Top prospects like Jesús Made and Leo De Vries are among the game’s most exciting potential call-ups this season, but most of the players who make the majors in the next couple of months won’t be in the same galaxy as those guys when it comes to their potential. Some may be fringe prospects, others former standouts who fell off team lists — some may have even already been labeled journeymen or organizational players. Nevertheless, a good number of them will contribute in the big leagues down the stretch. Some of last year’s impact rookies, like Caleb Durbin, Isaac Collins, Joey Cantillo, Justin Wrobleski, and Chad Patrick, weren’t Top 100 prospects — most would have struggled to make a Top 500 list. Yet their production mattered, and you can point to a dozen players like that every year.

We’re still a month away from the trade deadline, but relatively few top-tier players are available and the ones who are won’t come cheaply, meaning many teams will have to look internally as they work to improve their rosters. Below, I’ve chosen seven players, either fringe prospects or guys who’ve fallen off the big league radar, who have some combination of projection, performance, improvement, or a pressing team need that makes them intriguing over the rest of the 2026 season. Naturally, this leaves out top prospects like Kade Anderson, who I absolutely adore, and even pretty good ones, like James Tibbs III. Let’s dig a little deeper. Read the rest of this entry »

11:59

Dan Szymborski: We seem to be having technical issues

11:59

Dan Szymborski: Nobody can log in and ask questions.

11:59

Dan Szymborski: And I tried it myself!

12:00

Dan Szymborski: Unless there’s a fix, we may need to 86 the chat this week. Unless people want to hang around as I share my idle musings about whatever stupid thing I’m thinking about currently.

12:01

Dan Szymborski: (And no, people should not want to hang around for that)

12:02

Dan Szymborski: If you’re reading this, hit refresh and it shoudl work now!

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Once in a while, a player gets to walk off into the sunset at the height of his game. Ted Williams and David Ortiz are two examples of Hall of Famers who retired while still stars. But most players, even many greats, don’t see their careers end on a high note. That much larger list includes Andrew McCutchen, who was released by the Texas Rangers in late May after hitting .197/.277/.260 in 37 games as a part-time designated hitter/outfielder. There’s still a possibility that McCutchen catches on with another team this season as a spare bat off the bench, but in any case, we’re likely seeing the last throes of his career. Time always wins in the end, so this discussion was inevitable, but a decade ago, it looked like this conversation would have Cooperstown-related content.

Going back to early 2016 in the time machine, Andrew McCutchen was a very different player. Still in his 20s, he was a five-time NL All-Star coming off four consecutive Silver Slugger awards and four top-five finishes in the NL MVP balloting, including a win in 2013. It was a better time for the Pittsburgh Pirates as well, having just made the playoffs for the third straight season, winning 98 games in 2015 before being unceremoniously eliminated by the Cubs in the Wild Card game. Always at risk of losing their stars to teams more willing to pay them, the Pirates didn’t have to worry about that yet with McCutchen, who still had three more years to go in Pittsburgh, thanks to the six-year, $51 million extension (with a team option for a seventh year) that he had signed before the 2012 season.

At this stage, McCutchen appeared to be on a pretty good Hall of Fame trajectory. After seven seasons, Cutch was entering his age-29 campaign having already tallied 41 WAR with a .298/.388/.496, 144 wRC+ career line while playing center field. On a historical level, these numbers were quite competitive with some of the best young center fielders in MLB history. Look at how prominently he featured on the leaderboard through his age-28 season:

Note that Mike Trout would eventually move up to third on this list; 2015 was only his age-23 season! It’s also weird to see Rickey Henderson here, but he played mostly center field for the Yankees in 1985-1987, and so he qualified in our database.

Anyway, that’s impressive company, and the vast majority of these players are Hall of Famers or will end up there eventually. ZiPS at the time saw no reason to be particularly suspicious of McCutchen’s performance, and without any red flags, was happy to project him with a fairly typical decline phase for a star outfielder.

As it turned out, 2015 was McCutchen’s last 4-WAR season, and in only one season was he better than 2 WAR (3.6 WAR, 2017) over the next decade. While ZiPS didn’t have any illusions that McCutchen would stay a superstar for another decade, it didn’t expect him to hit a more drastic decline until the early 2020s. Sticking in center for a few more years, with a projected 2,600 hits, 72.7 WAR, and 333 home runs, when combined with his peak, I think this McCutchen would’ve made the Hall of Fame, though it probably would’ve taken him several years on the ballot to creep over the 75% line.

