Five Bold-Ish Predictions for the 2024 Season

I’m not a bold predictions kind of guy. Maybe it comes with the territory of writing so much: On average, my views are pretty down the middle because I just have so many views. There’s so much baseball bouncing around in my brain all the time that it tends toward the mean. Or maybe that’s just a cop out, a way to pre-excuse my lack of boldness. Because it’s time for my annual attempt at it. Here are five things I think will occur that hopefully will shock you a little – but not too much, because I’m hoping that at least two or three of these actually will transpire.

1. The Mets Will Lead Baseball in DH WAR
Our projections hate J.D. Martinez, and there’s a reason why: He’s 36 and squarely in the back half of his career. Over the past four years, he’s posted a 120 wRC+, which is great but not otherworldly, and he struck out 31.1% of the time in 2023. This kind of general trajectory is what projections feast on; they recognize early and commonly shared signs of decline and then extrapolate from there.

Doubting those projections wouldn’t really count as a bold claim in my book, though, because Martinez is a very good hitter. Also, the way that projections work means that he’ll exceed those numbers roughly 50% of the time even if they’re a good approximation of his true talent. We need to be much bolder than that. So let’s kick it up a notch and imagine how good Martinez could feasibly be.

If he repeats his 2023 season, Martinez will be very good indeed. He was worth 2.2 WAR in only 472 plate appearances. The Dodgers DH position produced 2.7 WAR thanks to a little help from Max Muncy (and Amed Rosario’s hitting .571/.667/.714 in nine DH plate appearances, insert fire emoji here). That was good for fifth in baseball.

It was within hailing distance of second in baseball, the Phillies at 3.3. Philadelphia will get fewer Bryce Harper appearances there, though, and the Mets can back Martinez with some other solid batters getting DH time. That means the hardest bar to clear here is Shohei Ohtani. The Angels were easily first in baseball in DH WAR last year, and the Dodgers project that way this year. He’s really good! But maybe Ohtani will fall back slightly from his all-world form, leaving the Mets in first.

2. The Rangers Will Miss the Playoffs
This is not a fun prediction, because the Rangers are a super fun team. Evan Carter is a prospect crush of mine who’s made good. Wyatt Langford is the new hottest name in the game, a dominant offensive presence who promises to kick the team’s lineup up a notch from scary to unstoppable. Adolis García is a blast. Josh Jung is great, and seems healthy. I haven’t even mentioned Corey Seager and Marcus Semien, who finished second and third in AL MVP voting last year. What a fearsome offense.

The pitching is good too, with a bunch of good innings-eating arms backing up an injured trio of potential studs. Nathan Eovaldi and Jon Gray project for volume galore. Dane Dunning and Andrew Heaney are nice back-of-rotation pieces. Jacob deGrom, Max Scherzer, and Tyler Mahle will return later in the year, and Michael Lorenzen can slide to the bullpen then.

Why do I think the Rangers will miss the playoffs? Because I just don’t buy their depth in a tough AL West. They have excellent projections at every offensive position – but pretty much nothing behind those guys. Ezequiel Duran, Josh Smith, Justin Foscue, and Travis Jankowski are the backups we see getting almost all the playing time in the event that any starter goes on the IL. That’s a rough group. Andrew Knizner is their backup catcher. And, already down three important pieces, the starting rotation will be extremely vulnerable to injury early in the season.

The way I see this going down is that a few nagging injuries turn the Texas lineup into a lightweight unit, particularly on days when anyone in the world needs a day off. Inevitable pitching injuries will mean a lot of Cody Bradford innings, and potentially some Jack Leiter time before he’s ready for the big leagues. The Rangers are still talented enough that they could make a run at it – but their division is really tough. I have the Mariners winning it, but the Astros are obviously very good as well. The AL East is as stacked as ever, and the Central is going to have so many bad teams that the great squads in the coastal divisions will win a ton. You might need 89 or 90 wins just to reach the playoffs in the AL. Last year, Texas squeaked into the playoffs in a tight three-way race. I say that this year, the Rangers will end up on the wrong side of the cut line. Stars and scrubs is a valid team construction method – but when it goes wrong, it goes really wrong. That’s what I think will happen here.

3. Elly De La Cruz Will Finish Top 5 in MVP Voting
It’s important to know your own limitations and biases as an analyst, and Dudes Who Generally Look and Play Like Elly De La Cruz is a category I specifically tend to overrate. I like my power projection tall and lanky, after years of being in on and wrong about Tyler O’Neill. I like shortstops, particularly fast shortstops. It’s definitely possible that I’m overrating De La Cruz as a result, but I have some method to my madness.

As Dan Szymborski pointed out, De La Cruz’s plate discipline wasn’t as awful as it looked. Sure, he struck out a third of the time, but his underlying metrics weren’t nearly that bad, and he actually swung and missed less frequently in the majors than at any stop in the minors. That’s what preternaturally talented players do sometimes; they just get better very quickly. He also didn’t run disastrous chase rates for a 21-year-old switch hitter, and he harnessed his aggression more as the year went on.

There’s really not much more to look for in terms of raw power – he already has it in spades – but I do think that De La Cruz will get the ball in the air more frequently this year than he did in 2023. His minor league track record shows that he’s capable of avoiding the grounder trap he found himself in last year. It’s not an automatic or easy change, but it’s the kind of improvement that guys like Elly make. I don’t think he’s suddenly going to be peak José Bautista or anything, but a league average GB/FB ratio would add four or five homers to his total, plus a heaping helping of scorched doubles.

