Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Toronto Blue Jays. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as our own observations. This is the fifth year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers. The ETAs listed generally correspond to the year a player has to be added to the 40-man roster to avoid being made eligible for the Rule 5 draft. Manual adjustments are made where they seem appropriate, but we use that as a rule of thumb.

A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.

All of the ranked prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details (and updated TrackMan data from various sources) than this article and integrates every team’s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the past six weeks, prospects from across the league have participated in spring training activity in Arizona and Florida. Some got into big league games, or participated in the Spring Breakout showcase; others have played in minor league games on the backfields for most of the last month. This spring activity has been enough to move the prospect needle for a handful of players. With the last minor league camps set to break today and extended spring training on the horizon, I’ve touched up my Top 100 list from the offseason to reflect relevant changes that players have made, as well as changes to my own thinking about them.

As you read, there are a couple of things to keep in mind, especially if you’re new to FanGraphs prospect stuff. First, the “Top 100” title is arbitrary SEO nonsense; I rank players as deep as I have them graded as 50 FV prospects or better, and as of this update, that’s 114 guys. Second, remember that Future Value is a value grade. The tools and ultimate potential upside of a player matter a lot, as does the length and consistency of a player’s performance track record and their proximity to the majors. There are players who have talent upside better than their FV grade, but if they’re risky for whatever reason, or if they’re in the low minors, I want to reflect that risk/time element in their grade.

Finally, remember that an actualized “50” is an average everyday player at a given position. Not “average” in the sense that I’m averaging every big leaguer who played that position to create a performance baseline. Rather, “average” here means that the player would fall toward the middle of the pack when we’re talking about the top 30-ish players at their position across a multi-year window. That’s a high bar. Really excellent, tenured players tend to occupy their spot on a big league roster for long periods of time. It’s hard for prospects to crack into that All-Star-caliber group, and even harder to sustain some measure of production for six-plus years of team control. Forty- and 45-grade players are good big leaguers, too, and there are many more of them across the pro baseball talent distribution than there are 50s. Read the rest of this entry »

Baseball analysts and team managers alike love to remind players and fans that Opening Day rosters are just one of many that each team will feature over the course of the season. And while that’s certainly true, the fanfare of making an Opening Day roster is an accomplishment that doesn’t get topped until players are lucky enough to find themselves as one of the 26 names on a postseason ballclub.

While Thursday’s rosters have already proven themselves to be ephemeral (RIP to Nick Gonzales’ ankle), it’s still a good opportunity to take a look back at how the rosters were constructed. Our Active Roster Breakdown will always be up-to-the-minute with the latest moves, if you’d like to peruse that at any point as rosters evolve throughout the season.

The Guardians’ modus operandi for years has been to build homegrown winners, and it’s unsurprising to see the Cardinals right there with Cleveland in that category considering how little St. Louis did this offseason. Conversely, because Padres president of baseball operations A.J. Preller keeps trading away their homegrown players, there are only three of them on San Diego’s Opening Day roster.

The teams that turn to free agency most are the ones that either have struggled to produce homegrown talent in recent years or, like the Padres, have traded away the top players in their system. Either way, because they lack capable internal options, they rely on the open market to fill out their rosters.

On the flip side, both Florida teams stayed out of the free agent market almost entirely. Nearly two-thirds of the Rays’ Opening Day roster (17 of 26) were acquired via trade. Meanwhile, the Marlins have been aggressive on the waiver wire since Peter Bendix was hired as president of baseball operations after the 2023 season, and the players they’ve claimed are not just non-roster flotsam; Derek Hill and Otto Lopez are in their starting lineup, Connor Gillispie is their no. 2 starter, and Jesus Tinoco is a key setup man.

Does it portend badly for the Dodgers that they’re the oldest team in baseball by over nine months? Well, no, they’re the Dodgers. But this list does reflect where a lot of teams are in their contention cycles. The Dodgers are in win-now mode, and while they’ll seemingly be in win-now mode in perpetuity, they’ll be doing that with older players. Even so, an aging roster doesn’t necessarily guarantee a winning one. As things stand, the Blue Jays, who have the fourth-oldest roster in the majors, appear to be nearing the end of their contention window. And that window could slam shut entirely if Vladimir Guerrero Jr. — who, at 26, actually brings their average age down — departs in free agency after the season.

Most of the teams on the other end of the age spectrum are either at the start of rebuilds (Marlins, White Sox) or are making progress but aren’t quite ready to contend yet (Nationals, A’s). Their average ages will get older as their roster gains experience and their window of contention opens. The Rays are always going to be young because they typically trade their homegrown players when they get older and more expensive.

A slightly different way to look at this is by years of MLB service, which generally correlates with age but not always. For example, the Reds are a little bit older than the league-average team, but they opened the season with 20 players who have fewer than six years of service time. That’s because Cincinnati’s roster includes late bloomers Jose Trevino, Sam Moll, and Ian Gibaut.

