“I will start with the easy answer:” wrote Jeff Zimmerman back in 2014. The next part was bolded: “No, first and second half stats are not as important as the entire season for pitchers and hitters.” Jeff was talking about fantasy baseball, and whether you should consider a particularly strong or weak second half more relevant to a player’s future performance, but the lesson was clear. Overall stats tell you a lot more about a player than half a season of stats.

The same lesson is true over the course of a career. Since 1933, the year of the first All-Star Game, Stathead says that 2,146 players have made at least 900 career plate appearances in both the first half and the second half. Just under 93% of those players have a second half OPS that’s within 10% of their first half OPS. (We’re using percentages here rather than raw points in order to create a level playing field for players of varying skill levels. I calculated them by subtracting each player’s first half OPS from their second half OPS, then dividing the difference by their first half OPS.) Only 15 players – again, that’s 15 players out of a sample of 2,146 – saw their second half OPS differ from their first half OPS by more than 20%.

All of this makes sense. There’s no reason that a batter should be consistently better at the beginning or end of the season. As Eno Sarris once reminded us, seasons themselves are arbitrary endpoints. Most of the 15 outliers I mentioned in the previous paragraph are the results of short, noisy samples, either because they had short careers or they’re still in the early stages of their career right now. The longer your career, the more likely that your true talent level will shine through, regardless of the date on the calendar. Read the rest of this entry »

No two scouts or evaluators are going to agree on everything, and we’re no exception. We get asked all the time about who liked which player more, or who was more lukewarm on this guy versus that one — not to mention the steady stream of “Outlet A ranked Player B here, but you had him there, what gives?” questions that populate our chats. These are especially compelling and relevant inquiries this time of year, because inevitably we had to resolve a degree of disagreement as we compiled our list of the Top 100 prospects in baseball.

This year, we’ve decided to address those questions head on. Throughout our list-building process, we came to similar, or similar enough, conclusions about most players. Oftentimes Eric was a tick higher on one player here, or Brendan the high man there, and usually a quick back and forth was enough to bridge any gaps. In a couple cases though, we didn’t reach consensus. There were a handful of players that Brendan was happy to rank, but Eric would have preferred to leave off, and vice versa. We think offering a peek into those discussions will prove insightful for readers. These back and forths highlight the types of players who are generally more difficult to evaluate, as well as the metrics and scouting practices that guide decision-making when you have to make a call one way or the other. Through it all, we hope you’ll arrive at a conclusion that most scouts and analysts eventually reach: That spirited debate is a healthy part of the evaluative process, and disagreements without clean resolution are occasionally the cost of doing business in an uncertain world.

Kendry Chourio, RHP, Kansas City Royals

Brendan: Let’s start with a pitcher who ultimately didn’t make our list. I never caught Kendry Chourio live, but I adored his stuff when I put on the tape. He throws hard, I see a path to a plus curve and changeup, and he’s advanced for someone who played all of last season as a 17-year-old. The Royals rightly promoted him off of the Dominican complex, and then he dominated in Arizona to the point that he actually wound up in Low-A down the stretch. And you can see why: For his age, his ability to command the ball and execute his secondaries stands out immediately. His line – 51.1 innings, 63 strikeouts, 0.95 WHIP, just five walks – was incredible. I think we both agree that there are a lot of good things going on here. Can you elaborate on why you were still a little skeptical of him when it came time to build the list? Read the rest of this entry »

The first thing Chaim Bloom did after taking over baseball operations in St. Louis was trade away everything that wasn’t nailed down. Sonny Gray? Thanks for your contributions, now go try to win a ring in Boston. Willson Contreras? Gone, and to the same team. Nolan Arenado? Thanks for the memories, enjoy the desert. With those trades sorted, he’s moved on to step two: prying up some of those aforementioned nails to make more deals. The most recent shoe to drop in the Cardinals retooling might be the biggest one, though. Brendan Donovan is now a Seattle Mariner, the key piece in a three-team trade that sends Ben Williamson to Tampa Bay and a heaping helping of prospects and draft picks to the Cardinals.

Donovan isn’t a household name like many of the best Cardinals of recent years, but that has far more to do with the team’s middling success of late than any lack of talent. His combination of versatility and offensive firepower calls to mind Ben Zobrist, and unlike almost every other flexible defender who gets compared to Zobrist, this one actually makes sense. Zobrist ran a 121 wRC+ during his seven-year peak. Donovan’s career mark is 119, the same as his 2025 total. He’s under team control for two more years at a reasonable rate, too: $5.8 million this year, with his last trip through arbitration set for 2027.