It’s hard to point to the obvious reason for his premature decline. The 2016 campaign was his worst season in the majors at that point, marred by a down June/July while he was playing through a severely jammed thumb. But that wasn’t thought to be a long-term problem, and his offense did bounce back to a degree for the next few seasons. His defense was already trending downward, but he was hardly slow, and, except for 2020 when he was coming back from a torn ACL that prematurely ended his 2019 campaign, he stayed above the 90th percentile in sprint speed through the 2022 season. His contact rate declined, but he still maintained his solid plate discipline and his hard-hit rate remained steady.

I don’t believe McCutchen’s going to do well when he hits the Hall of Fame ballot, but I think the version that we got might be too easily dismissed. He only ranks 30th in Jay Jaffe’s JAWS for center fielders, a place where most players do not get into the Hall. He does fare better using FanGraphs WAR, however, both in seven-year peak fWAR and in fJAWS. McCutchen ranks 13th in peak fWAR among center fielders, compared to 24th in Baseball Reference’s version.

Using FanGraphs WAR, McCutchen ranks 19th among center fielders in JAWS rather than 30th, and that ranking is strong enough that I think you at least need to have a conversation about his Hall of Fame suitability. As noted above, I’m not optimistic; the writers gave very little attention to Jimmy Wynn (19th), Kenny Lofton (12th), and Jim Edmonds (11th), while it took nine ballots to induct Andruw Jones (eighth). McCutchen had a huge peak, but the freshest memories of him will not be of that peak, but of his decade as a middling DH/corner outfielder.

If this is actually the end for Andrew McCutchen, he shouldn’t be remembered for coming up short of Cooperstown. For the better part of a decade, he was one of the very best players in baseball, the biggest name in a Pirates revival that briefly made Pittsburgh feel like a big baseball city again. The second half of his career didn’t dazzle like the first, but he did more than enough to be remembered as something greater than merely a very good player who got old quickly.

The 2026 season has not gone the way the Houston Astros envisioned. After Sunday’s loss to the Athletics, the Astros are 30-37 and in fourth place in the AL West. The only reason they’re even within shouting distance of first place is because the entire division has been mediocre so far. However, that doesn’t mean that everything’s gone wrong for them. One thing that has gone decidedly right for Houston is Yordan Alvarez’s comeback season. A fractured hand cost the three-time All-Star nearly four months of the 2025 season and, combined with a sprained ankle in September, limited him to a total of 48 games, his fewest since a torn patellar tendon wiped out all but two games of his 2020 campaign. But now he’s back with a vengeance, hitting .316/.431/.650 in 65 games for 3.3 WAR. He also leads the American League in home runs, RBI, and is second in batting average, behind only Yandy Díaz, at .325. We’re well into the third month of the season, which means the Triple Crown discussion is more than just silly speculation. Not that I’m above that, of course.

It’s true that two of the three Triple Crown stats have lost a significant amount of their analytical heft in recent decades, but it’s still a rare achievement for a player to finish the season leading his league in batting average, home runs, and RBI. More than that, though, Triple Crowns are cool. In the nearly 60 years since Red Sox legend Carl Yastrzemski won the AL Triple Crown in 1967, only Miguel Cabrera has managed to pull it off, in 2012 with the Tigers. No NL player has secured a Triple Crown since Joe Medwick in 1937.

For better or worse, Alvarez has tended to be overshadowed by Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani when the masses talk about baseball’s most feared sluggers. It’s hard for a huge power hitter on a successful franchise to be underrated, but I’d argue that Alvarez is actually one of those few examples. His 165 wRC+ ranks 11th in baseball history and fourth in the expansion era among players with a minimum of 3,000 plate appearances, and while that is bound to come down during his eventual decline phase, he’s set himself up nicely to be one of baseball’s all-time-great sluggers. He offers little defensive value, but he’s an incredibly well-rounded offensive player; he’s not a swing-and-miss hacker like many huge power hitters, and his production doesn’t diminish against left-handed pitchers. In fact, as Matt Martell explained in a Members-only mailbag column in January, Alvarez is the best left-on-left hitter since Barry Bonds. And even when we lower the minimum to 1,000 plate appearances, Alvarez is fifth in batting average among active players. Read the rest of this entry »

