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Dean Kremer has been a staple of the Orioles rotation in recent years. Even while missing significant time due to injuries in a couple of seasons, he’s made more starts than any other Baltimore pitcher since the beginning of 2022, a span that encompasses both the division-winning Orioles from ’23 and last year’s basement dwellers. Yet this past weekend, Kremer was optioned to the team’s minor league camp, the odd man out in a rotation battle. He’s not the only familiar name among those slated to start the season in the minors due to such decisions.
Opening Day is full of fanfare and so often freighted with meaning, but it’s still just one day on the baseball calendar; the decisions regarding who gets to be there (and who doesn’t) don’t actually define the season. Still, unless they’re recalled to replace injured players — which is hardly out of the question — optioned position players need to remain in the minors for 10 days and pitchers for 15 days, counting from March 25 (Opening Day for the Giants and Yankees). In other words, they’ll be eligible to return on April 4 or April 9. Beyond that, circumstances change as the season progresses, and rosters are in a constant state of flux.
Kremer stands out because he’s fully established himself in the majors, while the other high-profile decisions I’ve highlighted below involve players who are or were recently considered top prospects. They’re all headed to Triple-A, and I expect them to stay past the aforementioned dates, but they’re notable because they’re still expected to play substantial roles in 2026. The players are listed alphabetically. Read the rest of this entry »
Yes, every once in a while a team will pretend to have four or six slots, but that team must inevitably confront the truth: Starting rotations have five slots. It’s a matter of policy, preference, and just plain practicality, Mariners general manager Justin Hollander said last year in an interview with Lookout Landing.
“The unfortunate thing about the roster rules is you only get 26 spots, and you only get 13 pitchers. And when you add a sixth starter, you take away a reliever. When you add a sixth starter, sometimes your starters pitch every six days, sometimes they pitch every eight or nine days. Starting pitchers are fussy. They don’t like that. They like to stay on a regular schedule. They like to know when they’re pitching.”
I’ve been thinking about the fixed-nature of rotations lately after reading this discussion between Eno Saris and Jen McCaffrey in The Athletic. They compare the rotations in Detroit and Boston by assigning each pitcher a label (one, two, three, four, five), sizing them up horizontally and vertically, and confronting the trade-offs in quality and depth. This reflects how many of us compare rotations in the abstract, and I wanted to see if this could be applied more broadly. Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve been doing a lot of looking at depth charts this week. All of us FanGraphs writers have – these positional power rankings don’t write themselves. When you look at the majors through this lens, you’ll naturally do a lot of thinking about floor and ceiling. The Yankees are playing who at third base? The Brewers are getting how much WAR by avoiding weak spots? The Red Sox have that many outfielders?
I’ve written someteamoverviews this winter. In them, I make the following claim: “Building a team that outperforms opponents on the strength of its 15th to 26th best players being far superior to their counterparts on other clubs might help in the dog days of August, when everyone’s playing their depth guys and cobbling together a rotation, but that won’t fly in October.” The converse of that claim – that stars matter disproportionately in October – is part and parcel of this depth argument. But is that true?
Some might say that the best time to answer this question is when the playoffs are just around the corner. I’d counter that those people haven’t just spent seven hours staring at a pile of acceptable-but-not-overwhelming third base and starting pitcher options and trying to write something about each one. So in the spirit of doing anything other than looking at power rankings, I decided to test out this assumption. Read the rest of this entry »
Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about MLB’s new experimental minor league rules, and the potential downsides of trying to skip straight to a desired on-field result, then complete the 14th annual season preview series by previewing the 2026 Los Angeles Dodgers (35:35) with The Athletic’s Fabian Ardaya, and the 2026 Colorado Rockies (1:30:13) with Rockies Insider’s Patrick Lyons.
I’ve now spent nearly a quarter of a century working with baseball projections, and in that time, I’ve always been struck by the certainty with which so many people view them. People are far more certain than they should be that great teams will be great, star players will be stars, and so on. However, one of the things that comes from working with projections for a big chunk of your life is that you develop a painful awareness of how much of the future cannot be known until it actually happens.
