For the 21st 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 and MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the next team up is the Miami Marlins.
Batters
Building a good offensive team on the cheap is something that can be done, but it’s definitely not anything the Marlins have ever been able to do consistently. In the franchise’s more than 30 years of existence, it has had a wRC+ of at least 100 exactly twice, in 2007 and 2017. The Marlins did come close during their two championship seasons (wRC+ of 99 in both 1997 and 2003), but putting together a great lineup from within just has not been in the organization’s DNA.
That’s not likely to change in 2025. In Miami’s defense, its projected lineup – with some optimism in the health department – isn’t truly dreadful anywhere. There’s a real lack of zero-point-somethings on the depth chart graphic below, which is a nice thing. But if there’s a real lack of zeroes, there’s also a critical shortage of twos and threes, let alone the fours and fives that drive teams to division titles and playoff spots. Read the rest of this entry »
The Miami Marlins are coming off of a 100-loss season, and a lack of bats had a lot to do with that. The NL East club scored the fewest runs in the senior circuit. The arms weren’t all that much better — only the Colorado Rockies allowed more runs — but there is light at the end of the tunnel. Sandy Alcantara and Eury Pérez are on track to return from Tommy John surgery, while Jesús Luzardo and Max Meyer should be healthy following comparably minor injuries. Moreover, the organization’s top pitching prospects have high ceilings. Pitching — especially young pitching — is the organization’s greatest strength.
Miami’s President of Baseball Operations largely agreed with that opinion when I presented it to him at last month’s GM Meetings in San Antonio.
“I think so,” Peter Bendix told me. “I hope so. We have a lot of guys I’m really excited about. I think that next year a lot of these guys have things to prove, whether that’s health, bouncing back from a disappointing season, just establishing themselves, or building on what they did last year.”
A pair of pitchers who are likely a few years away from reaching the big leagues stand out. One of them is is a now-20-year-old southpaw whom the Marlins drafted 35th overall in 2023 out of Andover, Massachusetts’s Phillips Academy.
“Thomas White is maybe the best left-handed pitching prospect in baseball,” said Bendix, whose opinion is by no means singular (Noah Schultz and one or two others are also in the conversation). “If you look at left-handed pitchers who were 19 years old, missed as many bats as he did, didn’t walk guys, limited hard contact, throw 95-plus, have a plus breaking ball, and have command, it’s a short list. Now it’s his job to go out there build on that, see what he can he can do with another full year underneath him.” Read the rest of this entry »
The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2025 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.
In a home run-saturated era, Ichiro Suzuki stood out. Before coming stateside, the slightly-built superstar earned the moniker the “Human Batting Machine” from Japanese media, and he hardly missed a beat upon arriving in Seattle in 2001, slapping singles and doubles to all fields in such prolific fashion that he began his major league career by reeling off a record 10 straight 200-hit seasons. Along the way, he set a single-season record with 262 hits in 2004, and despite not debuting until age 27, he surpassed the 3,000-hit milestone. Between Nippon Professional Baseball and Major League Baseball, he totaled 4,367 hits, making him the International Hit King — a comparison that rankled some, including the Hit King himself, Pete Rose.
Despite his small stature (listed at 5-foot-11, 175 pounds), Suzuki was larger than life, an athlete on a first-name basis with two continents full of fans. Wearing “Ichiro” on the back of his jersey — his manager’s idea of a promotional gimmick — he built his legend in Japan by winning seven straight batting titles (1994–2000) and three straight MVP awards for the Orix Blue Wave, whom he led to a Japan Series championship in 1996. When he joined the Mariners, he faced widespread skepticism about whether his style of play would translate, because while NPB star Hideo Nomo had enjoyed considerable success with the Dodgers upon arriving in 1995, no Japanese position player had made the transition to MLB before. The Mariners — who within the previous two years had shed superstars Randy Johnson, Ken Griffey Jr., and Alex Rodriguez from their squad — won Suzuki’s rights and signed him, but his struggles in his first spring training caused manager Lou Piniella concern. Yet it all worked out, and in spectacular fashion. Suzuki led the AL with a .350 batting average, won Rookie of the Year and MVP honors while helping the Mariners to a record 116 wins, and began 10-year streaks of All-Star selections and Gold Glove awards.
