Hello everyone, and welcome to the final mailbag of 2025! I hope you are all having a wonderful holiday season.

We are now officially in what my family refers to as the lobe of the year, the week between Christmas and New Year, when a lot of us wind down and spend time with friends and loved ones. It’s a time for relaxing and reflecting. You’ll notice that here at FanGraphs, aside from this mailbag and a few transaction reactions, we are mostly taking it slow. Instead, we’re republishing our favorite FanGraphs pieces of the year. You can check those out here, or as they populate the homepage from now through the end of next week.

In this week’s mailbag, we’ll cover the best players who never received a Hall of Fame vote, NPB posting rules, and Dillon Dingler’s breakout season. Before we do, though, I’d like to remind you that this mailbag is exclusive to FanGraphs Members. If you aren’t yet a Member and would like to keep reading, you can sign up for a Membership here. It’s the best way to both experience the site and support our staff, and it comes with a bunch of other great benefits. Also, if you’d like to ask a question for an upcoming mailbag, send me an email at mailbag@fangraphs.com. 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 Boston Red Sox.

Batters

After three years fumbling around the .500 mark and being firmly out of the AL East discussion, the Red Sox returned to the playoffs for the first time since 2021, and were still fighting for the AL East title as late as early September. The season ended with the unsatisfactory conclusion of dropping the Wild Card Series to the Yankees in three games. The Red Sox are a team I have lot of conflicting emotions about. I still don’t think the Mookie Betts situation was handled all that well, and I think they’ve missed some upside opportunities by generally being very quiet at trade deadlines. I also wonder if the whole Alex Bregman–Rafael Devers situation earlier this year could have been avoided with better communication. But this is also a franchise that does big things to improve the team; trading for Garrett Crochet was a huge play, signing Bregman last year was bold, and acquiring both Sonny Gray and Willson Contreras from the Cardinals in separate swaps this offseason were shrewd moves to target specific team problems. I guess the best way to describe the franchise now is “unsentimental.”

However they got here, ZiPS projects the lineup to be an incredibly solid, deep group, with the weakest spots — second base, third base, and catcher — still projecting to be average or better. This isn’t just an artifact of aggressive playing time projections, either, as ZiPS sees a lot of value in the the stable of backups and role players. That Boston was able to send prospects to the White Sox sufficient to land Crochet last offseason while still graduating several prospects to the majors reflects how quietly excellent the organization’s developmental pipeline has been.

One can see why there’s so much talk about a possible Jarren Duran trade that may or may not involve Ketel Marte. Duran will get plenty of playing time in Boston, but he’s probably even more valuable to a team like Arizona than the Red Sox, who are without any real outfield holes now that Roman Anthony has successfully reached the majors. Kristian Campbell’s projection has taken a big hit, due to a lousy major league debut and a surprisingly underwhelming performance at Triple-A after his demotion; he still projects to have a solid future, though it may not be in Boston. I’m not predicting Trevor Story to be as healthy as our Depth Charts expect, but it was nice to see him get a fully healthy season in for the first time in a while.

Adding Contreras was a particularly nice deal. If Duran is more valuable to another team than Boston, then Boston is arguably one of the absolute best places for Contreras. No, he isn’t a star, but the Red Sox are prime contenders, and that means they need certainty here rather than someone who could possibly bring higher upside. The Sox cobbled together replacements at first base after Triston Casas ruptured his patella, but that’s a tough position to cobble together offense for on the fly, and Red Sox first basemen only combined for a .244/.305/.386, -0.7 WAR line, easily the worst production at the position of any playoff team this year. Casas’ injury in 2025 and a fractured rib in 2024 cost him a lot of playing time, and even if there’s an expectation that he can turn things around, Boston is in a tough position to actually have to count on that. I still think Casas can have success in the majors, but it may simply be with a franchise that can take a riskier approach.

I’m actually mildly annoyed there isn’t more to complain about, since I’m a man who likes snark, and since I’m from Baltimore, any Red Sox success may hinder the Orioles.

