It’s Valentine’s Day, and instead of being out on the town with your beloved, you’re sitting on the sofa bingewatching the latest installment of a streaming entertainment institution. Not the new season of Love is Blind; the new season of college baseball.

Baseball is like football and basketball, in that a large part of the appeal of the college game is its abundance. Not every game is worth watching, but with some 300 Division I schools to choose from, there’s a good chance that somewhere out there, there’s a close game in the bottom of the ninth, or a pitchers’ duel between top prospects, or a rivalry matchup with postseason implications. It’s borderline-impossible to remember the names of all 300 teams, much less any useful information about them. So in the interest of efficiency, here are seven schools I’ll have my eye on this season, because I think they’ll have an outsize influence on the shape of this season as a whole.

Oregon State
I’m not going to say this is the most excited I’ve ever been for a college team, ever. But it’s the most excited I’ve been for a college team without multiple contenders for the no. 1 overall pick, like the Kumar Rocker/Jack Leiter Vandy team, or Paul Skenes and Dylan Crews at LSU. Read the rest of this entry »

Now that the dust has settled on teams’ pursuit of Roki Sasaki, and clubs have signed most of their 2025 international prospects, it is time to turn our attention to the international pros whose 2025 seasons will soon get underway and to the tippy top of the 2026 international amateur class. All of my top 2025 international prospects have now signed. Twins outfielder Carlos Taveras was the last from that group to put pen to paper, signing a couple of days ago for a shade over $1 million. The players and rankings from that class have been archived on their own page of The Board, including the couple of Japanese pros who came over from NPB this offseason. Remaining on the active International Players page (which you’re going to want to open in a new tab) are the foreign pros I think readers should know about and follow for this season and beyond, as well as a couple of amateur players from the upcoming 2026 class (more on those lads in a few paragraphs). Read the rest of this entry »

The Seattle Mariners currently have one of baseball’s best farm systems, and its strength differs markedly from that of the big league roster. Pitching-rich at the major league level, it’s Mariners position player prospects who populate the top tier of our rankings. That’s welcome news — at least on paper — for a Seattle team that has recently excelled at keeping runs off the board, but has too often struggled to score.

Justin Toole is front and center in the organization’s quest to graduate productive bats into the parent club’s lineup. Brought on as director of player development following the 2022 season, the 38-year-old Council Bluffs, Iowa native has both the background and the acumen to help make that happen. Prior to coming to Seattle, Toole played seven professional seasons, then served four years as a minor league hitting coach, followed by three as a major league hitting analyst. All of his pre-Mariners experience came with Cleveland.

Toole discussed several of the system’s most promising prospects prior to heading to Arizona for the start of spring training.

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David Laurila: What is the current strength of the system?

Justin Toole: “From a player development standpoint, I think the strength is the individuality with how we handle our players. When we get people into our system, we figure out their strengths, we figure out their weaknesses, we help them understand their identity. We work with our players to get a feel for where they think they are, and where they want to go.

“Our group has done an unbelievable job of creating good player plans that are clear, that are are easy to follow. They’re simple. I think that’s kind of been the strength of our player development group. Of course, any good player development group is going to be good because of the scouting group. They bring in good players, players that fit what we want to do, and who we want to be.” Read the rest of this entry »

Robert Hassell III has encountered bumps in the road, but he’s confident that he’s finally heading in the right direction. Health and a better understanding of his left-handed stroke are two reasons why. Added to the Washington Nationals’ 40-man roster over the offseason, the 2020 first-rounder — he went eighth overall to the San Diego Padres — is also still just 23 years old. While his path to the big leagues has been anything but smooth, Hassell is far from over the hill in terms of prospect status.

Injuries have hampered his progress. Since turning pro, Hassell has incurred a pair of wrist injuries, including a broken hamate bone, and strained a groin muscle. As a result, he’s played in just 428 games over four seasons. Seldom at full strength for an extended period of time, he’s slashed an uninspiring .260/.350/.385 with 36 home runs and a 105 wRC+.

Hassell didn’t want to dwell on his past injury issues when I spoke to him during the Arizona Fall League season, although he did acknowledge that he “needs to be healthy and on the field” in order to allow his true talent to play. And he definitely has talent. While power has never been part of his profile, Hassell’s combination of bat-to-ball skills, speed, and outfield defense helped make him a primary piece in the multi-player trade that sent Juan Soto from Washington to San Diego in August 2022.

The conversation I had with Hassell in Arizona centered on his development as a hitter — something he views as a work-in-progress in need of nuance, not one that requires an overhaul. Read the rest of this entry »

By all reasonable accounts, the 2024 Kansas City Royals had a successful season. Fortune usually frowns upon a 100-loss team that makes a bunch of low-key free agent signings, but that was not the case for the Royals. The veterans starters they added, Seth Lugo and Michael Wacha, joined Cole Ragans to make up one of the best top-of-the-rotation trios in the majors, and Bobby Witt Jr. ascended from promising young star to MVP candidate. They made some smart deadline moves to bolster their bullpen, and they benefitted from some pleasant surprises along the way. Thanks to all of these things, the Royals won 30 more games in 2024 than they did the year before, and as a result, they made the playoffs for the first time since they won the 2015 World Series. While there was no improbable dash to the World Series this time, the Royals did at least eliminate the Baltimore Orioles, and although they fell to the Yankees in the ALDS, all four games were close. Moral victories may not count for much in professional sports, but Kansas City fans ought to be delighted with what this team accomplished last season.

