These are not good times for the Astros. The team has stumbled to an 8-15 start, and while slow starts themselves are nothing new for Houston, this Astros’ roster has been particularly depleted by injuries. Including All-Stars Hunter Brown, Josh Hader, and Jeremy Peña, they currently have a major league-high 14 players on the injured list. In the grand scheme, one of the few thing going right for the club is the return of Yordan Alvarez, who’s back to being healthy and unstoppable. Limited to just 48 games by injures last year, the 28-year-old slugger has not only played every game, but has hit a major league-high 10 homers.

During Sunday’s game against the Cardinals at Daikin Park, the Astros trailed 4-1 with two outs and nobody on when Alvarez stepped in against lefty JoJo Romero in the eighth inning. In running the count to 2-2, he fouled off three pitches, including a sweeper that was well off the plate. Romero then threw him a changeup that sank below the bottom edge of the zone, and Alvarez went down and got it, hitting a towering solo homer to right field:

The Astros then added two more runs in the inning as Jose Altuve and Isaac Paredes sandwiched singles around a Christian Walker walk and a wild pitch from incoming reliever Riley O’Brien. That tied the game, which went to extra innings, where the Astros couldn’t do enough to counter the three runs the Cardinals scored against reliever Bryan King; they lost 7-5. Read the rest of this entry »

Davey Lopes was my first favorite ballplayer. In retrospect, I’m not sure how my eight-year-old self settled upon Lopes in a star-laden lineup featuring power hitters Dusty Baker, Ron Cey, Steve Garvey, and Reggie Smith, who the year before (1977) had become the first quartet of teammates to homer 30 times apiece in a season. I have a much better grasp of how Bill James helped my teenage self appreciate Lopes for his combination of high on-base and stolen base rates with mid-range power, but James wasn’t communicating those ideas via mass-market paperbacks circa 1978. Perhaps it was Lopes’ position atop the lineup I memorized while learning to decode box scores (my theory) or the Topps baseball card set that began my collection. Maybe it was simply his instantly recognizable, bushy mustache (my friends’ theory), but one way or another, even before later heroes such as Fernando Valenzuela and Jim Bouton, Lopes was my guy.

The news that Lopes passed away on April 8 at age 80 due to Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases — a brutal double bill — reached me while I was traveling in Austria with my own 84-year-old parents and additional family as we tracked down the Vienna addresses of my long-deceased paternal grandparents. I had no shortage of thoughts regarding mortality, and yet the hits kept coming. Lopes wasn’t even the most recent former All-Star-second-baseman-turned-manager to pass away, as Phil Garner, his National League rival and then predecessor in managing the Brewers, died of pancreatic cancer on April 11. So it goes.

Though he didn’t debut until well past his 27th birthday, Lopes spent 16 seasons in the majors (1972-87), the first 10 with the Dodgers, whom he helped to four pennants and a championship while making four All-Star teams, winning a Gold Glove, and becoming team captain. From 1973–81, he manned the keystone in the longest running infield in major league history, along with Garvey at first base, Cey at third, and Bill Russell at shortstop — a unit that formed the foundation of those pennant-winning teams under managers Walter Alston and Tommy Lasorda. “He was the catalyst of the engine. It was 700 horsepower with the four of us, and the equation was his ability to get on base,” Garvey told CBS LA in the wake of Lopes’ death. Read the rest of this entry »

The normal flow of a baseball season inevitably includes injuries. The dog days of summer usually come with a star or two on the shelf. It’s a long year, and roster depth matters more and more as the months advance. But sometimes, injuries don’t occur at predictable intervals. Sometimes it’s April 14 and half your roster is on the IL. Just ask the Astros.

On Monday, Houston placed Tatsuya Imai and Jeremy Peña on the IL. That followed two moves from last Friday, when Cristian Javier and Jake Meyers both hit the IL. Five days before that, staff ace Hunter Brown landed on the IL himself with a shoulder strain that will keep him from throwing for at least two weeks, and likely prevent him from appearing for far longer than that. And that’s just the in-season injuries. Josh Hader, Zach Dezenzo, Bennett Sousa, and Nate Pearson all started the year on the IL. Brandon Walter, Ronel Blanco, and Hayden Wesneski are still working their way back from elbow injuries sustained in 2025. That’s 12 players on the IL if you’re counting at home, and a number of stars among them.

