Starting rotations have five slots.

Yes, every once in a while a team will pretend to have four or six slots, but that team must inevitably confront the truth: Starting rotations have five slots. It’s a matter of policy, preference, and just plain practicality, Mariners general manager Justin Hollander said last year in an interview with Lookout Landing.

“The unfortunate thing about the roster rules is you only get 26 spots, and you only get 13 pitchers. And when you add a sixth starter, you take away a reliever. When you add a sixth starter, sometimes your starters pitch every six days, sometimes they pitch every eight or nine days. Starting pitchers are fussy. They don’t like that. They like to stay on a regular schedule. They like to know when they’re pitching.”

I’ve been thinking about the fixed-nature of rotations lately after reading this discussion between Eno Saris and Jen McCaffrey in The Athletic. They compare the rotations in Detroit and Boston by assigning each pitcher a label (one, two, three, four, five), sizing them up horizontally and vertically, and confronting the trade-offs in quality and depth. This reflects how many of us compare rotations in the abstract, and I wanted to see if this could be applied more broadly. Read the rest of this entry »

The introduction to last year’s center field rankings highlighted a changing of the guard at the position, initiated by Mike Trout’s departure from the top of the heap in 2024 and continuing with Aaron Judge vacating the no. 2 spot in the rankings in 2025. This year, Trout might be headed back to center field (👀👀👀), but this isn’t a return of the old guard. He no longer sits atop the hierarchy (spoiler alert: the Angels check in at 23rd); the transition is complete.

But the new guard isn’t just new; they’re also young. Which, duh. That’s how lifecycles work. Something gets old or ineffective, and we replace it with a newer, younger model. Perhaps this changing of the guard is enough to explain the simultaneous youth movement happening at the position. Because this is a very young crop of center fielders. This year, the average age of the player at the top of each team’s depth chart is 26.9. Is this data point merely a momentary dip before the average age of center fielders begins its gradual ascent once more? Or is it part of a larger trend? Has center field become a young person’s position? Is the middle pasture strictly playable by folks speedmaxxing and rangemogging their opponents? Will all center fielders soon be wearing JNCOs in their tunnel fits and dressing their Labubus in Gucci?

As it turns out, yes. Read the rest of this entry »

There was a fair amount of movement on this year’s left field list. Most notably, the New York Mets have jumped from ninth to first, and the Boston Red Sox from 13th to second, while the Miami Marlins are now 13th after being second from the bottom a year ago. Those are some of the climbers. Most notable among the teams going in the other direction are the Cleveland Guardians, who plummeted from third to 20th. Position switches play a role in many (but not all) of these season-to-season changes. Moreover, a recent switch actually resulted in a meaningful change to a team’s 2026 ranking. Where they’d have slotted a week ago is different from where they ultimately ended up.

Trades and injuries also move the needle on season-to-season rankings, as does age. The presence of burgeoning young stars like Roman Anthony and Jackson Chourio often (but not always, as you’ll see below) influence up arrows, while long-in-the-tooth veterans still holding onto their positions can result in down arrows. Ditto breakouts and down seasons, regardless of players’ ages. One year affects the next, although it bears noting that good projection systems are savvy enough not to overreact. Projections aren’t perfect, of course. Players outperform and underperform them every season, which will almost assuredly be the case again this year. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been doing a lot of looking at depth charts this week. All of us FanGraphs writers have – these positional power rankings don’t write themselves. When you look at the majors through this lens, you’ll naturally do a lot of thinking about floor and ceiling. The Yankees are playing who at third base? The Brewers are getting how much WAR by avoiding weak spots? The Red Sox have that many outfielders?

I’ve written some team overviews this winter. In them, I make the following claim: “Building a team that outperforms opponents on the strength of its 15th to 26th best players being far superior to their counterparts on other clubs might help in the dog days of August, when everyone’s playing their depth guys and cobbling together a rotation, but that won’t fly in October.” The converse of that claim – that stars matter disproportionately in October – is part and parcel of this depth argument. But is that true?

Some might say that the best time to answer this question is when the playoffs are just around the corner. I’d counter that those people haven’t just spent seven hours staring at a pile of acceptable-but-not-overwhelming third base and starting pitcher options and trying to write something about each one. So in the spirit of doing anything other than looking at power rankings, I decided to test out this assumption. Read the rest of this entry »

Third base is undergoing a generational change at the moment. The late 2010s and early 2020s were dominated by a group of five superstars: Nolan Arenado, Alex Bregman, Matt Chapman, Manny Machado, and José Ramírez. All five are still in the majors, and you’ll see each of them on today’s ranking. But while Ramírez is still the best third baseman in baseball, and while you’ll also find Bregman and Chapman near the top, there’s a new group of stars breaking in at the hot corner. Junior Caminero is only 22. Maikel Garcia is a threat to embark on a decade-long string of defensive awards, and he turned into a great hitter in 2025 to boot. Bo Bichette and Carlos Correa have joined the party from shortstop. Kazuma Okamoto hit NPB pitching so well that he immediately helps Toronto project in our top 10. The top of this list has changed meaningfully in the last few years, and I expect more of that to come.