The Cincinnati Reds went 10-17 during the month of May, dropping from first in the NL Central to last, making this a terrible time for them to lose their most important player. Unfortunately, that’s precisely what happened on Monday, when shortstop Elly De La Cruz landed on the injured list for the first time in his career after straining his hamstring on Sunday. Now in his fourth big league season, De La Cruz was hitting .280/.346/.509 with 12 homers and a 134 wRC+ in 58 games, and looked to be on his way to making his third consecutive All-Star team. His 2.7 WAR was enough to lead all National League shortstops and rank second in the majors at the position, behind Bobby Witt Jr.. Minor league infielder Edwin Arroyo was called up from Triple-A Louisville to take De La Cruz’s place on the roster.

While it’s never good news to see your superstar miss time, the silver lining is this is not a season-risking injury. After limping while running the bases on a fifth-inning single on Sunday against the Braves, De La Cruz immediately came out of the game and underwent an MRI the next day. Manager Terry Francona described the results as “kind of between a Grade 1 and a Grade 2” strain. For those without the weirdly specific knowledge of muscle strain terminology, Grade 1 typically refers to a mild strain and Grade 2, a partial tear. So this is more than just a “Rub some dirt on it and get back in the game” thing, but less than a “Crap, do we have to look up Jose Iglesias’ phone number?” diagnosis. The initial prognosis is that De La Cruz will be out for two-to-four weeks. Read the rest of this entry »

12:01

Dan Szymborski: And heeeere we go

12:03

Dan Szymborski: There are some rules, though I’m not sure precisely WHERE they’re written down

12:03

Dan Szymborski: 15 seconds, no inappropriate lyrics, themes, etc.

12:03

Dan Szymborski: and it has to be licensed

Read the rest of this entry »

As the caretaker of the ZiPS projection system, I answer a lot of questions about both how it functions and the numbers that it spits out. One question I get a lot is why the system has consistently underrated the Milwaukee Brewers, which it has over the last five seasons and by a significant margin. While I’ve talked a little bit about this issue, mostly in offhand remarks in chats and on social media, addressing that question in detail is probably necessary at this point. Of course, ZiPS isn’t alone in underrating the Brewers. But as the system’s sole developer for nearly a quarter of a century, I have a responsibility to both be as transparent as possible and improve the model as much as I can.

So, how has ZiPS done with the Brewers historically? Well it turns out that since the system was first developed, worse than it has with any other major league franchise! Here are the results for ZiPS vs. Reality since 2005. I’ll note the columns don’t precisely add up, as ZiPS projects full 162-game seasons (or a 60-game one in the case of 2020) and there are a bunch of times that teams played 161 or 163 games:

One source of error that’s really difficult to control for is what a team does at the trade deadline. Many of the teams that have overperformed their preseason projections have added talent during the season; conversely, underperformers have a tendency to trade talent away. That’s challenging to model, since it involves trying to project players who aren’t currently in the organization as part of the team, even though we have little idea who those players will actually be four months in advance. I actually created a model based on team quality, age, payroll, recent record, and trade history to get an idea of the likelihood a team will be a buyer or seller in an upcoming season. But while it sort of works, its accuracy isn’t up to the level where I’d include it as part of a projection.

Historically, the Dodgers and Yankees have been two of the league’s most aggressive buyers, so it isn’t surprising to see them atop the list of the biggest ZiPS misses. But while the Brewers have made some big in-season moves — the biggest arguably being the CC Sabathia trade in 2008, which was one of the most effective trades of this type ever — they aren’t on the buy side as frequently as some of the other underprojected teams. So, what’s going on here?

First, here’s an overview of how the percentiles for team projections have worked out. Ideally, you want 10% of teams to exceed their 90th-percentile projection, 20% of teams to exceed their 80th, and so on:

ZiPS does a pretty good job in the aggregate. To put it simply, the basic job of a projection system is to know the range of possible outcomes, and be wrong by the appropriate margins the proper number of times. It would be easy to say “Hey, projections work as they’re supposed to in the aggregate, and some team is inevitably going to have the worst projections of the 30, so whatever,” but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t investigate these issues and assess whether there’s something systemic that the model is missing. Especially so in a case like Milwaukee, where nearly two-thirds of the 21-year error comes from the last five seasons (417 projected wins vs. 463 actual wins).

