projected 110 wRC+ and 1.4 WAR represent a fairly sizable upgrade.

Not a lot of surprises here for the Phillies. Like the Braves, they had a very quiet offseason. As has been the case for the past few seasons, Philadelphia’s offense is quite solid, and incoming outfielder Max Kepler is a reasonable fill-in. The main concern for the Phillies here is simply that so many of their key contributors are now on the wrong side of 30. There is some risk that comes with new starting pitcher Jesús Luzardo, whom they acquired from the Marlins, but he offers quite a lot of high-end outcomes. But the truth is, this rotation probably would project to be a top-five staff in baseball even if Philadelphia had signed Steve Carlton instead, without the use of a time machine.

The Mets, on the other hand, had an action-packed offseason. Just signing Juan Soto and then mic-dropping likely would have made for a successful winter. To my utter shock, they were able to pull off the feat of not having to say goodbye to Pete Alonso or pay him a ludicrous amount of money. Yes, he’s declining, but the team is better with him at first and Vientos at third than with Vientos at first and Brett Baty at third. Now, I think people are underrating Baty based on his early career performance, but a contending team ought to be far more interested in the Polar Bear! ZiPS is not particularly enthused by the rotation, but it’s enough to pull the Mets into just about an even projection with the Braves and Phillies.

The Nationals are improving incrementally, and you can see that offensive core of James Wood, Dylan Crews, CJ Abrams, and Luis García Jr. coming together. First baseman Nathaniel Lowe is a solid trade pickup, and he came cheap enough that I can hardly protest too loudly that he’s a much better fit on a contending team. But ZiPS thinks about half this lineup is awful, and feels this pitching staff might be a little worse that the offense. Washington is better than the Marlins, but ZiPS doesn’t believe this team is ready for a breakthrough in 2025.

The gamble for the Marlins was that if they could get enough of their dynamic young pitching to stay healthy, they could compete for a wild card spot even with their lineup looking like the equivalent of a Chevrolet Citation that’s been sitting in your weird cousin’s barn for 30 years. When that roll of the dice didn’t work out, they were out of ideas. Now, their rotation projects to be a bottom-five staff, and as for the lineup, I think I’d rather put my money on the car.

As has been noted, ZiPS really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really likes Chicago’s lineup, even though Kyle Tucker isn’t as good a fit for Wrigley Field as he was for that park in Houston with the new name I just forgot again. Daikon? Dovahkiin? Dank? (Editor’s note: It’s Daikin Park.) ZiPS is not excited about the rotation, especially if a few injuries work their way into the mix, but it’s not enough to keep the Cubs from projecting at the top of the division.

The Cubs shouldn’t rest too easy, though, with the Brewers projected to finish just a couple games behind them. Milwaukee bleeds an elite bullpen arm every year it seems, but it pumps out new dominant relievers at a faster rate than I churn out Simpsons references from 1995. The offense has stabilized a bit, with Christian Yelich getting his offense back on track, and though the Brewers didn’t go big and bold this offseason, most NL Central teams didn’t either. ZiPS gives Nestor Cortes a nice little bounce-back season, which should ease the pain of the loss of Devin Williams.

I thought the Cardinals would come out a few games better than this, but ZiPS clearly is not buying their offseason of inaction. It was surprising not because I think the Cardinals are good, but because ZiPS rarely projects them to mediocre, let alone bad. This is only the second time ZiPS has clocked them as a sub-.500 team. The first time was 2008, when St. Louis won 86 games. Perhaps this projection is a bit counterintuitive because the Cardinals were worse in 2023 than they were in 2024, and they entered last season with an 83-win projection, but ZiPS simply saw last year’s team as having a lot more opportunity for upside. That makes sense when you consider the Cardinals didn’t sign a major league free agent before camps opened, lost Paul Goldschmidt and Andrew Kittredge to free agency, and declined their options for current free agents Lance Lynn and Kyle Gibson. All four of those guys are in the twilight of their careers at this point, but the Cardinals didn’t replace them externally, and their internal options don’t represent much of an improvement. Really, it feels like the Cardinals are just waiting around for John Mozeliak’s tenure to end.

The Reds boast some upside, but they also have some serious depth concerns, and an uninspiring group on the offensive side of the defensive spectrum. ZiPS kind of likes the rotation, but not the Plan B options after the projected starting five, and it’s decidedly lukewarm about the bullpen. There’s a lot of value tied up in comparatively few players: Elly De La Cruz, Hunter Greene, and a hopefully healthy Matt McLain.

Pittsburgh is a far less depressing team then you’d expect from its projected record, but it has far too many positions that are just screaming for more offense. Signing Anthony Santander would have been a much better idea than simply relying on Andrew McCutchen firing up the member berry invocations of a decade ago. Sure, a slugger like Santander wouldn’t come cheap, but now is precisely the time for the Pirates to spend. The top three in the rotation are terrific, and the Pirates are the type of team that if they could sneak into October, they could really surprise some people.

The curve for the Dodgers’ projections is actually pretty funny. You don’t quite see it with the 80/20 splits, but their 10th-percentile projection only drops another a third of a win and their first-percentile projection is 86 wins. Contrary to what people think, the sum of the Dodgers’ adding very expensive depth isn’t really on the high end, because they’re already pushing into diminishing returns territory. With good health, the Dodgers will have a hard time getting maximum value from all their players because they have so many good ones. The biggest benefit of all this is that the team is Marianas Trench deep, down at the depth where you start to see these fish things that look like Eldritch abominations. For the Dodgers to have a truly lousy season, it would probably take someone on their roster doing gain-of-function research on smallpox in the dugout, which is probably against the rules.

