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 Toronto Blue Jays.

Batters

The Toronto Blue Jays were just two runs away from winning the World Series, so suffice it to say, 2025 was a pretty successful season. Even with a disappointing first year from Anthony Santander, the Jays were second in the American League in runs scored. The lineup wasn’t just potent at the plate, either, with the team’s position players leading baseball at 44 runs above average in FRV. The pitching, both the rotation and the bullpen, was fairly middling, but given what Toronto got out of its bats, the arms didn’t need to do that much to propel the team deep into the playoffs. Now the Jays seek to finish 2025’s job in a division that won’t make it an easy task. Not that they’re sitting around and waiting; less than a year after extending Vladito for a half billion dollars, they’ve shelled out another $336 million in guaranteed money this winter. Just for context, that’s nearly $100 million more than the rest of the AL East has spent in free agency combined ($249.6 million). Crashing past the final luxury tax threshold certainly fulfills any reasonable definition of going “all in” on winning.

Neither Andrés Giménez nor Ernie Clement has the offensive upside that the recently departed Bo Bichette does, but both are fine defensive players. ZiPS isn’t banking on Kazuma Okamoto being a star or anything, but he should hit for power and be a plus at third if his defense holds up. Completing the infield is Vladimir Guerrero Jr., and while his offensive output was well below his 2024 level, he was still a star-level first baseman last year. With both Davis Schneider and Addison Barger projected as basically league average starters at second and third respectively, there’s impressive infield depth here as well.

Even though he missed half the season, first recovering from offseason shoulder surgery and then a hamstring malady, Daulton Varsho still managed 2.2 WAR in 2025. Varsho is never going to put up impressive batting averages, but he has very good power for the position and plays good defense, and I think most of the remaining locals who were upset that he’s on the roster instead of Gabriel Moreno have quieted down by this point. The corner outfield positions are both in flux, with the exact mix of Santander and George Springer at DH undetermined, but between those two, Schneider, Barger, and Nathan Lukes, who is more than capable of taking the larger piece of a platoon, they ought to get at least average production in the corners and at DH. The Jays have been endlessly linked to Kyle Tucker, and he’d undoubtedly improve the team, but I’m not sure that they wouldn’t get a lot more bang for the buck by signing one of the top pitchers remaining.

Pitchers

Dylan Cease was a solid addition, and forms a quality 1-2 punch with Kevin Gausman. There’s also a lot of upside in Trey Yesavage — you saw how he pitched in the postseason — and a healthy Shane Bieber could be a big plus. But a pitcher with just a single year of professional experience, or one who comes with Bieber’s injury history, carries real risks as well. Cody Ponce is interesting, and a good risk given the upside, but you can’t completely ignore that before his huge season in the KBO, he really wasn’t very good at all in Japan. If José Berríos gets back on track, well, having too much pitching has never actually been a real problem; the Dodgers over the last five years could tell you about that. I can’t help but think that for as good as the Cease signing was, adding Framber Valdez or Ranger Suárez is still a good idea, as it would lower the rotation’s downside considerably and make the Jays the AL East favorite by a win or two.

Despite the middle-of-the-pack results last year, ZiPS is actually rather enamored with Toronto’s relief corps. While it doesn’t see the team as having a Jhoan Duran or Mason Miller at the top of the ‘pen, with the exception of Yimi García, the computer projects every pitcher with 30 relief innings on our depth chart to have an ERA under 4.00 as a reliever. That even holds true if you stretch things out further, to Chase Lee and Lazaro Estrada. The soft-tossing Tyler Rogers was the big bullpen addition, practically a unicorn in that he’s an exceedingly unusual submariner who doesn’t have significant platoon splits. I don’t think the Jays really need to do much else here, and their deep store of talent might even justify them trading a reliever or two if one of the contenders with bullpen issues fails to shore things up over the next two months.

All told, the Blue Jays look to be neck-and-neck with the Red Sox, and slightly better than the Yankees, in the AL East. As for the Orioles, you’ll have to wait for that ZiPS post later this week.

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.

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 Houston Astros.

Batters

For the first time since 2016, the Houston Astros missed the playoffs. Now, it would be a mistake to call the 2025 season a disaster, as they were just barely squeezed out of October baseball by virtue of an awful idea that I hate with every fiber of my being: the tiebreaker. Still, it’s an unhappy milestone for this era’s Astros, especially coming after the departure of two of the team’s key players, Kyle Tucker and Alex Bregman, before Opening Day. The prospect of losing Framber Valdez after the season makes the early elimination feel even worse.

