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 Los Angeles Dodgers.

Batters

Yes, the Los Angeles Dodgers were an excellent team in 2025, a statement that won’t come as a shock to anyone who was paying even a quarter-attention to baseball last year. The team was adeptly built to weather any storms, navigated said metaphorical weather, and then enjoyed a rotation that was mostly healthy come October, a welcome reversal from their 2024 postseason squad. The Dodgers repeated as World Series champions — the first team in the 21st century to successfully defend a title — earning their third trophy of the 2020s. They’ll look to pull off the three-peat next, something that has only been done once in the last half century (the Yankees from 1998-2000). And they have relatively good odds to pull it off: For the fifth time in the last six years (the 2023 Atlanta Braves being the only exception), ZiPS sees the Dodgers as the best team in baseball.

With that, I’m basically done talking about how great the Dodgers are. After all, this isn’t just a great team, but an obviously great one. There’s no mystery to their greatness. They have three future Hall of Famers in the starting lineup (Shohei Ohtani, Freddie Freeman, and Mookie Betts), with a fourth player, Will Smith, who could very well emerge as one. The pitching staff is phenomenally talented, though it admittedly comes with its share of injury concerns. All of these marvelous players get marvelous projections; there honestly isn’t much new to say about them. So instead, I’m going to talk more about what the Dodgers are not, and what could end up being their undoing. Or at least, their undoing by their own lofty standards, which would still probably mean something like a 90-win season.

The Dodgers have a seemingly infinite supply of both cash and brainpower, which is a potent combination, especially for their NL West rivals. But they aren’t a juggernaut in the sense that they dominate games or even short series; the superteam storyline is something that’s been filched from sports with less randomness and awkwardly applied to baseball. There’s a bit of Baseball Calvinism at play, in the sense that because the Dodgers won the last two World Series, some seem to believe that they were always fated to do so. The truth is, like any baseball team, they weren’t truly dominant. They lost 43% of their games during the regular season. In 2022 and 2023, they didn’t even reach the NLCS. And despite getting all of their stars onto the field in the World Series, they still only narrowly bested the Blue Jays. That’s just how baseball works.

And while the lineup is certainly star-studded, there are some risks. The offense is mostly driven by the four guys I mentioned above, and all four are on the wrong side of 30. Freeman in particular showed some signs of aging in 2025, as both his out-of-zone swing rate and his whiff rate jumped, especially the latter, and he’s never had elite bat speed. By the end of this season, he’ll have celebrated his 37th birthday. Betts didn’t experience a huge WAR drop-off thanks to him playing better defense at shortstop than he had any right to, but he’s also coming off the worst offensive season of his big league career and is entering his mid-30s. Smith doesn’t have as many games on his knees as a lot of backstops his age, but the presence of Ohtani and Freeman also means that if he’s too banged up to play catcher, he can’t just slot in at first base or designated hitter to keep his bat in the lineup. Then there’s Ohtani, who’s so amazing that he can practically only surprise negatively at this point.

Outside of the top four, the Dodgers are good, but hardly as intimidating. Max Muncy seems to refuse to age, and the recently signed Andy Ibáñez can spell him against lefties as needed, but time remains undefeated and will likely come for the third baseman sooner than later. Elsewhere, the outfield is rather ordinary, as is second base. And if fortune doesn’t favor the Dodgers on the injury or aging front, the projections suggest that Josue De Paula and Zyhir Hope might not be ready to remedy the situation in the short-term, as ZiPS has both of their 2025 minor league translations with an OPS just shy of .650. The lesser prospects in the high minors don’t really fit the bill, either, as ZiPS likes the team’s fringy guys at Triple-A a lot less than it usually does.

Pitchers

As noted, this is a talented rotation, but as with the lineup, there is some downside risk that can’t be ignored. Yoshinobu Yamamoto was the only Dodger to pitch enough to qualify for the ERA title last year, and the only other pitchers who threw at least 100 innings are either retired (Clayton Kershaw) or in St. Louis (Dustin May). Now, if Los Angeles is able to line up Tyler Glasnow, Ohtani, Blake Snell, and Roki Sasaki in consecutive outings behind Yamamoto, opponents will be grateful that there are no five-game series during the regular season. But as we’ve seen in recent years, the Dodgers have struggled to get all their arms healthy at the same time, and there’s no Emperor of Sports Movie Endings to ensure that they’ll be able to do so come October.

