When the market is hot, it seems like it’ll never cool down. Forget the fact that we’re late into free agency and yet too early in the year for contract extensions. The last few marquee free agents to sign are starting to do so – hi, Cody – and that seems to have opened the floodgates for a series of trades. You’ve heard about all the noise the Mets have gotten up to, no doubt. They aren’t the only ones. The Rangers have jumped in on the action in a big way. On Thursday, they acquired MacKenzie Gore from the Nationals in exchange for prospects Gavin Fien, Devin Fitz-Gerald, Alejandro Rosario, Abimelec Ortiz, and Yeremy Cabrera, as Jon Heyman of the New York Postfirst reported.
In some ways, this trade has been a long time coming. Gore has been on the trade block for most of his major league career. First, he got sent from San Diego to Washington in the first Juan Soto trade. Almost immediately upon his arrival in the nation’s capital, however, he turned into a trade chip. The Nats were pretty obviously far away from competing, and Gore is the kind of arm that lots of teams dream about placing at the top of their rotation.
By 2024, Gore’s third year in the big leagues, the trade rumors were at full volume. Gore exploded out of the gate, with 98 strikeouts over 80 innings in his first 15 starts. He was a deadline target for many teams – but he slumped hard down the stretch, with a 4.48 ERA and 4.16 FIP the rest of the way, and no trade ever came to fruition. The Nats looked around that winter, didn’t move him, and then again held on after Gore came out of the gates hot, making his first All-Star appearance on the back of a 3.02 ERA (2.96 FIP) in the first half. He stayed put at the deadline – and once again slumped hard down the stretch.
That brings us to the present. Trading Gore always made sense, and the new Nationals front office finally did it. He still has two years of team control remaining, and the price for controllable starters has never been higher. His service time status lines up very well with the situation in Arlington. The Rangers have a roster that is built to contend now. Their lineup has five different hitters in their 30s (baseball-age wise, Jake Burger doesn’t celebrate his 30th until April), and only two who are 25 or younger. The rotation is led by Jacob deGrom and Nathan Eovaldi, two heroes of the 2010s who are in the twilight of their respective careers. Read the rest of this entry »
Last night, the Brewers and Mets swung a big trade. Milwaukee sent staff ace Freddy Peralta, along with righty Tobias Myers, to Queens in exchange for two Top 100 prospects in Brandon Sproat and Jett Williams. Both are near-ready contributors who grade out as 50 FVs 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. Davy Andrews wrote up New York’s side of the swap. Here, we’ll take a look at the youngsters heading to the Midwest.
Let’s start with Sproat. After selecting the righty in the third round in 2022 and then failing to sign him, the Mets went back to the well a round earlier the following season. This time they got their man, and the former Florida Gator took to pro ball quickly. He posted a 3.40 ERA with 131 strikeouts in 116.1 innings in 2024, with solid walk and contact-management metrics alongside. He capped the year with seven starts at Triple-A, and while those were mostly forgettable, he entered 2025 as the club’s top farmhand and one of the brightest pitching prospects in baseball.
He then battled through an uneven 2025 campaign. He started slowly, with a new, less deceptive motion, and missed significantly fewer bats in the first half of the season than he had the year prior. Still, the traits that long made Sproat an enticing prospect mostly endured, as he was still sitting in the mid-to-upper 90s and mixing in a plus breaking ball. He righted the ship in July and saved some of his best baseball for the latter part of August, a run of form that culminated in his first big league call-up. 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.
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.
The 2026 Hall of Fame election is history, with a pair of center fielders who were born one day apart, fourth-year candidate Carlos Beltrán (born April 24, 1977) and ninth-year candidate Andruw Jones (born April 23, 1977), elected by the Baseball Writers Association of America. This is the fourth time two players from the same position besides pitcher were elected by the writers in the same year. Right fielders Harry Heilmann and Paul Waner were the first pair in 1952, followed by right fielders Henry Aaron and Frank Robinson in ’82, with left fielders Rickey Henderson and Jim Rice elected in 2009. That’s some impressive company!