The Diamondbacks are absolutely solid everywhere except designated hitter, though ZiPS isn’t as keen on some of their replacement options. Adding Corbin Burnes is huge, and even if Jordan Montgomery ends up getting a lot of innings, he has to be better than he was last year, right? I actually thought Arizona would come out a few games better than this, but ZiPS really doesn’t like what happens in the event of a Gabriel Moreno or Ketel Marte injury, and the lackluster DH projection reflects the team’s lack of spare bats.

The Padres could be very good, but this is also a really delicate team. Bringing in Nick Pivetta is more helpful in the projections than what people might’ve expected because the back end of San Diego’s rotation looked pretty bleak to ZiPS. However, the wins that were giveth could be taketh away if the Padres trade Dylan Cease, something they seem determined to do, but that hasn’t happenedeth yet. The sudden changes in team revenues because of Diamond Sports’ bankruptcy and team ownership turmoil have really hurt the Padres, as they’re likely nearing the end of their current run. ZiPS really likes prospects Ethan Salas and Leodalis De Vries, but they won’t impact the 2025 roster, so you’ll have to wait until the ZiPS Top 100 Prospects next week for more on them!

The Giants successfully retained Matt Chapman, but they were below .500 with him last year. The big addition here is Willy Adames, but Justin Verlander is far less exciting than he was five years ago. There’s just too much meh all around for ZiPS to project San Francisco to be anything more than a third-tier candidate, though far from a hopeless one.

This may come as a shock to you, but the Rockies are acting with far more competence lately. Over the last two offseasons, they haven’t done anything crazy in free agency — like sign Kris Bryant to play the outfield — and they’ve stopped their usual practice of treating prospects as annoyances. It’s nice that Colorado is going to give Nolan Jones every chance to have a bounce-back season rather than plotting to replace him with, say, Andrew Benintendi, as the Jeff Bridich-era Rockies may have done. But just because they are a better-run organization doesn’t mean they are good. The hole is so deep that it will take quite a while to get out of it, and they basically still have to find an entire pitching staff. A healthy Germán Márquez and a miraculous resurgence from Bryant still wouldn’t make this team a contender.

As usual, I’m including the ZiPS playoff chart, which shows what the chances are that a number of wins is achieved by the division and Wild Card winners. For example, ZiPS projects the team that wins the NL East to have, on average, 95.6 wins, but just under 20% of the time, the eventual NL East champ will win at least 101 games.

The biggest remaining free agent of the 2024-25 offseason is off the board. In a splashy signing Wednesday night, the Boston Red Sox and Alex Bregman agreed to a three-year, $120 million deal. There’s no shortage of things I want to say about this match of team and player, so let’s stop with this boring introduction already and get right into it.

The Team

The Red Sox needed Bregman, or someone like him, badly. Just one problem – there was no one else like him. When Dan Szymborski ran the numbers last week, he found that the Sox were one of the teams who would receive the greatest boost in playoff odds from signing Houston’s long-time third baseman. Per Dan, Bregman adds 10.8 percentage points to Boston’s chances of reaching October.

The Red Sox play in the toughest division in baseball. They have some holes in their lineup, particularly a decided lack of juice at the bottom of the order. Their bullpen projects well but is packed with uncertainty. A sure thing was just what they needed. Bregman is just that. Since his 2016 debut, he’s been the 10th-best hitter in baseball according to our measure of WAR. “Oh, but Ben, he’s old, he’s faded, he’s past his prime, no one cares about 2019.” Yeah, well, over the last four years, Bregman has been the 11th-best position player in baseball. So much for a decline phase.
Read the rest of this entry »

Bubba Chandler is on track to join Paul Skenes and Jared Jones in the power department of the Pittsburgh Pirates starting rotation. Equipped with an elite upper-90s fastball and a solid array of secondary offerings, the 22-year-old right-hander has emerged as one of baseball’s highest-ceiling pitching prospects. As Eric Longenhagen notes in our forthcoming Top 100, Chandler, who was a two-sport, two-way player as an amateur and began focusing solely on pitching in 2023, is still developing, but “so far, [it’s] going as well as could have been hoped when he was drafted, and he’s tracking like a mid-rotation starter.”

His 2024 season offered ample evidence of his ability to overpower hitters. In 119 2/3 innings between Double-A Altoona and Triple-A Indianapolis, Chandler fanned 148 batters while surrendering just 81 hits. Along with a 30.9% strikeout rate and a .187 batting-average-against, he logged a 3.08 ERA and a 3.10 FIP. Moreover, he displayed improved command. The 2021 third-round draft pick out of Bogart, Georgia’s North Oconee High School lowered his walk rate from 10.5% in 2023 to a stingier 8.6% last season.

Chandler discussed his developmental strides, and the bat-missing arsenal he takes with him to the mound, earlier this month.

———

David Laurila: What have you learned about pitching since getting to pro ball?

Bubba Chandler: “The number one thing has been command. You can have great stuff, but I’ve noticed that the more I’ve gone up [minor league levels], the less guys swing at crappy pitches. In Low-A, you can throw a slider way out of the zone, and a lot of times you’re going to get a swing. If you throw a slider way out of the zone in Triple-A, especially if you didn’t set that pitch up, you’re not even going to get a lean over, or a budge, on it.