All of this played out during a time when sabermetricians downplayed the value of batting average relative to on-base and slugging percentages. Like Derek Jeter, Suzuki was more a fan favorite than a stathead one, though his additional contributions on the bases and in right field helped him rank third among all position players for that decade-long stretch with 54.8 WAR, trailing only Albert Pujols (81.4) and Rodriguez (71.5). But Suzuki wasn’t just about the numbers. Beneath his near-religious devotion to routine burned a competitive fire that was offset by a sly sense of humor, both of which featured copious quantities of f-bombs that were hardly lost in translation, to hear others tell the stories. Read the rest of this entry »
Travis Ice and I have begun early work on the Los Angeles Angels and Sacramento Athletics prospect lists, and because both franchises’ prospects are on the Mesa Solar Sox roster, I spent most of last week seeing whatever game they were playing.
At this point in the Fall League, the leaders in games played have laced up their spikes only eight or nine times. Anything you’ve read about this year’s AFL so far has encompassed just two weeks of part-time play for any given player. Remember this is a hitter-friendly league for a number of both developmental and environmental reasons, and that triple slash lines in this league are not a reliable proxy for talent.
Offensive standards at first base are quite high, and even though the collective performance of this year’s group was down relative to recent norms (by kind of a lot), it’s still a position from which we expect good players and prospects to provide impact power. Morgan has been a relevant prospect since high school, but a relative lack of power has tended to cap his projection into more of a part-time first base/outfield role.
During the 2024 regular season it looked like Morgan was more often taking max-effort swings and selling out for power. He reached Double-A and slugged .483 across three levels, but his middling raw strength and opposite-field tendency as a hitter (plus elevated chase rates relative to his career norms) suggested this was maybe not the best approach for him. In the Fall League, Morgan has been more balanced, really taking enormous hacks only in favorable counts. He’s still stinging the ball in a way that indicates he’ll be a doubles machine, and he seems less vulnerable to fastballs up and away than he did during the summer. We don’t have a way of truly knowing how Morgan will handle elevated big league fastballs until he faces them, but a more balanced, contact-oriented style of hitting is going to give him a much better chance of covering the top of the zone and being a more complete hitter. (An aside: Watch A’s prospect Denzel Clarke go first-to-third at the video’s 1:55 mark.)
I think the absolute ceiling for his production looks something like Brandon Belt’s or Daniel Murphy’s pre-Juiced Ball era statline. More likely Morgan’s output will look something like Ji Man Choi’s or LaMonte Wade Jr.’s. Morgan is not a guy who is going to hit 20 homers per year, but a heady, well-rounded offensive skillset coupled with his excellent, profile-seasoning first base defense make him better than the 40 FV grade player I evaluated him as during the year. He is making a case to be elevated into the back of this offseason’s Top 100 list.
I gave Durbin short shrift last year even after his .353/.456/.588 line in the 2023 Fall League. He had a good 2024 at Triple-A Scranton, including a strong second half after he returned from a fractured wrist. Durbin is short — really short, he’s 5-foot-6 — but he’s not small; he’s built like a little tank. His compact, stocky build helps keep his swing short and consistently on time to pull the baseball. His quality of contact in 2024 was commensurate with a guy who slugs under .400 at the big league level, but he was dealing with an injury that typically impacts contact quality for a while after recovery.