Pitchers

If you asked me after the World Series what the Red Sox most needed in the pitching department, I’d have said a true no. 2 starter between Crochet at the top and their deep stable of mid-rotation starters. They addressed their biggest offensive weakness with a trade, and they did the same thing here, acquiring Gray from the Cardinals. And as with the Crochet trade, they did it without giving up anyone they desperately did not want to lose; Brandon Clarke could be a real plus for the Cardinals someday, but there are a lot of things that need to happen for him to get there.

Crochet has the second-best WAR projection for a pitcher in ZiPS, behind only Tarik Skubal, so there’s no ZiPS reasons to question Crochet’s bonafides as a beast of an ace. No other members of the rotation besides Crochet and Gray get amazing projections, but there are a lot of absolutely useful projections, good enough to make the Red Sox and most of their fans happy. Brayan Bello is a dependable number three, and ZiPS places Payton Tolle, Connelly Early, Kutter Crawford, Kyle Harrison, Patrick Sandoval, and Johan Oviedo in roughly the same tier of average-ish performance. Basically, pulling any two out of the hat gives the Sox one of the better 4/5 situations in the majors. And you can argue that basically all of them have an upside scenario that would at least put them at Gray-level performance, though I’m a little less bullish on Oviedo. A bunch of arms with question and upside is the Dodgers’ approach, and I think it’ll work well here.

Aroldis Chapman has some downside risk due to age, but he was terrific in 2025, when he cut out the walks that had long plagued his profile as his sinker increasingly became a larger part of his arsenal. It’s rare to see pitchers change what makes them successful as they approach 40, and outside of those age concerns, there’s no real reason to worry about him. The days of experimenting with Garrett Whitlock as a starter might be over, but he successfully came back from injury as a dynamite setup man. Likewise, Jordan Hicks is best used as a reliever. Of the projected bullpen, ZiPS is really uneasy about only Zack Kelly. It also thinks that Ryan Watson, a Rule 5 reliever picked up in a trade with the A’s, was a sneaky-good move.

All told, ZiPS thinks the Red Sox ought to eclipse 90 wins and be seriously in the fight for the AL East title. ZiPS also thinks that Boston has less downside than its competition, and an awful lot would have to go wrong for this team to go back to where it was from 2022-24.

Ballpark graphic courtesy Eephus League. Depth charts constructed by way of those listed here. Size of player names is very roughly proportional to Depth Chart playing time. The final team projections may differ considerably from our Depth Chart playing time.

Players are listed with their most recent teams wherever possible. This includes players who are unsigned or have retired, players who will miss 2026 due to injury, and players who were released in 2025. So yes, if you see Joe Schmoe, who quit baseball back in August to form a Ambient Math-Rock Trip-Hop Yacht Metal band that only performs in abandoned malls, he’s still listed here intentionally. ZiPS is assuming a league with an ERA of 4.16.

Hitters are ranked by zWAR, which is to say, WAR values as calculated by me, Dan Szymborski, whose surname is spelled with a z. WAR values might differ slightly from those that appear in the full release of ZiPS. Finally, I will advise anyone against — and might karate chop anyone guilty of — merely adding up WAR totals on a depth chart to produce projected team WAR. It is important to remember that ZiPS is agnostic about playing time, and has no information about, for example, how quickly a team will call up a prospect or what veteran has fallen into disfavor.

As always, incorrect projections are either caused by misinformation, a non-pragmatic reality, or by the skillful sabotage of our friend and former editor. You can, however, still get mad at me on Twitter or on Bluesky. This last is, however, not an actual requirement.

Another day, another Met out the door. Jeff McNeil, who to this point had spent his entire 13-year professional career in the Mets organization, is now an Athletic. The 33-year-old second baseman and outfielder is headed to Sacramento (or, to use the Athletics’ official branding, Parts Unknown), in exchange for 17-year-old pitching prospect Yordan Rodriguez. The Mets will pay down $5.75 million of the $15.75 million due to McNeil in 2026, and if the A’s decline McNeil’s club option for 2027, Steve Cohen will cover the $2 million buyout.