One of the main reasons Houston missed the playoffs is simply that it’s really hard to make up for shedding Tucker and Bregman in a single winter. Add in Yordan Alvarez’s season being ruined due to hand problems, and you’re talking quite a few wins that suddenly went poof! into the aether. As a result, the Astros fell to 12th in position player WAR, the first time they’ve been that low over a full season since 2014. 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.

He was a first-round draft pick, and a rotation regular at age 20. By the time he turned 30, he had won both a Cy Young Award and a World Series ring while helping his teams reach the playoffs six times. On the heels of emerging as the best high school pitching prospect in the country, Rick Porcello packed all of that into a 14-season span, with 12 of those seasons spent in the majors with the Tigers, Red Sox, and Mets. He endured a fair share of growing pains and wild performance swings along the way, threw his last pitch at age 31, and didn’t put up numbers that will keep him on the Hall of Fame ballot. But within that comparatively short timespan, Porcello checked a few pretty impressive boxes.

…

Frederick Alfred Porcello III was born on December 27, 1988 in Morristown, New Jersey, the second of three children of Fred and Patricia Porcello. Fred worked as a civil engineer, founding his own firm in 1994. Baseball was in Rick’s bloodlines, as Patricia’s father Sam Dente spent parts of nine seasons in the majors (1947–55) as an infielder with six American League teams; he had his best season (79 OPS+, 1.2 WAR) with Cleveland’s AL pennant-winning 1954 squad, and played in three games in that World Series. Rick’s older brother Zack pitched for Lehigh University and the New Jersey Institute of Technology, and later became an assistant coach at Seton Hall University, while his younger brother Jake was drafted by the Tigers out of high school in the 48th round in 2009, and pitched at NJIT as well. Read the rest of this entry »

It was a big night in Chicago. On Saturday, about an hour before Caleb Williams and the Bears defeated the Packers in the Wild Card round, erasing an 18-point deficit with a fourth-quarter comeback so furious that it earned the rare non-baseball wheeee from Sarah Langs, the Cubs elicited a different kind of dopamine rush. As Jon Heyman of The New York Post first reported, Alex Bregman has agreed to a five-year, $175 million contract to play in Wrigley Field. A year after Bregman signed a high-value, prove-it pact with the Red Sox, he’s finally gotten the long-term deal he sought, while the Cubs got a premier player to replace free agent Kyle Tucker. The deal contains no opt-outs and a full no trade clause. It’s the third-largest in franchise history, though on Sunday morning, Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic reported that it contains $70 million in deferred money, dropping the average annual value to just over $30 million. Bregman should remain in Wrigley through his age-36 season. It is a huge move, and the likely pièce de résistance for one of the most aggressive offseasons in recent memory for the Cubs.

Just in case you need a refresher on his résumé, Bregman ranked second on our Top 50 Free Agents list this winter, and for good reason. He’s a two-time World Series champion and three-time All-Star who owns a Gold Glove, a Silver Slugger, an All-Star Game MVP, and two top-five AL MVP finishes. Since his first full season in 2017, he’s accrued 41.8 WAR, eighth most among all position players. Aside from a partial rookie year and the truncated 2020 campaign, he’s finished below 3.0 WAR just once, in an injury-shortened 2021 season. (Any career recap also has to include at least some mention of Bregman’s role in Houston’s sign-stealing scheme in 2017 and 2018. Bregman would express regret about the scandal, but his initial deflections – “the commissioner made his report, the Astros made their decision, no further comment on it” – rankled fans, and his apologies fell flat with many outside of Houston.)

Bregman is no longer the MVP candidate he was in 2018 and 2019, when he ran a combined 162 wRC+ and put up 16.2 WAR, but he’s been extraordinarily consistent ever since. Not only has he averaged a 124 wRC+ over the past six seasons, he’s kept within 13 points of that mark every single year and he’s combined that offensive excellence with great defense at third. He earned MVP votes as recently as 2023, and he was on pace to pick up some more in 2025 until a quad strain and a late-August slump changed the trajectory of his season; he still managed a .273/.360/.462 line with 18 home runs, a 125 wRC+, and 3.5 WAR in 114 games. 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 »

Exciting news, everyone! In just about a month’s time, pitchers and catchers will be reporting to their respective spring training sites, with the rhythms of the game beginning once again. And with the start of mitts popping and best-shape-of-my-life boasting, the hopes and fears of baseball to come will be renewed.

Until then, we have plenty of things to give us Certified Baseball Sickos our fix. Four of the top five and six of the top 10 players on Ben Clemens’ Top 50 Free Agents rankings remain unsigned, including a trio of former Astros teammates in Kyle Tucker, Alex Bregman, and Framber Valdez. Also coming soon: the results of the 2026 Baseball Hall of Fame election, which will be announced on January 20. As always, Jay Jaffe has been covering the ballot top to bottom with his indispensable series of player profiles.