The ZiPS projected standings have two components: the projections themselves and the estimates of who actually ends up with playing time. To get an idea of how much of the ZiPS misses are errors in projection compared to errors in playing time, I will frequently re-project team wins using the actual playing time for each player after the season is done. Re-projecting the 2021-2025 Brewers using their preseason projections but the players’ actual playing time makes the issue a lot clearer:

Knowing each player’s actual playing time doesn’t eliminate the errors, but it whittles the missing 46 wins all the way down to 12. In other words, ZiPS isn’t doing a bad job with the projections; Dan Szymborski has done a poor job guessing which players will end up with playing time for the Brewers! Injuries are sometimes a reason for playing time discrepancies, but they typically result in teams underperforming their projections as regulars miss time. Not only have the Brewers overperformed, they’ve done so while not being particularly good at avoiding injuries; they’ve actually lost slightly more wins than the average team due to IL stints over the last five years.

Instead, what appears to be happening is that the Brewers have been extraordinarily successful at giving more playing time to players exceeding their projections. For example, there were 62 hitters who had seasons with at least 200 plate appearances for the Brewers from 2021 to 2025. As a group, ZiPS only underestimated them by 1.5 points of wRC+ in the aggregate (104.7 actual vs. 103.2 projected). But of the 33 hitters who exceeded their projected wRC+, 28 of them received more plate appearances than I had as my baseline expectation. The same is true for pitchers, especially relievers. Now, there’s a natural tendency for teams to give more playing time to players who are outperforming their projections and less to guys who are underperforming, but the Brewers have been notably more successful at this than the rest of the league. From 2021 to 2025, 81% of their qualifying players who outperformed their expected wRC+ or ERA+ got more playing time than I expected as a baseline. To put that into context, the league-wide rate was just under 61%, and no other team was above 70%.

So, how do I fix the Brewers’ projections? That’s a bit of a craggy problem that I’m still working on. This offseason, I tried to be more aggressive in my assumptions about who would get playing time for Milwaukee based on the quality of their projections. As a result, ZiPS forecast the team for 85 wins. Naturally, the Brewers are on pace for 99.7 wins as of Wednesday morning. I may need to more accurately project actual front offices; if the Brewers are simply better than everyone else at evaluating their talent with information only they have access to, it’s not something I can directly correct for. Unless, of course, the Brewers decide to just give me all their internal data, which seems unlikely. Or if I, say, catch Dan Turkenkopf in a giant net and imprison him in my tool shed until he spills the beans. As much as I like improving projections, I don’t think my employer would appreciate if I did so by committing federal crimes, so I’ll simply have to keep trying. Being wrong is how we improve predictive models, and let’s just say that the Milwaukee Brewers continue to give me a lot of opportunities to learn.

Previously one of the most durable pitchers of the 2020s, José Berríos was absent last year when the Toronto Blue Jays missed out on a World Series championship by a single base. Berríos was first demoted to the bullpen in late September after a string of uninspiring starts, and then was left off the playoff roster due to elbow inflammation. Three mediocre spring starts and an ugly rehab stint in the minors later, Berríos underwent season-ending Tommy John surgery this week, cutting short his 2026 season before it ever really began, and almost certainly costing him a decent chunk of 2027 as well. If the Jays aren’t furrowing their brows at their fourth and fifth starters yet, it may be time to start.

The Jays had been at least cautiously optimistic about Berríos entering the season. He said he felt back to 100% this spring, and new inflammation was only discovered when he underwent an MRI for insurance purposes as he attempted to play for Puerto Rico in the World Baseball Classic. Neither Berríos nor manager John Schneider seemed the least bit worried, at least publicly:

“It’s weird. The MRI is seeing something, and what I feel is way different,” Berríos said. “The MRI says I have inflammation, so we need to take care of that.

“He feels great, and I can’t overstate that. He feels great,” Schneider said. “He’s going to continue to play catch until we get a bit more info, but he’s not going to start today. It’s a unique situation right now with an MRI and the WBC insurance.”