At the time of the trade, McNeil was the Mets’ active leader in games played, plate appearances, and hits. If you want a sense of how the Mets’ offseason is going, here’s a fun fact. In the past 30 days, the franchise has had four active leaders in those categories: Brandon Nimmo, who was traded to Texas just before Thanksgiving; then Pete Alonso, who signed with the Orioles during Winter Meetings; then McNeil; and now Francisco Lindor. All that upheaval without playing a single game.

All told, 16 of the 63 players who suited up for the Mets in 2025 have departed since the end of the season. Come February, “Meet the Mets” might be more than a song. They’re going to have to spend the first week of camp wearing name tags and doing icebreakers. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Cincinnati Reds. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the sixth 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 »

A new day dawned in Major League Baseball on Sunday, as the top international player in this free agent class has signed with — that’s right — someone other than the Dodgers!

The White Sox, yes, believe it or not, the White Sox, have landed Munetaka Murakami. Per Jeff Passan, the 25-year-old corner infielder, late of the Tokyo Yakult Swallows of NPB, will make $34 million over the next two seasons. We had him ranked 12th on our Top 50 Free Agents list, with an estimated contract AAV of $22 million. Ben Clemens predicted he’d get seven years, our readers six.

It’s one of the biggest discrepancies you’re likely to see, and for good reason. Murakami is, in my opinion, the no. 1 most interesting player in this class, and while I’m shocked his contract dropped this far below expectations, I’m not at all surprised by the extent to which he’s divided popular opinion. Read the rest of this entry »

World Baseball Classic managers were made available to the media during the Winter Meetings, and I took that opportunity to ask Chinese Taipei’s Hao-Jiu Tseng about some of the best arms in Taiwan. I had specific pitchers in mind, but opted to begin with an open-ended question rather than cite any names. The response I got was likewise non-specific.

“I hope all pitchers from our team can be known by all baseball fans,” Tseng told me via an interpreter. “There are so many young pitchers. Most of them are still playing at the minor league level, but this tournament can help them improve their skills and experience, and someday grow into great players at a top level.”

The first pitcher he mentioned when I followed up was Wei-En Lin, a 20-year-old left-hander in the Athletics system who was featured here at FanGraphs back in August. The second was the hurler I was most interested in hearing about
.
“Jo Hsi Hsu pitches in the [Chinese Professional Baseball League], ”Tseng said of the recently-turned-25-year-old right-hander, who had a 2.05 ERA and 120 strikeouts, with just 78 hits allowed, over 114 innings for the Wei Chuan Dragons. “He is a posted player this offseason. Right now he is eligible to negotiate with foreign clubs. He possibly will transfer his contract to Japan or America. He is the ace of the CPBL. Read the rest of this entry »

As is often the case the week after the Winter Meetings, there has been a flurry of transactions for us to cover at FanGraphs since we got back from Orlando. So many relief pitchers came off the board. The Padres re-signed Michael King on Thursday night while Meg’s Seahawks were staging an absolutely stupid comeback against my Rams; San Diego followed that up yesterday by signing a Korean infielder with the musical name, Sung-mun Song. Earlier this week, the Twins signed Josh Bell to hit in the middle of their order, while the Phillies added Adolis García to replace right fielder Nick Castellanos, who is still technically on the roster but definitely won’t be when the season starts. The two moves inspired Michael Baumann to compare them to babies putting every single thing they see into their mouths. Lovely.

Then, yesterday, two big trades went down. Eric Longenhagen has you covered on the Rays-Orioles swap that sent Shane Baz to Baltimore, while Brendan Gawlowksi analyzed the three-team trade between the Rays, Pirates, and Astros. Of course, there are a number of high-profile free agents still out there, including four of the top five on Ben Clemens’ Top 50 list and six of the top 10.

