The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2026 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

Last week, BBWAA voters elected Carlos Beltrán and Andruw Jones to the Hall of Fame — and in doing so, they once again foiled my chances at a perfect five-year projection of upcoming elections. Not that I had any real expectation of running the table given my spotty track record regarding this endeavor, but while a year ago I correctly projected that Beltrán, who received 70.3% on the 2025 ballot, would make it this year, I was somewhat surprised that Jones, who received 66.2% last time — leaving him with what has typically been roughly coin-toss odds of reaching 75% the next year — made it as well.

If I’ve learned anything from 14 years of doing these five-year outlooks, dating back to the wrap-up of my 2014 election coverage at SI.com, it’s humility, because there are far more ways to be wrong in this endeavor than to be right; when a candidate gets elected more quickly than I expect, or lags relative to my expectations, it creates a ripple effect. The presence of a high-share holdover means less space for and less attention paid to the mid-ballot holdovers, so clearing one from the ballot can have ramifications that won’t be felt for a few years; likewise, a more rapid election than predicted can accelerate other candidates’ timelines. What’s more, the Hall can change the rules for election without warning, and candidates can do unforeseen things that compromise their chances.

The first time I tried this was so long ago that candidates still had 15 years of eligibility instead of 10, so I could afford to project Tim Raines for election in 2018, his 11th year of eligibility. The Hall’s unilateral decision to truncate candidacies to 10 years would come just months later, though thankfully voters accelerated their acceptance of Raines, who was elected in 2017. Both the eligibility shortening and Hall vice chairman Joe Morgan’s open letter pleading with voters not to elect candidates linked to performance-enhancing drugs changed the landscape in ways I couldn’t foresee. Meanwhile, Ichiro Suzuki made a two-game comeback that bumped his eligibility back a year, Curt Schilling found increasingly elaborate ways to offend voters, Omar Vizquel became the subject of multiple allegations of domestic violence against his wife and sexual harassment of an autistic batboy, and Beltrán lost a shot at first-year election because of his involvement in the Astros’ illegal sign-stealing scheme. My Magic 8 Ball didn’t see any of that coming. Read the rest of this entry »

IRMO, S.C. — At Friarsgate Park, there’s never enough parking. Whenever there’s a baseball game, the lot gets full and drivers find spots on the grass next to the sidewalk. Eventually, the parking lot over at the elementary school fills, too.

It’s only a week night, but there’s so much commotion — and this isn’t for a tournament, just fall baseball games.

“It’s the old ‘Field of Dreams,’” said Bobby Jenson, Little League president. “If you build it, they will come. If you build the right atmosphere, people will come because, if it’s 60, 70 degrees and you’re just relaxed and you’re getting peanuts or popcorn or sunflower seeds, and just watching a game of baseball — it’s just no better place I’d rather be.”

This is Irmo, South Carolina, the most baseball a baseball town can be.

Irmo is so baseball that last year it sent not one, not two, not three, but four teams in different divisions to the Little League World Series — baseball teams of up to 12-, 13- and 16-year-old boys, along with a girls softball team. Little League has seven divisions, each of which holds a national tournament of top teams every year, the World Series. Do the math: One community sent clubs to more than half the national competitions.

Irmo is so baseball that championship jerseys hang in local restaurants as relics of pride with signatures of the ball players, who are treated as local celebrities.

Irmo is so baseball that even though the South Carolina Golf Association is just a few miles down the road from the ball fields, there isn’t even a golf course in town. It closed several years ago.

It’s hard to find someone not connected to Irmo Little League.

“I’ve lived in North and South Carolina my whole life and baseball is very important here,” said Matt Westbrooks, a Little League parent. “We’re shocked that we don’t have a major league team yet. And I will tell you, Irmo Little League is doing it right. If you’re not involved, you need to be involved. It’s a great place to have your kids. It’s a great place to learn about baseball.”

Classic Southern

Irmo is 20 minutes away from Columbia and is full of Southern charm. Local businesses coexist with typical chain restaurants and retail stores, and with the South Carolina Gamecocks competing close by, there’s an SEC rooting interest.

Lake Murray is just to the west of town and has 650 miles of shoreline. The Big Bass Tour hosts tournaments on the lake each fall and spring that draw people to Irmo. But there’s always plenty of folks fishing. Some of the players often trade in bats for fishing rods.

Irmo is home to the annual Okra Strut, a two-day festival with a parade that was started by the Lake Murray-Irmo women’s club 50 years ago. Initially, the goal was to fundraise money to build a new library, but that only took seven years.

It still remains the town’s most cherished celebration, but the Williamsport team of up to 12-year-olds couldn’t attend the strut this year — the Atlanta Braves were hosting the little leaguers for their game against the Pittsburgh Pirates.

Where The Magic Happens

Irmo Little League has been around for a while, and baseball has been considered America’s favorite pastime for a lot longer, so why is it just now that Irmo is so good?

One reason is facilities. At Friarsgate, there are four large fields, three for baseball and one for softball. Right at the park’s entrance, there are two smaller fields for t-ball.