Sticking with their youth movement, the Marlins’ most experienced players are Sandy Alcantara and Cal Quantrill, who have a combined 12 years and 60 days of MLB service entering the year. That’s a figure topped by 19 individual players on Opening Day rosters.

Lastly, let’s look at the countries where each team’s players were born.

Specifically, I’d like to highlight the players from the least-represented countries in the majors.

Aruba: Xander Bogaerts (Padres), Chadwick Tromp (Braves)

Australia: Curtis Mead (Rays)

Bahamas: Jazz Chisholm Jr. (Yankees)

Germany: Max Kepler (Phillies)

Honduras: Mauricio Dubón (Astros)

Peru: Jesús Luzardo (Phillies)

South Africa: Rob Refsnyder (Red Sox)

Baseball truly is a global game, and I hope the game continues to grow internationally so that we can have players from more countries in the years to come.

Alan Roden roped baseballs with regularity this spring, helping himself to land not only a roster spot, but also an Opening Day start in right field for the Toronto Blue Jays. Showing signs that he’s ready to take off at the MLB level, the 25-year-old left-handed hitter punished Grapefruit League hurlers to the tune of a 1.245 OPS and a 220 wRC+. He also coaxed six free passes and fanned just four times over his 37 plate appearances.

More than spring training results factored into his first big-league opportunity. Building on a strong 2024 season, split between Double-A New Hampshire and Triple-A Buffalo, Roden has been adding pop to his profile. Previously known more for his bat-to-ball skills than for his ability to clear fences, the erstwhile Creighton University Bluejay is now looking to lift.

Having read of Roden’s efforts to generate more power, I asked him how he’s gone about impacting the ball with more authority.

“I think it’s less of the actual impact that’s better,” Roden told me at Blue Jays camp. “It’s more the shape of the ball off the bat, directionally. The exit velocities are high enough to where if I’m getting in the air to the pull side, it’s going to go. That’s where the damage comes from, hitting the ball with more ideal launch angles.”

Roden has a B.A. in physics, so understanding the aerodynamics of ball flight, and the swing paths that produce results, comes with the territory. Explaining his mechanical adjustments was a simple exercise for the Middleton, Wisconsin native. Read the rest of this entry »

For the Tampa Bay Rays, it was the fearsome power of nature; for the Athletics, the whims of a greedy doofus. But while the cause may vary, the outcome is the same: Both teams will play all 81 of their home games this season in minor league parks. The A’s will set up shop at Sutter Health Park, also known as the home of the Triple-A River Cats; the Rays’ address is now George M. Steinbrenner (GMS) Field, the erstwhile environs of the Single-A Tampa Tarpons. (The River Cats will share custody, while the Tarpons will move to a nearby backfield.)

This is suboptimal and sort of embarrassing for the league. But it does present a compelling research question: How will these parks play? According to the three-year rolling Statcast park factors, the Oakland Coliseum and Tropicana Field both qualified as pitcher-friendly. The Coliseum ranked as the sixth-most pitcher-friendly park, suppressing offense 3% relative to league average, while Tropicana ranked as the third most, suppressing offense around 8%. Where will Sutter Health and GMS Field settle in?

I started by looking at how each park played in their previous minor league season. Over at Baseball America, Matt Eddy calculated the run-scoring environment for each ballpark in the 11 full-season minor leagues. Eddy found that Sutter Health ranked as the most pitcher-friendly Pacific Coast League park by far in 2024, allowing 31% fewer runs than the average PCL park. GMS Field played closer to neutral compared to its Florida State League peers, but it did significantly boost home runs, particularly to left-handed hitters. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

All hail Chris Sale and Tarik Skubal! Last year, both southpaws dominated opposing hitters, winning the Pitching Triple Crown by leading their respective leagues in wins, ERA, and strikeouts. They also topped their circuits in both the FanGraphs and Baseball Reference flavors of WAR, and took home their first Cy Young Awards. It was just the second time that AL and NL hurlers won the Pitching Triple Crown in the same year, after Justin Verlander and Clayton Kershaw in 2011. Like that pair in 2012, they’re both slated to usher in the 2025 season by taking the ball on Opening Day, with Sale facing the Padres in San Diego at 4:10 p.m. ET on Thursday and Skubal going up against the defending champion Dodgers (who already had their Opening Day on March 18 in Tokyo against the Cubs) in Los Angeles at 7:10 p.m. ET.

