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Baseball is in the air. Grainy cellphone footage has started to leak out. The excitement for the World Baseball Classic is peaking. The last time we ran these power rankings, the offseason had just begun and teams were still making plans for how they were going to improve their rosters during the winter. This run of the rankings provides a good barometer for which teams took big steps forward with their splashy signings and big trades, and which ones have been left in the dust. Today I’ll cover the teams projected to finish under .500 in 2026, with those forecast for a .500 or better record to follow on Monday.

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 pre-spring training rankings, I’ve pulled the Depth Charts projections — now powered by both the 2026 Steamer and 2026 ZiPS projections — and calculated an implied Elo ranking for each team. First up are the rankings for teams 18-30, presented in a sortable table. Below that, I’ve grouped the teams into tiers, with comments on each club. The delta column in the table below shows the change in ranking from the last offseason run of the power rankings in November.

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It’s been a surprisingly quiet offseason for the Padres. They re-signed Michael King — a near necessity after seeing Dylan Cease depart in free agency and losing Yu Darvish for the season to elbow surgery — and Joe Musgrove should be healthy after missing all of 2025 with his own elbow surgery. But even with those two starters back in the fold, the rotation looks frighteningly shallow. You could probably say that about the entire roster, though. Years of win-now trades have depleted the farm system, and the upper minors look pretty devoid of meaningful depth. Maybe that won’t be a problem if everyone stays healthy, but the grind of the regular season means San Diego will inevitably have to dip into that depth at some point.

If the Rangers were going to squeeze every last ounce from this contention window that brought them a championship back in 2023, they needed to make some pretty dramatic moves this offseason. Trading Marcus Semien for Brandon Nimmo? Check. Sending a host of prospects to the Nationals for MacKenzie Gore? Check. Will it be enough to challenge the Mariners and Astros for the AL West crown? The projections aren’t convinced. Adding Gore to the starting rotation shifts the weight of expectations off of Jack Leiter and Kumar Rocker’s shoulders, but the pitching staff still looks weaker than the unit that led the majors in run prevention last year. On the offensive side of things, if you squint, you can see a healthy season from Corey Seager, a big step forward from Wyatt Langford and Evan Carter, and bounce-back campaigns from Joc Pederson and Jake Burger all powering an improved lineup. But that’s a lot of things that need to go right for Texas to hit its 90th-percentile win projection.

The Twins are in the midst of a significant transition at the organizational level. Last week, the team announced that it had “mutually agreed to part ways” with the president of baseball and business operations Derek Falvey. He had been at the helm since 2016, and combined with the huge teardown last summer, his departure represents a huge shift in direction for the franchise. Most of the moves the Twins have made this offseason have been on the fringes: They signed Josh Bell, Victor Caratini, and Taylor Rogers to short-term deals and have made a handful of small trades to clear space on their 40-man roster. And yet, they still have a strong core of players — including Joe Ryan, Pablo López, and Byron Buxton — and a trio of young position players — Luke Keaschall, Walker Jenkins, and Emmanuel Rodriguez — who could make an impact this year. The projections have them a hair below .500 right now, but it feels like that can swing dramatically depending on if they stick with the guys they have now or decide to continue selling off the talent they have left this summer.

The Reds blasted just 167 home runs last year, 10th fewest in the majors and a surprisingly low total for a team that calls Great American Ballpark home. Reuniting with Eugenio Suárez and his powerful bat should help in that regard. The rest of the lineup still has plenty of question marks. Will Elly De La Cruz bounce back after playing through a quad injury last summer? Can any of Spencer Steer, Matt McLain, or Noelvi Marte emerge as stars? Fortunately, the pitching staff looks like it will continue to be a strength. Led by Hunter Greene, the starting rotation should carry Cincinnati to the fringe of the NL Wild Card race. It worked out for the Reds last year, maybe lightning will strike twice.

The A’s continued to fortify the foundations of their roster by handing out a pair of seven-year contract extensions to Tyler Soderstrom and Jacob Wilson this offseason. Along with Brent Rooker, Lawrence Butler, and Rookie of the Year winner Nick Kurtz, those five players are signed or under team control through at least 2029. That means this core will still be with the team for its expected move to Las Vegas in a few years. Adding to the excitement is 19-year-old top prospect Leo De Vries, the prize from last summer’s Mason Miller trade who is developing quickly. Yet, for all that thump on offense, the less that’s said about the pitching staff, the better. That puts the A’s in an awkward position, where their lineup is plenty good enough to contend but their pitchers are lagging far behind. There are some promising young arms coming up through the organization, but they are still a few years away. In the meantime, the hurlers at the major league level will struggle to survive in the extremely hitter-friendly confines of West Sacramento’s Sutter Health Park.