The fall season for Irmo Little League is dedicated to teaching young players the game and developing skills. Scores aren’t kept, the outfield boards remain off, and coaches interrupt the game action for pivotal teaching moments. But in the spring, kids are playing to make an All-Star team with the chance to make a Little League championship bracket and coaches want the chance to make the trip North, too.

Registration for the spring starts in December and ends in the middle of January. In February, players are evaluated and the regular season teams are formed, practices begin and games run for seven weeks starting in early March.

At 9 a.m. on opening day there’s a parade — it’s a town spectacle. All teams take the field that day and Jensen said 5,000 people normally attend.

“Oh my gosh, it was like if Norman Rockwell was here today, like what he would create for a town celebration,” said Jill Giulietti, mother of one of Irmo’s star sluggers. “It was so charming.”

The fences surrounding each field and the press box structures behind home plate are covered in banners of previous Irmo Little League teams that won state championships or reached a Little League World Series. The sign from 2009 sits next to more recent champions. It might be old, but the cracks in it are an important reminder of how much Irmo Little League has grown.

The fields didn’t always have lights, they didn’t always have scoreboards, there wasn’t always a paved walkway providing better accessibility to the fields. It took commitment from the community and investing to get here.

Baseball may have come first, but softball is what put Irmo Little League on the map. In 2022, the juniors team made it to the World Series in Seattle and came in second. Their Southeast jersey is framed at Lucky’s Burger Shack — it’s the place everyone flocks to when Irmo teams play in the World Series. The lineups are always posted and the regulars enjoy knowing who to root for each night.

“You don’t necessarily have to be family to be supportive of each other,” restaurant manager Kim Laniere said. “Everybody becomes aunts and uncles and brothers and sisters, you know, they all adopt whoever the kids are.”

The Grind

Irmo is the first local Little League to send four teams to their respective World Series in one season and it sent two teams in 2023 and 2024. But it’s not so simple to make that final tournament.

“It’s very hard, and for these players and families, there’s a lot of commitment that they make,” Jenson said.

Once All-Star teams are announced at the end of the spring regular season, practices begin and they’re intense. This year’s team that went to Williamsport practiced in the evenings three to four nights a week, starting at 7 p.m. to try and avoid the heat of the day. Practices were slotted for an hour and a half but it wasn’t unusual if they ran late and the crew shut down Friarsgate.

Manager Dave Bogan prepared his players intentionally and vigorously — they worked hard. His son, Andrew, was on the team, and his oldest, Jake who also played up through Irmo Little League, now goes to Dutch Fork High School.

“They got some of the high schoolers to come down and pitch to us, like throwing 70, 75, fastball, curveball, like all the pitches to get us ready for what we’re gonna face,” said Joe Giulietti, pitcher and third baseman.

Joe was one of Irmo’s most powerful hitters and he’s not bad on the mound either. He hit a grand slam during Irmo’s first game in Williamsport and his younger sister teased him that it wasn’t even off the barrel. At Friarsgate, during the home run derby last year, he even broke a scoreboard.

“If you run cross county, which is the three-mile race, you’re gonna go out and you’re gonna train for eight or nine miles,” Bogan said. “If I can get a high school kid that’s going to throw 75 to 80, which is really fast for these boys, when we see someone throwing 60-70, they’re ready.”

Bogan had to switch fields for practice so he wouldn’t lose as many baseballs in the trees beyond the fence.

“Practice was always hard and they made it hard on purpose to face difficult moments so it would look easy and make it easy,” said Brady Westbrooks, who smacked the walk-off hit in the regional tournament that earned Irmo its trip to Williamsport.

What Makes Irmo Different?

If you’re a parent and you have a son or daughter who wants to play ball, you basically have two choices: rec or travel ball.

Recreational baseball programs such as Little League don’t always have a great reputation because they aren’t necessarily recognized as competitive as travel ball. Even the Giuliettis were skeptical.

Before arriving in Irmo because of a career move, they lived in Texas. There, Joe seemed to out-grow Little League ball. He always had a strong arm. In Williamsport, Joe never gave up a hit.

“The coaches (in Texas) were trying to teach him to either roll it or to throw a rainbow,” Jill Giulietti said. That was because they worried Joe would “take someone’s face off.” So, to put Joe in a more competitive baseball environment, the Giuliettis turned to travel ball.

That’s where they believed the best players had the best opportunities. They had no idea Irmo was such a baseball haven.

While the popularity of travel ball has skyrocketed, Irmo Little League hasn’t been affected because of the program’s commitment to letting travel and rec play coexist. The two sometimes conflict in scheduling.

Before Jenson was league president, Justun Baxter held the position for eight years and he bought into travel ball rather than trying to work separately from it.

“Justun got them involved with our concession stand and stuff like that, to where you can make a little extra money to help your travel ball team expenses,” Jenson said about Baxter’s approach. “That got travel ball players to come back (for Little League).”

Irmo Little League refrains from having its games on the weekend because that’s when travel tournaments are typically held. Now when those tournaments use Friarsgate fields, all concession sales go back to Irmo Little League. Jensen and other volunteers are typically outside of the concession stand under a tent working the grill all afternoon.