As in most seasons, we enter without a general conception of which teams will be the best. We may pretend everyone starts off with a clean slate, but absolutely nobody expects the Rockies to be better than the Dodgers. But even if that particular scenario is extremely unlikely, every one of the top teams has a scenario in which things fall apart. These clubs have a vested interest in protecting against that potential downside, as much as possible, so I thought it would be interesting to look at the doomsday scenario for some of the best teams in baseball.
To get an idea, I did a full seasonal simulation of the ZiPS projected standings, and instead of looking at the standings overall, I looked at the bottom 20% of outcomes to see what we could glean from the results. According to ZiPS, every team except the Dodgers misses the playoffs when it performs no better than its 20th-percentile win total.
Philadelphia Phillies: Rotation Depth
This almost seems counterintuitive given just how good the rotation projections are for the Phillies, but the projections are not enthusiastic about their depth here. And what makes that especially worrisome is that with so much uncertainty around the health of Zack Wheeler and the performance of Aaron Nola, Philadelphia is probably going to need that depth more than it did last year. This time around, the Phillies are missing Ranger Suarez, who signed with the Red Sox during the offseason. Andrew Painter was healthy in 2025, but one cannot ignore that he was rather middling against Triple-A hitting. The outfield looks like a problem, as well, but it generally has been, and ZiPS is a fan of Justin Crawford.
If Philadelphia adds one of the innings-eaters still available in free agency, ZiPS sees the team’s outlook improve, much more than I expected. Just having someone like Lucas Giolito, Tyler Anderson, or even Patrick Corbin around did a lot to alleviate the rotational downside. It may come down to which of these pitchers is open to a swing role or a minor league deal with an opt-out date. And yes, I do think it feels weird to suggest Corbin as an upgrade for a team in 2026.
New York Mets: Right Field
The Mets certainly don’t dominate in either the rotation or bullpen projections, but ZiPS is fairly confident that both of these units will hold up over the course of the season. Despite a solid projection for Carson Benge in right field, the range of outcomes is quite high, and in the simulations where Benge struggles, ZiPS has trouble competently filling in right field. Tyrone Taylor is an underwhelming option, and ZiPS thinks Brett Baty would have a tough time defensively in the outfield. With no particularly interesting outfielders available in free agency, the best solution might simply be making sure Jacob Reimer gets some time in the outfield. New York’s roster just isn’t really set up to get him time at third base, where he probably is most valuable. But he also represents the most tantalizing 2026 upside of any player the Mets have in the minors, so they ought to try and be open to promoting him aggressively, and getting a little weird with it, if need be.
New York Yankees: Injuries
The Yankees’ outcomes are weird, in that their bad seasons were mostly ones in which Aaron Judge, for whatever reason, ended up with fewer than 300 plate appearances, and only occasionally something else. Getting limited innings from Gerrit Cole and Carlos Rodón was already baked into the cake, and ZiPS thinks there are enough fourth-starter types to patch up any rotation holes that might pop up. The problem is, just how do you replace Judge? I’m not sure there’s a scenario where the Yankees can do much to mitigate any risk there, for the simple reality that in a tightly projected division, suddenly losing six wins is likely to drop them out of the AL East divisional race. At the very least, the Yankees should hold off on shopping Spencer Jones for help elsewhere, but it wouldn’t fix a Judge loss.
Baltimore Orioles: Rotation Quality
Baltimore has potential aces in both Trevor Rogers and Kyle Bradish, but that word potential is an unpleasant adjective. Adding Pete Alonso and Taylor Ward really stabilizes the offense, which was a concern last year, but the rotation is an issue. The Orioles finished with a bottom five rotation in the ZiPS simulations more often than all other AL East teams combined. There’s nothing on the farm that helps this, and I think that with the Orioles increasingly pushing their chips in, they ought to be aggressive at taking the opportunity to loot struggling teams of their top pitching, even if the prospect hit would be tremendous. I think there are even scenarios, though not many, in which it might make sense for the O’s to trade either Adley Rutschman, assuming he has a bounce-back season, or Samuel Basallo.
