The most consequential transaction (if you can call it that) in baseball this week was the resignation of Tony Clark as the executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association. Clark, who had been the head of the union since 2013, stepped down after an internal investigation revealed that he’d had an “inappropriate relationship” with his sister-in-law, who had been hired to work for the union in 2023. The MLBPA elevated deputy executive director and lead negotiator Bruce Meyer into the top spot on an interim basis. The timing of the move is far from ideal, coming less than 10 months before the current collective bargaining agreement expires at 11:59 p.m. ET on December 1, at which point the owners are expected to promptly lock out the players for the second time this decade. Still, as Michael Baumann wrote on Tuesday, it’s an even worse time for the union to have leadership that its membership doesn’t trust. Beyond the “inappropriate relationship,” Clark is one of the subjects of a broader ongoing federal probe into both the MLBPA and the NFLPA over financial dealings related to the group licensing firm OneTeam Partners, and was the subject of a November 2024 whistleblower complaint alleging him of misusing union resources, self-dealing, and abuse of power. His departure allows the players to better coalesce around their shared priorities.
In lighter news, 12 teams played their first spring training games on Friday, providing us with a perfect opportunity to watch some of the players we covered during Prospect Week. If you tuned in to the Mariners-Padres game, for example, you would’ve seen four of our Top 100 Prospects — including shortstop Colt Emerson (no. 11), center fielder Jonny Farmelo (no. 51), right fielder Lazaro Montes (no. 66), and second baseman Michael Arroyo (no. 78) — in action, all playing for Seattle. The 21-year-old Arroyo (a 50-FV prospect) smoked a two-run homer to right center field on an 0-2 changeup that caught way too much of the plate. He doubled his next time up and finished the day 2-for-2. There are 16 games slated for this afternoon.
We have more labor talk to come in this mailbag, but that’s the last we’ll say about the start of spring training games. Instead, we’ll be answering your questions about quantifying the pitcher-catcher relationship, the looming lockout, how teams perform after significant roster turnover, and more. Before we do, though, I’d like to remind you that this mailbag is exclusive to FanGraphs Members. If you aren’t yet a Member and would like to keep reading, you can sign up for a Membership here. It’s the best way to both experience the site and support our staff, and it comes with a bunch of other great benefits. Also, if you’d like to ask a question for an upcoming mailbag, send me an email at mailbag@fangraphs.com. Read the rest of this entry »
One of the things that happens when pitchers and catchers report to camp is that managers update everyone on any unreported offseason developments. Unfortunately, few of those updates are about fun new cocktails they tried or animals they saw on vacation. It brings me no pleasure to tell you I have yet to see one single beat reporter file a story about a manager who saw a really cool sea turtle while snorkeling. Most of those developments are injuries, which meant that Tuesday was at once a glorious rite of the coming spring and an unbearably heavy dump of unpleasant injury news. Today we’re going to focus on the depressing dump, so courtesy of Andy Kostka of The Baltimore Banner, here’s a gorgeous picture that captures the eternal hope of spring training as a little pre-casualty report treat to soften the blow.
Andy Kostka
Wow. That was beautiful. Thank you, Andy. Now we’ll get miserable, but please remember that it could always be worse. We could be back in the 1880s, when the unpleasant health updates weren’t about who broke their hamate bone, but about who died of consumption. (The preceding sentence was originally intended to be a joke, but guess what.) Read the rest of this entry »
All WAR figures refer to the Baseball Reference version unless otherwise indicated.
Denny McLain was the ace of the 1968 Tigers, going 31-6 with a 1.96 ERA en route to both the American League Cy Young and Most Valuable Player awards, but during that year’s World Series against the defending champion Cardinals, he was outshined by teammate Mickey Lolich. While McLain started and lost Games 1 and 4 before recovering to throw a complete-game victory in Game 6, Lolich went the distance in winning Games 2, 5, and 7, the last of which secured the Tigers’ first championship in 23 years. By outdueling Bob Gibson — the previous year’s World Series MVP and the author of a 1968 season to rival McLain’s — in Game 7, Lolich secured spots both in Fall Classic lore and the pantheon of Detroit sports heroes.
