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 »

The last few years, I’ve had a pre-Opening Day tradition of making five bold predictions about the upcoming season. It’s a good way to talk through some of the players and teams where my opinions are different from the crowd. But bold predictions are a boom industry – the entire FanGraphs staff will be making some tomorrow, and I already drafted 10 of my own on Effectively Wild. So Meg and I came up with a great substitute: five big questions about the season. These aren’t the only big questions I have. They aren’t even necessarily the biggest questions in baseball. But they’re five storylines that I think are unresolved, and their answers will have a lot to say about how the 2025 season goes.

1. Are the Rays still the Rays?
The Rays have been doing the same player-swapping roster construction trick for more than a decade now. They operate on a shoestring budget, they consistently find ways to trade their surplus for great value, and their pitching development is some of the best in the game. They’re constantly churning out top prospects, and even after graduating Junior Caminero, they boast one of the best farm systems in baseball.

That prospect pipeline keeps on delivering, but in 2024, the wins didn’t follow. The team finished below .500 for the first time since 2017, and got outscored by 59 runs in the process. The Rays didn’t do much this winter – trading Jeffrey Springs, and signing Danny Jansen and Ha-Seong Kim were their big moves. We’re projecting them to finish last in the AL East – albeit still above .500. What happened to the 90-win perpetual juggernaut? Read the rest of this entry »

At first glance, this might seem like a list of the best pitchers in baseball rather than a list of the best rotations. That’s the thing I noticed most when writing this article; nine of the top 10 pitchers in the game according to our projections can be found on these 15 teams. It’s not that good pitchers inherently make for good pitching staffs, though that’s certainly part of it. It’s more that the concentration of top pitchers on top teams reflects a strategic optimization of limited resources.

A good pitcher on a bad team is just bad business in today’s game. Pitchers are highly sought after in trade, which makes them worth their weight in prospects, so to speak. They’re also fragile – one sore elbow, and bam, 18 months go down the drain. That gives teams with good pitchers but bad playoff chances a clear incentive: maximize the value of your top pitcher by trading them before they get injured. And rebuilding teams almost never sign top pitchers in free agency; it’s safer to anchor yourself around a hitter. Can you draft and keep one of these top-tier arms? Absolutely, and you’ll see some of those on this list, but the prevailing trend is that of established aces migrating towards contending teams. Read the rest of this entry »

I always get excited to take my first look at my half of the starting pitcher Positional Power Rankings. I come in with preconceived notions of each rotation, usually with a solid handle on the top eight to 10 options for every team, as I’m no doubt buried in multiple fantasy drafts when Meg sends everything out. And yet I never cease to be amazed. I’m not saying the projections are infallible, but seeing the numbers laid out versus my mental snapshot of each team is sobering. There are always teams I’m surprised to see in my section, and rankings that absolutely shock me at first blush. Read the rest of this entry »

During the last week of spring training, after rosters have been more or less settled, some teams will find they have more pitchers than they can use at the moment. There’s a no. 6 starter who’s pitched well enough to earn a job, but there’s no room for him on the roster and he’s out of options. Good news: Another team needs a pitcher and is willing to trade a minor league depth infielder, say, to jump the waiver line and trade for yours.

I find this process oddly heartwarming, because everyone benefits: Both teams get a more balanced roster, and the pitcher in question gets a spot on a major league roster instead of getting DFA’d. Professional baseball is usually a zero-sum competition, but that doesn’t mean you can’t help your friends out. Read the rest of this entry »

There are some positions for which a cleaner, wider gap exists between the top teams and the bottom, where we can more definitively say that some teams are better than others. For instance, the combination of talent and depth that the Dodgers, Phillies, and Braves have in their starting rotations separates their projections from the rest of baseball in a meaningful way. Relief pitching is not one of these positions. As you digest the forecasts and player details below, make sure to note how thin the margins tend to be from one team to the next. Also know that relief inning sample sizes are small enough that this is where WAR is the least good at properly calibrating impact and value, a dynamic heightened in the playoffs when the remaining bullpens are all turbocharged by the way the postseason schedule allows for rest, or for an elite starter to work an inning on his bullpen day. Things like coherent managerial usage, roster management, and good or bad health luck tend to play a huge role in the way bullpens perform throughout a season, and those are factors we can’t totally control for here. Read the rest of this entry »

After wrapping up our position player rankings last week, we turn our attention to the league’s pitchers, starting with the bullpens in the bottom half of the reliever rankings.

It’s impossible to project relievers. The pitchers themselves are random enough, sprouting new pitches or gaining five ticks on their fastball with no prior warning. Pitchers also tend to get injured, especially the ones who go max effort on every pitch. And then there’s the randomness of 60-inning samples, where a fly ball sneaking just past the glove of a leaping outfielder can catapult an ERA from respectable to disastrous. This is all to say that the task of forecasting a bullpen’s performance over the course of a single year is destined to fail.

So I’ll take this introduction as an opportunity to encourage you to not take the order of these rankings too seriously. Less than one-tenth of a win separates some of these teams. There is perhaps just one truly terrible bullpen in the mix; every other team essentially has a mix of proven shutdown guys, solid middle-inning depth, and intriguing wild cards. With that said: To the rankings! Read the rest of this entry »