It’s not like every injury matters the same. Pearson has never appeared for the Astros and has a negative career WAR. Dezenzo is a fifth outfielder. The core missing names for Houston are Brown, Imai, Peña, Hader, Javier, and, to a lesser extent, Meyers. If the Astros can’t replace the production from those five, all of whom are key parts of their roster, 2026 will be a long year. So let’s consider how each affects Houston’s prognosis in isolation, and then consider them all in concert.

Peña’s injury is the one the Astros are best-equipped to deal with. Thanks to last season’s Carlos Correa trade and a quiet offseason, Houston came into this year with an infield logjam. Peña, Correa, Isaac Paredes, and Jose Altuve gave the team four good players for only three spots. None could reliably flex to DH because of the presence of Yordan Alvarez. Altuve spent some time in the outfield last year, even before Correa arrived. Read the rest of this entry »

Jacob Misiorowski has a fastball that consistently reaches triple digits, and he augments it with an effective curveball-slider combination. Usage-wise, the 24-year-old Milwaukee Brewers right-hander is throwing his high-octane heater at a 62.3% clip, while his breaking-ball percentages are 16.6 and 17.3 respectively. Given the lethality of those pitches — his xBA is a paltry .168, and his K-rate an MLB-best 41.8% — he has little need for a changeup…

… but there is one in his arsenal. From time to time, he will even show it to a batter. Of the 289 pitches Misiorowski has delivered so far this season, 11 (3.8%) have been changeups. The story behind his only-sporadically-used weapon?

“I’ve had a changeup my whole career,” Misiorowski told me prior to throwing three of them in a 101-pitch start at Fenway Park on Tuesday. “That was one of the first pitches I truly learned. But then as I started throwing harder, I began going away from it, and it obviously got worse and worse the less I threw it. By the time I got drafted [63rd overall in 2022], I basically didn’t have a changeup any more. I had to relearn it, re-figure it out. So, yeah, it’s always been there, but it hasn’t always been there.”

Misiorowski went on to tell me the grip was originally a more conventional four-seam circle, but that he now has his pointer and middle fingers together, and his thumb underneath. He also said that he likes the amount of horizontal he gets on it, which is generally around 18 inches and has been up to 20. When I told him that the movement profile sounds a little like a two-seam sinker, he agreed that it does.

A few more things Misiorowski told me about the pitch are unfortunately lost, due to glitches I’ve recently encountered on my iPhone’s recording app (I mentioned this teeth-gnashing, hopefully-resolved-soon, issue in Monday’s piece on Padres’ broadcaster Mark Grant.) Fortunately, I was able to grab a few minutes with Brewers pitching coach Chris Hook, who made up for the missing words with his own perspective.

How would he describe Misiorowski’s changeup? Read the rest of this entry »

Until this weekend, baseball’s injured list was noticeably bare to start the 2026 season. Then, beginning with Blue Jays catcher Alejandro Kirk on Friday, the stars went down in rapid succession. The Cubs lost two of their top starting pitchers, Cade Horton and Matthew Boyd, in consecutive days. Joining them on the IL are two of the top players in the National League, Mets left fielder Juan Soto and Dodgers shortstop Mookie Betts, and one of the best pitchers in the American League, Astros ace Hunter Brown. Each of those three teams has a share of first place at the moment, making these especially high-leverage injuries. Read the rest of this entry »

Cody Ponce left his first start on a cart with a trainer.

Ponce collapsed in considerable pain Monday after making an awkward attempt to field a grounder in the third inning against the Rockies. He appeared to twist his right knee in a direction it’s not meant to go. He stood and limped to the cart on his own before exiting. Blue Jays’ manager John Schneider said after the game that Ponce will get an MRI.