Boston Red Sox: First Base
The good news is that ZiPS sees the Red Sox as the most stable of AL contenders, with the lowest percentage of sub-.500 seasons of any AL team. The rotation isn’t the best in baseball, but it may be the most bulletproof one, and that isn’t even counting on getting lots of innings from pitchers like Payton Tolle and Connelly Early, who would be Plan As in most rotations in baseball. In fact, when the Red Sox had their worst performance, it was almost entirely the offense that fell short, and not necessarily from the position you might expect.
Most people have focused on third base because of the loss of Alex Bregman, but Caleb Durbin is actually a decent option. Plus, if Durbin struggles, Marcelo Mayer could very likely provide what the former isn’t. Where there is real downside risk is at first base. I liked the Willson Contreras acquisition, too, and he’s probably going to be at least solidly average in 2026, but he’s also going to be 34 in May. It’s an age where you look at the long left tails of the outcome distribution for non-elite first basemen, and there’s always a real risk of a very sudden plummet off a cliff. Triston Casas hasn’t played in a game since last May — and won’t even play in any spring training games this year — and he has a real mixed history.
What to do? That’s a lot trickier. Boston obviously isn’t going to replace Contreras before he has that downside year. But this team should be ready for that possibility, and if the surplus of pitching turns out to be real, the Sox will have a position of depth from which to trade.
Chicago Cubs: Rotation Quality
The outlook improved with the addition of Edward Cabrera, but ZiPS still has the Cubs with the weakest rotation of the 10 teams listed here. In the ZiPS simulations, the rotation was largely the source of the Cubs’ worst seasons. There aren’t really any exciting starters left out there in free agency, but I think I’d do what I suspect the Cubs are already thinking of doing: giving Ben Brown’s upside as a starting pitcher more serious consideration. He allowed too many home runs and had a high BABIP on a really good defensive team, but it’s guys like that who tend to come out of nowhere quickly (see Corbin Burnes in 2019). Brown has swing-and-miss stuff, and I think given the potential, I’d rather see him starting at Triple-A than pitching in relief in the majors.
Houston Astros: Outfield Corners
Not counting 2020, for obvious reasons, the 686 runs the Astros scored in 2025 represented their fewest since 2014. A full, healthy season of Yordan Alvarez would be incredibly helpful, but the team’s also not likely to wring another 135 wRC+ out of Jeremy Peña. Not helping matters is that Joey Loperfido and Cam Smith project as one of the weakest corner outfield tandems in the majors in 2026. Smith surprised many, including me, in the early months last year, but an OPS that fell shy of .500 in the second half is highly concerning. There’s a chance that the Astros get little from their outfield corners, which is a problem for a team with a middling offense that just lost ace Framber Valdez in free agency. In some 30% of simulations, the Astros got a sub-90 wRC+ out of their corner outfielders, and in those runs, they had a .475 winning percentage. If there’s a team that should aggressively go after either Jarren Duran or Wilyer Abreu, it’s Houston.
Toronto Blue Jays: Rotation Depth
Even with the loss of Anthony Santander to shoulder surgery, ZiPS still sees the Blue Jays’ rotation as their biggest pain point. There are simply a lot of question marks once you get past Dylan Cease and Kevin Gausman, something I mentioned a bit in Toronto’s ZiPS rundown in January. In a lot of the sims, the team got next to nothing out of any of Cody Ponce, José Berríos, Shane Bieber, and Max Scherzer, whether because of injury, decline, or general performance issues. If Sandy Alcantara looks anywhere near his old self with the Marlins in the early months, I think the Jays ought to be one of his suitors. At the very least, Alcantara would do well with an infield that has Andrés Giménez and Ernie Clement.
Seattle Mariners: Outfield Corners
As with the Astros, ZiPS sees Seattle’s corner outfield spots as having the most downside. Unlike the Astros, ZiPS doesn’t view it as truly a doomsday scenario. After the Red Sox and Dodgers, ZiPS considers the Mariners to be the contender with the least downside. Randy Arozarena’s projection distribution is pretty interesting, with the bottom falling out of him once you get under the 15th-percentile projection or so; while his 20th-percentile OPS+ is a non-disastrous 94, it drops to 70 for the 10th-percentile level. As for Victor Robles, he’s been all over the place in his career, and the Plan Bs in the organization are unimpressive. I think Seattle’s strong enough that it doesn’t necessarily have the same need to be aggressive as Houston does, but this is still a potential point of weakness that could pose an issue.
