When the Cubs signed Nico Hoerner to a six-year contract extension on Opening Day, they knew exactly what they were getting. You see, Hoerner has been remarkably consistent throughout his career; over his four full seasons in the majors, his wRC+ has had a peak of 109 and a low of 102, to go along with sterling defensive metrics. His seasonal WAR marks during that four-year span have ranged from 3.8 to 4.8. The only reason why this isn’t a five-season sample is because, in 2021, three separate IL stints curtailed his campaign to just 44 games. In those 44 games, though, he put up a 106 wRC+ and 1.6 WAR.
However, the Nico Hoerner that has showed up to play this year isn’t the same as before. He’s still playing excellent defense at an up-the-middle position, but he’s also rocking a .320/.393/.515 slash line (a 156 wRC+) with four home runs, meaning that in just 24 games, he’s already nearly halfway to his career high of 10, set back in 2022. Last week, he racked up nine hits, two home runs, and two stolen bases to earn NL Player of the Week honors. It’s still early in the season, but there are enough underlying changes in Hoerner’s performance that it’s worth digging into how he’s been able to power up this year. 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 laterheroes 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 »
Jeremiah Estrada’s path to big league success was bumpy. Drafted out of Palm Desert High School in California in 2017, the now-27-year-old right-hander battled multiple injuries, including one that required Tommy John surgery in 2019. There was non-health-related adversity as well. Estrada spent his first seven professional seasons in the Chicago Cubs organization, and he didn’t always see eye to eye with the club’s pitching coordinators and coaches. They were occasionally at cross purposes when it came to optimizing his repertoire.
Estrada reached the big leagues with Chicago in 2022, although it wasn’t until two years later that he found much success. Cast aside by the Cubs, with whom he’d thrown just 16 1/3 big league innings over parts of two seasons, he has thrived since being claimed off waivers by the San Diego Padres prior to the 2024 campaign. Over 145 appearances, Estrada has logged a 3.35 ERA, a 2.85 FIP, and a 36.1% strikeout rate over 139 2/3 frames. His Friars ledger also includes four saves and an 11-9 won-lost record.
Estrada discussed his nonlinear, and often frustrating, path to big league success over a pair of conversations. The first came in early March at the Padres’ spring training complex, while the second was conducted at Fenway Park this past weekend.
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David Laurila: How much have you changed since coming to pro ball?
Jeremiah Estrada: “I’d say a lot, and not just what happens on the field. With the baseball side, you learn what’s important and what’s not important, but that’s pretty much like life. Right? Life starts to kick in. Even though many of our lives are different, we worry about the same things. Read the rest of this entry »
This isn’t how they drew it up on the North Side this winter. The Cubs won 92 games in 2025, and then they made some additions in the winter. The Brewers, meanwhile, subtracted. Chicago had the best playoff odds of any team in the NL Central, whether you’re talking about our odds, PECOTA’s odds, or pretty much any projection system you can name. The Cubs had exciting rookies, battle-tested veterans, and fun vibes. Surely, they’d sail through 2026.
Nearly two weeks into the season, it’s fair to say that things haven’t gone according to plan. There’s the standings, for one thing: They’re in last place in the NL Central. But this early in the year, only four games separate first and last in the division, so that’s not the biggest problem in Wrigleyville. A bigger concern is that Cade Horton and Matthew Boyd, two of Chicago’s top starting pitchers, hit the IL on consecutive days. Seiya Suzuki hasn’t appeared yet this year, though he’s expected back on Friday.
Horton’s injury looks to be the worst of the two. He left last Friday’s start after feeling forearm discomfort, and after getting some scans over the weekend, he’s seeking a second opinion from Dr. Keith Meister. That ominous turn of phrase doesn’t guarantee a long-term injury, of course, but it’s definitely not a good sign. Pitchers don’t generally seek second opinions from famous surgeons unless there’s a decent chance of surgery.
Boyd was supposed to be the safe option in the Cubs rotation. We had him down for the most innings and the most WAR, the staff ace. His bicep strain might not be all that bad; he noted that he could have pitched through the injury if it weren’t so early in the year. But that’s not really the nature of pitcher injuries, in my experience. Sure, sometimes they’re short. But a guaranteed minimum stay doesn’t exist. I think it’s reasonable to be worried about Boyd’s prognosis until he’s back on a major league mound, even though he seems likely to return far sooner than Horton. Read the rest of this entry »
A week ago, the Cubs roster was light on long-term commitments. Only Alex Bregman and Dansby Swanson held guaranteed contracts that extended past 2027, and only two others – Phil Maton and Shelby Miller – even had guaranteed years in 2027. But as it turns out, Chicago payroll commitments abhor a vacuum. On Tuesday, Pete Crow-Armstrong signed a six-year extension. On Thursday, Nico Hoerner followed suit with a six-year pact of his own, as Michael Cerami first reported. The deal starts in 2027 and is worth $141 million, with minor deferrals that drop the total present value to the mid-130s.
If you don’t catch many Cubs games, it’s easy to overlook Hoerner. His offensive game is most notable for its lack of extremes. He doesn’t walk much. He doesn’t strike out much. He doesn’t hit for a ton of power. He’s not excessively swing happy like so many contact hitters. He doesn’t pound the ball into the ground, but he equally doesn’t sell out to lift and pull. He’s produced low-power, solid-OBP seasons for four years running, and they’ve been almost metronomically consistent: his seasonal wRC+ marks of 108, 103, 102, and 109 work out to a 105 average.