We won’t be covering any of that in today’s mailbag; you can find all the relevant buzz in Jon Becker’s latest edition of the Matrix Reloaded column. Instead, we’ll answer your questions about the position players with the most WAR who never made an All-Star team, whether baseball should use WPA as pitcher wins, the windup, and more. But first, I’d like to remind you that this mailbag is exclusive to FanGraphs Members. If you aren’t yet a Member and would like to keep reading, you can sign up for a Membership here. It’s the best way to both experience the site and support our staff, and it comes with a bunch of other great benefits. Also, if you’d like to ask a question for an upcoming mailbag, send me an email at mailbag@fangraphs.com. Read the rest of this entry »

Orioles fans have had “Frontline Starter” on their Christmas list since the departure of Corbin Burnes, and though Friday’s acquisition of Shane Baz is perhaps the gift equivalent of asking for a Ferrari and getting an Acura, it adds a proven element to the middle of an Orioles rotation that still feels like it will be anchored by Kyle Bradish and Trevor Rogers.

To acquire the 26-year-old Baz, who is coming off a 2-WAR season, the Orioles had to part with a prospect potpourri made up of a pair of 2025 draftees (Coastal Carolina catcher Caden Bodine and high school outfielder Slater de Brun), a Competitive Balance Round A pick in next year’s draft, upper-level starting pitcher prospect Michael Forret, and speedy 22-year-old outfielder Austin Overn. It’s an enormous, high-volume return for one player and helps the roots of the Chris Archer trade tree anchor deeper into the game’s soil. I’ll talk more about each prospect, the comp pick, and the way this trade impacts both clubs’ farm systems later in the post. But let’s start with the most immediately consequential piece of the deal: Shane Baz.

Baz has been famous since his junior year of high school, when he emerged as one of the better pitching prospects in the 2017 draft. He was selected by Pittsburgh in the middle of the first round and traded as the Player to be Named in the Archer deal a little over a year later. The pandemic and persistent injuries (there were some near-misses as well) slowed Baz’s ascent through the minors and prevented him from working more than 81 innings in any single season until literally 2025. The Rays doggedly deployed him as a starter despite his injuries and early-career command woes, and they were rewarded with something of a breakout this year, as Baz ate 166.1 innings across 31 starts. He posted a 4.87 ERA, but hurricane damage to Tropicana Field meant that he pitched his home games in a minor league park with the hitter-friendly dimensions of Yankee Stadium; his xERA, which controls for defense, quality of contact, and the hitting environment, was 3.86. Read the rest of this entry »

The San Diego Padres have re-signed starting pitcher Michael King to a… let’s just call it a three-year deal worth $75 million for now, though the particulars are somewhat more complicated.

Good for the Padres, getting their Christmas shopping done on time; not all of us are so organized. I also can’t remember if I’ve already used the joke about how a reunion between King and the Friars is the opposite of Becket, the 1964 film starring Richard Burton and Peter O’Toole. These are confusing times.

Especially for the Padres, who have been one of baseball’s more chaotic teams in the 2020s, shipping massive talents in and out with little warning and little regard for the long-term future. King came to San Diego in one of the more famous examples of this behavior: the trade that sent Juan Soto to the Yankees in 2023.

That all-in attitude — even when the Padres were selling in the short term, it was to set up another major push in the medium term — was assumed to have a shelf life. Especially after the death of popular owner Peter Seidler, whose largesse enabled GM A.J. Preller to satisfy his inexhaustible thirst for making deals. 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 Arizona Diamondbacks.

Batters

Buoyant with last offseason’s Corbin Burnes signing, the Diamondbacks looked poised to return to the playoffs this season after a disappointing follow-up to their 2023 pennant, but it never quite came together. There were plenty of exciting developments, none more than Geraldo Perdomo’s breakout performance, for which he finished fourth in the NL MVP race. But Arizona lost Burnes to injury early, the rotation on the whole was mediocre, and there were a few big holes in the lineup that the team’s stars couldn’t overcome. While the D-backs did hang around in the Wild Card race into the final weeks of the season, they never really coded as a contender, and ended the season right around the .500 mark.