However, successful doesn’t mean perfect, and the Royals did have some significant flaws. The most glaring one was a team offense that was full of holes. The Royals scored enough runs to support their excellent pitching, enough to rank a healthy sixth in the American League in runs per game (4.54), but it was an extremely unbalanced effort. Witt carried more than his fair share of the overall load, with his 10.4 WAR accounting for more than half of the total 20 WAR Kansas City got from its position players. From three of the four most offense-heavy positions, first base, the outfield corners, and designated hitter, the Royals received an embarrassing lack of production. First base was fine, if unspectacular, manned by Vinnie Pasquantino and Salvador Perez, but the outfield corners combined for an OPS south of .650 and a brutal -2.5 WAR, and Kansas City DHs combined for a 77 wRC+, the fourth-worst production in the majors from that position. With Witt’s season and a bare level of competence from these three positions, Kansas City’s offense should’ve been one of the top three or four in the AL. Instead, what the Royals got from the two corner outfield spots and DH was — and I’ll put it generously — below a bare level of competence. Read the rest of this entry »

Pete Alonso is going back to the Mets. It always felt like the most likely outcome, and to be honest, it would’ve been super weird to see him in any other uniform. Alonso has never been the best player on the Mets, but he does the coolest and most valuable thing you can do on a baseball diamond — hit home runs — with great frequency. That, and an affable attitude that’s endeared him to the fans, has made him an institution in Queens.

Unfortunately, there was something of a disagreement over what all those contributions were worth. Alonso returns to his team of origin on a front-loaded two-year, $54 million contract that features an opt-out. If Alonso does what he’s done his whole career, he can test free agency again next winter, having pocketed $30 million. That’s a handsome one-year salary for any player, but far, far short of Alonso’s expectations. Read the rest of this entry »

I went to the Pirates’ RosterResource page this morning and thought the following thought: “Man, is Isiah Kiner-Falefa really going to lead off for this team? God, that’s depressing.” Not that I have anything against IKF; it’s just symptomatic of a Pirates team that seems built to do little more than participate in the coming season.

The Pirates being an afterthought is nothing new; on the contrary, it’s been the default state of affairs for most of the past 45 years. But recent developments have made this a particularly frustrating time for Pirates fans.

At the risk of oversimplifying things, there are two kinds of good players: Players you can get and players you have to have drop out of the sky for you. Like Willy Adames is a really good player, and worth the monster contract the Giants just gave him. But if he’d signed elsewhere, the Giants could’ve found another player like him.

Not so Paul Skenes. Read the rest of this entry »

Today, we released the first run of our playoff odds for the 2025 season. With both the ZiPS and Steamer projections loaded in and playing time projections added to the mix, the FanGraphs supercomputer (okay, fine, our cloud services account) can get cranking and spit out some predictions. As is customary, I’ll walk through my first thoughts on them, while later today, Michael Baumann will contribute his own takeaways on the teams most likely to surprise our model. Let’s quickly walk through the process, and then get to the takeaways.

The model itself remains simple. We use those aggregated production and playing time numbers I mentioned earlier to create team-level projections, then use BaseRuns to turn individual outcome projections into scoring and run prevention. That gives us team strength against a neutral opponent. We use those values to simulate the season 20,000 times. The odds are a summary of those simulations as of earlier this morning. That might sound intuitive, but intuition doesn’t always match reality, so let’s go division-by-division to look at how our model got there and what I think of it. Read the rest of this entry »

George Lombard Jr. is a promising prospect with a first-round pedigree. Drafted 26th overall in 2023 out of Gulliver Preparatory School in Pinecrest, Florida, the right-handed-hitting shortstop is also the son of former big league outfielder (and current Detroit Tigers bench coach) George Lombard. Assigned a 45 FV by lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen, the athletically gifted youngster is no. 4 on our recently released New York Yankees Top Prospects list.

The 19-year-old’s first full professional season was a mixed bag statistically. Over 497 plate appearances between Low-A Tampa and High-A Hudson Valley, Lombard logged a .231/.338/.334 slash line, a 99 wRC+, and 32 extra-base hits, five of which left the yard. Taking advantage of his plus wheels, he swiped 39 bases in 47 attempts.

Lombard discussed his game late in the 2024 season.

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David Laurila: I’ve seen you listed at 6-foot-2, 190 pounds. How accurate is that, and where do you see yourself going forward?

George Lombard Jr: “I’m 6-foot-3 and around 205 pounds. I’ll put on some more weight in the next few years, and I think our goal will end up being around 215, maybe 220. We believe that I can still be fast as I put on weight, so we’re going to continue to do that. A lot of it will just come with physically maturing over time, and putting in the work in the weight room.” Read the rest of this entry »

I worry that Jackson Merrill’s incredible rookie season has been appropriately recognized but underexamined. For any rookie to put up 5.3 WAR and finish in the top 10 in MVP voting is incredible; for a kid who was 20 years old on Opening Day and learning to play center field on the job, it’s extraordinary.

As impressive as that one-line summary is, Paul Skenes (and to a lesser extent Jackson Chourio) sucked up a lot of the shine that would have accompanied such a performance in most seasons. Shine can be hard to come by for a player on a West Coast non-Dodgers team that’s already got plenty of stars to promote.

So I found myself, in the dead of winter, contemplating what comes after the abstract for Merrill. Specifically, whether a certain nit is worth picking. Read the rest of this entry »