“Learning how to set pitches up has been a big thing for me. Setting them up, tunneling, and just how pitches move… but really, the command part is really what has helped make me better.” Read the rest of this entry »

In the middle of the 2024 season, MLB released bat tracking data for the current year. It was a huge revolution in publicly available data, taking something previously observable but not measurable and turning it into numbers. You can see how hard Giancarlo Stanton swings, but now you can also quantify how different that is from other large hitters. Luis Arraez’s superhuman coordination is obvious from watching him play. But in terms of getting his barrel on the ball, relative to the rest of the league, how superhuman is he? Now we know. I think that public research on this front is likely to deliver more and more insights in the coming years.

Of course, what we all wanted to know about bat speed wasn’t available right away. Namely: How does it change? Was Ronald Acuña Jr.’s disappointing start to the season related to an inability to impact the ball with force? Did Matt Olson’s decline have more to do with bat speed or plate discipline? Also, plenty of non-Braves questions, presumably. In any case, we couldn’t say much about that because all we had were the 2024 numbers.

Guess what: Now we have some 2023 data. MLB and Statcast released 2023 data starting after the All-Star break, the earliest data we’ll ever get because that’s when the bat tracking infrastructure got going. Obviously, we’re also going to get more year-over-year data when the 2025 season starts. But our first crack at multiple seasons of data is still noteworthy, so I set out to look through the numbers and came to a few conclusions. I don’t intend for these to be comprehensive, and I’m sure that a measured and careful approach is going to tease out some new insights that I don’t have. But the data came out yesterday, and here are a few highlights.
Read the rest of this entry »

There’s still more winter to go, but this week gave us a sign of spring that’s way more promising than any silly groundhog in Pennsylvania. Pitchers and catchers have reported to Florida and Arizona for spring training. As usual, this is also the best time to do the first mega-run of ZiPS projected standings, to gauge where every team stands at the prelude to the 2025 season. Naturally, these are not the final projected standings, but they’re accurate through every bit of knowledge ZiPS and Szymborski have as of the morning of Tuesday, February 11.

These standings are the result of a million simulations, not results obtained from binomial or even beta-binomial magic. The methodology isn’t identical to the one we use for our playoff odds, which we recently launched to both acclaim and dismay. So how does ZiPS calculate the season? Stored within ZiPS are the first- through 99th-percentile projections for each player. I start by making a generalized depth chart, using our Depth Charts as a jumping off point. Since these are my curated projections, I make changes based on my personal feelings about who will receive playing time as filtered through arbitrary whimsy my logic and reasoning. ZiPS then generates a million versions of each team in Monte Carlo fashion.

After that is done, ZiPS applies another set of algorithms with a generalized distribution of injury risk that changes the baseline plate appearances or innings pitched for each player. ZiPS then automatically and proportionally “fills in” playing time from the next players on the list to get to a full slate of PAs and innings.

The result is a million different rosters for each team and an associated winning percentage for each million of them. After applying the new strength of schedule calculations based on the other 29 teams, I end up with the standings for each of the million seasons. I promise this is much less complex than it sounds.

The goal of ZiPS is to be less awful than any other way of predicting the future. The future is tantalizingly close but beyond our knowledge, and if anyone figures out how to deflect the astrophysicist Arthur Eddington’s arrow of time, it’s probably not going to be in the form of baseball projections. So we project probabilities, not certainties. If this does not satisfy you, just assume that any deviation from the actual results are due to flaws in reality.

Over the last decade, ZiPS has averaged 19.2 correct teams when looking at Vegas preseason over/under lines. I’m always tinkering with methodology, but most of the low-hanging fruit in predicting how teams will perform has already been harvested. ZiPS’ misses for teams from year to year are uncorrelated, with an r-squared of one year’s miss to the next of 0.000541. In other words, none of the year-to-year misses for individual franchises has told us anything about future misses for those franchises.

We’ll cover the American League today before getting into the National League tomorrow.

Right away, when glancing at the projections, you can see the theme of the American League: There are no dominant teams. The AL East is a good example to remember that the 50th-percentile projections don’t mean that the top team will actually win the division. Neither the Orioles or Yankees are projected with an over/under of 90 wins, but either team would need to win 96 games to have a 50% chance at taking the division.

Once again, ZiPS projects the O’s with the tiniest sliver of an edge over the Yankees. ZiPS thinks there’s a good chance that Baltimore can replace Anthony Santander’s production – or at least what he was likely to do in 2025 – and is a surprisingly big fan of Tyler O’Neill. But losing Corbin Burnes is a very big deal, and a few lower-key pitching signings can’t really replace that. It reminds me a bit of Buzzie Bavasi’s quote nearly 50 years ago that when the Angels lost Nolan Ryan, they could just replace him with “two 8-7 pitchers.” How’d that work out for them? There’s some downside in Baltimore’s rotation, but ZiPS thinks the offense is quite resilient.

The Yankees lost an even more important piece than the O’s did this offseason, when Juan Soto signed the largest contract in sports history to play for the Mets. That said, the Yankees made a number of solid upgrades at other positions after losing the second coming of Ted Williams. I prefer Devin Williams and Cody Bellinger to Clay Holmes and Alex Verdugo, and Max Fried is a very good addition. Paul Goldschmidt is well on the back end of his career these days, but he still represents an upgrade over Anthony Rizzo. Still, they lost Gleyber Torres to the Tigers, and with Jazz Chisholm Jr. set to slide from third base to second, the task of replacing Torres’ production falls to a platoon of Oswaldo Cabrera and the shell of DJ LeMahieu at third base. The Yankees didn’t quite hold serve in the exchange, but the O’s had losses of their own, so the status quo largely prevails.