The injury is an unfortunate setback for Ponce, who was making his first start in the majors since 2021. He was perhaps the most anticipated in a quartet of free agent pitchers who signed out of the KBO or NPB this winter. I’d already planned to write about each of them, leading with Ponce for the reasons he displayed before the injury. And while I don’t want to overreact to one start, I think there are interesting takeaways from each that could inform the shape of their respective seasons to come. 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 »

I’ve now spent nearly a quarter of a century working with baseball projections, and in that time, I’ve always been struck by the certainty with which so many people view them. People are far more certain than they should be that great teams will be great, star players will be stars, and so on. However, one of the things that comes from working with projections for a big chunk of your life is that you develop a painful awareness of how much of the future cannot be known until it actually happens.

As in most seasons, we enter without a general conception of which teams will be the best. We may pretend everyone starts off with a clean slate, but absolutely nobody expects the Rockies to be better than the Dodgers. But even if that particular scenario is extremely unlikely, every one of the top teams has a scenario in which things fall apart. These clubs have a vested interest in protecting against that potential downside, as much as possible, so I thought it would be interesting to look at the doomsday scenario for some of the best teams in baseball.

To get an idea, I did a full seasonal simulation of the ZiPS projected standings, and instead of looking at the standings overall, I looked at the bottom 20% of outcomes to see what we could glean from the results. According to ZiPS, every team except the Dodgers misses the playoffs when it performs no better than its 20th-percentile win total.

Philadelphia Phillies: Rotation Depth

This almost seems counterintuitive given just how good the rotation projections are for the Phillies, but the projections are not enthusiastic about their depth here. And what makes that especially worrisome is that with so much uncertainty around the health of Zack Wheeler and the performance of Aaron Nola, Philadelphia is probably going to need that depth more than it did last year. This time around, the Phillies are missing Ranger Suarez, who signed with the Red Sox during the offseason. Andrew Painter was healthy in 2025, but one cannot ignore that he was rather middling against Triple-A hitting. The outfield looks like a problem, as well, but it generally has been, and ZiPS is a fan of Justin Crawford.

If Philadelphia adds one of the innings-eaters still available in free agency, ZiPS sees the team’s outlook improve, much more than I expected. Just having someone like Lucas Giolito, Tyler Anderson, or even Patrick Corbin around did a lot to alleviate the rotational downside. It may come down to which of these pitchers is open to a swing role or a minor league deal with an opt-out date. And yes, I do think it feels weird to suggest Corbin as an upgrade for a team in 2026.

New York Mets: Right Field

The Mets certainly don’t dominate in either the rotation or bullpen projections, but ZiPS is fairly confident that both of these units will hold up over the course of the season. Despite a solid projection for Carson Benge in right field, the range of outcomes is quite high, and in the simulations where Benge struggles, ZiPS has trouble competently filling in right field. Tyrone Taylor is an underwhelming option, and ZiPS thinks Brett Baty would have a tough time defensively in the outfield. With no particularly interesting outfielders available in free agency, the best solution might simply be making sure Jacob Reimer gets some time in the outfield. New York’s roster just isn’t really set up to get him time at third base, where he probably is most valuable. But he also represents the most tantalizing 2026 upside of any player the Mets have in the minors, so they ought to try and be open to promoting him aggressively, and getting a little weird with it, if need be.

New York Yankees: Injuries

The Yankees’ outcomes are weird, in that their bad seasons were mostly ones in which Aaron Judge, for whatever reason, ended up with fewer than 300 plate appearances, and only occasionally something else. Getting limited innings from Gerrit Cole and Carlos Rodón was already baked into the cake, and ZiPS thinks there are enough fourth-starter types to patch up any rotation holes that might pop up. The problem is, just how do you replace Judge? I’m not sure there’s a scenario where the Yankees can do much to mitigate any risk there, for the simple reality that in a tightly projected division, suddenly losing six wins is likely to drop them out of the AL East divisional race. At the very least, the Yankees should hold off on shopping Spencer Jones for help elsewhere, but it wouldn’t fix a Judge loss.