Lolich died last Wednesday at an assisted living facility in Sterling Heights, Michigan at the age of 85. Beyond his World Series heroics, he was a three-time All-Star with a pair of 20-win seasons and top-three Cy Young finishes. A power pitcher whose fastball was clocked as high as 96 mph, he struck out more than 200 hitters in a season seven times, with a high of 308 in 1971. Even today, he’s fifth in strikeouts by a lefty with 2,832, behind only Randy Johnson, Steve Carlton, CC Sabathia, and Clayton Kershaw, and 23rd among all pitchers.
But for as much as anything, Lolich is remembered for piling up innings. In that 1971 season, he went 25-14 while making 45 starts, completing 29 of them and totaling 376 innings — leading the AL in all of those categories except losses — with a 2.92 ERA (124 ERA+). He also topped 300 innings in each of the next three seasons, including 327 1/3 in 1972, when he went 22-14 with a 2.50 ERA.
“No pitcher in 125 years of Tigers big-league life was so tied to durability, or so paired his seeming indestructibility with such excellence during his time in Detroit,” wrote the Detroit News’ Lynn Henning in his tribute to Lolich. “No pitcher in Tigers history quite matched his knack for taking on inhuman workloads that could forge even greater gallantry at big-game moments.” Read the rest of this entry »
Last summer, an article titled Mark Gubicza Tackles a Challenging Career Quiz ran here at FanGraphs. In it, the Los Angeles Angels broadcaster did his best to answer matchup-specific questions from his playing days —- he pitched in the big leagues from 1984-1996 — such as which batter he allowed the most hits to, and who took him deep the most times. Along with taking a stab at the answers, Gubicza shared entertaining anecdotes about some of the hitters that were mentioned.
He isn’t the only pitcher-turned-broadcaster I challenged with (a version of) the quiz. Later in the season, I sat down with David Cone who, much like his 1980s-1990s contemporary, had fun stories to share.
I first asked the New York Yankees broadcast analyst which batter he faced the most times. Cone failed to come up with the correct answer, first guessing Will Clark (76 plate appearances), and then Juan Gonzalez (57), to who he recalled surrendering several gophers.
The answer is Roberto Alomar, against whom he matched up 93 times. What does he remember about facing the Hall of Fame second baseman?
“The thing that stands out — and he was a teammate of mine, too — is that Robbie was one of the best at picking up tipped pitches,” Cone told me. “Maybe a pitcher was doing something with his glove, and you kind of knew that Robbie would see that. But a lot of times he was using it as a bluff. Alex Cora does it to this day. You want the pitcher to think you have something on him, which gets into his head. It’s psychological warfare, and Robbie was the best at that.”
“Could be, like, where I’m at on the ball too, but…”
With that fragment, Nolan McLean kicked off the baseball season. Ask a dozen baseball fans when they think the season starts, and you’re likely to get five or six different answers. Maybe you think the season starts on Opening Day, or with the first showcase series before Opening Day, or when spring training games start, or when your local broadcast starts actually airing spring training games, or on the first day of spring training, or when pitchers and catchers report, or on truck day. Or maybe you just think that all of these milestones deserve to be celebrated in their own right as we creep out of the cold toward actual, meaningful baseball. Nobody’s wrong, but some of us believe that baseball begins when grainy cellphone footage of players performing baseball-related activities on the backfields in Florida and Arizona starts trickling into our social media feeds. If you count yourself among that cohort, then congratulations. Baseball season has started.
