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The hot stove has started to heat up, but it’s still pretty early in the offseason. On Tuesday, I took stock of how the early 2026 projections viewed the bottom 18 teams in baseball as they’re currently constructed. Today, I’ll take a look at the teams projected to finish with a .500 or better record in 2026. This exercise should give us a pretty good idea of which clubs would be ready to compete if the season started today, and which ones still have work to do this offseason.

Our power rankings use a modified Elo rating system. If you’re familiar with chess rankings or FiveThirtyEight’s defunct sports section, you’ll know that Elo is an elegant ranking format that measures teams’ relative strength and is very reactive to recent performance. For these offseason rankings, I’ve pulled the Depth Charts projections and calculated an implied Elo ranking for each team. Right now, our Depth Charts projections are powered entirely by the 2026 Steamer projections; the 2026 ZiPS projections will be folded in later in the offseason.

First up are the rankings, presented in a sortable table. Below that, I’ve grouped the teams into tiers, with comments on each club. You’ll notice that the official ordinal rankings don’t always match the tiers — there are times when I take editorial liberties in grouping teams together — but generally, the order is consistent. The delta column in the table below shows the change in ranking from the final regular season run of the power rankings. The rankings for teams 18–30 have been updated with the handful of moves that occurred around baseball since Part I was published. Read the rest of this entry »

The Chicago White Sox have two of baseball’s most promising pitching prospects. Noah Schultz, a 22-year-old left-hander who was drafted 26th overall in 2022 out of an Oswego, Illinois high school is currently no. 22 on The Board with a 55 FV. Hagen Smith, himself a 22-year-old southpaw, was drafted fifth overall in 2024 out of the University of Arkansas and is no. 81 with a 50 FV. Each possesses a power arm, and both have a lot to prove in the forthcoming season — albeit for different reasons. Schultz was limited to 73 innings this year due to injury, while Smith dealt with command issues and lacks a solid third pitch.

I asked White Sox executive vice president/general manager Chris Getz about the young pitchers during last week’s GM Meetings in Las Vegas.

“For Noah, it was an inconsistent year,” Getz said of the 6-foot-10 Schultz, who struggled to the tune of a 4.68 ERA between Double-A Birmingham and Triple-A Charlotte. “Much of that was related to his knee — he had patellar tendonitis — and he needed be to shut down. He’s doing [physical therapy] and strengthening right now. I anticipate that once the knee is completely healed, once it is healthy and completely strong, we are going to get the version of Noah that made him a top prospect in our game. Read the rest of this entry »

For the 22nd consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction, as well as MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the next team up is the Texas Rangers.

Batters

Finishing the season with an exactly .500 record seems a fitting fate for the 2025 Texas Rangers, a team that spent most of the year jumping into and out of the playoff race, until their demise was eventually sealed by an eight-game losing streak in September. The oldest team in baseball this year, the Rangers got a lot of production out of their core performers, but a pitching swoon in August and September, and holes at the offense-heavy positions, left the team short of its goal of getting back to the playoffs and grabbing a second World Series trophy. That 2023 championship campaign is the only season in the last nine in which Texas finished with a winning record. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben, Meg, Michael Baumann, Ben Clemens, and Chris Hanel congregate to review the results of the 2025 minor league free agent draft (11:45) and recap their 40 bold preseason predictions (19:01), following quick games of “2025 College World Series Starting Pitching Matchup or First Amendment Supreme Court Case” (2:58) and “Cedar Rapids Kernel or Character in the Star Wars Universe” (7:42).

Audio intro: The Shirey Brothers, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Daniel Leckie, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to free agent draft episode
Link to draft history
Link to preseason predictions episode
Link to predictions game history
Link to EWStats site
Link to EWStats on Bluesky
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Link to Chris’s website
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I don’t want to overstate the value of raw financial power in baseball. The Mets spent more than $320 million on player salaries, not counting luxury tax penalties, and they finished four games over .500. Money can’t buy happiness, or even a spot in the playoffs.