The Rays snuck their way into three separate three-team deals this offseason, a near perfect encapsulation of their incremental approach to roster building. And with every other team in the AL East looking like a powerhouse, this year seems like a perfect moment for Tampa Bay to reset the roster and start building for its next contention window. Out are Brandon Lowe, Josh Lowe, and Shane Baz. In are Gavin Lux — probably a temporary stopgap at second base — and a collection of prospects to restock the farm system. Thankfully, Junior Caminero looks like a star to build around, and the pitching staff looks solid with the hopefully healthy return of Shane McClanahan.

Even if the rest of their offseason was quiet, it has to be seen as a success for the Guardians after they signed José Ramírez to a seven-year contract extension that should keep him in Cleveland through the end of his career. Locking up a future Hall of Famer to a team-friendly deal is something to be celebrated, especially since Ramírez has a pretty good shot at becoming the franchise’s best player of the last 100 years. But if you did want to quibble with the rest of the Guardians’ lack of activity this offseason, you could point to the small payroll savings they negotiated via Ramírez’s deal and the lack of reinvestment in the roster. Maybe those funds will trickle down to the roster in the near future, but the current group is pretty flawed. The Guardians were pretty lucky to win the AL Central last year, and the projections see them as the fourth-best team in that division heading into this season.

The Marlins did well to trade away from a position of strength — their starting rotation — to hopefully acquire an impact bat in Owen Caissie and restock their farm system with a gaggle of prospects. Eury Pérez took a big step forward last year after recovering from Tommy John surgery, and top pitching prospects Thomas White and Robby Snelling should get an opportunity to debut this year. These are small steps toward building a contender in Miami, but it feels like there’s some forward momentum here.

Chaim Bloom started tearing down the Cardinals as soon as he was installed as their president of baseball operations this offseason. He found trade partners for Nolan Arenado and Sonny Gray, removing the largest contracts on the team’s books, and also dealt Willson Contreras and Brendan Donovan for a bunch of prospects and draft picks. It’s a promising start to the Cardinals’ rebuild, and I’d expect more moves this summer. Meanwhile, top prospect JJ Wetherholt should have an opportunity to earn a spot on the Opening Day roster. That should give fans a glimpse of the future while the front office sorts out how to build a contender around him.

You can’t fault the Angels for attempting to raise their ceiling a little bit. They brought in five pitchers this offseason — Grayson Rodriguez, Alek Manoah, Jordan Romano, Kirby Yates, and Drew Pomeranz — who have each been fantastic at some point in the past, but have also dealt with significant injuries that have sapped their effectiveness. It’s a fine gamble to make, with the hope that at least one or two of them will actually make an impact this year. They also re-signed third baseman Yoán Moncada and acquired outfielder Josh Lowe, who will replace Taylor Ward in the outfield after they sent him to Baltimore in the Rodriguez deal. Will it be enough to lift the Halos out of their doldrums? No, probably not, but at least they’re trying something a little different.

New president of baseball operations Paul Toboni got right to work rebuilding the Nationals this winter. He dealt away MacKenzie Gore in the offseason’s biggest trade and made a savvy move to get catcher Harry Ford from the Mariners for lefty reliever Jose A. Ferrer. What these moves indicate is that Washington is about to embark on another rebuilding cycle after the last one petered out under former GM Mike Rizzo. James Wood is young enough, and under team control for long enough, that he should still be considered a big part of the team’s future. The same might not be true for CJ Abrams, though with three years left of control, the Nats shouldn’t be in a hurry to move on from their shortstop.

The White Sox had a pretty interesting offseason. Of course, the biggest headline was the signing of Munetaka Murakami to a two-year deal. It’s a huge risk, but it’s an exciting move that could pay off handsomely if Murakami adjusts to MLB pitching quickly. Chicago also moved on from Luis Robert Jr. and used some of the payroll savings to take Jordan Hicks’s contract off Boston’s hands in order to get an interesting pitching prospect in David Sandlin. With Colson Montgomery and Kyle Teel already making an impact in the majors, and Noah Schultz and Hagen Smith close to debuting, the shape of an interesting team is starting to emerge on the South Side.

Unlike some of the other front office hires this offseason, Paul DePodesta has taken a pretty quiet approach to reshaping the roster. The moves he’s made have all been focused on improving the margins of the roster. The Rockies have signed Willi Castro and Michael Lorenzen and traded for Jake McCarthy and Edouard Julien. The four newcomers provide some much-needed depth, but none of them really raises the ceiling of the ball club. I guess we’ll have to wait for this summer to see if there are any impactful trades in the offing.