ZiPS has projected the Red Sox to finish last in the AL East over the last few seasons, but they’ve always been within shouting distance of .500. The last bit stays true in 2025, but on the sunny side this time. Even though you’d be crazy to pencil him in for 180 innings, Garrett Crochet is a big addition to Boston’s rotation, and the bullpen has become sneaky good. The computer really believes in Kristian Campbell, though the question remains how quickly the team will integrate him into the lineup. The Red Sox, of course, would look even better with Mookie Betts, but that’s old news at this point.

ZiPS thinks Tampa Bay’s lineup is rather lackluster, and it doesn’t see a huge offensive upside here, but it does think the Rays have pretty solid depth. The big upside comes from the rotation because of the health questions surrounding Shane McClanahan, Shane Baz, and Drew Rasmussen. If any or all of these three pitchers are healthier than the projections currently expect, even small positive shifts in their workload assumptions would have pretty large effects on the whole AL East race.

Anthony Santander was a necessary addition for the Blue Jays, but was his signing enough? ZiPS is unsure, and while it’s projecting bounce-back seasons from guys like Bo Bichette and Kevin Gausman, there’s no certainty there, and this a tough, tough division. This is one of the best last place teams I’ve ever projected, so take from that what you will!

ZiPS projects the Guardians to win the AL Central over the Twins, but like in the AL East, the lead comes from the tiniest of mathematical margins. Their bullpen is terrific, but their offense has a bit too much merely OK floating around, and their rotation is adequate at best. Despite being projected as the AL Central leader, ZiPS only projects Cleveland as a coin flip to make the playoffs.

The Twins project to have an elite bullpen and a very good – and probably underrated – rotation. But it’s less than enthralled by the lineup once you get past Carlos Correa and Byron Buxton during their healthy moments, and it gets really hard, as with the Guardians, to see a scenario in which Minnesota gets far above 90 wins.

I don’t want to harp too much on Kansas City’s offense, since I did that at length last week, but the fact is it’s a very Bobby Witt Jr.-reliant lineup with a ton of holes. This might be the best projected Royals pitching staff in ZiPS history, and that may be enough for Kansas City either to keep pace with the Guardians and Twins or outright topple them. There are benefits to playing in a division with no truly ambitious teams.

Bringing back Jack Flaherty was a necessity for the Tigers, and they got him at a cheaper price than necessities tend to cost. They still project just behind the top three teams, but this division remains quite unclear. I would not want to be paying Alex Bregman in 2029 or 2030, but I’d seriously consider it if I were a team like the Tigers, with so much to gain by having him around the next few years.

The White Sox are projected to have one of the largest improvements in baseball, but a lot of that is simply because winning only 41 games in a season requires many things to not go your way. They are good bet to veer toward “ordinary awful” territory, even if they may not have hit rock bottom yet. Whatever happens, don’t mistake any win-loss improvement as organizational competence. Chicago’s most interesting pitchers will likely start the season in the minors, and the big question for the offense is how many of the aging role players the team signed will somehow be stuffed into the lineup for no particular reason.

The Astros are a lot less likely to be a juggernaut than they were a few years ago, but they’ve handled the myriad star departures well. ZiPS thinks Isaac Paredes and his pull-happy power will feel quite at home in Minute Maid Daikin Park, and Christian Walker is a far better idea to fill their gaping hole at first base than José Abreu was a few years ago. Yordan Alvarez is an absolute beast offensively, and ZiPS projects Jose Altuve to continue to age gracefully. The Astros aren’t really lousy anywhere, and that’s basically what quality team building in a 12-team playoff league looks like.

The common perception of the Mariners is they have a bad offense, but that’s been demonstrably untrue, and playing in a poor offensive park is the big culprit here. What is true, though, is that after Cal Raleigh and Julio Rodríguez, they’re just not amazing anywhere in the lineup, and they’ve been particularly unambitious there. The rotation, however, is dynamite, and though ZiPS is unimpressed with Seattle’s depth, if this team generally remains healthy, it can challenge Houston.

ZiPS likes the Rangers’ offense a lot. The rotation? Not so much. Jacob deGrom naturally projects very well, but given his extensive injury history, both ZiPS and I are coming way under the 132 innings that Depth Charts currently projects for him. He’s not the only Texas pitcher with injury concerns, and as a result, ZiPS sees this rotation as having one of the deepest downsides in baseball, which holds the Rangers’ projections down quite a bit.

Congratulations, A’s, you’ve moved up to a fourth-place projection! Their lineup is actually pretty decent, though not at first base, where ZiPS is bearish on Tyler Soderstrom. OK, the computer’s not quite as high on Jacob Wilson or JJ Bleday as is Depth Charts, but it wouldn’t be shocking to see a team with a lineup like this be a Wild Card contender. Where ZiPS has its doubts is the rotation, and though Luis Severino and Jeffrey Springs give this starting five some real upside, the other three guys are far less exciting.

I suspect the Angels think they’re better than this, but ZiPS really isn’t seeing it. The team’s been active this offseason and added a ton of familiar names, but largely ones that are familiar because of things they accomplished a long time ago. Getting a healthy Mike Trout would be fun for the Angels, and certainly for fans, but it probably wouldn’t be enough.