But since pitchers are cursed by the Fates to near-Odysseus levels, things naturally unraveled from there. Berríos consulted with Dr. Keith Meister in mid-March, and was diagnosed with a stress fracture that caused him to miss the start of the season. After four rehab starts in the minors, Berríos reported additional elbow soreness, which led to surgery to address the fracture and remove loose bodies. Apparently, those bodies were pretty darn loose, and Berríos had the full reconstructive Tommy John surgery, definitely erasing him from the team’s short-term plans.

Toronto’s rotation has actually been quite good overall in 2026 so far, thanks to the trio of Dylan Cease, Kevin Gausman, and Trey Yesavage all likely pitching as well as they ever will. In terms of their best three starters, the Jays have been absolutely elite so far:

The Jays rank third in the majors in WAR from their best three starting pitchers, and that’s with Yesavage missing the first month of the season with a shoulder impingement. Outside of their top three starters, however, the Jays have been among the bottom of the league:

The good news is that the performance of a team’s top three starters becomes extremely important when we’re talking postseason baseball, given that that trio tends to get a much larger proportion of the team’s innings than it does during the regular season. The projections reflect this, and despite a rest-of-season projected roster winning percentage of only .521, ZiPS has the Jays at a .543 roster strength for a possible playoff run.

Of course, to get to October, the Jays first have to survive May through September, and that’s a bit trickier. The AL East crown looks like a tough get, with Toronto 11 games back as of Friday morning. The team has a lot of pitchers theoretically available, but they’re now mostly injured, which is why Berríos coming back healthy was so important. A healthy Berríos is probably best classified as a no. 3 starter at this point, but eating innings has a lot of value on a team like this, and only three pitchers, Aaron Nola and teammates Gausman and Patrick Corbin, have thrown more innings over the last decade. Among the alternatives, Bowden Francis and Cody Ponce are both out for the 2026 season, and while Max Scherzer is nearing a return, he looks like he’s running on fumes at this point in his Hall of Fame career. Shane Bieber is nearing a return as well, but betting on him staying healthy is a pretty gutsy dice roll. Spencer Miles is fascinating, but he has all of three professional starts and an even scarier injury history than Bieber. When Corbin is likely in your rotation for the foreseeable future, you know there are depth issues to be concerned about.

That’s why when the Marlins inevitably start shopping Sandy Alcantara around again, the Blue Jays ought to be all-in on him. This is a roster designed to win now, and if you’re going to move on from Bo Bichette and go with an Andrés Giménez/Ernie Clement middle infield, you might as well take advantage of it with a sinkerballer who doesn’t whiff that many guys. ZiPS projects the Jays to get a bigger boost from acquiring Alcantara than any of the other 28 possible suitors. And Gausman is a free agent after the season, so acquiring a pitcher who can be written into the 2027 rotation wouldn’t be a bad idea even under happier circumstances.

The Blue Jays didn’t need Berríos to be what he was with the Twins — a boring, sturdy, and available version would do — but they did need him, and that is why losing him hurts. They’re a dangerous team if they make it to October, but to get there, some additional tinkering with the rotation looks increasingly necessary.

12:02

Dan Szymborski: Since there is a time to every purpose under heaven, so to there is one for SzymChat

12:04

Dan Szymborski: Mostly-ish?

12:04

Dan Szymborski: He’s “down” about three tens of a run in the ZiPS ROS basic model

12:05

Dan Szymborski: and right now, his 2027-2029 ERA+ projections are 103, 107, 109

12:05

Dan Szymborski: So it’s at least confident he’s a 2/3 dude

Read the rest of this entry »

Expectations were generally quite low for the Minnesota Twins coming into the 2026 season after last summer’s fire sale that resulted in the departure of seven players from the 26-man roster, including Carlos Correa and half the bullpen. To defy those expectations this year, the Twins needed to wring as much performance as they could out of the talent that remained. In the early going, Ryan Jeffers did more than meet his projection, hitting .295/.408/.541 for a sterling 165 wRC+. At 1.7 WAR in just under two months, he was already nearing his career-best 2.3 WAR from 2023. Now, a broken left hamate bone will likely knock him out for four to six weeks, resulting in a lot more Victor Caratini in the lineup than anyone wants to see.