That’s concerning for a few reasons, not least because while there’s obviously still more offseason to go, the Dodgers’ starting pitching depth is decidedly thinner than it has been in recent history. In the past, one of the reasons ZiPS has seen Los Angeles as having a very high floor is that it has usually liked the team’s no. 8-10 starters. But after Emmet Sheehan and his 4.13 projected ERA if he’s used as a starter full-time, ZiPS sees the Dodgers’ spare rotation candidates as a decidedly below-average lot. River Ryan, Kyle Hurt, Gavin Stone, Justin Wrobleski, and Landon Knack all have projected ERAs worse than 4.50 as starters.

After years spent shoring up their bullpen with cleverness, the Dodgers have taken an unusually direct approach the past two winters: giving a great reliever a whole bunch of money. Last offseason, it was Tanner Scott (it hasn’t gone well). This time around, it’s Edwin Díaz, who is an awesome reliever, even if he’s unlikely to reach the heights of his 2018 or 2022 seasons again. ZiPS is pretty happy with the rest of the bullpen, seeing Alex Vesia, Scott (in a bounce-back season), Jack Dreyer, and Wrobleski as all comfortably above average. (You can add in Brusdar Graterol, who also gets a solid projection after ZiPS takes his injury into account.) The computer is a bit more squeamish when it comes to Blake Treinen and Brock Stewart, but it still sees them as having really solid upside. This ought to be a good bullpen.

Even accounting for the potential downside scenarios, the Dodgers look like the best team in baseball. Now, this being baseball, they’re still more likely to end the season with a loss than a champagne shower, but they’re as well positioned to make a deep run as their fans could possibly hope.

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.

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley break down the Cubs’ big Alex Bregman signing, Nolan Arenado’s trade to Arizona, Kauffman Stadium’s soon-to-be-cozier confines, and a former GM’s dismissal of advanced stats, plus a few follow-ups.

Audio intro: Josh Busman, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Ian H., “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to Andrews on Bregman
Link to Baumann on Bregman
Link to Langs on draftees
Link to Montgomery on Boras
Link to Kennedy comments
Link to Sheehan on the Sox
Link to Tucker rumors
Link to team depth charts
Link to team payrolls
Link to Baumann on Arenado
Link to Passan on Kauffman
Link to Royals announcement tweet
Link to ballpark homogenization
Link to LA Memorial Coliseum info
Link to Statcast park factors
Link to Pasquantino take
Link to Rooker retort
Link to Mack piece at BP
Link to Sam on where to put a pit
Link to Amaro wiki
Link to Amaro tweet 1
Link to Amaro tweet 2
Link to Bichette report
Link to Collins report
Link to stream Stove League
Link to Stove League pods
Link to Sea Unicorns article

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The St. Louis Cardinals, or what’s left of them, have traded third baseman Nolan Arenado and cash to the Arizona Diamondbacks for right-handed pitcher Jack Martinez.

Arenado was one of the best players of the 2010s, a three-time National League home run champ and an elite defensive third baseman. In eight seasons with the Rockies, Arenado made five All-Star teams and finished in the top eight in MVP voting five times. He made the All-Star team and pulled off the Gold Glove-Silver Slugger double every season from 2015 to 2018.

On the strength of those performances, the Rockies signed Arenado to one of the richest contracts in baseball history — nine years, $275 million. After two years, they shipped him to St. Louis, where the Cardinals lived out the bargain of the quarter-billion-dollar extension: A couple great seasons, followed by gradual decline and now decrepitude, all before the deal runs out. Read the rest of this entry »

Steven Kwan looks like the kind of guy who gets underestimated. He’s undersized. He doesn’t hit the ball particularly hard. He plays for a franchise that’s most famous for refusing to spend money. Still, I don’t think many people are underestimating Kwan these days. He’s the undisputed second-best player on the Guardians, behind only future Hall of Famer José Ramírez. He’s a two-time All-Star. He’s never put up fewer than 3.0 WAR in a season. He’s never not won a Gold Glove. Everybody knows that he’s a great player, but I’d like to highlight a couple specific parts of his game that we tend to take for granted.