We’ll talk a little bit of Hall of Fame today, but through the lens of the best pitchers who never received a Hall of Fame vote. Also in this mailbag, Michael Baumann digs into Chandler Simpson, Davy Andrews looks at whether inducing popups is a skill for pitchers, and Dan Szymborski explains which types of players have the widest variance in their ZiPS projections. Before we continue, 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 »

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.

From being called out publicly by his general manager, manager, and third base coach during an historically wretched season one year, to being robbed of an MVP award after falling just short of a 40-homer, 40-steal campaign the next, Matt Kemp was an enigma. Because he focused more on basketball than baseball growing up, his instincts for the sport sometimes lagged behind his physical abilities, but at his best, he was a superstar, and a sight to behold thanks to his speed and power — a combination of traits that earned him the nickname “The Bison.” He made three All-Star teams and won two Gold Gloves (despite subpar metrics), but unfortunately, a series of injuries to his shoulders and legs compromised those abilities. The $160 million contract he signed after that near-MVP 2011 season became a millstone that sent him from team to team during its eight-year run. 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 San Diego Padres.

Batters

The season ended in disappointing fashion, as the Padres lost the NL Wild Card Series in three games against the Cubs. But overall, 2025 has to be considered a success for San Diego. For the first time in franchise history, the Padres passed the 90-win mark in consecutive seasons, and they did so against the backdrop of their owner’s death and their TV provider going bankrupt. They also lost Joe Musgrove for the year, and possibly Yu Darvish permanently. The Friars patched just enough pitching and hitting together to threaten the Dodgers’ supremacy in the division, and now they’ll try to do it again, without Dylan Cease and with a nearly maxed out payroll.

The good news is San Diego seems to have mitigated two of the problems on offense that ZiPS saw coming into last year. Ramón Laureano, whose career looked to be on life support a year ago, has largely returned to form, and though ZiPS is not projecting another .855 OPS from him, it does think he’s a legitimate, non-problematic starter in left field. ZiPS was quite down on catcher Elias Díaz, and while midseason acquisition Freddy Fermin didn’t hit all that well last year, he has a better offensive track record, and he’s still not far past 30. ZiPS still doesn’t like the team’s situation at first base, where Jake Cronenworth is set to play now that Luis Arraez is a free agent.

Jackson Merrill and Fernando Tatis Jr. remain terrific, and while Manny Machado and Xander Bogaerts are likely on the downslope of their careers, that’s more of a long-term worry than a problem for this year. I’d feel better about the Padres if they had a better starter at either first or designated hitter, but this is a solidly above-average lineup.

Pitchers

What San Diego gets from the rotation might truly determine the team’s ceiling and floor. ZiPS isn’t pegging Nick Pivetta to repeat his 2025, but he’s solid, and fairly durable, and that’s quite valuable. Bringing back Michael King was necessary, as this rotation just isn’t good enough to absorb the loss of both King and Cease, even if King chooses to opt out after the 2026 season. But the questions begin after the two of them. I’ve always liked Musgrove, and ZiPS thinks he’ll be fine, but there’s a great deal of risk for any pitcher coming off Tommy John surgery, especially immediately.

After Musgrove, the questions grow darker still. Randy Vásquez had a 3.84 ERA in 2025, with peripherals that didn’t remotely support that performance, and let’s just say that baseball has a long history of pitchers who are declared to have invalidated FIP theory, right before it becomes clear that no such thing happened. JP Sears is pure innings-eater, and while he remains the last Sears location open for business, that’s not saying much at this point. ZiPS likes Kyle Hart more as a reliever than a starter, and cordially hates all the other starting options currently in the organization, with the possible exception of any surprise reliever–>starter conversions.

ZiPS isn’t as excited as Steamer is about the bullpen, but it does see it as a solid B/B+ squad. Mason Miller is, of course, absolutely stunning, and ZiPS likes the Adrian Morejon/Jeremiah Estrada/Jason Adam part of the supporting cast. But it’s lukewarm on guys like Wandy Peralta and David Morgan, and doesn’t really care for the back of the pen. There’s only one “no name special” here, in that ZiPS is highly interested in Garrett Hawkins, with a 3.70 ERA projected as a reliever, and would very much like to see him in the big league bullpen soon. Well, if ZiPS actually had human feelings, of course.

The Padres look a lot like the 2025 team, with a win projection in the high 80s and 90 being well within the probable range. But it’s a fragile 90 wins. A few nasty surprises in the rotation could unravel things very quickly, as the team doesn’t have a deep farm system at the moment to acquire good starting pitching.

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.