It can, however, buy you a closer and a major upgrade to your bench. So the Braves demonstrated Wednesday, when they re-signed closer Raisel Iglesias for one year at $16 million, and swapped utility infielders with the Astros, sending Nick Allen west in a 1-for-1 trade for Mauricio Dubón.

The Braves went into last season as one of the favorites to win the NL pennant only to tumble to fourth place behind the Marlins (the Marlins!) after befalling a series of farces and calamities that recall A Serious Man. Jurickson Profar got popped for PEDs, Spencer Strider and Ozzie Albies lost their juice, half the roster got hurt, it was a huge mess. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

For four years now, I’ve been updating you on the changing contours of the strike zone. By my count, this is the 10th installment in that series and the sixth specifically about the accuracy of ball-strike calls on the edges of the zone. With the implementation of the ABS challenge system in 2026, these updates will no doubt start to look a bit different. This is our last umpire accuracy update of the pre-ABS era, so let’s take stock of where we are at the end.

After a tiny dip in 2024, umpires were back on track in 2025, posting a record-high accuracy rate of 92.83% overall. In fact, 2024 was the only year in the pitch-tracking era in which umpires didn’t set a record for accuracy. However, this latest record came with a bit of controversy. Early in the season, pitchers and catchers picked up on the fact that the strike zone seemed to have shrunk. The league tightened up the standards that it used to grade umpires, reducing the size of the buffer zone around the edges of the zone. As a result, accuracy shot up specifically on pitches outside the zone, even more specifically, on pitches just above the top of the zone, causing pitchers and catchers to complain that they were losing the high strike.

This graph reminds us of a couple facts that might just be so obvious that we rarely think about them. First, the vast majority of takes come on pitches outside the strike zone. Of course they do; those are the pitches you’re not supposed to swing at. This year, for example, 68% of the calls umpires had to make came on pitches outside the strike zone. Second, it’s easier to identify balls than it is to identify strikes. Of course it is; the area outside the zone is a lot bigger than the area inside the zone. Read the rest of this entry »

For the 22nd consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction, as well as MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the next team up is the Detroit Tigers.

Batters

This year was like two very different seasons in one for the Detroit Tigers. Through July 8, their high-water mark in 2025, the Tigers had the best record in baseball, and held an imposing 14 game lead over the Twins and Royals. Over the final three months of the season, however, they barely played .400 ball, and won less often than any of the White Sox, Pirates, or Nationals. While the threats from the Twins and the Royals didn’t prove to be fatal, the Guardians made up a 15 1/2 game gap to grab the division at the last moment, and the Tigers just barely snuck into the postseason on the strength of a tiebreaker with the Astros. By comparison, the humiliations of the 1978 Red Sox and 1969 Cubs (nine games) were minor. While the Tigers were able to get revenge against the Guardians in the Wild Card round, they were bounced by the Mariners in a 15-inning Game 5 nail-biter in the ALDS. But in what might end up being Tarik Skubal’s final season with the team, the Tigers don’t have much time to brood on the summer of 2025. Read the rest of this entry »

“OK, but what if you could steal first base?” is surely a thought that’s occurred to just about every baseball fan. We’ve all seen players come up who look like absolute studs, except for one thing: They can’t hit. It’s only one skill, but it’s the most important skill for a position player.

I remember having a simply overpowering version of this thought in the press box at Camden Yards during the 2024 ALDS. Maikel Garcia’s tools sizzled and crackled with potential. He’s stolen 37 bases in 39 regular-season attempts. His defense at third base was very good, good enough to play shortstop on a team that had not been built around the best shortstop on the planet. Garcia played 157 regular-season games for the Royals in 2024, and he was about as good a player as you can be with a single-digit home run total and a .281 OBP.

Those two headline numbers do limit one’s potential, unfortunately.

In October, Garcia poked enough grounders through the infield to eke out a .318 batting average in Kansas City’s six playoff games, teasing us with the hope of what could have been if he just learned how to hit. Read the rest of this entry »