First sight of Nolan McLean ????? atmlb.com/4qDlxyw
McLean was on the mound at Clover Park, the Mets’ spring training facility in Port St. Lucie, Florida to throw some sort of bullpen session alongside fellow prospect Jonah Tong. Someone on staff captured footage of the two young players pitching, and bothvideos went up on social media in the early afternoon on Monday. The videos were taken vertically, then cropped down to an awkward 672×768 pixel ratio, but they featured the loud pop of ball meeting glove, and that’s enough. By virtue of being posted first, McLean’s kicked off the season. Read the rest of this entry »
John E. Sokolowski, Nick Turchiaro, Wendell Cruz-Imagn Images
You already know how it works: January is for signings, trades, and articles that grade those signings and trades. Everything gets a letter, every transaction has a winner and loser, and positive thinkers like me hand out thumbs up left and right. I’ve rarely seen a signing I didn’t like. I think that most trades help out both sides. What about the aggregate effect of all the signings and trades, though? Which teams play the offseason game the best or the worst? Looking at the Mets this winter got me thinking.
How should we evaluate a front office, particularly in the offseason when we don’t have games to look at? I’ve never been able to arrive at a single framework. That’s only logical. If there were one simple tool we could use to evaluate the sport, baseball wouldn’t be as interesting to us as it is. The metrics we use to evaluate teams, and even players, are mere abstractions. The goal of baseball – winning games, or winning the World Series in a broad sense – can be achieved in a ton of different ways. We measure a select few of those in most of our attempts at estimating value, or at figuring out who “won” or “lost” a given transaction. So today, I thought I’d try something a little bit different.
Instead of a single number, I’m going to evaluate the decisions that David Stearns and the Mets made this winter on three axes. The first is what I’m calling Coherence of Strategy. If you make a win-now trade but then head into the season with a gaping hole in your roster, that’s not coherent. If you trade a star for teenage prospects and then extend a 33-year-old, that’s not coherent. Real-world examples are never that simple, but you get the idea. Some spread in decisions is inevitable, but good teams don’t work against themselves more than they have to.
Next, Liquidity and Optionality. One thing we know for sure about baseball is that the future rarely looks the way we expect it to in the present. Preserving an ability to change directions based on new information is important. Why do teams treat players with no options remaining so callously? It’s because that lack of optionality really stings. Why do teams prefer high-dollar, short-term contracts over lengthy pacts in general? It’s because you don’t know how good that guy is going to be in year six, and you certainly don’t know how good your team will be or whether you’ll have another player for the same position. All else equal, decisions that reduce future optionality are bad because they limit a team’s ability to make the right move in the future.
Finally, maximizing the Championship Probability Distribution. We like to talk about teams as chasing wins, but that’s not exactly what’s going on. Teams are chasing the likelihood of winning a World Series, or some close proxy of that. That’s often correlated to wins, but it’s not exactly the same. Building a team that outperforms opponents on the strength of its 15th-26th best players being far superior to their counterparts might help in the dog days of August, when everyone’s playing their depth pieces and cobbling together a rotation, but that won’t fly in October. Likewise, high-variance players with decent backup options don’t show up as overly valuable in a point estimate of WAR, but they absolutely matter. Teams are both trying to get to the playoffs as often as possible and perform as well as they can after arriving there. That’s not an easy thing to quantify, but we can at least give it a shot.
Let’s begin with a look at the transactions that reshaped the lineup. The biggest of these has to be the infield turnover, with Pete Alonso out and Bo Bichette, Jorge Polanco, and Marcus Semien in. Since we’re including Semien, we’ll have to include the departure of outfielder Brandon Nimmo as well. These decisions are clearly coherent; Alonso’s leaving meant space in the infield and an offensive deficit, and the Mets signed multiple free agents to account for that. I’ll analyze the Coherence of Strategy axis at the end of this write-up, but for each individual deal, I’ll focus on the other two axes of analysis. Read the rest of this entry »
This one may be a little too one the nose. On Wednesday evening, the Brewers and Mets agreed to a trade that sent Freddy Peralta and Tobias Myers to the Mets in exchange for two top 100 prospects, Jett Williams and Brandon Sproat. That’s right, the Brewers got cheaper and younger by selling their best pitcher for prospects, the Mets flexed their financial muscle, and president of baseball operations David Stearns acquired Freddy Peralta. Welcome to every single day.