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about MLB player chatbots, an Addison Barger giveaway, Tarik Skubal’s big arbitration win, the Tigers signing Framber Valdez, and a rough week for sports media, then (36:29) begin the 14th annual EW season preview series by discussing the 2026 Houston Astros with The Athletic’s Chandler Rome, and the 2026 Arizona Diamondbacks (1:25:35) with The Arizona Republic’s Nick Piecoro, followed (1:54:53) by a postscript.

Audio intro: Alex Ferrin, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio interstitial 1: Austin Klewan, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio interstitial 2: Sean .P, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Tom Rhoads, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to chatbots story
Link to Barger story
Link to season preview series wiki
Link to Passan on Skubal
Link to Baumann on Skubal
Link to Dan S. on Framber
Link to Rosenthal on the Pirates
Link to Rosenthal on the Tigers
Link to Chandler on the cross-up
Link to team SP projections
Link to NPR on WaPo
Link to NYT on WaPo sports
Link to The Ringer on WaPo sports
Link to The New Yorker on WaPo
Link to The Atlantic on WaPo
Link to Silver on WaPo
Link to MLB.com layoffs
Link to Grant post
Link to team payrolls
Link to Astros offseason tracker
Link to Astros depth chart
Link to BP IL Ledger
Link to Dan S. on team injuries
Link to Chandler on Correa
Link to Chandler on Imai
Link to Chandler on the infield
Link to Chandler on Espada/Brown
Link to Trueblood on Peña
Link to Chandler’s author archive
Link to Crush City Territory
Link to Diamondbacks offseason tracker
Link to Diamondbacks depth chart
Link to team RP WAR
Link to team RP WPA
Link to ballpark funding deal info
Link to more funding deal info
Link to funding deal opinion piece
Link to renovations preview
Link to Nick on the Alexander trade
Link to FG post on Santana
Link to Nick’s author archive
Link to Boehly/Epstein article
Link to ESPN’s Clase report
Link to Ben on Clase
Link to EW episode on Clase
Link to SABR awards voting
Link to Wood/Lolich IP leaderboard
Link to Lolich obit

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Seldom, if ever, has the baseball world waited on tenterhooks to hear the result of a salary arbitration case, but most arbitration-eligible players are not Tarik Skubal. On this point, the arbitrator seems to have agreed, granting the Tigers left-hander a record $32 million salary for his final year of team control.

Arbitration cases themselves are usually back-page news. The question is not whether a player will return to his previous team, but how much he’ll be paid. Only people who work in baseball and unrecoverable RosterResource addicts care about such things, especially because the club’s offer and the player’s request usually only differ by a small amount. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

Lucas Elissalt is an under-the-radar prospect in one of the game’s top farm systems. A 21-year-old right-hander whom the Detroit Tigers tabbed in the 13th round of the 2024 draft out of Chipola College, Elissalt is coming off of a first full professional season in which he put up a 2.51 ERA and 3.23 FIP over 89 2/3 innings split between Low-A Lakeland and High-A West Michigan. Moreover, his 26.9% strikeout rate was the highest among Detroit farmhands who tossed 80 or more frames.

Elissalt’s fastball wouldn’t be described as high octane. The 6-foot-4, 190-pound hurler’s heater sat 90-93 mph last year, occasionally ticking up to 94 (but also down to 89). Adding good weight to his lanky frame — “maybe 15 or 20 pounds” — could contribute to increased velocity, arguably the key to his developing into a major league starter.

Regardless of any velo gains that might be forthcoming, the ABS system could work in his favor. Elissalt’s 9.4% walk rate wasn’t exactly Maddux-esque, but command nonetheless profiles as one of his strengths going forward. At a time when some organizations are reassessing their views of power versus pitchability, the young righty may be ascending the minor league ladder at an opportune moment. What Elissalt lacks in gas, he makes up for with guile. Read the rest of this entry »

Two years ago, Zac Gallen was one of the top pitchers in baseball. Building upon a breakout 2022 season in which he finished fifth in the NL Cy Young voting, he went 17-9 with a 3.47 ERA, a 3.26 FIP, and 5.2 WAR in 210 innings for the Diamondbacks, making his first NL All-Star team, helping an upstart Arizona squad reach the World Series — where he took a no-hitter into the seventh inning of his Game 5 start — and placing third for the Cy Young. Since then, however, it’s been mostly downhill. After hitting free agency on the heels of a season in which his ERA ballooned to 4.83 and his WAR dipped to 1.1, the 30-year-old righty remains unsigned, and pitchers and catchers are due to report to spring training camps next week.