As usual, I’m including the ZiPS playoff chart, which shows what the chances are that a number of wins is achieved by the division and Wild Card winners. For example, ZiPS projects the team that wins the AL West to have, on average, 94.4 wins, but 20% of the projected AL West winners finish with only an 89-73 record.

Pulled fly balls, to me, are hitter highlights. Just as strikeouts showcase the nastiness of pitchers, and groundballs allow infielders to demonstrate what they can do, balls in the air promote the powerful sluggers who hit them.

I’m including “pulled” in the description because plenty of research over the past decade has established that pulled fly balls are more productive than their straightaway and opposite-field counterparts. We here at FanGraphs have certainly jumped on that trend. Even if you ignore all my articles about Isaac Paredes, our writing about hitters who either pull the ball a lot or should pull the ball a lot is voluminous.

With that introduction in mind: This article is about pitchers. Bear with me for just a minute, and I’ll explain to you how I got here. It took me a while to wrap my head around why pulled fly balls perform so well. It’s not like the wall is much closer to that side, at least not consistently, and given that both lefties and righties display this trend, that clearly can’t be the thing. But thinking about how it actually feels to swing helped clue me in.

To broadly generalize, hitters make contact with the ball out in front of the plate when they pull it. The angle of the bat starts pointing toward the pull side as soon as it crosses the plane running parallel with the front of home plate. For the most part, because bat speed and “attack angle” — the vertical angle of the bat path — increase throughout a swing, batters tend to hit the ball harder when they catch the ball out in front and put in in the air. As a result, pretty much every hitter produces better on pulled air balls. Read the rest of this entry »

The Seattle Mariners currently have one of baseball’s best farm systems, and its strength differs markedly from that of the big league roster. Pitching-rich at the major league level, it’s Mariners position player prospects who populate the top tier of our rankings. That’s welcome news — at least on paper — for a Seattle team that has recently excelled at keeping runs off the board, but has too often struggled to score.

Justin Toole is front and center in the organization’s quest to graduate productive bats into the parent club’s lineup. Brought on as director of player development following the 2022 season, the 38-year-old Council Bluffs, Iowa native has both the background and the acumen to help make that happen. Prior to coming to Seattle, Toole played seven professional seasons, then served four years as a minor league hitting coach, followed by three as a major league hitting analyst. All of his pre-Mariners experience came with Cleveland.

Toole discussed several of the system’s most promising prospects prior to heading to Arizona for the start of spring training.

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David Laurila: What is the current strength of the system?

Justin Toole: “From a player development standpoint, I think the strength is the individuality with how we handle our players. When we get people into our system, we figure out their strengths, we figure out their weaknesses, we help them understand their identity. We work with our players to get a feel for where they think they are, and where they want to go.

“Our group has done an unbelievable job of creating good player plans that are clear, that are are easy to follow. They’re simple. I think that’s kind of been the strength of our player development group. Of course, any good player development group is going to be good because of the scouting group. They bring in good players, players that fit what we want to do, and who we want to be.” Read the rest of this entry »

Players have begun to report to Arizona and Florida, and the sights and sounds of spring baseball are beginning to emerge from the cold winter. The last time we ran these power rankings, the offseason had just begun and teams were still making plans for how they were going to improve their rosters during the winter. This run of the rankings provides a good barometer for which teams took big steps forward with their splashy signings and big trades, and which ones have been left in the dust.

Last year, we revamped our power rankings using a modified Elo rating system. If you’re familiar with chess rankings or FiveThirtyEight’s defunct sports section, you’ll know that Elo is an elegant solution that measures teams’ relative strength and is very reactive to recent performance. For these pre-spring training rankings, I’ve pulled the Depth Charts projections — now powered by both the 2025 Steamer and 2025 ZiPS projections — and calculated an implied Elo ranking for each team. The delta column in the full rankings below shows the change in ranking from the last offseason run of the power rankings in November.

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Not content with simply winning two World Series over the last five years, the Dodgers made it clear they intend to solidify their dynasty by becoming the first team to repeat as champions since the 1999-2000 Yankees. Not only did they land Roki Sasaki, but they also re-signed Teoscar Hernández, signed arguably the best starting pitcher and the best relief pitcher on the market in Blake Snell and Tanner Scott, respectively, and filled in their roster depth with a host of smaller moves. Los Angeles has become the premiere franchise in baseball since its current ownership group took over a little more than a decade ago, and implementing a salary cap to curtail that spending wouldn’t do much, if anything, to change that perception. Players want to win, and the Dodgers currently provide the best opportunity for them to do that. Why wouldn’t they want to join that kind of party?

The Braves suffered through what could easily be described as a nightmare season last year and still managed to win 89 games and narrowly slip into the playoffs. They haven’t needed to be very active this offseason because their foundation is so strong. The one move they did make, adding Jurickson Profar to bolster their outfield, addressed the one glaring hole on their roster. There might be a bit more variance to Atlanta’s win projection than you’d expect from a team with playoff odds over 90%; strong post-injury performances from Ronald Acuña Jr. and Spencer Strider and bounce backs from Austin Riley, Matt Olson, and Sean Murphy drive that high ceiling, but those are lots of conditions the Braves need to meet to reach their lofty projections. The good news is that, like last year, they don’t need to be hit their ceiling to be one of the most competitive teams in the NL.