Perhaps most importantly, Durbin looks fine at both second and third base and has also been playing all over the outfield. Defensive versatility might be his key to being rostered consistently. Durbin ran a jailbreak 4.10 for me last week, but his home-to-first times have been close to 4.4 seconds on normal swings. That’s not blazing and slower than what’s typical of a decent center fielder, but any kind of outfield viability would help the former Division-III standout become an improbable big leaguer. Durbin has played sparingly in center field during his career, and it’s going to be very difficult to evaluate him there this Fall League unless he starts getting reps there every day, which I think is unlikely. It’s more of a thing to watch develop into next spring.
Alderman, a 2023 second round pick out of Ole Miss who had some of the best exit velocities in that draft class, is currently leading the AFL with six home runs. He hit one on Friday at a whopping 119.5 mph. It went out on a line, ricocheting off the side of the batter’s eye, which you can see in this frame:
Friday, Marlins outfielder Kemp Alderman hit a homer that left Salt River Fields in a real hurry, at 119.5 mph. pic.twitter.com/HBvj2F0oud
Like Durbin, Alderman missed time in 2024 with a broken hand. It’s good to see Alderman hitting with elite peak power coming off of this particular injury, but I’d advise everyone to pump the breaks on his overall prospectdom at this time. He loads his hands so deep, high, and late that I worry he’ll struggle against better velocity as he climbs the minors. Though Alderman’s regular-season strikeout rates don’t raise alarm, I don’t think 30-ish games at each A-ball level is a meaningful sample, especially for a draft pick out of an SEC school. It’s fine to be hopeful that I’m wrong or that Alderman will make necessary adjustments once better stuff starts beating him, and he clearly has the power to clear the offensive bar at a corner outfield spot. But even though he’s raking out here, he does not have an opinion-altering look. I know Marlins fans have gone through this a lot lately, where they have a minor leaguer with elite power but an insufficient hit tool to profile (Peyton Burdick, Griffin Conine, Jerar Encarnacion), and I worry Alderman is another of this ilk.
Alert Ben Lindbergh, we have a knuckler. The 25-year-old Kirby was an undrafted free agent out of UConn in 2023 and spent most of 2024 in Fort Myers either on the Complex or FSL roster. His knuckleball needs to be more consistent for him to be considered a prospect at all, but for now it’s a lot of fun to watch a guy whose primary pitch is his knuckler.
The Arizona Fall League has a knuckleballer this year, Twins righty Devin Kirby. pic.twitter.com/Z6c7ik6vH4
These players have had their scouting reports added to the Fall League tab on The Board. Head over there to check out their tool grades and scouting reports.
Welcome back to Top of the Order, where every Tuesday and Friday I’ll be starting your baseball day with some news, notes, and thoughts about the game we love.
If you’ve read even a couple installments of this column, you know that roster changes are my favorite things in baseball. Free agents, trades, extensions, IL stints… I don’t really care; they’re all interesting and fun to follow! My love for such machinations isn’t limited to players, though. I’m also a big fan of managerial and coaching changes, so much so that I have a personal Excel workbook that contains nothing but a list of the current coaching staffs.
So, now that we’ve reached the point of the season when the managerial carousel starts spinning — David Bell’s firing by the Reds on Sunday was the latest move — this is a great time to look over who teams could have on their candidate lists. At least three teams will be in the hunt for managers: the White Sox, Reds, and Marlins. Miami hasn’t officially moved on from Skip Schumaker, but he’s already discussing his tenure in the past tense. Teams with a managerial vacancy almost always cast a wide net, so I’ll do the same in running down some options. Read the rest of this entry »
Prior to talking to him in Wrigley Field’s home clubhouse in late August, my knowledge of Ethan Roberts mostly consisted of his being a 27-year-old, right-handed reliever with limited big-league experience and a high spin rate. I also knew he’d had Tommy John surgery in 2022 as that was mentioned, along with his spin, when he was blurbed as an honorable mention on our 2023 Chicago Cubs Top Prospects list.
The 2018 fourth-round pick out of Tennessee Technological University has added to his résumé since we spoke and now has 27 appearances for his career, 18 of them this year. His numbers in the current campaign include a 2.66 ERA and 23 strikeouts over 23-and-two-thirds innings. Three days ago he tossed a scoreless frame against the Washington Nationals and was credited with his first big-league win.