Los Angeles Dodgers: Black Swans
It’s really hard to kill the Dodgers. I argued after the 2024-2025 offseason, a very busy one, that the Dodgers weren’t really improving their average outcome so much as drastically raising their floor. I stand by it; they’ve added Kyle Tucker and Edwin Díaz while losing nobody who was crucial to the 2025 team. That doesn’t mean they’re going to be projected to win 105 games or anything, but it does mean that in most of their worst projected outcomes, they’re still a playoff contender. Their 10th-percentile projection, for example, is 86 wins. Their 2% chance of finishing below .500 is the smallest percentage I’ve ever projected, a record that now goes back more than 20 years. Doomsday for the Dodgers may require an actual doomsday scenario like societal collapse, nuclear war, or a vacuum metastability event. Since I do not know how to prevent any of those, there’s nothing more I can add.
A pitcher goes to the mound hoping to record outs without allowing runs. Unfortunately, a lot goes on between the ball leaving the pitcher’s hand and the scoreboard changing. You can’t just toe the rubber, chuck the ball, and say, “God’s will be done,” as you stare glassy-eyed into the distance like Martin Sheen as Robert E. Lee in Gettysburg.
I mean, you could, but you wouldn’t like the results.
A modern pitcher goes to the mound with a plan to influence events much further up the causal chain. Every pitcher is special in his own way, but every plan boils down to this: By changing speed, movement, or location, trick the hitter into swinging somewhere other than where the ball will be. Read the rest of this entry »
You should never worry about spring training results; it’s a small sample against uneven competition, in which the outcome of the game is irrelevant. But it’s not going great for Roki Sasaki. In two Cactus League starts, the Dodgers’ 24-year-old right-hander has allowed half of the 20 batters he’s faced to reach. His ERA is 18.90, and no matter the context, you never want to see a pitcher with a post-Civil War ERA.
For people doing the Chicken Little act about the Dodgers signing every big free agent, Sasaki — not Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Shohei Ohtani, or Kyle Tucker — is the guy who should’ve been scariest. The Dodgers signed a 23-year-old NPB ace even though, by dint of his youth, money was not an issue. If the Dodgers could land Sasaki, perhaps their dominance would become self-perpetuating. Read the rest of this entry »
While winning three World Series with the Dodgers, Max Muncy and Enrique Hernández have both made their marks in October, with the former setting the franchise record for postseason home runs (16) and the latter doing so for games played (92). Both will remain in Dodger Blue for awhile longer, with a chance to increase those totals — and chase a third consecutive championship. On Thursday, a day ahead of their pitchers and catchers reporting to Camelback Ranch, the Dodgers announced that Muncy has agreed to an extension for 2027, and that Hernández, a free agent, will again return to the fold. A day earlier, Los Angeles announced that it had re-signed righty Evan Phillips, who missed last year’s postseason run due to Tommy John surgery and was non-tendered in November. Amid the ensuing roster crunch, the Dodgers designated catcher Ben Rortvedt for assignment for the second time this winter, and traded previously DFA’d lefty Anthony Banda to the Twins for international bonus money.
That’s a lot to pick through, creating ripples up and down the roster. We’ll start with Muncy, who with the retirement of Clayton Kershaw is now the longest-tenured Dodger, having joined the team in 2018. The 35-year-old slugger was already signed for 2026, because in November the Dodgers picked up the $10 million option on his previous two-year, $24 million extension. His new contract — his fourth extension in the past six years, all of them so team-friendly that he’s never had a base salary above $13.5 million — guarantees him another $10 million, with $7 million for his 2027 salary and another $3 million as a buyout for a $10 million club option for ’28.
