In the not-so-distant past, the shortstop position was dominated by defense-first players who hit at the bottom of the lineup. Pitchers loved to see them coming because it meant they could mentally check out for a batter. Meanwhile, if a shortstop could hit, he probably played pretty clumsy defense. I find it a bit trite to declare anything a renaissance while it’s still happening, and I don’t have the historical baseball authority to do so anyway, but I do want to acknowledge how impressive it is that such a strong majority of the starting shortstops on this list can legitimately hit and defend. Well-rounded shortstops are no longer unicorns or “nice to have.” Well-rounded shortstops are the standard. Glove-only shortstops are the aberration. Read the rest of this entry »
CJ Abrams does not wait patiently. That’s never been his thing. He rampaged his way to the major leagues in 2022 at age 21, on a playoff contender no less. Now, should he have been in the majors that year? It’s easy, in retrospect, to question San Diego’s decision to call him up. He was below replacement level as a rookie with the Padres before they sent him to the Nationals in the Juan Soto trade, and then he was also below replacement level with Washington that year. But doing things even before they make sense has always been Abrams’ game.
To wit: You wouldn’t teach a major leaguer to swing like Abrams does. He’s one of the most aggressive hackers in the sport. His 53.1% swing rate – and 34.2% chase rate – are both among the highest marks in the league. And this isn’t some case of premeditated, Corey Seager-style aggression, either. Everyone who swings more frequently than Abrams swings at more strikes than he does. Seager chases seven percentage points less frequently and swings at strikes seven percentage points more frequently. Abrams isn’t playing six dimensional chess when he swings. He’s trying to do this:
That’s absurd (complimentary). As fate would have it, I was watching that game on TV when it happened as part of an article I hoped to write on the opposing pitcher, Hayden Birdsong. I made a strange sound when Abrams hit that ball, somewhere between a laugh and a gasp. Look at his contact point again:
Second base is the bass guitar of a baseball team. If you’re there, most people will assume that you don’t have the chops to play lead or rhythm guitar (shortstop and third base in this metaphor). And unless you’re truly exceptional, those same people will immediately forget you exist. Most of the time, it’s a thankless, anonymous job. But while most four-piece rock bands can plug along with a mediocre bassist, an exceptional bassist can elevate the group’s sound, and indeed come to define it.
Unless one of the youngsters listed below really pops in 2025, “exceptional” will probably be difficult to come by at this position. But competence abounds. Some 15 teams are projected for 3.0 WAR or more at this position, with 24 teams projected for 2.5 WAR or better. You could count on one hand the teams that have neither a solid regular at second base nor a prospect with that upside waiting in the high minors. Read the rest of this entry »
First base talent isn’t distributed as evenly as many of the other positions you’ll read about in this exercise. There’s a clear top tier, just like everywhere on the diamond, but things drop off quickly after that. The top few teams have situations that any contender would be happy with, but the landscape turns shockingly flat just afterwards. A whopping 17 teams project for between 1.5 and 2.5 WAR at first base, an enormous tier that starts in the top 10 and stretches nearly to the bottom of the list.
What’s behind that talent distribution? I like to call it the first base dead zone, a concept I’ll be talking about quite a bit today. It works like this: The major leagues are full of hitters who can manage a line that’s around 5-15% better than league average. They tend to disproportionately be limited to first base, DH, and the outfield corners. In 2024, only three primary first basemen managed a wRC+ of 135 or better (minimum 200 PA). There were 25 players between a 100 and 120 wRC+, though. No other position has a distribution that even approaches that rare peak and broad middle. Read the rest of this entry »
I don’t know everything about baseball, but I know this: When a player’s name is in a headline that ends with the phrase “Stares Down Oblivion,” that’s not a good sign. That happened to Joey Gallo four weeks ago, as Michael Rosen wrote a lovely tribute to a popular player whose career seemed to be nearing its end. If the headline weren’t ominous enough, little of what followed augured good things: A table that showed Gallo posting the two highest single-season whiff rates of the decade; a comparison to Ken Griffey Jr. and Andruw Jones, but only during their time with the White Sox; a metaphor about hanging off a cliff by one’s fingertips.