Kwan’s defense certainly receives plenty of appreciation. In two of his four major league seasons (2023 and 2025), he has swept the three advanced defensive metrics, finishing first among all left fielders in Defensive Runs Saved, Deserved Runs Prevented, and Fielding Run Value. In 2022, he finished first in both DRS and FRV, but didn’t lead in DRP. In 2024, he finished in second in FRV and fourth in DRS (but because of the arguably arcane innings minimum of 900, he did lead all Gold Glove-eligible left fielders in both metrics). The point of this complicated litany is that all of the major defensive metrics love Kwan, and that’s important because they use very different methods, methods don’t always line up. DRS detests Oneil Cruz, but FRV thinks he’s great. DRP loves Randy Arozarena even though the other two systems hate his guts. All the systems can agree on Kwan. Whether you’re breaking down video with human eyes or analyzing catch probability through the lens of a high-speed Statcast camera, when you look at Kwan, you’ll see the best left fielder in the game. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s a weird chart:

If you’re like me, you’re struggling to make sense of it. The value of a barrel? But aren’t barrels a measure of value themselves? That’s like asking how many dollars a ten dollar bill is worth, or how you’d rate The Lion King on a scale of one to The Lion King. But that’s not actually how it works. Barrels are defined based on exit velocity and launch angle pairs that, according to the dataset MLB used in their creation, were extremely likely to result in extra-base hits. Those cutoffs have remained the same. The results on barrels haven’t.

What gives? Well, some of it is the ball, of course. I’m not breaking new news in the long-running ball aerodynamics debate; you can read some good recent entries into tracking drag coefficients and the like here and here. Indeed, if you’re measuring barrels that way, you can see a pretty straightforward decline. Here are home runs per barrel over the years:

Read the rest of this entry »

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 baseball industry loves its pitching prospects — and sometimes seems to love dreaming on them by using them as trade chips almost as much as it does actually letting them pitch. Considered to have one of the best curveballs in the game from the outset of his professional career, Gio Gonzalez was traded three times before he’d thrown a major league pitch, and five times during a career that ended just after he turned 35. Along the way, the undersized southpaw made two All-Star teams, received Cy Young votes twice, and helped his teams reach the playoffs five times. While he wasn’t always easy to watch given his high walk rates, his ability to miss bats was a testament to the quality of his stuff.

…

Giovany Aramis Gonzalez was born on September 19, 1985 in Hialeah, Florida, a city in Miami-Dade County where roughly three-quarters of the population is of Cuban ancestry. He’s the oldest of six children of Max and Yolanda (Yoly) Gonzalez. Max, a first-generation Cuban-American, installed billboards and owned a scooter shop, while Yoly, an immigrant from Cuba, worked at various jobs to help the family make ends meet.

Gio was just four years old when his parents introduced him to baseball. Growing up, he played sandlot baseball with neighborhood kids in a narrow, rocky strip of land behind the family’s townhouse. “We broke so many windows that I found a guy who would replace them for 15 bucks apiece,” Yoly recalled in 2011.

“Max grew up tough, never got to play as much ball as he wanted and, when it rained on too-rare Sundays when he had a game as a child, he broke down in frustration and cried. But he never stopped studying the sport,” wrote the Washington Post’s Thomas Boswell in 2012. When his eldest son showed an aptitude for the game, Max taught him the curveball that would become his signature. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the weekend, the Chicago Cubs made the splashiest headlines of the new year by signing Alex Bregman — three-time All-Star, two-time top-five MVP finisher, and 2017 World Series champion — to a five-year, $175 million contract. It’s the second-richest contract signed this offseason in terms of total sticker price, and even after accounting for significant deferrals, it’s the second-highest AAV of any contract signed so far this winter.

I don’t want to rehash too much of what Davy Andrews covered in his writeup, but it’s an interesting move to be sure. The Cubs weren’t exactly hard-up for infield help, with Matt Shaw, Dansby Swanson, and Nico Hoerner (from left to right) occupying the three positions Bregman might conceivably occupy. Hoerner’s in his last year of team control, and you might argue that Shaw — my preseason pick for NL Rookie of the Year — disappointed a little in 2025. (I think a 93 wRC+ and 1.5 WAR in 126 games is perfectly OK for a rookie third baseman, though Bregman would likely represent a significant upgrade.)