While Irmo Little League prevents travel teams from staying together — players get divided among all teams in their age group — it ultimately makes the spring regular season games more competitive.

“They get to play against each other, pitching against each other, hitting against each other, it brings back that excitement to the travel ball players,” Jensen said. “You get the better players in your zip codes and success can happen.”

Because of its recent success, Irmo Little League is expecting to have close to 1,000 kids playing baseball and softball in the spring. This fall, a record 43 teams (nearly 500 kids) played, which is nearly double the amount of participation compared with when Jensen first got involved 15 years ago.

And for a sport like softball, the popularity and excitement are only continuing to grow.

Sarah Minchew coached her daughter, Ainsley, in the junior softball Little League World Series last summer. Sarah grew up playing the game, but Ainsley was a dancer before becoming a lights-out pitcher. Sarah sees a drastic difference in the sport’s popularity because of the exposure collegiate softball now receives.

“The diamond sports, to me, are some of the most difficult games because you have to be really athletic, but you also have to be really skilled,” Sarah said. “You can’t just get by with athleticism, you have to really commit yourself to being a good skilled player too, so it’s unique in that regard, but I think girls are putting in more time than they ever have historically to this game.”

Irmo currently has its highest participation in softball with at least 250 girls expected in the spring and about 150 playing this fall.

Community Commitment

Jensen and Baxter spend nearly 40 hours every week at Friarsgate and that’s in addition to their full-time jobs. Irmo Little League is run entirely by volunteers and most parents are highly involved in the league’s operation.

There are about 200 volunteers, but Baxter said only about five “put in way too much time.” Even though his kids are too old to still play in Irmo Little League, he wouldn’t do anything differently.

“This is my home,” Baxter said, adding that he believes this league is so successful because “it’s 80% family, 20% baseball.”

Irmo is a place where many people grow up and eventually move back to and start businesses. Tre Dabney opened Chickenbutt Donuts seven years ago with his wife. He grew up in Irmo and played Little League — now he’s a sponsor of the program.

“There just hasn’t been a better place that I’ve been,” Dabney said. “And it really seems like the rest of the country is figuring it out. The secret is kind of out.”

Chickenbutt Donuts was a part of Irmo Little League’s largest fundraising year last season, supplying over 300 dozen donuts sold at the concession stand. Dabney does not see this partnership ending anytime soon.

“It’s great coaches and it’s great kids and it’s a great community supporting them along the way,” Dabney said. “When you see what they put on the field, it looks like magic, it looks like it’s just supernatural, but really, it’s about coaches working hard and kids working hard and the community putting the full force of their support behind all of them. And boy, howdy.”

Baseball Is Fun!

In a town like Irmo, baseball is tradition. The community rallies behind its clubs and in September it hosted a town celebration for the four teams that made Little League World Series appearances.

“Success is when I come down here (to Friarsgate), am I seeing a bunch of smiling faces?” Jensen said. “Are siblings who you see at other sports maybe getting dragged by the hand out of the car because their brother or sister is playing? Versus, when they get out of the car here, and they’re running to see their friends. That, to me, is success.”

Sunflower seeds coat the ground from underneath the bleachers where parents keep a close eye on the game. Siblings and other kids are running around, even tossing rocks in the air and trying to hit them with sticks while baseball is played all around them.

“You have so many people come out that are not even having to be here that night but are coming just because it’s so much fun,” Jensen said.

In the rare moments when not all of the Friarsgate fields are occupied, the lights remain on.

Kids often just play sandlot ball on the fields, nothing serious, just fun. Friends are made during pick-up games of catch or impromptu hitting practice.

“I’m sure this happens at lots of Little Leagues, I’m not saying it doesn’t, but that’s the kind of thing that makes it special,” Bogan said mid-interview, when he noticed a group of kids randomly playing together. “I don’t even know how well (they know each other) but they’re out there playing and they’re just goofing off.

“It’s just a fever about playing baseball.”

Joe, the slugger/pitching star for Irmo, certainly has that fever. After coming back from Williamsport, the first thing he did was pick up a bat and started swinging in the back yard.

“If we were the ones pushing him, I feel like it wouldn’t be right, but he wants to do it,” said his father, Jason Giulietti.

Members of last year’s All-Star teams are still deciding if they will return to Irmo Little League or not. The divisions they compete in are changing as the kids get older. But no one wants to think about next year yet — the accomplishment of making it to a Little League World Series is still sinking in.

“Imagine having a great Thanksgiving dinner and you’re just stuffed and you’ve had a great experience, you wouldn’t trade it for anything and then people say ‘Well what are you going to do for breakfast tomorrow?’ Like, you’re not ready to think about it,” Bogan said, referring to a conversation he had with his wife about baseball decisions for next spring. “That’s kind of where we’re at. We’re not really ready to think about it.”

But if not Bogan, someone will coach Irmo Little league next year. And kids will certainly be ready to play. And Friarsgate will be ready to greet them.