Beltrán and Jones will be inducted into the Hall along with Contemporary Baseball honoreeJeff Kent on July 26, 2026, on the grounds of the Clark Sports Center in Cooperstown, New York. There’s no official word yet on which caps the players will be wearing on their plaques — the Hall has the final word — but odds are they’ll be the ones that you expect. Said Beltrán, who’s currently a special assistant for the Mets, “There’s no doubt that the Mets are a big part of my identity.” Kent has expressed his desire to wear a Giants cap, and Jones is almost certain to wear a Braves cap.
As usual, beyond the topline results, there’s plenty to digest from Tuesday’s returns. So as promised, here’s my candidate-by-candidate breakdown of the entire slate of 27 candidates, 13 of whom will return to the ballot next year. Note that references to percentages in Ryan Thibodaux’s indispensable Tracker may distinguish between what was logged at the time of the announcement at 6 p.m. ET on Tuesday (245 total ballots) and what’s in there as of Thursday at 9 a.m. ET (254 total ballots) Read the rest of this entry »
In early November, MLB Trade Rumors and Baseball Prospectus released their top 50 free agents lists, which included guesses about where each player would end up. Our focus in this article is on Luis Arraez, and in those two lists, seven very smart people and one random number generator made their best estimations about his likeliest destination. Only two of those experts picked the same team for him. The next week, MLB.com’s Mike Petriello broke down a whopping seven potential landing spots for Arraez. Only one of those teams was on either of the two previous lists. Lastly, just this weekend, a Fox Sports article with no byline explained why three teams would make the best fit for Arraez, and only one of those teams had any overlap with the previous three articles. By my count, that’s eight different experts, one robot, and one I-don’t-know-what making a total of 18 predictions. Somehow, those 18 predictions included 15 different landing spots for Arraez. That’s half the league! Only three teams got multiple votes, and no team got more than two. We’ve got a genuine mystery on our hands.
To some degree, all of this is understandable. Most projections have Arraez signing for either one year or two with an average annual value of $11 or $12 million. That means even the stingiest teams can afford him. And although Arraez is a poor defender who only projects for roughly 1.5 WAR (depending on your projection system), he’s never once put up a below-average season on offense. With the possible exception of the Dodgers, there is no such thing as a team that couldn’t find a spot for a hitter of Arraez’s caliber. ZiPS is slightly higher on Arraez than most systems, projecting him for 1.8 WAR in 2026. That’s more than we have projected in our Depth Charts either at first base, DH, or both for 21 different teams. Everybody can afford him. Almost everybody could use him. He really could end up anywhere.
While I don’t have any special insight about where Arraez will end up, I do have a strong preference. I want him to sign with the Rockies, and I want this for a very simple reason. I want to see Luis Arraez be the most Luis Arraez he can be. His skill set is unique in today’s game, and Coors Field is the perfect environment to let him flourish. 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 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.
Our long national nightmare is over. After weeks of back and forth between Cody Bellinger and the New York Yankees, it’s official: He’s staying in the Bronx. The two sides have agreed to a five-year, $162.5 million deal with opt outs after the second and third seasons, a $20 million signing bonus, and a full no-trade clause, as first reported by Jeff Passan.
This fit was so obvious that it almost had to happen. The Yankees need offense, and they’d prefer it to come in the form of a left-handed outfielder who can cover center field in a pinch. They’re already familiar with Bellinger, who just put up a 5-WAR season in pinstripes. No other teams needed this exact type of player as much, at this current moment, as they did. Likewise, Bellinger was probably going to have to sign with the Yankees to get the deal he wanted. Now that that foregone conclusion has been reached, let’s unpack how this all fits together.
This contract is the culmination of a long, decorated career that was conspicuously lacking in free agency appeal. Bellinger burst onto the scene in 2017 with 39 homers for the Dodgers, taking Rookie of the Year honors in the process. He then went fully supersonic in the homer-happy 2019 season, with the rocket ball propelling him to 47 homers, a 161 wRC+, and NL MVP honors. Disaster struck in the 2020 World Series, however. Bellinger dislocated his shoulder celebrating a home run, and his performance fell off a cliff immediately after. Read the rest of this entry »
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 »
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 antepenultimate team is the Chicago Cubs.
