The baseball season will soon be upon us, which means it’s time for an age-old question: How long until the best hitter’s reign ends? This year, and seemingly every year of late, that means Aaron Judge. You can quibble about who the best overall player is, but Judge is pretty clearly the best offensive player on the planet. Over the last four years, he has a composite 204 wRC+, miles clear of the competition, and he just put up that exact number in 2025. In 2026, we think he’s going to be the best hitter again, obviously.

Will we in 2027, though? It depends, of course. If Judge looks like his usual self this year, it’s hard to imagine anyone taking the crown. I wanted a little bit more rigor than that, however, so I dusted off the Marcel projection methodology. Marcel is what Tom Tango dubbed the minimum sufficient projection system. It’s as simple as taking the last three years of performance, weighting them, and tossing in some league average.

Let’s take Judge’s last few seasons as an example. I grabbed his wOBA and plate appearances for 2023-2025 and threw them into a table. Then I calculated league average across those three years (the exact calculation uses some weighting to match Judge’s playing time by season). That looks like this:

Turning those into a Marcel projection is simple. Multiply the most recent year’s plate appearances by five, the next-most-recent year’s by four, the next by three, and the league average by two. Take a weighted average of these new values. The result is Judge’s 2026 Marcel projection – which works out to a .440 wOBA. That tracks logically, which is the point of Marcel. It’s really close to what you and I would think about a player’s skill. Post a wOBA above .450 for two straight years, and I’ll expect you to come back to the pack a little but still do something outrageous the next year.

Using this methodology, here are the top projected hitters for 2026:

Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Cal Raleigh, Randy Arozarena, and WBC handshake etiquette, whether a mercy-rule-inducing dinger qualifies as a walk-off, whether a winning home team could voluntarily play the bottom of the ninth, MLB’s ban of the Brewers’ challenge-system system, why the MLBPA should defend Jurickson Profar and other players with positive PED tests, and Joe Sewell’s indestructible bat, then preview the 2026 New York Mets (56:35) with The Athletic’s Tim Britton, and the 2026 Washington Nationals (1:40:27) with The Athletic’s Spencer Nusbaum, plus several postscript updates (2:27:10).

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With Ranger Suarez now a Red Sock, Zack Wheeler rehabbing from thoracic outlet surgery, and Aaron Nola trying to rebound from a career-worst season, the Phillies rotation has its share of uncertainty as the 2026 regular season approaches. On Monday, the team did its best to bolster that unit for the longer term, agreeing to a five-year, $135 million extension with lefty Jesús Luzardo.

The 28-year-old Luzardo is coming off an impressive first season with the Phillies, who acquired him (along with catching prospect Paul McIntosh) from the Marlins in December 2024 in exchange for two prospects, shortstop Starlyn Caba and outfielder Emaarion Boyd. After making just 12 starts for Miami in 2024 due to elbow tightness and a stress reaction in his lower back, Luzardo made a full complement of 32 starts last year while setting career highs with 183.2 innings and 5.3 WAR, both second on the team behind Cristopher Sánchez. Both his 2.90 FIP and 3.33 xERA — each of which ranked fourth in the National League — make better cases for the quality of his pitching than his 3.92 ERA; in fact, the gap between his ERA and FIP was the third-highest among all qualifiers:

Strangely enough, all 10 of those pitchers hail from the NL; José Soriano, who had the largest gap in the American League at 0.53 runs (4.26 ERA, 3.73 FIP), ranked 11th among qualifiers, just below the cutoff in the table above. Read the rest of this entry »

A pitcher goes to the mound hoping to record outs without allowing runs. Unfortunately, a lot goes on between the ball leaving the pitcher’s hand and the scoreboard changing. You can’t just toe the rubber, chuck the ball, and say, “God’s will be done,” as you stare glassy-eyed into the distance like Martin Sheen as Robert E. Lee in Gettysburg.

I mean, you could, but you wouldn’t like the results.

A modern pitcher goes to the mound with a plan to influence events much further up the causal chain. Every pitcher is special in his own way, but every plan boils down to this: By changing speed, movement, or location, trick the hitter into swinging somewhere other than where the ball will be. Read the rest of this entry »

The Seattle Mariners boast two of the game’s most promising young arms. Second and third respectively in a highly regarded farm system, Ryan Sloan and Kade Anderson also reside in the front half of our 2026 Top 100 Prospects list. Sloan, a 20-year-old right-hander, ranks 20th, while Anderson, a 21-year-old southpaw, comes in at no. 50.

How do the two compare in terms of repertoire and approach? Both are profiled in the write-ups that accompany the aforementioned rankings, but what about how the pitchers see themselves? Moreover, how are they viewed by a catcher who knows them well and a prominent member of the organization’s pitching brain trust? Wanting to find out, I spoke to Anderson and Sloan, as well as to Luke Stevenson and Trent Blank, at Seattle’s spring training complex late last month.

Before we get to those perspectives, here are brief snapshots, augmented with quotes from our prospect analyst team of Eric Longenhagen, Brendan Gawlowski, and James Fegan:

Drafted third overall last year out of LSU, Anderson, who threw his first professional pitch this spring, was described as follows: “Maybe the best pitcher in the 2025 draft, [he] projects as a quick-moving mid-rotation starter with a great breaking ball.”