This year’s Hall of Fame ballot included three former Philadelphia Phillies position players, none of whom received the necessary 319 votes (out of 425 cast) to gain election. Chase Utley fared best with 251 votes (59.1%), while Bobby Abreu got 131 (30.8%), and Jimmy Rollins received 108 (25.4%). As did my colleagues Jay Jaffe and Dan Szymborski, I put checkmarks next to Abreu’s and Utley’s names, but not Rollins’s.

How did other BBWAA voters choose among the Phillies trio? A comprehensive answer isn’t possible — not everyone makes their ballots public — but we do know about the 260 voters whose selections were shared on Ryan Thibodaux’s Ballot Tracker. Here is the breakdown as of yesterday afternoon courtesy of the Tracker’s Anthony Calamis:

66 voted for none of the three.
25 had all three.
52 had only Utley.
9 had only Abreu.
3 had only Rollins.
63 had Utley and Abreu, but not Rollins.
42 had Utley and Rollins, but not Abreu.

As for the players’ relative merit, that is in the eye of the beholder. Reasonable arguments, both for and against, can be made for all three former Phillies by prioritizing specific statistics and accolades — or even reputations (none of Abreu, Rollins, or Utley have been tainted by scandal). Read the rest of this entry »

At this time last week, the Mets were celebrating their signing of Bo Bichette. Up until that point, though, their offseason was largely being viewed as a letdown as they assembled an oddly shaped roster. Earlier this winter, they watched as Edwin Díaz spurned them for the Dodgers, let Pete Alonso walk and then signed Jorge Polanco to play first base, and missed out on Kyle Tucker. Sure, they upgraded at second base with the Marcus Semien trade, but doing so required them to part with Brandon Nimmo, who was coming off a year in which he hit a career-high 25 home runs and posted 3.0 WAR. They decided to replace that production with 23-year-old Top 100 prospect Carson Benge, who had a 53 wRC+ in 103 Triple-A plate appearances last season, as the big spoon of a platoon in left field. They also reinforced their bullpen with two of the more inconsistent members of the 2025 Yankees’ relief corps, Devin Williams and Luke Weaver. These weren’t bad moves, to be clear. Williams especially is a strong bounce-back candidate; Polanco is a quality player, though his entire experience at first base consists of one defensive plate appearance; and Semien fulfills the team’s desire to get better defensively. But they were a bit puzzling given that the Mets’ greatest areas of need were another impact bat, a center fielder, and a frontline starting pitcher.

As it turns out, adding Bichette was just the first in a trio of acquisitions to address those major roster holes. Late Tuesday night, the Mets traded for center fielder Luis Robert Jr., who is coming off two straight seasons of injuries and poor performance but is still a tantalizing talent and just 28 years old. “If you made an outfielder in a lab, he’d look a lot like this,” wrote Ben Clemens about Robert after the trade. Then, on Wednesday, they swung a swap with the Brewers for All-Star right-hander Freddy Peralta to anchor their rotation. They had to give up two of their top prospects to get him, but as Davy Andrews noted in his column on the trade, “the Mets are trying to win this season, and now that he’s not in Milwaukee, David Stearns has the luxury of leaving tomorrow’s problems for tomorrow.”

We won’t be answering any questions about the Mets or any of the other big recent transactions, such as Cody Bellinger’s re-signing with the Yankees or the Rangers’ trade for MacKenzie Gore, but we will be talking about the other big baseball topic of the week: the Hall of Fame. We’ll also discuss the best left-on-left hitters of all time, the aesthetic potential of the Colorado Rockies, and what to expect from Foster Griffin with the Nationals. 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 »

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 ultimate team is the St. Louis Cardinals.

Batters

If you looked up “.500 team” in the dictionary, you’d find, well, nothing. THAT’S NOT HOW DICTIONARIES WORK. But if they did have extensive listings of colloquialisms and an editor obsessed with baseball, you might see the 2025 Cardinals. Despite not falling behind by double digits in the NL Central race until late in the season, the Cardinals certainly never felt like they were ever realistically in any playoff race. At the same time, they were also never enough of a doormat team to be interesting out of ineptitude. The Cards spent the season basically playing out the string, in baseball limbo while fans waited out the swan song year of executive vice-president John Mozeliak, with most of the interest surrounding when/if various veterans would be traded.

While roughly a .500-looking team has some wild card upside, St. Louis has the look of a team with an incredibly low ceiling in the short term, like on the level of that room near the start of Willy Wonka’s factory tour. Only Masyn Winn is a high threat to put up a 4-WAR season, and he’s already at that level, not someone who can break out to that level. But except for right field, since ZiPS has long since thrown in the towel on Jordan Walker, the Cardinals also aren’t bad anywhere in their lineup, either. Brendan Donovan is extremely versatile, but he could be traded sometime during the season, if not before then, and players like Nolan Gorman and JJ Wetherholt can also collect plate appearances playing a variety of positions. Wetherholt’s first full professional season was a dynamite one, and he gets a strong projection entering his first year in the big leagues. ZiPS at least sees him as an upgrade on the departed Nolan Arenado in 2026.