There’s also the matter of his switch hitting, which Tom Tango covered in detail. De La Cruz has been a very bad hitter as a righty (28 wRC+ across 122 PAs last year). But while Tango would have him abandon the right side of the plate, I have more patience, and that’s another reason to buy into the hype. He’s already a strong hitter as a lefty (107 wRC+ in 305 PAs). If he can improve a bit from the right side, there’s plenty of room to grow.

Of course, all these improvements probably won’t happen at once. That would be too much to ask for. De La Cruz is a great player, but he’s only 22, and there are a lot of things to improve on. They don’t all have to click, though, because he already looks elite at the other phases of baseball. He’s one of the best baserunners in the game, with blinding speed and also great instincts. Defensive systems disagree on how good he was in 2023, but scouts think he’ll make it work, and even if he’s an average shortstop, that’s a huge tailwind to his game. Maybe I’m a year early, or maybe I’m just completely off base, but I think that De La Cruz is the next big star, with emphasis on big.

4. Erick Fedde Will Make the All Star Game and Receive Cy Young Votes
Bold enough for you? Fedde is projected for a 5.00 ERA by our excellent Depth Charts system. In his last season stateside, he posted a 5.81 ERA over 127 innings. That season was so bad that he didn’t get any major league offers, so he headed to Korea to pitch for the NC Dinos last year.

As you might have heard, that trip worked out incredibly well for him. He won MVP honors in the KBO last year, with a 2.00 ERA, 2.38 FIP, and 29.5% strikeout rate. He won the pitching Triple Crown comfortably and rejuvenated his career. His two-year, $15 million deal with the White Sox more than doubled his previous career MLB earnings. Even if he’s just an average pitcher, he’s already quite a success story.

I think things will go even better than that for him, though. I’ve always been a Fedde backer, even though he’s never been great. I think the sinker/cutter/slider pitch mix is one of those setups that produces better outcomes than you’d expect for middling raw stuff, and I can’t put my finger on why, but I always thought his walk numbers were elevated relative to his command. Lo and behold, his walk rate dropped precipitously in Korea, and it looks good again in spring training. His strikeout rate looks much worse, but he’s drawing more swinging strikes than at any previous point in his career, so I think that will come out in the wash.

To be clear, I don’t think that Fedde is suddenly going to strike out 30% of opponents or anything like that. But he’s always delivered volume, and I’m a lot more intrigued by that volume now that it comes with a 90 mph hard cutter and a big-breaking sweeper. He’s also added some horizontal wiggle to his sinker while maintaining its customary sink. Most importantly, the cutter/slider combo worked out so well that it allowed Fedde to ditch his curveball, which basically behaved like a worse version of the slider.

This is still a long shot, to be clear. We’re talking about a pitcher with a career 5.41 ERA here. His stuff has definitely improved, but we don’t know how it’ll play against big league competition. The White Sox are going to play mostly atrocious defense behind him, too, and that’s rough given how grounder-heavy he is at his best. But I think it’s all going to work out – particularly if the Sox play Nicky Lopez a lot when Fedde is on the mound – and that he’ll be another marvel of late-career pitching improvement.

5. Two NL Central Teams Will Make the Playoffs
I wanted to make this prediction about the AL Central, but then I thought about it and decided that I couldn’t go quite *that* far. But while the two coastal divisions look tough at the top this year in the senior circuit, I think that the balanced Central is going to surprise a little bit to the upside after disappointing in 2023.

We’re still early in our investigation of depth here at FanGraphs, but all five NL Central clubs placed quite highly when we looked at how well teams were set up to weather injuries to key players. That’s why this prediction will work, if it does. Injuries are inevitable, and some teams aren’t particularly well set up to handle them. If either of Philadelphia’s top pitchers go down, there’s going to be a problem. If Corbin Carroll misses time, the Diamondbacks are dead in the water. Logan Webb can’t keep throwing 200 Cy Young caliber innings every year – and the Giants haven’t even been that great recently with him doing that.

Meanwhile, the NL Central teams are lousy with good backups. There are pitching questions up and down the division, but none of them revolve around a single irreplaceable ace. The same is mostly true for position players. Sure, Nolan Arenado and Paul Goldschmidt and my guy Elly De La Cruz are great, but their backups are pretty good too, and it’s not like those three headliners are as talented as Mookie Betts or Ronald Acuña Jr., either. The gaps here are just smaller.

That’ll add up, as far as I’m concerned. I can’t tell you which Central teams are going to come out on top. I can’t tell you which West or East teams will disappoint. Other than the Pirates, in fact, I think that the division is roughly an even race, and Pittsburgh is far from dead in the water. It’s not a good division by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s an extremely balanced one.

My guess is that the Reds and Cardinals will end up in the 86-88 win range, but if you asked me yesterday, I might have had the Brewers and Cubs in those positions. Meanwhile, there are five or six other NL teams better than these clubs at the start of the season – but I’m skeptical that they’ll still be better after the year plays out. It’s a fitting last prediction, in my mind. Baseball is full of endless possibilities to start the year. At the end of the season, though, plenty of those possibilities won’t happen – injury, underperformance, and so on. This one is a bet that some squads are built better than others to take advantage of that natural attrition.