That said, there’s a shortage of great third base prospects poised for big league action. Colt Emerson is the best prospect with meaningful playing time projected here, and he’s a shortstop playing out of position. There were only five third basemen listed on our preseason Top 100, and two of them (Kevin McGonigle and Sal Stewart) are starting at different positions in the majors this year. Two of the others have ETAs of 2029, with the third set for 2027. In other words, the veterans will probably have a bit more time in the top half of the rankings even as they decline, because Caminero and Garcia aren’t set to be joined by a broad cohort of young stars. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m somehow nearing 50 years of age — I’m a little concerned this number seems to be going up by one every 365 days or so — and the position of shortstop has changed a lot since I got into baseball as a small child. Back then, the attitude was defense is what mattered from shortstops, and anything else a team got from the position was gravy. In 1978, the year I was born, only four primary position shortstops with 300 plate appearances had a wRC+ of at least 100: Roy Smalley III, Dave Concepcion, Robin Yount, and the eternally underrated Toby Harrah. Only Smalley and Harrah even hit the double digits in home runs. In 2025, 25 primary position shortstops had double-digit home run totals and 19 finished with a wRC+ in the triple digits. An average player at the position in 1978 slashed .258/.309/.335, a line that would cause teams of today to look for an upgrade unless their shortstop were Ozzie Smith with the glove.

While there were always scattered shortstops who excelled at the plate, they were generally seen as outliers. But that changed as teams became more and more willing in the 1980s and 90s to let their best athletes stay at shortstop until they conclusively proved they shouldn’t be at the position, and larger players like Cal Ripken Jr. and Alex Rodriguez weren’t simply moved to traditional “big dude” positions. Defense remained important, but offense became a really big deal, as many talented hitters demonstrated that previous generations were too quick to move young sluggers down the defensive spectrum. Shortstops are like quarterbacks now; you either have a star shortstop or you’re biding your time until you find one. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Houston Astros. 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 »

Second base can be a bit of an unglamorous position; what is a second baseman, after all, but a failed shortstop? Indeed, the keystone is light on true superstars but heavy on solid regulars. The difference between third place and 13th, in our projections, is just half a win. A few teams in the bottom half of the ranking are bringing in exciting young players, too, so a low ordinal ranking does not necessarily indicate that the team’s second base situation is a lost cause.

It might please you to learn that second base in 2026 is also a position for interesting players: guys with extreme tool sets, speedsters, glove-only wizards, high-contact/no power dudes. It’s like they put the Statue of Liberty at second to exhort the sport’s most unorthodox hitters to congregate at this position. There’s something for everyone here. Read on, you’ll see. Read the rest of this entry »

Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Bryce Harper, and Freddie Freeman walk into a bar — the same bar, in fact, as the one they walked into last year, and in the same order; the trio and their assorted backups topped these rankings in 2025, just as they do in ’26. But where they towered over the rest of the field last year, with a full win gap between the third-ranked Dodgers and the fourth-ranked Rays, this time it’s only Guerrero who’s separated from the pack. The 0.9-WAR gap between the Blue Jays and Phillies is just 0.1 WAR less than the gap between those Phillies and ninth-ranked Mariners.

It’s not hard to understand what’s happening. Guerrero is 27 years old, and if he didn’t have his best season by the numbers in 2025 — though a half-billion dollar extension and a near-miss of a championship is still a pretty great year — our projections suggest he’ll rebound. Harper, on the other hand, is 33 and Freeman 36, and while they remain championship-caliber players, both are increasingly prone to the aches and pains that can leave a mark on their performances, as explained below.

It’s not just that those older guys are past their peaks — likely future Hall of Famers, but trending down just the same — it’s that an influx of younger talent is pushing the middle of the pack upward. The 23-year-old Nick Kurtz, 27-year-olds Ben Rice and Jonathan Aranda, and 28-year-olds Michael Busch and Josh Naylor all rank among this year’s top dozen; none was the primary first baseman on a team ranked above no. 14 last year. Read the rest of this entry »

When the Royals traded for Isaac Collins in December, I praised the move. I understand that there are limitations to a 5-foot-8 corner outfielder who showed his first signs of major league life at age 27, but the man hit .263/.368/.411 last year, and the Royals — a team traditionally in dire need of live bats — only gave up a middle reliever to get him.

A Royals fan on Bluesky asked me how to feel about that move when it happened, and I answered thusly: “I think it’s a steal, as long as you make your peace with the small but non-trivial possibility that the Brewers turn Angel Zerpa into Josh Hader.” Read the rest of this entry »