As you’ll see below, there are a ton of competitive AL teams projected for around 83-85 wins, and a handful more a hair below that group. The Yankees stand above that fray, though not by much. After losing Juan Soto to their crosstown rival, their offseason could have spiraled. Instead, they signed Max Fried and Paul Goldschmidt and traded for Cody Bellinger and Devin Williams. As far as consolation prizes go, those four newcomers should prove to be difference makers, and the projections agree; the Yankees are favored to come out on top of the most difficult division in baseball.

With so much of their core carrying over into 2025, the Phillies didn’t have much work to do this offseason. Instead of resting on their laurels, though, they went out and bolstered an already stacked starting rotation by trading for Jesús Luzardo right before Christmas. They also filled out their bullpen depth by signing Jordan Romano and Joe Ross, though that group still looks a little thin, and added Max Kepler to their outfield mix. Even with those moves, the projections think Philadelphia is a fairly significant step behind Atlanta and pretty even with the Mets.

On the heels of their surprise playoff appearance last year, the Mets made the biggest splash of the offseason by signing Juan Soto to the largest contract in sports history. They also restocked their roster by bringing back Pete Alonso, Sean Manaea, and Jesse Winker, and their free agent signings of Frankie Montas and Clay Holmes provide their rotation with a bit of depth. That said, the Mets lack the high-end ace or two you’d expect from a playoff contender, and the bottom half of their lineup looks pretty punchless right now. The addition of Soto does a lot to cover for those last remaining holes, and the organization seemingly has all the resources at its disposal to continue to improve once the season gets underway.

The Diamondbacks missed out on the playoffs by a single game a year after their shocking run to the World Series in 2023. To ensure that doesn’t happen again, they went out and signed Corbin Burnes to anchor their rotation and traded for Josh Naylor to replace Christian Walker at first base. They didn’t need to make a ton of additions to push their ceiling any higher; the continued development of Corbin Carroll will carry their lineup a long way, and their core remains largely intact.

With the Cardinals retooling and the Brewers and Pirates resistant to invest in their rosters, the Cubs saw an opportunity to separate themselves from their division rivals this offseason. Bringing in Kyle Tucker was the first salvo, and they followed that move by going back to the Astros to pilfer Ryan Pressly. They didn’t do enough to be considered one of the best teams in the NL, but they’re clearly a step ahead in their division, and that’s good enough to be lumped in with the other contenders in this tier.

Here’s that huge group of AL contenders that I mentioned above. There are three teams from the AL West, and two each from the Central and East divisions. If you believe the projections, two of the teams in this tier won’t make the playoffs, but it’s anyone’s guess as to which two will fall short.

In a bit of a surprise, the Rangers enter spring training with the best odds to take home the AL West division crown. Granted, that division race is essentially a toss up between the two Texas teams and Seattle, but the Rangers shouldn’t be overlooked even after their disappointing follow-up season to their 2023 championship. Who knows how many innings Jacob deGrom has left in him, but he’s healthy right now. And the biggest task facing the team this offseason has mostly been accomplished; six new relievers populate the Texas bullpen now, and while none of them is a lights out closer, the ‘pen is in a much better state than it was in November.

Instead of acting aggressively to give their good, but not great roster the edge it needed to be considered one of the best teams in the AL, the Mariners opted to have one of their quietest offseasons since Jerry Dipoto started running the show. They re-signed Jorge Polanco and are moving him to a new position, and they signed Donovan Solano to play the short side of a platoon at first base. Technically, those moves addressed the major holes on their roster, but their passivity and lack of ambition are maddening to a success-starved fan base. Still, Julio Rodríguez, Cal Raleigh, and that vaunted starting rotation form such a strong core that the Mariners are projected to have the third-best record in the AL.

The Astros are in the middle of an awkward transition. They’ve been the best team in the AL for nearly a decade and have managed to thrive despite navigating the departures of Gerrit Cole, Carlos Correa, and George Springer. And now they’re trying to figure out another one of those inflection points. Opting to trade away Tucker was a shock, but Houston did well to acquire Isaac Paredes, a player who is well suited for the ballpark formerly known as Minute Maid Park, and signing Christian Walker should give this lineup a boost after José Abreu flopped. Seeing the Astros with the third-best playoff odds in their own division doesn’t seem right, but their roster just isn’t in as good a place as it was when those other stars departed. They still could re-sign free agent third baseman Alex Bregman, whose return likely would be enough for them to leap to the top of the AL West projections, but it would also require some roster maneuvering and positional shuffling.

The unresolved question of the Twins’ potential sale and what that transition could mean for their organization has put a freeze on any activity in Minnesota this winter. They’ve made just a couple of minor moves, but the good news is that they didn’t really need to overhaul their roster anyway. They have a strong lineup anchored by Carlos Correa and a deep pitching staff backed by a dynamite bullpen. Of course, the uncertainty surrounding the health of their biggest stars is enough to put a damper on their projections, though it seems like they’re a step ahead of their division rivals right now.

The Red Sox entered the offseason with a talented but flawed roster. The additions of Garrett Crochet and Walker Buehler bolster an already strong starting rotation, and even though the two of them come with lingering injury and workload concerns, they were enough to edge Boston ahead of Baltimore in our projections — though the Orioles still rate higher when looking at our raw WAR projections. The Sox also have two top prospects waiting in the wings, Kristian Campbell and Roman Anthony, both of whom should make their big league debuts early in the season. If enough things break their way, it wouldn’t be surprising to see them emerge on top of the AL East this year.