ZiPS thinks Lars Nootbaar is still young enough to bounce back from a real down season in 2025. When that may happen, though, is an open question. Last fall, he had surgery to shave down his heels to remedy his Haglund’s deformities, and reading the first half of this sentence makes me wonder if my brain has actually finally lost its last connection with reality. Nootbaar’s lack of ability to do much against lefties limits his upside, but like most of the rest of the team, he’ll be… fine. Also in that wide range of adequacy is Victor Scott II, who plays defense well enough these days to carry his abysmal offense, and Alec Burleson at first, who needs a lefty-crushing platoon partner, though he did improve some against southpaws last season. The Cardinals’ catching situation could be really interesting, depending on when and if Iván Herrera gets back to playing catcher. Even if he doesn’t, he’s shown he’s a good enough player to have value as a DH, and Pedro Pagés hits just enough that he’s not a problem starting behind the plate.

Luckily, the mid- and long-term outlooks for St. Louis are sunnier. Wetherholt has already been mentioned, but ZiPS thinks both Jimmy Crooks and Leonardo Bernal could hold their own as major league catchers. Joshua Baez has a strong long-term ZiPS projection, and the computer sees him as someone who could (and should) replace Walker if/when the former top prospect doesn’t come around.

Pitchers

As with the starting lineup, the Cards look like they’re going to have a very deep rotation, but one that’s almost mindblowingly average. Michael McGreevy has the best projected ERA of the starters, which ought to tell you a lot about the state of the rotation. If you believe ZiPS, St. Louis could field about three major league rotations of starting pitchers with an ERA+ somewhere in the 90s. So there’s not a lot of difference between the guys we have as getting the bulk of the innings on the depth chart (Matthew Liberatore, Andre Pallante, Dustin May, Kyle Leahy, Richard Fitts), and the guys who aren’t (Quinn Mathews, Tink Hence, Hunter Dobbins, Ixan Henderson, Tekoah Roby if not for the Tommy John surgery). In other words, this group probably won’t crack the top 10 in starting pitcher WAR, but there are enough spares that it likely won’t be an embarrassment, either.

While that’s not great for the team’s chances to contend in 2026, that does suggest a path to long-term benefits. The deep stable of no. 3 and no. 4 starters is decidedly on the young side, all in their 20s, and at least some of them ought to develop into something better. Mathews is probably the best candidate to do so, as is Hence, even though there’s a reasonable chance that the latter pitches out of the bullpen in the short term. Liam Doyle didn’t get an official projection here because of his lack of professional experience, but if I instruct ZiPS to use his college translations, he has a very good long-term outlook, too.

ZiPS projects the bullpen as below average, but not in dumpster-fire territory. The computer only really likes three relievers, JoJo Romero, Matt Svanson, and Gordon Graceffo, and a fourth if you believe the Cards will use Hence in relief in 2026. Outside of that quartet, there are a lot of guys with projected ERAs just above four in relief, firmly in C- territory. It’s probably not quite this bad, as the multitude of starting pitching options means the pen will get some reinforcements if the top starters are healthy, so someone like Leahy could end up here after all. In any case, this is a middling bullpen, one that probably won’t approach the production of last year’s unit, which had the ninth-best relief WAR in baseball.

All told, ZiPS sees St. Louis as, you guessed it, about a .500 team.

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.

When the market is hot, it seems like it’ll never cool down. Forget the fact that we’re late into free agency and yet too early in the year for contract extensions. The last few marquee free agents to sign are starting to do so – hi, Cody – and that seems to have opened the floodgates for a series of trades. You’ve heard about all the noise the Mets have gotten up to, no doubt. They aren’t the only ones. The Rangers have jumped in on the action in a big way. On Thursday, they acquired MacKenzie Gore from the Nationals in exchange for prospects Gavin Fien, Devin Fitz-Gerald, Alejandro Rosario, Abimelec Ortiz, and Yeremy Cabrera, as Jon Heyman of the New York Post first reported.

In some ways, this trade has been a long time coming. Gore has been on the trade block for most of his major league career. First, he got sent from San Diego to Washington in the first Juan Soto trade. Almost immediately upon his arrival in the nation’s capital, however, he turned into a trade chip. The Nats were pretty obviously far away from competing, and Gore is the kind of arm that lots of teams dream about placing at the top of their rotation.

By 2024, Gore’s third year in the big leagues, the trade rumors were at full volume. Gore exploded out of the gate, with 98 strikeouts over 80 innings in his first 15 starts. He was a deadline target for many teams – but he slumped hard down the stretch, with a 4.48 ERA and 4.16 FIP the rest of the way, and no trade ever came to fruition. The Nats looked around that winter, didn’t move him, and then again held on after Gore came out of the gates hot, making his first All-Star appearance on the back of a 3.02 ERA (2.96 FIP) in the first half. He stayed put at the deadline – and once again slumped hard down the stretch.