Peralta may not be your idea of a surefire ace, but he was the unquestioned leader of the Brewers rotation, their Game 1 starter in the playoffs for each of the past two years. As salary dumps go, this one is particularly depressing. Peralta is due just $8 million in his walk year, a hair more than the Angels will be paying Anthony Rendon to clear out of Anaheim as soon as possible, if you please. For Myers and the wildly underpaid Peralta, the Mets surrendered the prospects who ranked 31st and 63rd overall in our Top 100 update back in July. The Brewers did what they do, avoiding expenditures of any kind, finding young players, and trusting that they can keep creating aces out of whole cloth. Meanwhile, the Mets have increased their CBT tax hit from preposterously large to ludicrously large in order to reinforce a rotation that still ranks just 15th on our Depth Charts.
Brendan Gawlowski wrote about Sproat and Williams in a separate article, so our focus here is on the major league side of things, and we’ll start with the headliner. In February 2020, right before the world started exploding, Peralta signed a five-year, $15.5 million extension with two club options that could push the total to $30 million. He was, at that point, a 23-year-old with a career 4.79 ERA and 3.96 FIP and more relief appearances than starts. “We are happy to announce that we have reached a multi-year extension with Freddy that can keep him in a Brewers uniform for the better part of this decade,” said Stearns, then Milwaukee’s president of baseball operations. That prediction came true by the slimmest of margins.
Peralta pitched in relief in 2020, running a 3.99 ERA and an encouraging 2.41 FIP. He broke out in 2021. Over the past five seasons, Peralta has put up 14.8 WAR and gone 54-34 with a 3.30 ERA and 3.65 FIP. Despite dealing with shoulder injuries earlier in his career, he’s pitched at least 165 innings in each of the last three seasons. He anchored the rotation in 2024 when Corbin Burnes got traded and Brandon Woodruff got hurt. By my count, the Brewers extracted roughly two-thirds of a win for each million they paid Peralta. At that rate for their entire roster, the Dodgers would expect to win 208 games this season.
Peralta’s $8 million salary was the fourth-highest on the Brewers, but it will now slot in as the 14th-highest on the Mets. The galling part isn’t just that the Brewers couldn’t swallow the $8 million this year. Trading him means there wasn’t even a thought that they might be able to extend him, or at least that they might be able use a really good pitcher in 2026 and then just deal with losing him in 2027. After all, this is a team that just finished with the best record in baseball and made it to the NLCS. No matter. Milwaukee is taking the cash and the prospects and betting that Woodruff will finally get healthy (and that his alarming drop in velocity isn’t a portent of bad things to come).
After this year (and just in time for a possible work stoppage), Peralta will be entering his age-31 season and finally have the chance to make what he is worth on the open market, unless the Mets lock him up to another extension. This certainly seems like the kind of trade that ends up that way, especially when you consider that Stearns must like Peralta an awful lot, given that he has now traded for him twice and extended him once. Peralta won’t turn 30 until early June, and he just put up the highest fastball velocity of his career. Sproat was our top-ranked prospect on Eric Longenhagen’s updated Mets list from last June, and Williams came in at sixth. In his piece on the Brewers’ return, Brendan wrote that both players “are near-ready, 50-FV contributors and slot into Milwaukee’s farm system as the club’s third- and fourth-best prospects, respectively. Sproat projects as a mid-rotation starter, while Williams is a middle-of-the-diamond player with an as-yet undetermined defensive home.” That’s a serious haul. Keeping Peralta for a while would certainly take some of the sting out of losing them.