That’s the 105th-best batting line among hitters over that span. That doesn’t sound particularly impressive. Hoerner is wedged between Jake Cronenworth and Mike Yastrzemski, solidly in nice-but-forgettable territory. He’s 57th in OBP over that span, which is a little bit more exciting, but truthfully, he is not a star at the plate.
The fun starts when you get into the rest of his game. Over that same time frame, from 2022-2025, Hoerner is the sixth-best baserunner in the majors. The guys in front of him – Corbin Carroll, Bobby Witt Jr., Trea Turner, Jarren Duran, and Elly De La Cruz – are famed for their exploits on the bases. Hoerner is the slowest of that group by a fair margin, but he makes up for it with excellent instincts and great reads. He’s fifth in the bigs in steals during that span, and his 85% success rate is better than everyone in front of him on the list. When he gets on base, he’s a threat to steal, and yet he almost never gets thrown out. Read the rest of this entry »
This extension, the largest ever for a player with so little service time, begins in 2027, buys out two of Crow-Armstrong’s free agent years, and includes escalators that could increase the value to $133 million. But shockingly, (and to the immense relief of those of us who are still parsing the inscrutable Julio Rodríguez extension), it does not include any option years. Whatever happens, Crow-Armstrong can still hit free agency after his age-30 season. Read the rest of this entry »
Chase Lee is now a Blue Jay after enjoying a mostly successful 2025 rookie season as a Tiger. The 27-year-old, sidewinding right-hander made 32 relief appearances with Detroit, logging a 4.10 ERA, a 24.3% strikeout rate, and a 6.1% walk rate over 37-and-a-third innings. He allowed 32 hits, seven of which left the yard, and was on the winning end of four of five decisions. Toronto acquired him in exchange for 24-year-old farmhand Johan Simon in mid-December
He was originally in the Rangers system. Texas took Lee in the sixth round of the 2021 draft out of the University of Alabama, only to move him to Motown at the 2024 trade deadline as part of the Andrew Chafin deal. Lee then headed into last season with Eric Longenhagen calling him a “a sinker/slider sidearmer who has posted strikeout rates up around 30% his entire minor league career… a high-probability up/down look reliever.” That proved accurate. Lee rode the Detroit-Toledo shuttle multiple times, making 23 appearances as a Mud Hen.
Talking to him Jays camp on Friday, I learned that the well-educated hurler places a high value on the information he gets from hitters.
“That’s where pitchers get a lot of their information,” the Alabama graduate told me. “When I’m working on new pitches, new shapes, new locations — whatever it may be — I normally go to the hitting coaches. It’s like, ‘Hey, if your team were to face me, what would the plan be?’ I take that, then it’s, ‘OK, how can I mess up that plan?’
“I did this the other day,” the former walk-on to the Crimson Tide baseball team added. “I talked to Cody Atkinson, who is one of our hitting coaches here. I knew Cody in [the Texas Rangers organization]. I asked him to write me a 30-second report on what he would tell hitters to do if we were on different teams and I was coming into a game. He said he would tell them to look in a certain location, for these two pitches. If I were to instead throw a fastball up, or a fastball in, that would ruin the entire plan.” 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.
Collin Snider is with Chicago looking to recapture what he had two seasons ago with Seattle. Currently in camp with the Cubs, the 30-year-old right-hander was a pleasant surprise for the Mariners in 2024, logging a 1.94 with a 27.8% strikeout rate over 42 relief outings comprising 41-and-two-thirds innings. Last year was a different story. Hampered by a flexor strain and unable to get back on track, Snider struggled to the tune of a 5.47 ERA across 24 appearances in the majors, then posted an even uglier 8.06 ERA across 25 games with Triple-A Tacoma. Cut loose by Seattle in November, he subsequently inked a deal with the Cubs in December.
Despite the dismal results, Snider wasn’t without suitors. He had options — every team can use more pitching — and in the case of the Cubs, he also had connections. Tyler Zombro, the NL Central club’s Vice President of Pitching Strategy, previously worked at Tread Athletics, where Snider trained in previous offseasons. As the erstwhile Vanderbilt Commodore put it, “That really steered my decision. I like the way the pitching development is here.”
Asked about his poor 2025 performance, Snider pointed to how his injury contributed to bad mechanical habits that resulted in a drop in velocity, as well as “pitch shapes that weren’t the same.” He knew what was happening, but correcting it was another matter.
“I was very rotational, throwing too side-to-side, whereas I need to be north-south,” Snider said. “Side-to-side made the velo go down, because I couldn’t get behind the baseball. I was aware of what was going on, but I didn’t know why I was doing it, or how to make the adjustment quickly. It ended up being one of those things where I needed the offseason to straighten it out.”
Snider averaged 92.5 mph with his four-seamer last season, whereas in the prior two years that number was 94.2 and 95.3. His sweeper was also impacted by his delivery being out of sync. Read the rest of this entry »
Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Mets pitching prospect Ryan Lambert’s consumption of copious quantities of raw eggs, then preview the 2026 Chicago Cubs (27:15) with The Athletic’s Sahadev Sharma, and the 2026 Cleveland Guardians (1:17:46) with The Athletic’s Zack Meisel, plus a postscript.
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