“A plus bat who can play defense everywhere” generally isn’t a good title to have applied to you. That’s because most of the hitters who receive that label either aren’t plus bats, don’t play good defense, or both. But as I mentioned, that’s not Donovan, and we might as well examine each of those two skills, as he’s the entire reason this trade happened, the best player going to any of the three clubs by a mile. Read the rest of this entry »

Franklin Arias has a bright future in Boston. Signed out of Venezuela in 2023, the 20-year-old shortstop is the top position-player prospect in the Red Sox system thanks to plus tools on both sides of the ball. A slick-fielder — Eric Longenhagen has described him as an incredibly polished defender for his age” — Arias possesses a line-drive stroke that produced a 109 wRC+ across three levels last season. And while that number may not jump off the page, it stands out when put into context: the Caracas native not only played the entire year as a teenager, he finished it in Double-A.

The degree to which he can boost his power profile will go a long way toward determining his ceiling. Currently more contact than pop, Arias went deep just eight times in 526 plate appearances. At a listed 5-foot-11, 170 pounds, he is by no means built like a bopper.

Red Sox farm director Brian Abraham brought up that aspect of Arias’s game when I asked him about the young infielder earlier this week.

“He’s a guy who makes really good swing decisions,” Abraham said of Arias, who posted a 10.1% strikeout rate and a 5.3% swinging-strike rate in 2025. “He puts the bat on the ball and can drive it to all fields. We’re looking to see him add size and strength so that he can really impact the ball pull-side in the air.

“It’s definitely in there,” added Abraham. “We’ve seen flashes of it, it’s just a matter of him being able to do that on a consistent basis. As a young player who is continuing to grow and get bigger, I think it will come out the more he is able to hit the ball out front and drive it to the pull side. Right now I would say that he is a contact hitter with occasional power, and that the power can be more consistent than it has been.”

Not surprisingly, Arias echoed Abraham’s thoughts when addressing his near-term development goals. Read the rest of this entry »

Not so many years ago, a tongue-in-cheek refrain went like this: “Great trade for the Rays. Who did they get?” With that in mind…

… a few days before the July 30, 2024 deadline, the Tampa Bay Rays dealt Randy Arozarena to the Seattle Mariners in exchange for prospects Brody Hopkins and Aidan Smith. I asked Erik Neander to look back at the transaction when I talked to him during November’s GM Meetings.

“It was a decision that was pretty clear,” Tampa Bay’s president of baseball operations told me. “That deal was about timing. Seattle was getting someone to make an immediate contribution — they’ve gotten that — and from our side it was a deal that was probably going to take years to realize the full potential of.

“With Brody Hopkins, we think the world of the arm talent,” continued Neander. “He was a two-way guy, highly athletic, and he is continuing to make strides and find the command. We believe that he’s someone who can pitch in the middle of a rotation, if not higher. I’m a little surprised that he doesn’t get more attention than he does.”

Hopkins, a 23-year-old right-hander who was taken in the sixth round of the 2023 draft out of Winthrop University, logged a 2.72 ERA, a 3.33 FIP, and a 28.7% strikeout rate over 116 innings with Double-A Montgomery this past season.

Smith, a 21-year-old outfielder who was drafted out of a Lucas, Texas high school the same year, slashed .237/.331/.388 with 14 home runs and a 114 wRC+ over 459 plate appearances — he also swiped 41 bases in 47 attempts — with High-A Bowling Green. Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2026 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

By the time Shin-Soo Choo reached the majors with the Mariners in 2005, nine South Korea-born pitchers had followed in the wake of Chan Ho Park, who debuted with the Dodgers in 1994, but just one position player preceded him, namely Hee-Seop Choi. It took a few years and a lopsided trade before Choo’s major league career got off the ground, and he lost significant time to a variety of injuries, but over the course of his 16 seasons with Seattle, Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Texas, he established himself as an on-base machine with considerable pop. He set a number of firsts, including becoming the first South Korean position player to make an All-Star team and now, the first such player to make a Hall of Fame ballot.