Peralta throws a four-pitch mix: four-seamer, changeup, curveball, and slider. He leads with the four-seamer, throwing it just over half the time to both righties and lefties. As Lance Brozdowski noted in his write-up of the trade, it’s a weird pitch (complimentary). It comes from a low release point not because of a low arm angle, but because he’s only six feet tall and he has a huge stride that brings him a long way down the mound. That huge stride also means huge extension. So even though Peralta’s 94.8 mph velocity put him in just the 57th percentile (among pitchers who threw at least 100 four-seamers in 2025), his 95.2 mph perceived velocity put him in the 74th percentile. A flat fastball with above-average velocity is a great combination, but it’s worth noting that Peralta really needs every bit of his stuff.
He hit the strike zone just 45% of the time in 2025, the lowest rate among all qualified pitchers. He ran the third-lowest mark in 2024 and the 13th lowest in 2023. Over the past five years, among pitchers who have thrown at least 2,000 pitches, his 46% zone rate puts him in the ninth percentile. That’s great if you can get away with it, as pitches over the plate are the ones that get hit. Peralta gives up too many walks, but he runs average chase rates and superlative whiff rates, allowing him to offset all those walks with tons of strikeouts and lots of weak contact. It’s a cocktail that some advanced ERA estimators, like DRA, absolutely abhor, but he’s got a long track record of success with it.
If and when Peralta’s stuff stops fooling batters, though, this trick could fall apart in a hurry. If he can’t induce chases, he’ll have to come into the zone. Once he’s in the zone, he’s probably going to allow more hard contact, and if he’s not inducing chases, he’s probably not going to induce as many whiffs either. That’s not to say that he couldn’t learn a new approach, and the good news is that this potentially swift decline doesn’t seem imminent. As you know, his four-seamer averaged 94.8 mph in 2025 (and played even faster), but his fastball velocity has actually been trending up over the past few seasons. It performed well even in 2022, when it averaged just 92.9 mph. That’s a reassuringly large margin for error. On the other hand, the inefficiency of his approach means that he throws tons of pitches; 8,991 over the past three years, to be exact. That’s the fifth most in the game, and it’s fair to wonder whether he might one day, you know, get tired.
Peralta halved his slider usage in 2025, throwing it just under 10% of the time. He didn’t really throw it to lefties at all, and against righties, he threw all three of his non-fastballs roughly 16% of the time.
Brozdowski posited that Peralta lost feel for his slider, noting its inconsistent amount of horizontal break. It has shifted so much that in some years, some pitch classifications split it up into a slider and a sweeper. Regardless, Stuff+ and StuffPro both regard the pitch as Peralta’s best, and Brozdowski hypothesized that the Mets will try to help him figure it out and return it to its place of prominence. Even if he doesn’t find another gear, he still slides in as the top pitcher in a Mets rotation that completely fell apart in the second half in 2025, and projects as average in 2026. That’s not to say it’s without upside.
The Mets have several starters whose names any baseball fan will know. It starts with Nolan McLean and Jonah Tong, who made their debuts in 2025. McLean looks ready to contribute right away in 2026. Kodai Senga has a career 3.00 ERA and 3.82 FIP in MLB. After a shoulder capsule strain and a calf strain cost him nearly the entire 2024 season, his velocity dropped and his strikeout rate cratered last year, when he also dealt with a hamstring strain. As a result, the projections peg him for an ERA that’s dangerously close to 4.00. But if he finds his old form, he’s a star.
In his first season as a starter, Clay Holmes posted a solid 3.53 ERA, but his 4.11 FIP told a different tale, and the peripherals were scary. The velocity of his sinker, his most-used pitch, fell by 2.9 mph as he transitioned from high-leverage reliever to starter. His strikeout rate, which had averaged nearly 25% to that point in his career, dropped to 18%. Holmes is entering his age-33 season, and it’s hard to know how much improvement to expect from him with one year of starting experience under his belt.