Sloan, who was drafted 55th overall in 2024 out of York Community High School in Elmhurst, Illinois, debuted professionally last season and logged a 3.73 ERA, a 3.18 FIP, and a 27.0% strikeout rate over 82 innings between Low-A Modesto and High-A Everett. “The upside is sky-high here,” wrote our prospect analysts, “and it’s not too early to say Sloan is one of the best pitching prospects in baseball.”

Blank serves as Seattle’s director of pitching strategy, so let’s start with his thoughts. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Atlanta Braves. 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 »

This is Ryan Blake’s first piece as a contributor for FanGraphs. He is a former newspaper reporter in the Inland Northwest and a current writer for Lookout Landing, where his work on the batter’s eye at T-Mobile Park was nominated for a 2026 SABR Analytics Conference Research Award.

A bottom-ranked pitching staff got a little deeper this weekend.

Zack Littell and the Nationals have agreed on a one-year contract, as several outlets reported Sunday. The price tag is currently unknown, though the deal includes a mutual option for 2027. Littell, 30, ranked next-to-last on our Top 50 Free Agents list this offseason. As it happens, he is also next-to-last to sign (only Lucas Giolito remains available).

Littell threw a career high 186.2 innings in 2025 across 32 starts for the Rays and Reds. Only 10 pitchers threw more innings last year. His 3.81 ERA was above average among qualified starters, and his 4.2% walk rate was the best in the majors. On the other hand, his 4.88 FIP, 17.1% strikeout rate, and 1.74 HR/9 each ranked in the bottom five. It was a mix of strengths and weaknesses that, taken together, made him the 88th-most valuable starting pitcher by WAR — useful depth for most organizations. Read the rest of this entry »

This offseason, I’ve taken high-level looks at the offseason decisions made by the New York Mets and the Boston Red Sox. It’s been a popular series, so today, I’m going to use the same framework to offer a holistic evaluation of the Brewers. As a refresher, here’s how I’ve been thinking about the exercise:

“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.”

I won’t be offering a single grade. Instead, I’m going to assess the decisions that Matt Arnold and the Brewers made across three axes. The first is Coherence of Strategy. If you make a win-now trade, but then head into the season with a gaping hole on your roster, that’s not a coherent approach. It’s never quite that simple in the real world, but good teams make sets of decisions that work toward the same overarching goal. Read the rest of this entry »

If there’s something even more satisfying than spending your hard-earned money, it’s spending someone else’s money that you didn’t earn. When we’re talking baseball, unless you’re an extremely high-net-worth individual who can casually spend hundreds of millions of dollars — if this describes you, call me and we can totally hang out or something — you only have the option to spend other people’s cash. I mean, I haven’t technically asked American Express to up my credit limit to $300 million, but I’m guessing the answer would be no. Every year around this time, I make a whole piece out of it, naming seven players I think teams should attempt to sign to long-term contracts now, rather than waiting until later. There are some additional complications, of course, with a lockout likely coming after this season, but teams and players could be willing to act with more urgency to sign contracts now before all the uncertainty ahead of them.

I’ve (hopefully) chosen seven players whose possible extensions would benefit both the player and the team, as all good contracts ought to do. I’ve included the up-to-date ZiPS projections for each player, as well as the contract that ZiPS thinks each player should get, though that doesn’t necessarily mean I think the player will end up with that figure or even sign an extension. Read the rest of this entry »

Collin Snider is with Chicago looking to recapture what he had two seasons ago with Seattle. Currently in camp with the Cubs, the 30-year-old right-hander was a pleasant surprise for the Mariners in 2024, logging a 1.94 with a 27.8% strikeout rate over 42 relief outings comprising 41-and-two-thirds innings. Last year was a different story. Hampered by a flexor strain and unable to get back on track, Snider struggled to the tune of a 5.47 ERA across 24 appearances in the majors, then posted an even uglier 8.06 ERA across 25 games with Triple-A Tacoma. Cut loose by Seattle in November, he subsequently inked a deal with the Cubs in December.

Despite the dismal results, Snider wasn’t without suitors. He had options — every team can use more pitching — and in the case of the Cubs, he also had connections. Tyler Zombro, the NL Central club’s Vice President of Pitching Strategy, previously worked at Tread Athletics, where Snider trained in previous offseasons. As the erstwhile Vanderbilt Commodore put it, “That really steered my decision. I like the way the pitching development is here.”

Asked about his poor 2025 performance, Snider pointed to how his injury contributed to bad mechanical habits that resulted in a drop in velocity, as well as “pitch shapes that weren’t the same.” He knew what was happening, but correcting it was another matter.

“I was very rotational, throwing too side-to-side, whereas I need to be north-south,” Snider said. “Side-to-side made the velo go down, because I couldn’t get behind the baseball. I was aware of what was going on, but I didn’t know why I was doing it, or how to make the adjustment quickly. It ended up being one of those things where I needed the offseason to straighten it out.”

Snider averaged 92.5 mph with his four-seamer last season, whereas in the prior two years that number was 94.2 and 95.3. His sweeper was also impacted by his delivery being out of sync. Read the rest of this entry »