That brings us to the present. Trading Gore always made sense, and the new Nationals front office finally did it. He still has two years of team control remaining, and the price for controllable starters has never been higher. His service time status lines up very well with the situation in Arlington. The Rangers have a roster that is built to contend now. Their lineup has five different hitters in their 30s (baseball-age wise, Jake Burger doesn’t celebrate his 30th until April), and only two who are 25 or younger. The rotation is led by Jacob deGrom and Nathan Eovaldi, two heroes of the 2010s who are in the twilight of their respective careers. Read the rest of this entry »

This one may be a little too one the nose. On Wednesday evening, the Brewers and Mets agreed to a trade that sent Freddy Peralta and Tobias Myers to the Mets in exchange for two top 100 prospects, Jett Williams and Brandon Sproat. That’s right, the Brewers got cheaper and younger by selling their best pitcher for prospects, the Mets flexed their financial muscle, and president of baseball operations David Stearns acquired Freddy Peralta. Welcome to every single day.

Peralta may not be your idea of a surefire ace, but he was the unquestioned leader of the Brewers rotation, their Game 1 starter in the playoffs for each of the past two years. As salary dumps go, this one is particularly depressing. Peralta is due just $8 million in his walk year, a hair more than the Angels will be paying Anthony Rendon to clear out of Anaheim as soon as possible, if you please. For Myers and the wildly underpaid Peralta, the Mets surrendered the prospects who ranked 31st and 63rd overall in our Top 100 update back in July. The Brewers did what they do, avoiding expenditures of any kind, finding young players, and trusting that they can keep creating aces out of whole cloth. Meanwhile, the Mets have increased their CBT tax hit from preposterously large to ludicrously large in order to reinforce a rotation that still ranks just 15th on our Depth Charts.

Brendan Gawlowski wrote about Sproat and Williams in a separate article, so our focus here is on the major league side of things, and we’ll start with the headliner. In February 2020, right before the world started exploding, Peralta signed a five-year, $15.5 million extension with two club options that could push the total to $30 million. He was, at that point, a 23-year-old with a career 4.79 ERA and 3.96 FIP and more relief appearances than starts. “We are happy to announce that we have reached a multi-year extension with Freddy that can keep him in a Brewers uniform for the better part of this decade,” said Stearns, then Milwaukee’s president of baseball operations. That prediction came true by the slimmest of margins.

Peralta pitched in relief in 2020, running a 3.99 ERA and an encouraging 2.41 FIP. He broke out in 2021. Over the past five seasons, Peralta has put up 14.8 WAR and gone 54-34 with a 3.30 ERA and 3.65 FIP. Despite dealing with shoulder injuries earlier in his career, he’s pitched at least 165 innings in each of the last three seasons. He anchored the rotation in 2024 when Corbin Burnes got traded and Brandon Woodruff got hurt. By my count, the Brewers extracted roughly two-thirds of a win for each million they paid Peralta. At that rate for their entire roster, the Dodgers would expect to win 208 games this season.

Peralta’s $8 million salary was the fourth-highest on the Brewers, but it will now slot in as the 14th-highest on the Mets. The galling part isn’t just that the Brewers couldn’t swallow the $8 million this year. Trading him means there wasn’t even a thought that they might be able to extend him, or at least that they might be able use a really good pitcher in 2026 and then just deal with losing him in 2027. After all, this is a team that just finished with the best record in baseball and made it to the NLCS. No matter. Milwaukee is taking the cash and the prospects and betting that Woodruff will finally get healthy (and that his alarming drop in velocity isn’t a portent of bad things to come).

After this year (and just in time for a possible work stoppage), Peralta will be entering his age-31 season and finally have the chance to make what he is worth on the open market, unless the Mets lock him up to another extension. This certainly seems like the kind of trade that ends up that way, especially when you consider that Stearns must like Peralta an awful lot, given that he has now traded for him twice and extended him once. Peralta won’t turn 30 until early June, and he just put up the highest fastball velocity of his career. Sproat was our top-ranked prospect on Eric Longenhagen’s updated Mets list from last June, and Williams came in at sixth. In his piece on the Brewers’ return, Brendan wrote that both players “are near-ready, 50-FV contributors and slot into Milwaukee’s farm system as the club’s third- and fourth-best prospects, respectively. Sproat projects as a mid-rotation starter, while Williams is a middle-of-the-diamond player with an as-yet undetermined defensive home.” That’s a serious haul. Keeping Peralta for a while would certainly take some of the sting out of losing them.

Peralta throws a four-pitch mix: four-seamer, changeup, curveball, and slider. He leads with the four-seamer, throwing it just over half the time to both righties and lefties. As Lance Brozdowski noted in his write-up of the trade, it’s a weird pitch (complimentary). It comes from a low release point not because of a low arm angle, but because he’s only six feet tall and he has a huge stride that brings him a long way down the mound. That huge stride also means huge extension. So even though Peralta’s 94.8 mph velocity put him in just the 57th percentile (among pitchers who threw at least 100 four-seamers in 2025), his 95.2 mph perceived velocity put him in the 74th percentile. A flat fastball with above-average velocity is a great combination, but it’s worth noting that Peralta really needs every bit of his stuff.

He hit the strike zone just 45% of the time in 2025, the lowest rate among all qualified pitchers. He ran the third-lowest mark in 2024 and the 13th lowest in 2023. Over the past five years, among pitchers who have thrown at least 2,000 pitches, his 46% zone rate puts him in the ninth percentile. That’s great if you can get away with it, as pitches over the plate are the ones that get hit. Peralta gives up too many walks, but he runs average chase rates and superlative whiff rates, allowing him to offset all those walks with tons of strikeouts and lots of weak contact. It’s a cocktail that some advanced ERA estimators, like DRA, absolutely abhor, but he’s got a long track record of success with it.