Despite underperforming his peripherals in a major way in 2024, David Peterson seems solid as ever, and he’ll make $100,000 more than Peralta in his final year of arbitration. An oblique strain blew up Sean Manaea’s 2025 season, limiting him to 12 ugly starts, but he’s just one year removed from a 2024 season in which he earned a Cy Young vote. That’s six names and nearly as many question marks, but this rotation certainly isn’t devoid of talent. It’s not hard to envision this staff being good, and it’s not hard to envision it being quite bad. If nothing else, Peralta adds some much-needed stability.
Tobias Myers is 27, and across his two big league seasons, he has made 31 starts and 18 relief appearances, putting up a 3.55 ERA and 3.92 FIP. An early-season oblique strain cost Myers some time in 2025, and he got sent down after a rough start. However, he came back up in a relief role in July, and over the last three months of the season, he posted a 2.64 ERA and 3.49 FIP. With a 93.5 mph fastball, his stuff grades out as roughly average, and he doesn’t strike out many batters. He also had the odd distinction of tying for the splitter that had the most induced vertical rise in baseball at 10.5 inches.
Myers throws six pitches: a four-seamer, cutter, slider, splitter, changeup, and curveball. When you look at his extremely steep 61-degree arm angle and the huge rise on his four-seamer, you start to wonder why he doesn’t embrace this North-South profile and throw his curveball much more often. He was blocked in Milwaukee, and if all goes to plan, he’s likely to be blocked in New York too, and maybe he’s shown all that he has to offer. Still, though it might not be the smartest thing in the world to assume that some other team is going to do a better job of developing a pitcher than the Brewers, it’s fair to say that Myers doesn’t seem like a finished product.
The Mets spent the beginning of the offseason upgrading their bullpen and replacing Pete Alonso. Over the past several days, they’ve reminded everyone just how much of a juggernaut they really are. What’s $8 million (and the resultant $8.8 million luxury tax hit) to a team that just snatched Bo Bichette away from the Phillies for (in theory) three years and $126 million? It’s entirely possible that the Brewers will turn Sproat into their latest ace, and that in a year or two he’ll start a playoff game against the Mets, just like Peralta did in 2024. But the Mets are trying to win this season, and now that he’s not in Milwaukee, David Stearns has the luxury of leaving tomorrow’s problems for tomorrow.
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 penultimate team is the New York Mets.
Batters
The Mets are a bit like an intellectual character in a 19th Century Russian novel. They’re well-read enough to understand why life just isn’t working, and while they make changes every winter, it always seems to come with the precognition that something will go horribly wrong, and there’s little recourse but to observe their own downfall. Yankees fandom is more transactional, and depending on how the season turns out, you either cheer the empire or curse Brian Cashman. Rooting for the Mets is existential; you go into every season with hope, but an unquenchable feeling that something will go horribly or maybe even comically wrong. Meaning as a Mets fan does not come from celebrating the team’s achievements, but the act of enduring and returning, year after year, with the knowledge that preparation offers no escape. Mets fans essentially become annotators of doomed worlds.
If every moment of Mets triumph is matched with an equal measure of Mets tragedy, the lineup may be in for some dark times when the worm turns. I actually think I’d rather have Pete Alonso for his deal than Jorge Polanco for his if I were the Mets, but the projections suggest that I might be wrong. Either way, this lineup looks extremely solid as a whole. Starting with two players, Juan Soto and Francisco Lindor make up for a lot of sins. But there aren’t really a lot of sins in the lineup. ZiPS thinks Bo Bichette is more valuable at third base than he was at shortstop, and he certainly has All-Star potential. ZiPS also forecasts decent bounce-back seasons for offseason trade acquisitions Luis Robert Jr. and Marcus Semien. Francisco Alvarez is coming off a near .800 OPS season, and under the new rules encouraging stolen bases, Luis Torrens’ value has increased because of his ability at preventing them, making him more than capable at holding up the lighter end of a catching tandem.