The same thing could probably be said about the Orioles, what with their seemingly limitless supply of talented young position players. But for whatever reason, Baltimore has been hesitant to invest heavily to push its roster over the hump. The departures of Burnes and Anthony Santander were met with the additions of Tyler O’Neill and Charlie Morton — a downgrade on both accounts, if only because O’Neill’s lengthy injury history limits his projected workload — and except for a few other moves for depth pieces, the O’s have been oddly passive this offseason. Their situation is a bit like that of the Mariners, where they have a strong young core as an enviable foundation but have thus far refused to actually do the hard work of building around that cohort to launch themselves into the stratosphere.

Following their surprise playoff run last year, the Tigers spent this offseason opportunistically supplementing their core with a few key additions in Gleyber Torres, Alex Cobb, and the return of Jack Flaherty. That trio doesn’t fix all the flaws of this roster, but these moves do tangibly raise the floor. Could Detroit have risen above the fray in the AL Central with a bit more ambition? Of course, but like so many other teams in the AL, the Tigers are banking on some internal development and a lot of luck as their path to success in 2025. After all, that same strategy worked for them last year.

It’s a testament to the Rays’ excellent development pipeline that they took a pretty significant step back last season and still project to be in the AL playoff mix in 2025. The return of Shane McClanahan from his Tommy John surgery and healthier seasons from Shane Baz and Drew Rasmussen will be key, and the Rays will need Junior Caminero to emerge as an anchor of their lineup. Last month, they made a splash in free agency and signed Ha-Seong Kim to the second-largest deal, by AAV, in franchise history. He’ll miss the start of the season recovering from the shoulder injury that cut his 2024 campaign short, but he should be back sometime in May. Overall, though, Tampa Bay lacks both the depth and upside to project as anything more than a middle-of-the-pack team entering spring training.

Fresh off their first postseason appearance since winning the 2015 World Series, the Royals had an underwhelming offseason. They brought back right-handed starters Michael Wacha and Michael Lorenzen to restock their rotation, traded for Jonathan India to play… somewhere, and signed Carlos Estévez to lock down the ninth inning. These are all smart moves, but at this point, Kansas City has not addressed its most two glaring roster holes from last season — its corner outfield spots — and the club still lacks the necessary depth to weather the attrition of a long season. Bobby Witt Jr.’s ascent to stardom was a huge boon to the future of the franchise, but the Royals have done a woefully inadequate job of building a lineup around him. Their path to success in 2025 looks a lot like it did last year: An MVP caliber season from Witt, a deadly trio fronting their rotation, and just enough luck to squeeze into the Wild Card picture. Put another way, they need a lot to go in their favor.

It’s hard not to feel a little bad for the Blue Jays after they missed out on signing Shohei Ohtani a year ago and then fall short in their pursuits of Juan Soto and Roki Sasaki this offseason. While those “we tried” banners don’t count for anything, the Jays did accomplish something this offseason, signing Anthony Santander, Max Scherzer, and Jeff Hoffman, and trading for Andrés Giménez. Toronto’s roster is in a better spot than it was in November, even if it doesn’t include a marquee free agent. Unfortunately, the Blue Jays probably still aren’t good enough to make much noise in the competitive AL East. They’ve got a puncher’s chance at securing a Wild Card berth, but barring some big collapses from the teams ahead of them or another significant acquisition on their part, they’re stuck in the murky middle of the AL.

The Padres’ ugly ownership battle has cast a long shadow over their offseason, and even though they were a finalist for Sasaki, they’ve largely stayed on the sidelines this winter. Signing Jason Heyward and Connor Joe last week sort of settles their left field situation, but there’s still so little depth here that if just one of their stars misses any significant amount of time, it could have a disastrous effect on their entire season. They’ve been rumored to be shopping Dylan Cease to help them shore up other areas of their roster, but removing him from their rotation would just open up another hole that can’t be filled so easily.

The Brewers have always been asked to do a lot with few resources available to them. It’s not surprising, then, to see them stay pretty inactive this offseason even when faced with the departure of Willy Adames and a host of depth pieces from their major league roster. They leveraged Devin Williams’s final year of control into Nestor Cortes and an intriguing MLB-ready prospect in Caleb Durbin, but that’s pretty much the extent of their activity. Meanwhile, the Cubs surged ahead of Milwaukee in the projections following their flurry of moves this winter. Yet, despite all of this, the Brewers still have a decent shot at making the playoffs. That’s the benefit of playing in the NL Central.

Buster Posey’s reign as Giants president of baseball operations began with a splash, signing Willy Adames to the largest contract in franchise history. Then Posey convinced Justin Verlander to spend what could be his final season in San Francisco. Those two additions pushed their projections to the cusp of .500 and to the fringes of the NL Wild Card picture. Of course, that’s not a new position for the Giants, who’ve finished with no fewer than 79 wins and no more than 81 in each of the past three seasons.

For all the talk about taking a step back in 2025 to reset for the future, the Cardinals haven’t done much of anything this offseason. They haven’t found a trading partner suitable enough for Nolan Arenado to waive his no-trade clause, and they haven’t exchanged any other established talent for prospects. Considering this, it seems that getting out from Arenado’s contract is their sole focus until Chaim Bloom takes over for lame duck president of baseball operations John Mozeliak after the season. There is some solid young talent currently on the roster, but it looks like St. Louis is content to spend 2025 spinning its tires with the same mediocre group that’s fallen short of the playoffs each of the past two years.