To these eyes, that latter distinction is a big deal. Most of the 12 newcomers on this year’s Hall of Fame ballot don’t have the numbers to merit election or even much debate. Their appearance on the ballot after spending at least 10 seasons in the majors with some distinction is its own reward, and with the deadline for voting now past, we’re in the part of the cycle where we can take the time to celebrate these players’ fine careers in their own right. A decade ago, I raised a bit of an international stink when Park — who spent 17 seasons in the majors (1994–2010), won 124 games (still the major league record for a player born in Asia, one ahead of former teammate Hideo Nomo), and became the first South Korea-born player to make an All-Star team — was left off. It felt like a needless snub. “Like Hideo Nomo, who blazed a trail for modern Japanese players to come to the majors, Park deserves the recognition that comes with a spot on the ballot,” I wrote for SI.com. I’ve made noise about other slights since then, and I think the situation has improved over time, so I’m particularly glad to see Choo here.

…

Shin-Soo Choo was born on July 13, 1982 in the Nam district of Busan, South Korea, a coastal city that is the country’s second-largest, behind Seoul. He’s the oldest son of father So-min Choo and mother Yu-jeon Park. He was born into a baseball family, as his mother’s brother, Jeong-Tae Park, starred as a second baseman for the KBO’s Lotte Giants from 1991–2004, winning five Gold Gloves (given to the best all-around player at each position, not just the best defender) and sealing the Giants’ 1992 championship by recording the final out in their Korean Series victory over the Binggrae Eagles. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Seattle Mariners. 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 »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2026 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

Though he was athletic enough to be drafted as a shortstop, Edwin Encarnación never found much success in the field. Through his first seven seasons with the Reds and Blue Jays, his defensive miscues offset generally solid offense, so much so that he earned the derisive nickname “E5” (as in error, third base). But as with his late-blooming teammate in Toronto, José Bautista, when adjustments to Encarnación’s swing unlocked his in-game power, he became a force to be reckoned with.

Surrendering his third baseman’s mitt and splitting time between first base and designated hitter definitely helped. From 2012–19, Encarnación hit a major league-high 297 homers, with at least 32 in every season, and a high of 42, set in ’12 and matched in ’16. He never led the league, but placed among the AL’s top five four times, and within the top 10 in three other seasons. Among players with at least 2,500 plate appearances in that span, his 138 OPS+ ranks 10th.

The one-two punch of Bautista and Encarnación kept the Blue Jays entertaining through some lean years, and with the arrivals of third baseman Josh Donaldson and catcher Russell Martin in 2015, the team reached the playoffs for the first time since winning back-to-back World Series in 1992–93. Toronto did it again the next year, punctuated by Encarnación’s three-run walk-off homer off the Orioles’ Ubaldo Jiménez to win the 2016 AL Wild Card Game. Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2026 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

The third and final multi-candidate pairing of this series is by far the heaviest, covering two candidates who have both been connected to multiple incidents of domestic violence. Read the rest of this entry »

For the 22nd consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction, as well as MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the next team up is the Seattle Mariners.

Batters

The Mariners have had some pretty awesome teams throughout their history, but the World Series has eluded them. Prior to this year, the team had topped out with six-game ALCS exits in 1995 and 2000, and while they missed the Fall Classic again in 2025, they at least set a new high water mark, with a bad seventh inning in Game 7 of their Championship Series against Toronto all that stood between them and a date with the Dodgers. Seattle will largely run it back in 2026, with most of the 2025 team returning for another go.

Looking at the offense, there’s surprisingly little to complain about too strenuously here, and I’m a man known for complaining about things I don’t like. Of the team’s three big hitters who reached free agency this winter — Josh Naylor, Eugenio Suárez, and Jorge Polanco — ZiPS believes that Seattle retained the right one. Naylor provides production at first base that the Mariners can’t replace and have needed for a long time; the M’s have gotten less than one combined win out of their first basemen in nine of the last 20 seasons. Remember how long Evan White was the future of the position? Suárez still projects decently at third, but he’s also five years older than Naylor, and ZiPS sees Ben Williamson and Colt Emerson as being fine at the hot corner, provided the defensive projections are accurate. ZiPS thinks Williamson is one of the minors’ elite defensive third basemen, and that doesn’t clash at all with the scouting reports. Getting that defense is absolutely crucial, though, as he is unlikely to develop into a real plus with the bat, and while there’s more upside with Emerson, he was promoted aggressively this year and may need a consolidation season. Read the rest of this entry »