Gallo went 2-for-20 for the White Sox in Cactus League play, and while a minute batting average is nothing new, Gallo’s secondary skills — the talents that made him an impactful big leaguer — were not in evidence. Both of his hits were singles, and he drew just one walk.
The man might swing from his heels, but he’s smart enough to read the signs. So on Sunday, he posted a video of old defensive highlights to X with the caption, “It’s been fun outfield,” with a peace sign emoji. A retirement announcement, perhaps? It seems Gallo also realized he’d been ambiguous, so 11 minutes later he sent a follow-up post: “Just to be clear, I will be pitching.” Read the rest of this entry »
The 2024 season was a strong year for catchers. Altogether, they produced 13.2% of all position player WAR, their largest piece of the pie in 10 years. Their collective 91 wRC+ was also the highest it has been in a full season since 2014. I’d posit that had something to do with starting-caliber catchers taking the field a bit more often, rather than ceding significant playing time to their backups. After watching teams cut back on catcher playing time for several years, we’re finally starting to see that trend reverse a bit. Read the rest of this entry »
Welcome to the 2025 positional power rankings! As is tradition, over the next week and a half, we’ll be ranking every team by position as we inch closer to Opening Day next Thursday. This is always something of a funny exercise. You read FanGraphs regularly, after all — a fact for which we are very grateful — and are well-versed in the various signings, trades, and injuries that have occurred over the offseason. You know that Juan Soto is now a Met, that the Diamondbacks signed Corbin Burnes, that the Red Sox traded for Garrett Crochet, and that Gerrit Cole needs Tommy John surgery. And yet, you’re still keen to know more about the game and what it might look like between now and October. The positional power rankings are our answer to that impulse.
This post serves as an explainer for our approach to the rankings. If you’re new to the exercise, I hope it helps to clarify how they are compiled and what you might expect from them. If you’re a FanGraphs stalwart, much of this will be familiar, but I hope it’s a useful reminder of what we’re up to. If you have a bit of time, you’ll find the introduction to last year’s series here. You can use the navigation widget at the top of that post to get a sense of where things stood before Opening Day 2024, a spring that saw a rash of pitcher injuries and a couple of notable free agents remain unsigned until just before the season began.
Unlike a lot of sites’ season previews, we don’t arrange ours by team or division. That is a perfectly good way to organize a season preview, but we see a few advantages to the way we do it. First, ranking teams by position allows us to cover a team’s roster from top to bottom. Stars, everyday contributors, and role players alike receive some amount of examination, and those players (and the teams they play for) are placed in their proper league-wide context. By doing it this way, you can more easily see how teams stack up against each other, get a sense of the overall strength of a position across baseball, and spot the places where a well-constructed platoon may end up having a bigger impact than an everyday regular who is good rather than great. We think all of that context helps to create a richer understanding of the state of the game and a clearer picture of the season ahead. Read the rest of this entry »
Jackson Jobe supplied a quality quote when asked about last weekend’s three-straight-heaters punchout of Toronto’s Vladimir Guerrero Jr..””I’m done with trying to dot a gnat’s ass,” he told a small group of reporters. “It’s, ‘Here’s my stuff. If you hit it, good. Odds are, probably not.”
Jobe is a student of the art and science of his craft, so I proceeded to ask him where he feels he is in terms development. Has the 22-year-old Detroit Tigers right-hander essentially settled into his mound identity, or is there still work left to be done in the pitch lab?
“I’d like to think I got it pretty much all fine-tuned,” replied Jobe, who is No. 9 on our Top 100. “Now it’s just learning the best way to use it, the best way to sequence it. I put my stuff up against anyone in the league on paper, to be completely honest. It’s just a matter of learning how to harness it.”
Asked about any recent changes to his pitch metrics, the rookie of the year candidate cited his slider. Read the rest of this entry »
Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Pittsburgh Pirates. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my 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 »
You’ve all heard the terms “luddite” and “sabotage” before. They’re words with pejorative connotations: The former is someone who distrusts technological progress; the latter is the act of conspiring to destroy from within. Luddites and saboteurs are rubes and terrorists, respectively, in modern vernacular.