Remember all those AL teams we discussed above who refuse to build around their young core and are instead fine with coin-flip odds of making the playoffs? Meet the NL version of that, except this team’s odds are significantly worse than a coin flip. The Pirates have an excellent young rotation fronted by Paul Skenes, one of the best pitchers in baseball, but they’ve done shockingly little to build a competent roster around him. Picking up Spencer Horwitz to help their lineup was a nice start to the offseason, but they followed that up by adding Adam Frazier and Tommy Pham, two pretty lackluster free agents. Skenes’ talent is such that he’s dragging Pittsburgh to the edge of the playoff picture, but he can only carry the team so far on his own.

The Guardians own perhaps the most surprising preseason projection, especially after winning 92 games and making the postseason last year for the second time in three seasons. They traded away the elder Naylor brother and Giménez and signed the ageless Carlos Santana to replace the former, but that’s not enough to truly bolster an offensive unit that was already one of the weakest in baseball. Cleveland really leaned on the pitching staff last season, the bullpen in particular, and it looks like that’s going to be the case again this year. The Guards are good enough to sit on the extreme fringe of the AL playoff picture, but their three AL Central rivals — the Twins, Tigers, and Royals — all look a bit stronger on paper.

The Reds brought in a host of depth pieces this offseason, trading for Brady Singer, Gavin Lux, Jose Trevino, and Taylor Rogers, and signing Austin Hays. That should help them raise the floor of their roster quite a bit, but the success of this team hinges on the development of Elly De La Cruz and the health of Hunter Greene and Matt McLain. There are good supplemental pieces up and down Cincinnati’s roster, but the projections see the sum of that talent as less than its parts.

Ahead of their inaugural season in Sacramento, the A’s have been busy spending to improve their roster. Granted, they needed to increase their payroll to avoid a grievance from the player’s union and maintain their status as revenue sharing recipients, but that’s neither here nor there. What matters is they signed Luis Severino to the largest contract in franchise history, extended Brent Rooker on a five-year deal, and traded for Jeffrey Springs. All that in an effort to impress in their new minor league digs, right?

The Angels were one of the most active teams to start this offseason, bringing in Jorge Soler, Yusei Kikuchi, Kyle Hendricks, and Travis d’Arnaud before Thanksgiving. And then they kind of fell silent until waking up in time to sign Yoán Moncada last week to take over as their starting third baseman, with Anthony Rendon relegated to the bench. For a team as far out of the playoff picture as Los Angeles is, these moves are a bit head scratching. Taken together, the additions give the Halos a few more projected wins, but winning 75 games instead of 71 isn’t really much of an accomplishment. It’s worth mentioning that these power rankings were put together before Tuesday morning, when news broke that the Angels had signed Kenley Jansen to a one-year, $10 million deal. Like their other moves, Jansen also represents an improvement, but he isn’t enough to turn the Halos into a winning team.

The debuts of James Wood and Dylan Crews last year marked a turning point for the Nationals. They’re now on the clock to build a contender around those young stars in the making. They took baby steps in that direction this offseason, trading for Nathaniel Lowe and signing Josh Bell to anchor their lineup, and bringing in a ton of new relievers to restock their bullpen. Washington is probably a couple of years away from truly contending, but at least there’s a bit of forward momentum toward that goal.

The Marlins’ surprise playoff appearance in 2023 seems like a lifetime ago. The hesitant optimism that surrounded Miami after that season has all but disappeared after the front office quickly tore down that roster and entered what looks like another long, drawn out rebuilding cycle. This offseason, the Marlins traded away Luzardo and Jake Burger, and it wouldn’t be surprising to see Sandy Alcantara on his way out the door by August if he pitches well in his return from Tommy John surgery.

If you really squint, you can sort of make out the shape of a semi-competitive Rockies team led by Ezequiel Tovar and Brenton Doyle, but that future is at least a few years away. That Colorado has two core pieces to build around at all is a step in the right direction. The Rockies picked up two veteran infielders in Thairo Estrada and Kyle Farmer this offseason, and both should be serviceable depth pieces to offer in midseason trades. Let’s see if the Rockies remember how to use the deadline to their advantage this year.

A quick reminder that the projected win-loss records seen in the tables above are the median projections for each team, so it’s pretty outrageous for any team — even the White Sox — to have its median projection sit at 100 losses. Technically, that would be a 21-game improvement over their historically bad 2024 campaign. This offseason, they’ve done what all good rebuilding clubs do: They added low-cost veterans to soak up playing time early in the season and then get traded for prospects ahead of the deadline. Still, as Michael Baumann wrote in his piece from this morning, “It’s a long climb out of the pit, and we’re not even sure where the floor is yet.”

For much of last summer, it looked as though Enrique Hernández had reached the end of the line with the Dodgers. For as popular as the team’s longtime superutilityman had been, his production was dreadful, and it seemed only a matter of time before he got caught in a numbers game as the team ran out of roster spots. Fortunately for both him and the Dodgers, a visit to the eye doctor helped, his production improved dramatically, and he had some huge moments in October while helping the Dodgers win the World Series. On Sunday afternoon, just before the Super Bowl, Hernández himself announced that he was returning to the fold.

Walking through the open door pic.twitter.com/hsd4IOpva6

— Enrique Hernández (@kikehndez) February 9, 2025

The statement refers to general manager Brandon Gomes’ words at the Dodgers’ recent FanFest. “Obviously, we’ll never close the door to Kiké,” said Gomes of the free agent, who has played a vital part on all four of the Dodgers’ World Series teams during the Dave Roberts era. Read the rest of this entry »