It’s amusing to look at the depth chart graphic and see just how polarizing ZiPS sees Arizona’s on-paper lineup right now. There are four positions ZiPS really likes — Corbin Carroll in right, Perdomo and Ketel Marte up the middle, and Gabriel Moreno behind the plate — and four positions ZiPS doesn’t like. Meanwhile, only third base, with Jordan Lawlar and Blaze Alexander, gets a neutral projection. In some aspects, this makes the Diamondbacks an easier group to upgrade because they have obvious areas in which they can to improve, but I’m not sure they’d seriously consider getting into the Kyle Tucker sweepstakes. There has been some chatter in the rumor mill about Alex Bregman as a target for Arizona, and if that’s the case, this team would certainly benefit from his addition, even if third base isn’t the biggest area of concern. Perdomo is for real, even if ZiPS isn’t projecting him to repeat his 7-WAR season, and I don’t think anyone’s surprised by Carroll, Marte, and Moreno being All-Star level talents. It’s fun to imagine Marte making a Hall of Fame run, but ZiPS thinks he’ll be short of 50 WAR when all is said and done, with a JAWS of 39, ranking him somewhere in the 30s among historical second basemen.

With Lawlar able to play the middle infield, Arizona could conceivably pull off a Marte trade for help in the outfield or in the rotation, though the return would likely have to be massive for this to move beyond idle internet discussion. ZiPS is thoroughly unimpressed with the Lourdes Gurriel Jr.-led combo in left, Alek Thomas in center, and the “whatever” currently slated to start at DH. This is a team that really could use Josh Naylor right about now! ZiPS sees little excitement in the high minors, especially as it has grown extremely bearish on Druw Jones’ ability to become a real hitter. Alexander perhaps has the most fascinating projection of anyone beyond the stars, and while he’s stretched as a shortstop, he is better at third base and has a lot of the qualities of a good supersub. He’ll certainly be a better supersub than he was as a cocktail: I tried to make a Blaze Alexander for science, consisting of Fireball cinnamon whiskey, crème de cacao, and cream in equal parts. It was terrible, though your mileage may vary; I’m also far less positive about negronis than most of the internet.

Pitchers

ZiPS sees a kind of last-hurrah season for Merrill Kelly, and it’s something Arizona needs with Zac Gallen perhaps departing in free agency and Burnes expectd to miss the bulk of the season. Kelly is a lot older than he seems, by virtue of debuting as a 30-year-old rookie who had to go to the KBO to become a quality pitcher. Brandon Pfaadt gets an OK projection, but ZiPS is souring on him enough that if he again greatly underperforms his peripherals, it may turn on him altogether.

The projections see some regression toward the mean for Ryne Nelson, but ZiPS still considers him a viable mid-rotation starter. Eduardo Rodriguez is projected to bounce back a bit after two rough years with Arizona, but like Pfaadt, he’s running out of time to make good on the silicon positivity. ZiPS isn’t enthusiastic about Michael Soroka, but it actually gave him a better projection than I expected.

Of the fringier pitchers that ZiPS likes, Arizona has two of the ones with better projections, in Mitch Bratt and Daniel Eagen. Bratt is a command guy, and though ZiPS knows to be skeptical of those pitchers in the minors, his control may be just good enough; he also misses bats at a high enough rate that he might thread that needle. Eagen has a couple good breaking pitches, and if the walks don’t shoot up with more time in the high minors, he may be a reasonable option in the not too distant future.

ZiPS is generally more positive about the frontend of the Diamondbacks bullpen than Steamer. The quartet of Andrew Saalfrank, Ryan Thompson, Kevin Ginkel, and Drey Jameson get a solid set of projections. The computer is also hopeful about a Justin Martinez comeback. The numbers are less positive for the second and third tier of the pen, with the exception of Kyle Backhus, who gets nearly as good a projection as any of Arizona’s other options, including Thompson and Ginkel.

Right now, the Diamondbacks are projected to be few wins better than they were this season. That puts them firmly in the Wild Card race, but ZiPS sees them as being well behind the Dodgers in the NL West, with the Giants also ahead of them. Success for Arizona also requires some of these pitching questions to be answered in a positive manner, and that’s naturally something you can’t always count on.

Ballpark graphic courtesy Eephus League. Depth charts constructed by way of those listed here. Size of player names is very roughly proportional to Depth Chart playing time. The final team projections may differ considerably from our Depth Chart playing time.