Batters
ZiPS was a big believer in the 2025 Chicago Cubs, and it was right on point about most of their core talent. The problem, though, was that ZiPS wasn’t right about the Milwaukee Brewers, and though Chicago stayed in the NL Central race for most of the season, Milwaukee’s 14-game winning streak all but settled things by mid-August. Add in a five-game loss to the Brew Crew in the NLDS, and a successful season ended in underwhelming fashion for the North Siders. The Cubs went into the offseason looking to replace Kyle Tucker in the lineup and shore up the rotation a bit.
Generally speaking, the Cubs have a rather boring lineup in one manner: It’s mostly well-established players who are largely in the same roles as last season. Carson Kelly and Miguel Amaya, the latter swapped in for Reese McGuire, will be a competent tandem behind the plate. Dansby Swanson, Nico Hoerner, and Pete Crow-Armstrong will play terrific defense, with PCA adding a bunch of homers at the cost of a rather low on-base percentage. Ian Happ and Seiya Suzuki are on the wrong side of 30, but not distressingly so, and the typically B+ corner outfielders will likely put up their typical B+ seasons. One can see why the Cubs felt they could afford to trade Owen Caissie to Miami for Edward Cabrera; he was going to have a hard time finding playing time, and Kevin Alcántara’s defense makes him a more versatile fourth outfielder.
Where there are changes are at third base and designated hitter (by way of Suzuki playing a lot more right field). Alex Bregman is more or less the Kyle Tucker replacement, with a bit less bat and a bit more defensive value. Moisés Ballesteros has a lot of offensive upside, but he’s not really exciting yet as a full-time designated hitter, and Matt Shaw loses significant value as a DH. ZiPS is optimistic about Tyler Austin after a mostly successful six-year run in Japan, though he doesn’t provide a lot of flexibility, as it’s been years since he’s played anywhere but first base. I say mostly successful because he wasn’t particularly durable in NPB, with his most notable — and amusing — injury coming when he smashed his head on the dugout ceiling while changing his jersey.
I’m actually not quite sure what happens with Shaw, who appears to have been musical chaired out of a significant role by the Bregman and Austin signings. I don’t know just how seriously the Cubs consider him a supersub. Swanson and Hoerner were both durable in 2025, so we didn’t get any sneak peeks at how the Cubs truly felt about Shaw’s ability to play the middle infield when the rubber meets the road.
I wonder if the Cubs will be particularly active with non-roster invitations over the next month; ZiPS doesn’t see a great deal in the way of reinforcements in the high minors. Guys like Scott Kingery are probably far too high in the ZiPS WAR rankings than the Cubs ought to be comfortable with.
Pitchers
ZiPS sees the Cubs as having a very deep rotation that’s also very deep in unexcitement. There’s certainly some upside here, especially in Edward Cabrera, but ZiPS largely views the team as having a whole lot of broadly average starting pitching options. The good news here is that if Justin Steele has any setbacks, ZiPS likes the team’s replacement options. Even with especially bad luck in the injury department, the computer thinks Javier Assad will be adequate — it has him with an ERA considerably lower than his FIP, though some of that is thanks to the stellar Cubs defense — and that Ben Brown and Jordan Wicks would both be far more acceptable as starters if called into duty than they’ve shown so far. Heck, if Colin Rea or even Connor Noland were forced into starting some games, that wouldn’t be an apocalyptic scenario for the Cubs.
While deep in meh, ZiPS is more enthusiastic about the Chicago bullpen. Now, as was the case with Assad, some of the bullpen’s projected sufficiency comes down to the defense behind it, but ZiPS largely sees these relievers as having ERAs below four, and generally well below that line. ZiPS especially likes Hunter Harvey, Daniel Palencia, and the relief version of Porter Hodge. In the case of Hodge, remember the rule not to freak out about one-year home run totals for otherwise competent pitchers. The only prominent relievers ZiPS looks at with a bit of a side eye are Ethan Roberts and recent signee Jacob Webb.
All in all, the Cubs look like a team with a win total in the low 90s. The only negative of that projection is that ZiPS feels similarly about the Brewers this time around. We won’t know the end of this story for another nine months.
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.