Baltimore Orioles: Rotation Quality

Baltimore has potential aces in both Trevor Rogers and Kyle Bradish, but that word potential is an unpleasant adjective. Adding Pete Alonso and Taylor Ward really stabilizes the offense, which was a concern last year, but the rotation is an issue. The Orioles finished with a bottom five rotation in the ZiPS simulations more often than all other AL East teams combined. There’s nothing on the farm that helps this, and I think that with the Orioles increasingly pushing their chips in, they ought to be aggressive at taking the opportunity to loot struggling teams of their top pitching, even if the prospect hit would be tremendous. I think there are even scenarios, though not many, in which it might make sense for the O’s to trade either Adley Rutschman, assuming he has a bounce-back season, or Samuel Basallo.

Boston Red Sox: First Base

The good news is that ZiPS sees the Red Sox as the most stable of AL contenders, with the lowest percentage of sub-.500 seasons of any AL team. The rotation isn’t the best in baseball, but it may be the most bulletproof one, and that isn’t even counting on getting lots of innings from pitchers like Payton Tolle and Connelly Early, who would be Plan As in most rotations in baseball. In fact, when the Red Sox had their worst performance, it was almost entirely the offense that fell short, and not necessarily from the position you might expect.

Most people have focused on third base because of the loss of Alex Bregman, but Caleb Durbin is actually a decent option. Plus, if Durbin struggles, Marcelo Mayer could very likely provide what the former isn’t. Where there is real downside risk is at first base. I liked the Willson Contreras acquisition, too, and he’s probably going to be at least solidly average in 2026, but he’s also going to be 34 in May. It’s an age where you look at the long left tails of the outcome distribution for non-elite first basemen, and there’s always a real risk of a very sudden plummet off a cliff. Triston Casas hasn’t played in a game since last May — and won’t even play in any spring training games this year — and he has a real mixed history.

What to do? That’s a lot trickier. Boston obviously isn’t going to replace Contreras before he has that downside year. But this team should be ready for that possibility, and if the surplus of pitching turns out to be real, the Sox will have a position of depth from which to trade.

Chicago Cubs: Rotation Quality

The outlook improved with the addition of Edward Cabrera, but ZiPS still has the Cubs with the weakest rotation of the 10 teams listed here. In the ZiPS simulations, the rotation was largely the source of the Cubs’ worst seasons. There aren’t really any exciting starters left out there in free agency, but I think I’d do what I suspect the Cubs are already thinking of doing: giving Ben Brown’s upside as a starting pitcher more serious consideration. He allowed too many home runs and had a high BABIP on a really good defensive team, but it’s guys like that who tend to come out of nowhere quickly (see Corbin Burnes in 2019). Brown has swing-and-miss stuff, and I think given the potential, I’d rather see him starting at Triple-A than pitching in relief in the majors.

Houston Astros: Outfield Corners

Not counting 2020, for obvious reasons, the 686 runs the Astros scored in 2025 represented their fewest since 2014. A full, healthy season of Yordan Alvarez would be incredibly helpful, but the team’s also not likely to wring another 135 wRC+ out of Jeremy Peña. Not helping matters is that Joey Loperfido and Cam Smith project as one of the weakest corner outfield tandems in the majors in 2026. Smith surprised many, including me, in the early months last year, but an OPS that fell shy of .500 in the second half is highly concerning. There’s a chance that the Astros get little from their outfield corners, which is a problem for a team with a middling offense that just lost ace Framber Valdez in free agency. In some 30% of simulations, the Astros got a sub-90 wRC+ out of their corner outfielders, and in those runs, they had a .475 winning percentage. If there’s a team that should aggressively go after either Jarren Duran or Wilyer Abreu, it’s Houston.

Toronto Blue Jays: Rotation Depth

Even with the loss of Anthony Santander to shoulder surgery, ZiPS still sees the Blue Jays’ rotation as their biggest pain point. There are simply a lot of question marks once you get past Dylan Cease and Kevin Gausman, something I mentioned a bit in Toronto’s ZiPS rundown in January. In a lot of the sims, the team got next to nothing out of any of Cody Ponce, José Berríos, Shane Bieber, and Max Scherzer, whether because of injury, decline, or general performance issues. If Sandy Alcantara looks anywhere near his old self with the Marlins in the early months, I think the Jays ought to be one of his suitors. At the very least, Alcantara would do well with an infield that has Andrés Giménez and Ernie Clement.