Those are bargain prices given the production and track record of Muncy, who has evolved from a cast-off by the A’s into a two-time All-Star and a pillar of the Dodgers lineup. While he was limited to 100 games in 2025 due to a bone bruise in his left knee — suffered on July 2, moments before Kershaw notched his 3,000th career strikeout — and then an oblique strain in mid-August, he hit .243/.376/.470 with 19 home runs in 388 plate appearances. Both his 137 wRC+ and 2.9 WAR were his highest since his All-Star 2021 campaign, but hardly out of character. Limited to 73 games in 2024 due to an oblique strain and a displaced rib, he hit .232/.358/.494 (133 wRC+) with 15 homers and 2.3 WAR in just 293 plate appearances. Read the rest of this entry »
One of my favorite sports movie tropes is the Scrappy Underdogs Who Discover the Power of Friendship. While there are myriad variations on the theme, the basic template involves a group of lovable losers facing off against some big baddie and initially being humiliated. As the movie goes on, the various underdogs unite against their common foe, and through determination, grit, moxie, and typically some shenanigans, they meet their antagonists again, only on more even footing. Ideally, our ragtag band emerges victorious, but even if they don’t, they’ve at least learned something about themselves and friendship, often earning the grudging respect of their rivals along the way.
The Yankees were once baseball’s Evil Empire, but these days, the Dodgers reign supreme. They’re rich, they’re smart, they play in a ritzy city, and they would definitely look down on the kids at the ramshackle summer camp across the lake. As it has in most recent seasons, ZiPS projects the Dodgers to be the best team in baseball, and the newly-released FanGraphs Playoff Odds agree. But baseball needn’t accept its projected fate. It’s time to fight back! It’s time to unite some scrappy underdogs — at least on a spreadsheet. And so, with a tip of the hat to Tom Tango, whose theoretical inspired me to put together this piece, to the computer!
To construct our ragtag squad, we’ll start with the worst projected team in baseball, the Rockies, and ask ZiPS to build the best 26-man roster it can to square off against the Dodgers in a fictional seven-game World Series. I’m looking for two probability thresholds here: A Fighting Chance (a one-in-three shot of winning the series) and the Hunter Becomes the Hunted (the underdogs pass the 50% mark). If a roster made entirely of Rockies fails to meet these thresholds, then the players from the next-worst projected team will join the pool. We’ll keep repeating the process until our heroes emerge victorious. Read the rest of this entry »
Let’s start with a thought experiment, then we’ll get to the guy in the picture up there. Say you’ve got an unhittable fastball. Every time an opposing batter swings at it, they miss. With such a pitch, you’d want to hit the strike zone every time. Only good things can happen in the strike zone. Either the batter takes and you earn a called strike, or they swing and you earn a swinging strike. Outside the zone, you’d run the risk of throwing a ball because the batter lays off it.
Now, say you’ve got an extremely hittable fastball. Not only does it never generate a whiff, but every time the batter swings at it, they also hit a home run. You’d never want to throw that pitch in the zone. You wouldn’t want to throw it much at all. Maybe you’d use it as a waste pitch to change the batter’s eye level, just every once in a while, and so far outside the zone that they wouldn’t even think about swinging at it. But that’s it.
Those are extreme examples, but my point is to introduce the concept of an ideal zone rate. Every pitcher (and every pitch) in baseball lives somewhere between those two extremes. Some pitchers should live in the zone and some should avoid it. All sorts of factors inform that ideal zone rate: how likely the pitch is to earn a whiff, how likely it is to earn a chase, how hard it tends to gets hit, whether it tends to gets hit in the air or on the ground, how it interacts with the rest of your repertoire, how it performs in different locations, how well you’re able to locate it, how confident you feel in it, the count, batter, situation, and so on, and so on.
Lately, the calculus has shifted somewhat. The zone rate has been rising because pitchers have been instructed to aim down the middle and trust in their stuff. In 2024, 49.6% of all pitches were in the strike zone and 26.5% were specifically in the heart zone (the area at least one baseball’s width from the edge of the zone). Both of those numbers were the highest rates we’d seen since the start of the pitch tracking era in 2008, and both of those numbers were surpassed in 2025, when for the first time ever, more pitches hit the strike zone than missed it. Across baseball, the ideal zone rate has increased.
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