The DH situation isn’t amazing, with Mark Vientos getting the bulk of the plate appearances there, but only a few teams really get a ton of WAR from that spot anyway. Carson Benge certainly has upside, and while it’s not a particularly exciting projection, it’s not a bad forecast for a guy who hasn’t hit Triple-A pitchers yet. Brett Baty showed in 2025 that he can hit well enough to provide solid depth for the Mets. Jett Williams was also good depth in the infield, but he didn’t have a clear path to actual playing time in the majors in 2026 outside of a reserve role, so the Mets sent him to Milwaukee on Wednesday night as part of a trade to the get right-handed pitchers Freddy Peralta and Tobias Myers.
Pitchers
ZiPS expects the Mets’ pitching to be pretty good, giving the staff a bit of a bump from last year’s preseason projections. And that was before the trade for Peralta, who was the Brewers’ the most valuable pitcher. While Peralta’s not really a sub-three ERA guy — ZiPS thinks he’s legitimate a low-BABIP pitcher, but .243 is damned hard to maintain — he’s still an excellent pitcher who is a huge addition to New York’s rotation. Clay Holmes isn’t an ace, and he bled a couple strikeouts when he transitioned from the bullpen to the rotation, but his 2025 also demonstrates that his conversion to starting wasn’t just a mad scientist’s latest crazy plan. Nolan McLean looks like a much stronger bet going into 2026 than he did at this time last year, and while Jonah Tong didn’t have instant success in the majors, he also greatly boosted his stock, though we may not see a lot of it in the majors in 2026 unless the team is hit by injuries. Last year, David Peterson didn’t match his 2.90 ERA from 2024, but that never should have been the expectation anyway, and he’s a fairly dependable no. 2 starter type. Kodai Senga’s return went generally well, aside from nobody checking how the ghost fork graphic at the stadium would interact with a strikeout tally.
Sean Manaea ought to get back to effectively eating innings in 2026, and though he’s certainly not the headliner, the acquired Myers is a reasonable option to have in reserve. ZiPS is less excited once we get past Myers, to guys like Christian Scott and Cooper Criswell. But on the plus side, ZiPS thinks there’s a real chance that Jonathan Pintaro’s command will improve just enough for him to have a breakout in 2026.
ZiPS views the Mets as having an above-average bullpen, but one that’s below baseball’s elite. Maybe it’s just cognitive dissonance on my part, but I still have some worries about Devin Williams despite all the objective data suggesting he’s a great bounce-back candidate. And he is, but 2025 will still be in the back of my mind plus, you know, the Mets. Luke Weaver is a good bullpen no. 2 and fallback closer option, and A.J. Minter was at his Mintest last season. Brooks Raley gets a strong projection as well, and ZiPS is unaware of my extreme bias in favor of side-armers; Raley is more low three-quarters, but he’s at least side-arm adjacent. Criswell gets a significantly better projection as a reliever than as a starter. My silicon counterpart is rather meh on the rest of the bullpen, except for maybe Huascar Brazobán, but it still looks like a highly cromulent unit.
Despite last season’s collapse, ZiPS projects the Mets as a highly competitive team in the NL East, and one the league shouldn’t dismiss. Now, come September, six Mets could need Tommy John surgery, or maybe Juan Soto and Francisco Lindor are destined to get trapped inside a leatherbound book given to Carlos Mendoza by a library maintenance worker who looks suspiciously like M.R. James. But predictive algorithms and fuzzy clustering methods allow us to peek only so far behind the veil of fate.
Ballpark graphic courtesy Eephus League. Depth charts constructed by way of those listed here. Size of player names is very roughly proportional to Depth Chart playing time. The final team projections may differ considerably from our Depth Chart playing time.
