The hot stove has started to heat up, but it’s still pretty early in the offseason. On Tuesday, I took stock of how the early 2026 projections viewed the bottom 18 teams in baseball as they’re currently constructed. Today, I’ll take a look at the teams projected to finish with a .500 or better record in 2026. This exercise should give us a pretty good idea of which clubs would be ready to compete if the season started today, and which ones still have work to do this offseason.

Our power rankings use 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 ranking format that measures teams’ relative strength and is very reactive to recent performance. For these offseason rankings, I’ve pulled the Depth Charts projections and calculated an implied Elo ranking for each team. Right now, our Depth Charts projections are powered entirely by the 2026 Steamer projections; the 2026 ZiPS projections will be folded in later in the offseason.

First up are the rankings, presented in a sortable table. Below that, I’ve grouped the teams into tiers, with comments on each club. You’ll notice that the official ordinal rankings don’t always match the tiers — there are times when I take editorial liberties in grouping teams together — but generally, the order is consistent. The delta column in the table below shows the change in ranking from the final regular season run of the power rankings. The rankings for teams 18–30 have been updated with the handful of moves that occurred around baseball since Part I was published. Read the rest of this entry »

The Chicago White Sox have two of baseball’s most promising pitching prospects. Noah Schultz, a 22-year-old left-hander who was drafted 26th overall in 2022 out of an Oswego, Illinois high school is currently no. 22 on The Board with a 55 FV. Hagen Smith, himself a 22-year-old southpaw, was drafted fifth overall in 2024 out of the University of Arkansas and is no. 81 with a 50 FV. Each possesses a power arm, and both have a lot to prove in the forthcoming season — albeit for different reasons. Schultz was limited to 73 innings this year due to injury, while Smith dealt with command issues and lacks a solid third pitch.

I asked White Sox executive vice president/general manager Chris Getz about the young pitchers during last week’s GM Meetings in Las Vegas.

“For Noah, it was an inconsistent year,” Getz said of the 6-foot-10 Schultz, who struggled to the tune of a 4.68 ERA between Double-A Birmingham and Triple-A Charlotte. “Much of that was related to his knee — he had patellar tendonitis — and he needed be to shut down. He’s doing [physical therapy] and strengthening right now. I anticipate that once the knee is completely healed, once it is healthy and completely strong, we are going to get the version of Noah that made him a top prospect in our game. Read the rest of this entry »

For four years now, I’ve been updating you on the changing contours of the strike zone. By my count, this is the 10th installment in that series and the sixth specifically about the accuracy of ball-strike calls on the edges of the zone. With the implementation of the ABS challenge system in 2026, these updates will no doubt start to look a bit different. This is our last umpire accuracy update of the pre-ABS era, so let’s take stock of where we are at the end.

After a tiny dip in 2024, umpires were back on track in 2025, posting a record-high accuracy rate of 92.83% overall. In fact, 2024 was the only year in the pitch-tracking era in which umpires didn’t set a record for accuracy. However, this latest record came with a bit of controversy. Early in the season, pitchers and catchers picked up on the fact that the strike zone seemed to have shrunk. The league tightened up the standards that it used to grade umpires, reducing the size of the buffer zone around the edges of the zone. As a result, accuracy shot up specifically on pitches outside the zone, even more specifically, on pitches just above the top of the zone, causing pitchers and catchers to complain that they were losing the high strike.

This graph reminds us of a couple facts that might just be so obvious that we rarely think about them. First, the vast majority of takes come on pitches outside the strike zone. Of course they do; those are the pitches you’re not supposed to swing at. This year, for example, 68% of the calls umpires had to make came on pitches outside the strike zone. Second, it’s easier to identify balls than it is to identify strikes. Of course it is; the area outside the zone is a lot bigger than the area inside the zone. Read the rest of this entry »

I was in Hawaii this past weekend, taking a nice vacation to wind down from the end of the baseball season, when I found myself thinking about intercept points. Weird? Overly baseball obsessed? Maybe. But in my defense, a kid at the pool kept swinging at a Wiffle ball almost hilariously late, spraying it “foul” every time. “Oh look, the next Luis Arraez,” I thought, before going back to my umbrella-adorned drink. But that stuck with me, and when I got home, a database query leapt out of my head fully formed, like Athena after Zeus’ headache.

Where is the optimal place to make contact with the ball? It depends on who’s swinging. Statcast measures every single swing’s contact point relative to a hitter’s center of mass, and that data clearly shows that there are many ways to succeed. That’s always stymied me as I’ve looked into swing path data. But that small child gave me an idea when he got off the best swing I’d seen all day, a Wiffle ball line drive that would have been a screamer down the left field foul line (he was batting lefty). Because his normal swing was so late, his best contact was ever so slightly less late. What if I bucketed hitters based on their own swings to look for swing timing clues?

I took every batter who produced 300 or more batted balls (foul balls or balls in play) in 2025. For each of those hitters, I took aggregate statistics for all of their results, then also split their batted balls into three groups: deepest contact point, middle contact point, and farthest forward contact point. You can think of it as late, on time, and early, adjusted for that player’s swing. The later you start your swing, the more you “let it travel,” the deeper your contact point relative to your center of mass. The earlier you start, the more you “get out in front,” the farther forward you make contact. Read the rest of this entry »

After Josh Naylor signed the first major free agent deal of the offseason over the weekend, four more big names came off the board Tuesday afternoon. Of the 13 free agents who were presented with qualifying offers, four accepted: Brandon Woodruff, Trent Grisham, Gleyber Torres, and Shota Imanaga will all return to their previous teams on one-year contracts worth $22.025 million.