This will be the sixth Opening Day start for Sale, who turns 36 on March 30, but his first since 2019, as a variety of injuries limited him to just 31 starts from ’20–23. After being traded from the Red Sox to the Braves in December 2023, he went 18-3 with a 2.38 ERA and 225 strikeouts as well as 6.4 fWAR and 6.2 bWAR, and reinvigorated his long-dormant Hall of Fame case along the way. The only down note to his season was that he didn’t pitch after September 19 due to back spasms and was left off the roster for the Wild Card Series (also against San Diego, coincidentally), which the Padres swept. As for the 28-year-old Skubal, he went 18-4 with a 2.39 ERA and 228 strikeouts as well as 5.9 fWAR and 6.4 bWAR. His breakout helped the Tigers reach the postseason for the first time since 2014, which they did thanks to an improbable 24-10 sprint to the finish; according to our Playoff Odds, at 62-66 on August 22, they had just a 0.8% chance of making it.

Setting the historic nature of the dual Triple Crowns and the rest of those story lines aside, having both reigning Cy Young winners starting on Opening Day marks a return to normalcy. For as commonplace as such assignments may seem, last year neither of the 2023 winners, Gerrit Cole and Blake Snell, were available, with the former sidelined by nerve inflammation and edema in his elbow and the latter not built up yet after signing with the Giants on March 19. As I noted at the time, the absence of both Cy Young winners from the slate was more or less a once-every-couple-decades occurrence. Prior to 2024, the last time neither reigning Cy Young winner started on Opening Day was in ’05, when both Astros right-hander Roger Clemens and Twins lefty Johan Santana yielded to longer-tenured teammates. Before that, one had to flip the calendar back to 1982, when Dodgers southpaw Fernando Valenzuela held out in a contract dispute, and Brewers righty Rollie Fingers was a reliever. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome back, baseball! Opening Day is here. Most teams have reason to be optimistic this time of year, but there are a handful of clubs facing significant hurdles as the season gets underway. Below, I’ll layout what the best- and worst-case scenario looks like for every team in 2025.

Last year, we revamped our power rankings using a modified Elo rating system. If you’re familiar with chess rankings or the MLB predictions at the now defunct FiveThirtyEight, you’ll know that Elo is an elegant solution that measures teams’ relative strength and is very reactive to recent performance. For these Opening Day rankings, I’ve pulled the Depth Charts projections — which are powered by a 50/50 blend of the 2025 Steamer and ZiPS projections, and RosterResource’s playing time estimates — and calculated an implied Elo ranking for each team. The two-game Tokyo Series between the Dodgers and Cubs has been taken into account in these rankings. The delta column in the full rankings below shows the change in ranking from the pre-spring training run of the Power Rankings I did back in February. Read the rest of this entry »

Every year, most teams hold some sort of team bonding, social event during spring training. The specifics of the event vary from team to team, but frequently they include renting out a movie theater and showing some cloying, inspirational movie like The Blind Side, Cool Runnings, Rudy, or better yet, a documentary like Free Solo. Regardless of the team’s outlook on the year, the goal is to get the players amped up for the season and ready to compete on the field, even if the competition in question is for fourth place in the division.

But what if instead of taking the clichéd route, teams actually tried to select a movie that fits their current vibe, one that’s thematically on brand with the current state of their franchise? They won’t do this because spring training is a time for hope merchants to peddle their wares, even if they’re selling snake oil to sub-.500 teams. But spring training is over. It’s time to get real. So here are my movie selections for each American League team, sorted by release date from oldest to newest.

Stay tuned for the National League movie lineup in a subsequent post. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the past week and a half, we’ve published our annual season preview, ranking the league’s players by position and team based on a blend of our projections (a 50/50 split between ZiPS and Steamer) and our manually maintained RosterResource playing time estimates courtesy of Jason Martinez and Jon Becker. If you happen to have missed any of those installments, you can use the navigation widget above to catch up.

Today, I’m going to summarize the results. We’ll look at some tables and pick out a few interesting tidbits in a moment, but first, it’s important to remember that this exercise captures a snapshot of how we project teams to perform now. Teams aren’t static. Since we began publishing our rankings, the Rockies traded outfielder Nolan Jones back to the Guardians, the team that drafted and developed him. The Brewers traded Mark Canha and Manuel Margot. Evan Carter, who burned so bright for the Rangers late in 2023, has been optioned as he tries to regain his stroke after an injury-riddled 2024 season. Drake Baldwin, our no. 11 overall prospect, and Cam Smith, no. 70, officially made their respective team’s Opening Day roster, as did Ryan Johnson, a 22-year-old right-handed pitcher who was drafted in the second round last year and has never thrown a pitch in affiliated ball (he ranked 11th on our Angels list as a 40+ FV prospect). And in a depressing callback to this time last year, when his signed with the Diamondbacks mere hours after our starting pitcher rankings went live, about 25 minutes after we published this year’s installment, Jordan Montgomery announced that he’ll be getting Tommy John surgery. Read the rest of this entry »