With Wednesday’s news that Framber Valdez signed a three-year, $115 million deal with the Tigers, Gallen is the only remaining free agent from among the nine who declined $22.025 million qualifying offers. He’s also the best-available player remaining on our Top 50 Free Agents list — where Ben Clemens placed him 19th — but hardly the only one. In fact, one can almost cobble together a passable rotation out of the starters still on the market, namely Gallen (19th), Chris Bassitt (35th), Lucas Giolito (36th), Zack Littell (49th), and Justin Verlander (50th). They’d be a stronger unit if we turned the clock back to 2022 or ’23, but for ’26 those five project to combine for 9.1 WAR, which would tie the White Sox for 27th on our Depth Charts. With Valdez instead of Giolito in my first draft of this article — going by 2026 projected WAR, the latter’s ranking doesn’t match where Ben placed him — the quintet projected to produce 11.4 WAR, which would rank 19th, ahead of three playoff teams from last year, namely the Cubs, Guardians, and Padres. Neither of those totals includes reinforcements who would have improved their standing a bit, since no team gets by on just five starters alone.

In parallel with Tuesday’s roundup of the best position players still available, what follows here is a run through the best free agent starters who’ve yet to sign. I’ll be working in order of projected WAR. Read the rest of this entry »

The biggest name remaining in free agency is now off the board, as Framber Valdez agreed to a three-year, $115 million contract with the Detroit Tigers on Wednesday night. The 32-year-old lefty, who ranked fourth on our Top 50 Free Agents list, hit the open market for the first time in his major league career this winter after parts of eight seasons with the Astros. In his final season in Houston, Valdez put up a 3.66 ERA and a 3.37 FIP in 31 starts over 192 innings, good enough to reach the 4.0-WAR mark for the third time in his career. His new deal with the Tigers comes with an opt out after the 2027 season, $20 million of the deal in the form of a signing bonus, and some unknown amount of deferred money, which will reduce the overall value of his contract by, well, an unknown amount.

For the Tigers, the benefits of adding Valdez to the rotation are quite clear. Of course, he would improve any team, since having too many good pitchers has been an actual problem zero times in baseball history, but he fits Detroit’s needs like a glove. The Tigers have managed to get their rotation through the season successfully over the last two years despite a lack of depth, but come playoff time, they have basically gone with a starting staff of Tarik Skubal and a trio of shrug emojis. Don’t believe me? Detroit has played 15 games across the last two postseasons, and I will now run down the full list of five-inning starts by Tigers pitchers with last names that aren’t Skubal:

[…]

[…]

Oh, sorry, I was eating tacos. There aren’t any players on that list. Signing Valdez gives the Tigers a dependable no. 2 starter, one who is better and with a better health record than Jack Flaherty. While I’m chaotic-neutral enough to get a thrill out of A.J. Hinch’s admitting in press conferences that he and the front office were basically coming up with the pitcher assignments as they went along, I’m sure that’s not an ideal scenario for making decisions. Read the rest of this entry »

Carlos Santana is well into the immaculate grid portion of his 16-year career. After spending 10 of his first 11 seasons in Cleveland, Santana has played for seven teams over the past five seasons (including one last stint with the Guardians last year). On Tuesday, we learned that he will be joining his newest, and southernmost, franchise in 2026, as the veteran first baseman has agreed to a one-year, $2 million deal with the Diamondbacks.

With just 0.3 WAR and a wRC+ of 81, Santana is coming off the second-worst season of his storied career. He will turn 40 a week after the season starts. All of that makes him a perfect fit for a Diamondbacks team whose mantra was announced by owner Ken Kendrick back in September: “We will not be spending at the same level.” Kendrick has so far lived up to his word. RosterResource currently has Arizona projected for a payroll of $173 million, down from $188 million in 2025. Santana said last year that the Diamondbacks were interested in him before he decided to return to Cleveland, and he is a reasonable bounce-back candidate and a cheap option for a team that’s only interested in cheap options. Read the rest of this entry »

Brayden Taylor had a disappointing season. Ranked seventh when our Tampa Bay Rays Top 56 Prospects list was published last February, the 23-year-old infielder went on to slash .173/.289/.286 with eight home runs and a 77 wRC+ over 437 plate appearances with Double-A Montgomery. It was a precipitous fall from the previous summer, when Taylor homered 20 times with a 143 wRC+ between High-A Bowling Green and the Double-A Biscuits.

I asked Taylor, a 2023 first-round pick out of Texas Christian University, about his lackluster performance in the early weeks of the Arizona Fall League season, where he was suiting up with the Mesa Solar Sox.

“Sometimes in baseball you just get a little bit out of sync,” said Taylor, who rallied to the tune of a .264/.400/.472 line in the hitter-friendly AFL. “Your sequence doesn’t feel good. Your body doesn’t feel good. Your mentality isn’t the greatest. I just didn’t have my best year at the plate.” Read the rest of this entry »