The Twins also held onto third baseman Royce Lewis last summer. Part of that was because he was affordable and under club control through the 2028 season, but it was also because he took a major step backward last year and wouldn’t have fetched them much in a trade. The oft-injured Lewis was a crucial part of the last Minnesota team to make the postseason in 2023, and the hope was that he would bounce back this season. Instead, a .539 OPS and some fairly extreme struggles with contact earned him a trip to Triple-A St. Paul.

Neither player’s stat line in 2026 looks like a fluke. Jeffers has shown continual improvement in his plate discipline over the last few years, and his walk rate was higher than ever in 2026. After debuting with a contact rate hovering around the 70% mark in 2020-2021 and running a 77.0% rate across 2022-2024, Jeffers increased his contact rate to 80.7% last year, and he was making contact at an 85.5% clip in 2026 before his injury. While he’s not going to absolutely destroy baseballs like Giancarlo Stanton or Oneil Cruz, Jeffers makes enough meaningful contact to do damage, especially for a catcher.

Caratini is a serviceable enough backup, but he’s a bit stretched as a starter, and six weeks of him in the lineup versus Jeffers does shrink Minnesota’s playoff odds a bit. With an uninjured Jeffers, ZiPS projected the Twins to have a 23.1% chance of making the playoffs this year. With the injury, though, their probability is down to 20.5%. That’s not a crazy-large gap, but it’s a major hit to take just from losing a single player for a quarter of a season.

Lewis hasn’t been completely healthy in 2026, but the sprained knee that sent him to the injured list last month isn’t really a satisfying explanation for what’s wrong with him. He’s been an absolute mess on offense, striking out in 31.1% of his plate appearances, nearly a 50% increase from his career strikeout rate. His contact rates have plummeted, suggesting that his inflated percentage of strikeouts is legitimate. His overall contact rate is down to 65.6%, well into the danger zone, and he’s making contact just 78.3% of the time when he swings at pitches in the zone, nearly five percentage points below his career mark. Meanwhile, his out-of-zone contact rate is a career-worst 44.0%, and he’s swinging at 32.8% of the pitches he sees outside the zone. Noticing all of this, pitchers are throwing 38.3% of their pitches to Lewis into the chase/waste zones compared to 29.8% last year. These numbers are highly concerning, especially because they tend to be quite meaningful in small sample sizes, enough to raise serious questions about Lewis’ future. Entering 2026, ZiPS saw him as a .730ish OPS guy over the next few years. That is no longer the case:

To replace him, Minnesota is likely to go with some combination of Tristan Gray, Orlando Arcia, and Ryan Kreidler. With that trio, the Twins are projected to rank 30th out of the 30 major league teams in production from their third basemen. If they’re going to have any hope at the hot corner, they’re going to need Lewis to figure things out in the minors and then right the ship in the majors. Otherwise, ZiPS thinks their best option at third base is to sign 36-year-old free agent utilityman Jon Berti. That’s bleak.

To add insult (and… injury) to injury, the Twins also lost another possible bat this week when 23-year-old prospect Emmanuel Rodriguez suffered a torn UCL in his left thumb, which will require surgery to repair. Rodriguez’s power upside and ability to play center field are tantalizing, but this is yet another setback for him in a professional career in which he has never been able to get on the field for 100 games in a season. ZiPS evaluates him as a 110 wRC+ hitter in the majors, but his impressively varied array of injuries has prevented him from getting a chance to try and do that in the big leagues for real.

No AL Central team is a juggernaut, and hanging in the playoff race well into the summer could have done a lot to improve fan perceptions of the Twins, who entered this season with their smallest payroll in some time. According to Baseball Prospectus/Cot’s Contracts, Minnesota’s payroll this season is its lowest since 2014 (excluding 2020 payroll, which is only lower because of the 60-game season). Adjusted for inflation, this is the team’s tiniest payroll since 2009.

The 2026 Twins are not dead and buried, even with the Jeffers injury and Lewis’ offensive issues. After all, nobody in the AL Central is capable enough to dig them a very deep grave. But their margin of error has shrunk considerably, and unless they can conjure up a quick answer or two soon, the Twins may end up extending their fire sale into another summer.