If and when Peralta’s stuff stops fooling batters, though, this trick could fall apart in a hurry. If he can’t induce chases, he’ll have to come into the zone. Once he’s in the zone, he’s probably going to allow more hard contact, and if he’s not inducing chases, he’s probably not going to induce as many whiffs either. That’s not to say that he couldn’t learn a new approach, and the good news is that this potentially swift decline doesn’t seem imminent. As you know, his four-seamer averaged 94.8 mph in 2025 (and played even faster), but his fastball velocity has actually been trending up over the past few seasons. It performed well even in 2022, when it averaged just 92.9 mph. That’s a reassuringly large margin for error. On the other hand, the inefficiency of his approach means that he throws tons of pitches; 8,991 over the past three years, to be exact. That’s the fifth most in the game, and it’s fair to wonder whether he might one day, you know, get tired.

Peralta halved his slider usage in 2025, throwing it just under 10% of the time. He didn’t really throw it to lefties at all, and against righties, he threw all three of his non-fastballs roughly 16% of the time.

Brozdowski posited that Peralta lost feel for his slider, noting its inconsistent amount of horizontal break. It has shifted so much that in some years, some pitch classifications split it up into a slider and a sweeper. Regardless, Stuff+ and StuffPro both regard the pitch as Peralta’s best, and Brozdowski hypothesized that the Mets will try to help him figure it out and return it to its place of prominence. Even if he doesn’t find another gear, he still slides in as the top pitcher in a Mets rotation that completely fell apart in the second half in 2025, and projects as average in 2026. That’s not to say it’s without upside.

The Mets have several starters whose names any baseball fan will know. It starts with Nolan McLean and Jonah Tong, who made their debuts in 2025. McLean looks ready to contribute right away in 2026. Kodai Senga has a career 3.00 ERA and 3.82 FIP in MLB. After a shoulder capsule strain and a calf strain cost him nearly the entire 2024 season, his velocity dropped and his strikeout rate cratered last year, when he also dealt with a hamstring strain. As a result, the projections peg him for an ERA that’s dangerously close to 4.00. But if he finds his old form, he’s a star.

In his first season as a starter, Clay Holmes posted a solid 3.53 ERA, but his 4.11 FIP told a different tale, and the peripherals were scary. The velocity of his sinker, his most-used pitch, fell by 2.9 mph as he transitioned from high-leverage reliever to starter. His strikeout rate, which had averaged nearly 25% to that point in his career, dropped to 18%. Holmes is entering his age-33 season, and it’s hard to know how much improvement to expect from him with one year of starting experience under his belt.

Despite underperforming his peripherals in a major way in 2024, David Peterson seems solid as ever, and he’ll make $100,000 more than Peralta in his final year of arbitration. An oblique strain blew up Sean Manaea’s 2025 season, limiting him to 12 ugly starts, but he’s just one year removed from a 2024 season in which he earned a Cy Young vote. That’s six names and nearly as many question marks, but this rotation certainly isn’t devoid of talent. It’s not hard to envision this staff being good, and it’s not hard to envision it being quite bad. If nothing else, Peralta adds some much-needed stability.

Tobias Myers is 27, and across his two big league seasons, he has made 31 starts and 18 relief appearances, putting up a 3.55 ERA and 3.92 FIP. An early-season oblique strain cost Myers some time in 2025, and he got sent down after a rough start. However, he came back up in a relief role in July, and over the last three months of the season, he posted a 2.64 ERA and 3.49 FIP. With a 93.5 mph fastball, his stuff grades out as roughly average, and he doesn’t strike out many batters. He also had the odd distinction of tying for the splitter that had the most induced vertical rise in baseball at 10.5 inches.

Myers throws six pitches: a four-seamer, cutter, slider, splitter, changeup, and curveball. When you look at his extremely steep 61-degree arm angle and the huge rise on his four-seamer, you start to wonder why he doesn’t embrace this North-South profile and throw his curveball much more often. He was blocked in Milwaukee, and if all goes to plan, he’s likely to be blocked in New York too, and maybe he’s shown all that he has to offer. Still, though it might not be the smartest thing in the world to assume that some other team is going to do a better job of developing a pitcher than the Brewers, it’s fair to say that Myers doesn’t seem like a finished product.

The Mets spent the beginning of the offseason upgrading their bullpen and replacing Pete Alonso. Over the past several days, they’ve reminded everyone just how much of a juggernaut they really are. What’s $8 million (and the resultant $8.8 million luxury tax hit) to a team that just snatched Bo Bichette away from the Phillies for (in theory) three years and $126 million? It’s entirely possible that the Brewers will turn Sproat into their latest ace, and that in a year or two he’ll start a playoff game against the Mets, just like Peralta did in 2024. But the Mets are trying to win this season, and now that he’s not in Milwaukee, David Stearns has the luxury of leaving tomorrow’s problems for tomorrow.