But for the time being, both incumbents remain in the Cubs organization, leaving a bit of a logjam for manager Craig Counsell to sort out. Nevertheless, I know what the Cubs’ next move should be: Signing Brendan Rodgers. 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 Toronto Blue Jays.

Batters

The Toronto Blue Jays were just two runs away from winning the World Series, so suffice it to say, 2025 was a pretty successful season. Even with a disappointing first year from Anthony Santander, the Jays were second in the American League in runs scored. The lineup wasn’t just potent at the plate, either, with the team’s position players leading baseball at 44 runs above average in FRV. The pitching, both the rotation and the bullpen, was fairly middling, but given what Toronto got out of its bats, the arms didn’t need to do that much to propel the team deep into the playoffs. Now the Jays seek to finish 2025’s job in a division that won’t make it an easy task. Not that they’re sitting around and waiting; less than a year after extending Vladito for a half billion dollars, they’ve shelled out another $336 million in guaranteed money this winter. Just for context, that’s nearly $100 million more than the rest of the AL East has spent in free agency combined ($249.6 million). Crashing past the final luxury tax threshold certainly fulfills any reasonable definition of going “all in” on winning.

Neither Andrés Giménez nor Ernie Clement has the offensive upside that the recently departed Bo Bichette does, but both are fine defensive players. ZiPS isn’t banking on Kazuma Okamoto being a star or anything, but he should hit for power and be a plus at third if his defense holds up. Completing the infield is Vladimir Guerrero Jr., and while his offensive output was well below his 2024 level, he was still a star-level first baseman last year. With both Davis Schneider and Addison Barger projected as basically league average starters at second and third respectively, there’s impressive infield depth here as well.

Even though he missed half the season, first recovering from offseason shoulder surgery and then a hamstring malady, Daulton Varsho still managed 2.2 WAR in 2025. Varsho is never going to put up impressive batting averages, but he has very good power for the position and plays good defense, and I think most of the remaining locals who were upset that he’s on the roster instead of Gabriel Moreno have quieted down by this point. The corner outfield positions are both in flux, with the exact mix of Santander and George Springer at DH undetermined, but between those two, Schneider, Barger, and Nathan Lukes, who is more than capable of taking the larger piece of a platoon, they ought to get at least average production in the corners and at DH. The Jays have been endlessly linked to Kyle Tucker, and he’d undoubtedly improve the team, but I’m not sure that they wouldn’t get a lot more bang for the buck by signing one of the top pitchers remaining.

Pitchers

Dylan Cease was a solid addition, and forms a quality 1-2 punch with Kevin Gausman. There’s also a lot of upside in Trey Yesavage — you saw how he pitched in the postseason — and a healthy Shane Bieber could be a big plus. But a pitcher with just a single year of professional experience, or one who comes with Bieber’s injury history, carries real risks as well. Cody Ponce is interesting, and a good risk given the upside, but you can’t completely ignore that before his huge season in the KBO, he really wasn’t very good at all in Japan. If José Berríos gets back on track, well, having too much pitching has never actually been a real problem; the Dodgers over the last five years could tell you about that. I can’t help but think that for as good as the Cease signing was, adding Framber Valdez or Ranger Suárez is still a good idea, as it would lower the rotation’s downside considerably and make the Jays the AL East favorite by a win or two.

Despite the middle-of-the-pack results last year, ZiPS is actually rather enamored with Toronto’s relief corps. While it doesn’t see the team as having a Jhoan Duran or Mason Miller at the top of the ‘pen, with the exception of Yimi García, the computer projects every pitcher with 30 relief innings on our depth chart to have an ERA under 4.00 as a reliever. That even holds true if you stretch things out further, to Chase Lee and Lazaro Estrada. The soft-tossing Tyler Rogers was the big bullpen addition, practically a unicorn in that he’s an exceedingly unusual submariner who doesn’t have significant platoon splits. I don’t think the Jays really need to do much else here, and their deep store of talent might even justify them trading a reliever or two if one of the contenders with bullpen issues fails to shore things up over the next two months.

All told, the Blue Jays look to be neck-and-neck with the Red Sox, and slightly better than the Yankees, in the AL East. As for the Orioles, you’ll have to wait for that ZiPS post later this week.

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.