Roberts learned that he spun the ball well upon entering pro ball. Not long thereafter, he learned that not all spin is created equal.
“It was my first time around technology,” explained Roberts. “I threw a bullpen and my fastball was spinning pretty high. It was spinning like 2,800 [RPMs] —right now it’s more 2,600-2,700 — and I actually throw it very supinated. It’s kind of like a natural cutter. But yeah, when I got on technology there, in Arizona [at the Cubs spring training complex], I was like, ‘I don’t know what any of this means, but thanks for telling me.’”
Welcome back to Top of the Order, where every Tuesday and Friday I’ll be starting your baseball day with some news, notes, and thoughts about the game we love.
The final stretch of the season is now upon us, and it sure is going to be fun. The Orioles and Yankees are jockeying for the AL East title, with a first-round bye almost certainly going to the winner. The NL Wild Card is a beautiful mess, with four teams fighting for the three spots and two other clubs, the Cubs and Cardinals, still lurking in the distance. And the under-the-radar Tigers are roaring, trying to pull out a last-minute postseason berth after selling at the trade deadline.
Last month, when I wrote about the players who were added off the waiver wire, I mentioned that another batch of waiver claims would come at the end of August, after more teams fell out of contention. So now that we’re well into September, let’s take a look at some of the notable players who’ve switched teams over the last few weeks.
One thing I love about writing for FanGraphs is getting the chance to cover players who otherwise would receive little (if any) attention from sources outside of their own team’s market. On this little part of the internet, pieces about the Joe Blows of the league aren’t just allowed, they’re encouraged. Yet, almost 10 years ago, the great Jeff Sullivan hemmed and hawed before writing about one such player:
For a while, I’ve personally been interested in Tyler Clippard. I’ve considered on several occasions writing about him, and about him specifically, but on every one of those occasions, I’ve talked myself out of it, because it just never seemed relevant enough. Generally, people haven’t woken up and thought, today I’d like to read in depth about Tyler Clippard.
I get what Jeff meant. I felt the same way before I wrote this article, hence this introduction. Still, it’s a funny train of thought coming from a writer who was so well known for making his readers care about topics they didn’t realize they would have cared about until they started reading. There was no need for Jeff to justify the subject matter of his article, least of all at FanGraphs. It’s also funny because Clippard was coming off an All-Star season in which he pitched to a 2.18 ERA and 1.5 WAR in 75 games. He had been one of the best relievers in baseball for the past five years. Clearly, the landscape of baseball blogging has changed over the past decade; a player with Clippard’s resume wouldn’t even qualify as a niche topic anymore. Indeed, Clippard might as well be a Shohei Ohtani-level mega-star compared to the reliever I’m writing about today. Read the rest of this entry »
Welcome back to Top of the Order, where every Tuesday and Friday I’ll be starting your baseball day with some news, notes, and thoughts about the game we love.
While esteemed FanGraphs writer Michael Baumann has spent this season anchored to South Jersey, the same can’t be said about the right-handed pitcher of the same name. Since that linked interview from July 2023, pitcher Mike Baumann (hereafter referred to as “Baumann”) has thrown 60 innings with a 5.10 ERA, with his 49 strikeouts, 26 walks, and 11 home runs producing a similar 5.39 FIP. Nothing special, and certainly nothing either Baumann is too happy about.
Welcome back to Top of the Order, where every Tuesday and Friday I’ll be starting your baseball day with some news, notes, and thoughts about the game we love.
As we’ve covered in this column a few times, the only way to acquire major league players from other teams for the rest of the season is via waivers. We have yet to see an Angels-level dumping of impact players en masse this season, but there has still been some movement since the trade deadline passed. Let’s take a look at some of the notable players who changed teams recently, as well as some guys in DFA limbo who could get claimed in the coming days.