Players are listed with their most recent teams wherever possible. This includes players who are unsigned or have retired, players who will miss 2026 due to injury, and players who were released in 2025. So yes, if you see Joe Schmoe, who quit baseball back in August to form a Ambient Math-Rock Trip-Hop Yacht Metal band that only performs in abandoned malls, he’s still listed here intentionally. ZiPS is assuming a league with an ERA of 4.16.
Hitters are ranked by zWAR, which is to say, WAR values as calculated by me, Dan Szymborski, whose surname is spelled with a z. WAR values might differ slightly from those that appear in the full release of ZiPS. Finally, I will advise anyone against — and might karate chop anyone guilty of — merely adding up WAR totals on a depth chart to produce projected team WAR. It is important to remember that ZiPS is agnostic about playing time, and has no information about, for example, how quickly a team will call up a prospect or what veteran has fallen into disfavor.
As always, incorrect projections are either caused by misinformation, a non-pragmatic reality, or by the skillful sabotage of our friend and former editor. You can, however, still get mad at me on Twitter or on Bluesky. This last is, however, not an actual requirement.
With most of the top free agents having found new homes – 12 of our top 15 have signed – the baseball transaction news figured to be light this week. Maybe the Yankees and Cody Bellinger would keep making lovey-dovey eyes at each other across the negotiating table to give us some headlines, but that felt like the only game in town for at least a few days. But just because no one is left to sign doesn’t mean nothing can happen. Out in Queens, the Mets weren’t content to sit pat after signingBo Bichette. They continued their offseason splurge by acquiring Luis Robert Jr. from the White Sox in exchange for Luisangel Acuña and pitching prospect Truman Pauley, as ESPN’s Jeff Passan first reported.
I’ve grappled with evaluating Robert innumerable times over the past few years. For a while, he was a yearly feature in our Trade Value series, an electric talent in his early 20s. Then he became an interesting litmus test when talking to team evaluators, as his production dipped but his prodigious tools remained as loud as ever. Finally, as his contract hit the expensive team option phase, I considered him for a list of top free agents, as I have to predict what option decisions teams will make. At every turn, I came away equally impressed and frustrated by Robert’s ludicrous ceiling and subbasement-level floor.
You want a tooled-up center fielder? Robert is your guy. If you click on the “Prospects Report” tab on his player page, you’ll see this short blurb by Eric Longenhagen: “Graduation TLDR: The Vitruvian Outfield Prospect in all facets save for his approach, Robert graduated from prospectdom as one of baseball’s most exciting players.” That Vitruvian Outfield Prospect phrase has stuck with me.
If you made an outfielder in a lab, he’d look a lot like this. Power? Robert has 90th-percentile bat speed and clobbered 38 home runs in his last full season of playing time. He gets the ball in the air, too, all the better to maximize his best contact. Speed? You guessed it, 90th-percentile sprint speed. He’s also among the best defensive outfielders in the game when he’s healthy. He even has a strong throwing arm, though it’s inaccurate at times. If you’re looking for a Gold Glove defender who can hit 40 homers at the hardest outfield spot and swipe 30 bags, he’s one of maybe three players in the entire majors who fits the bill. Read the rest of this entry »
Bichette and the Dodgers had been in discussions over a short-term, high-AAV deal like the one Tucker ultimately signed, but Bichette, like most free agents, seemed to be interested in a contract with more term and overall value, but a lower annual salary. Back in August, I made a case for Bichette to cash in by pitching him as Trea Turner, but slow. And when America went to bed on Thursday, the smart money was on Bichette signing with the Phillies, who had already invested $300 million in Original Recipe Turner.
The Mets were reeling from Tucker’s rejection, amidst mortifying vagueposting from Steve Cohen. (Seriously, if you’re worth more than $500 million, you should not be allowed on social media.) But credit to Cohen and David Stearns, who suddenly found themselves with $220 million earmarked for Tucker, and no Tucker to spend that money on. They not only grabbed the next-best bat left on the market, in so doing they put a finger in the eye of their division rival. Read the rest of this entry »