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 penultimate team is the New York Mets.

Batters

The Mets are a bit like an intellectual character in a 19th Century Russian novel. They’re well-read enough to understand why life just isn’t working, and while they make changes every winter, it always seems to come with the precognition that something will go horribly wrong, and there’s little recourse but to observe their own downfall. Yankees fandom is more transactional, and depending on how the season turns out, you either cheer the empire or curse Brian Cashman. Rooting for the Mets is existential; you go into every season with hope, but an unquenchable feeling that something will go horribly or maybe even comically wrong. Meaning as a Mets fan does not come from celebrating the team’s achievements, but the act of enduring and returning, year after year, with the knowledge that preparation offers no escape. Mets fans essentially become annotators of doomed worlds.

If every moment of Mets triumph is matched with an equal measure of Mets tragedy, the lineup may be in for some dark times when the worm turns. I actually think I’d rather have Pete Alonso for his deal than Jorge Polanco for his if I were the Mets, but the projections suggest that I might be wrong. Either way, this lineup looks extremely solid as a whole. Starting with two players, Juan Soto and Francisco Lindor make up for a lot of sins. But there aren’t really a lot of sins in the lineup. ZiPS thinks Bo Bichette is more valuable at third base than he was at shortstop, and he certainly has All-Star potential. ZiPS also forecasts decent bounce-back seasons for offseason trade acquisitions Luis Robert Jr. and Marcus Semien. Francisco Alvarez is coming off a near .800 OPS season, and under the new rules encouraging stolen bases, Luis Torrens’ value has increased because of his ability at preventing them, making him more than capable at holding up the lighter end of a catching tandem.

The DH situation isn’t amazing, with Mark Vientos getting the bulk of the plate appearances there, but only a few teams really get a ton of WAR from that spot anyway. Carson Benge certainly has upside, and while it’s not a particularly exciting projection, it’s not a bad forecast for a guy who hasn’t hit Triple-A pitchers yet. Brett Baty showed in 2025 that he can hit well enough to provide solid depth for the Mets. Jett Williams was also good depth in the infield, but he didn’t have a clear path to actual playing time in the majors in 2026 outside of a reserve role, so the Mets sent him to Milwaukee on Wednesday night as part of a trade to the get right-handed pitchers Freddy Peralta and Tobias Myers.

Pitchers

ZiPS expects the Mets’ pitching to be pretty good, giving the staff a bit of a bump from last year’s preseason projections. And that was before the trade for Peralta, who was the Brewers’ the most valuable pitcher. While Peralta’s not really a sub-three ERA guy — ZiPS thinks he’s legitimate a low-BABIP pitcher, but .243 is damned hard to maintain — he’s still an excellent pitcher who is a huge addition to New York’s rotation. Clay Holmes isn’t an ace, and he bled a couple strikeouts when he transitioned from the bullpen to the rotation, but his 2025 also demonstrates that his conversion to starting wasn’t just a mad scientist’s latest crazy plan. Nolan McLean looks like a much stronger bet going into 2026 than he did at this time last year, and while Jonah Tong didn’t have instant success in the majors, he also greatly boosted his stock, though we may not see a lot of it in the majors in 2026 unless the team is hit by injuries. Last year, David Peterson didn’t match his 2.90 ERA from 2024, but that never should have been the expectation anyway, and he’s a fairly dependable no. 2 starter type. Kodai Senga’s return went generally well, aside from nobody checking how the ghost fork graphic at the stadium would interact with a strikeout tally.

Sean Manaea ought to get back to effectively eating innings in 2026, and though he’s certainly not the headliner, the acquired Myers is a reasonable option to have in reserve. ZiPS is less excited once we get past Myers, to guys like Christian Scott and Cooper Criswell. But on the plus side, ZiPS thinks there’s a real chance that Jonathan Pintaro’s command will improve just enough for him to have a breakout in 2026.

ZiPS views the Mets as having an above-average bullpen, but one that’s below baseball’s elite. Maybe it’s just cognitive dissonance on my part, but I still have some worries about Devin Williams despite all the objective data suggesting he’s a great bounce-back candidate. And he is, but 2025 will still be in the back of my mind plus, you know, the Mets. Luke Weaver is a good bullpen no. 2 and fallback closer option, and A.J. Minter was at his Mintest last season. Brooks Raley gets a strong projection as well, and ZiPS is unaware of my extreme bias in favor of side-armers; Raley is more low three-quarters, but he’s at least side-arm adjacent. Criswell gets a significantly better projection as a reliever than as a starter. My silicon counterpart is rather meh on the rest of the bullpen, except for maybe Huascar Brazobán, but it still looks like a highly cromulent unit.

Despite last season’s collapse, ZiPS projects the Mets as a highly competitive team in the NL East, and one the league shouldn’t dismiss. Now, come September, six Mets could need Tommy John surgery, or maybe Juan Soto and Francisco Lindor are destined to get trapped inside a leatherbound book given to Carlos Mendoza by a library maintenance worker who looks suspiciously like M.R. James. But predictive algorithms and fuzzy clustering methods allow us to peek only so far behind the veil of fate.

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.