Bo Bichette, Dylan Cease, Edwin Díaz, Framber Valdez, Kyle Schwarber, Kyle Tucker, Michael King, Ranger Suárez, and Zac Gallen all declined their qualifying offers and will hit the open market, carrying draft pick penalties to be determined by MLB’s inscrutable compensation system.

If you’re thinking this is a bumper crop of QO acceptance, you’d be right. In the first 14 years of the qualifying offer system, 144 offers were extended to pending free agents, and only 14 accepted. This year, nearly one in four qualified free agents decided to bank the offer and walk away, rather than face one more multiple-choice question from Regis Philbin. Read the rest of this entry »

Well sports fans, it’s that time again. We Tried season is officially upon us, and for the second offseason in a row, I will be keeping my eye fixed firmly on the periphery of the action. For the uninitiated, We Tried is a noun in this context. It’s the name for the phenomenon of reporters announcing, once a player has signed with a team, that another team was interested in signing that player too. Team A might have succeeded in landing the player in question, but Team B wants to make sure the public knows that they failed to sign him because they want credit for that failure. It is both our duty and great honor to award that credit. The illustrious Jon Becker has once again graciously offered to host the We Tried Tracker on his maniacally comprehensive MLB Matrices spreadsheet, so be sure to check there for all the latest in major league effort.

Jeff Passan, ESPN’s officially-licensed baseball bombardier, kicked off the real offseason bright and early on Tuesday morning (Becker tipped me off to the news not long after). At 7:00 AM, Passan published an offseason preview that featured a key piece of information about Josh Naylor, who agreed to return to the Mariners this past weekend:

The largest free agent contract the Pirates have ever handed out was more than a decade ago: three years and $39 million to Francisco Liriano. They are consistently a bottom-five payroll team. And yet the Pirates were primed to spend more than twice that on Josh Naylor before he re-upped with Seattle for five years and $92.5 million in the first signing of the winter on Sunday night — and they’re considering other possibilities to supplement Paul Skenes and a rotation that was among the five best in MLB in the second half.

Read the rest of this entry »

For the 22nd consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction, as well as MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the next team up is the Cincinnati Reds.

Batters

Much like during the 2020 COVID season, the 2025 Reds finished just above .500, barely squeaked into the playoffs, and got bounced from the Wild Card round in two games. At least this time around, they actually scored runs! But the lineup was a recurring problem in the regular season, the biggest reason Cincy needed a late-summer collapse by the Mets in order to play October baseball. The lineup’s 13.2 WAR ranked 26th in baseball, with Elly De La Cruz and TJ Friedl combining for more than half of that total. Finishing 21st in home runs isn’t good for a team that plays in one of the best home run parks in the majors today. Read the rest of this entry »

When it comes to building a team, to what extent do the Astros look to form an identity, as opposed to simply acquiring the best players possible? Houston general manager Dana Brown didn’t specifically answer that question when it was posed to him at the GM Meetings in Las Vegas, but he did offer some insights into the team’s identity itself. On the heels of a 2025 season in which his club scored its fewest runs since 2014 (save for the truncated COVID campaign), Brown cited the need to rediscover part of what made them a perennial postseason participant.

“We lost a little of our identity last season,” Houston’s top exec told me. “We got away from running deep counts [and] hitting for slug. Those are things we need to get back to, and that’s why we made a change in the hitting area. We wanted new voices. So that’s going to be our identity. Our identity is slug, have deep counts, catch the ball, and really pitch.”

The change Brown referred to was replacing hitting coaches Alex Cintrón and Troy Snitker with Victor Rodriguez and Anthony Iapoce, each of whom brings years of experience and a reputation of working well with hitters. Also notable was the promotion of Dan Hennigan to director of hitting/offensive coordinator. As reported by MLB.com’s Brian McTaggart, Brown believes that Hennigan “will help us from an analytic and data standpoint in terms of preparing and game-planning. It’s a complete overhaul of how we did things.” Read the rest of this entry »

We’re currently in the lull between the end of the World Series and the real start of hot stove season. Teams are just about done with the annual housekeeping necessary to prepare their rosters for the winter — the 40-man deadline is later today, while the non-tender deadline is Friday — but Josh Naylor aside, the big free agent moves are still on the horizon. That means it’s the perfect time to take stock of how each team measures up. The rankings below represent each team as it is currently constructed, based on our Depth Charts playing time projections. That should give us a pretty good idea of which clubs would be ready to compete if the season started today, and which ones still have work to do this offseason. Today I’ll cover the teams projected to finish under .500 in 2026, with those forecast for a .500 or better record to follow later this week.

Our power rankings use 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 ranking format that measures teams’ relative strength and is very reactive to recent performance. For these offseason rankings, I’ve pulled the Depth Charts projections and calculated an implied Elo ranking for each team. Right now, our Depth Charts projections are powered entirely by the 2026 Steamer projections; the 2026 ZiPS projections will be folded in later in the offseason.

First up are the rankings, presented in a sortable table. Below that, I’ve grouped the teams into tiers, with comments on each club. You’ll notice that the official ordinal rankings don’t always match the tiers — there are times when I take editorial liberties in grouping teams together — but generally, the order is consistent. The delta column in the table below shows the change in ranking from the final regular season run of the power rankings. Read the rest of this entry »

For the 22nd consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction, as well as MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the next team up is the Pittsburgh Pirates.

Batters

From a pure talent standpoint, the Pittsburgh Pirates are in better shape than their 71-91 record this season might suggest. Still, the organization always feels like it’s on a giant treadmill because when the time to increase the level of investment comes, the push is always extremely underwhelming. The Pirates have actually gotten slightly better at committing to payroll (slightly!), but when they do spend, they frequently do so in rather unproductive ways. Read the rest of this entry »