Seattle Mariners: Outfield Corners

As with the Astros, ZiPS sees Seattle’s corner outfield spots as having the most downside. Unlike the Astros, ZiPS doesn’t view it as truly a doomsday scenario. After the Red Sox and Dodgers, ZiPS considers the Mariners to be the contender with the least downside. Randy Arozarena’s projection distribution is pretty interesting, with the bottom falling out of him once you get under the 15th-percentile projection or so; while his 20th-percentile OPS+ is a non-disastrous 94, it drops to 70 for the 10th-percentile level. As for Victor Robles, he’s been all over the place in his career, and the Plan Bs in the organization are unimpressive. I think Seattle’s strong enough that it doesn’t necessarily have the same need to be aggressive as Houston does, but this is still a potential point of weakness that could pose an issue.

Los Angeles Dodgers: Black Swans

It’s really hard to kill the Dodgers. I argued after the 2024-2025 offseason, a very busy one, that the Dodgers weren’t really improving their average outcome so much as drastically raising their floor. I stand by it; they’ve added Kyle Tucker and Edwin Díaz while losing nobody who was crucial to the 2025 team. That doesn’t mean they’re going to be projected to win 105 games or anything, but it does mean that in most of their worst projected outcomes, they’re still a playoff contender. Their 10th-percentile projection, for example, is 86 wins. Their 2% chance of finishing below .500 is the smallest percentage I’ve ever projected, a record that now goes back more than 20 years. Doomsday for the Dodgers may require an actual doomsday scenario like societal collapse, nuclear war, or a vacuum metastability event. Since I do not know how to prevent any of those, there’s nothing more I can add.

If there’s something even more satisfying than spending your hard-earned money, it’s spending someone else’s money that you didn’t earn. When we’re talking baseball, unless you’re an extremely high-net-worth individual who can casually spend hundreds of millions of dollars — if this describes you, call me and we can totally hang out or something — you only have the option to spend other people’s cash. I mean, I haven’t technically asked American Express to up my credit limit to $300 million, but I’m guessing the answer would be no. Every year around this time, I make a whole piece out of it, naming seven players I think teams should attempt to sign to long-term contracts now, rather than waiting until later. There are some additional complications, of course, with a lockout likely coming after this season, but teams and players could be willing to act with more urgency to sign contracts now before all the uncertainty ahead of them.

I’ve (hopefully) chosen seven players whose possible extensions would benefit both the player and the team, as all good contracts ought to do. I’ve included the up-to-date ZiPS projections for each player, as well as the contract that ZiPS thinks each player should get, though that doesn’t necessarily mean I think the player will end up with that figure or even sign an extension. Read the rest of this entry »

Most people have never been traded. Most people find a job and go there until they find a better one (or until they move or they get fired or they can’t take it anymore or they die). I don’t have any friends or relatives who showed up for work one day only to be told, “Oh, you don’t work here anymore. We’ve decided you work for the competition.” It must be even weirder for Joey Loperfido, who got traded from the Astros to the Blue Jays at the deadline in 2024 and is now getting traded back. Somewhere out there is an elephant who got pregnant the day the Astros traded Loperfido to the Jays, and that elephant won’t give birth until June.

The 26-year-old Loperfido is headed back to the Astros in a one-for-one lefty-hitting corner outfielder swap for Jesús Sánchez. Sánchez must be feeling like the subject of buyer’s remorse, too, as the Astros traded for him at the 2025 deadline, a mere 197 days ago. Any humans who got pregnant the day of that trade still have another month or so before they actually have to assemble the crib. As starkly as it outlines the differences between the life of a baseball player and the life of a human with a regular job, the trade makes its own sense. We’re going to start in Toronto, because although it involves a lot of platoon finagling, the situation there is simpler. Read the rest of this entry »