Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about a surprising amount of Mo Vaughn content, a rash of spring injuries (including Gerrit Cole‘s Tommy John surgery and other Yankees ailments), the latest A’s and Rays woes, and more. Then they preview the 2025 Los Angeles Dodgers (26:11) with The Athletic’s Fabian Ardaya, and the 2025 Colorado Rockies (1:34:00) with The Rockies Insider’s Patrick Lyons.

Audio intro: Luke Lillard, “Effectively Wild Theme”
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Jacob deGrom made his Cactus League debut on Saturday, tossing two perfect innings against the Royals and looking dominant while doing so. The 36-year-old righty, who returned from his second Tommy John surgery to make three abbreviated starts last September, projects to be the team’s most valuable starter, even while pitching at the back of the rotation in order to limit his innings. He’s the most substantial “addition” to a team that succumbed to a championship hangover last year but is forecast (barely) to have the upper hand in a three-way race in the AL West.

After winning the 2023 World Series in manager Bruce Bochy’s return to the dugout, so much went wrong for the Rangers in terms of injury and underperformance last season that they slipped to 78 wins and third place in the AL West. But while the Astros traded Kyle Tucker and lost Alex Bregman this winter, and the Mariners mostly sat on their hands, the Rangers had a comparatively productive winter, with general manager Chris Young making a couple key trades and adding a handful of free agents to augment their lineup and overhaul their bullpen. Our Playoff Odds currently project Texas for 84.8 wins and a 32.8% chance of winning the division, compared to 84.4 wins for the other two teams, with Seattle’s odds at 30.6% and Houston’s at 29.4%. Obviously, that’s a true toss-up, but things look better for the Rangers than at the start of last year, when even as reigning champs, they projected for 81.8 wins (and 10.7% odds) to the Astros’ 90.5.

Unlike Jake Burger, Kyle Higashioka, Chris Martin and Joc Pederson — the most prominent outside additions to this roster — deGrom was already a Ranger, having signed a five-year, $185 million deal in December 2022. Yet his contribution since putting pen to paper has been minimal. He made just six starts before needing another repair of his torn ulnar collateral ligament on June 12, 2023 (his first was in 2010). Fifteen months and one day later, he returned to throw 10.2 innings spread over three starts, enough to provide some peace of mind heading into the offseason. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re a Cleveland Guardians fan, the ritual is surely getting old at this point. The team develops an All-Star middle infielder, and times are good. Then, inevitably, that player leaves and is replaced by a new and unproven middle infielder. Can the team make it work? Tune in next season to find out.

The latest intriguing replacement is Gabriel Arias, who, like seemingly every recent Guardians hitting prospect, is a shortstop by trade. He looked like the heir apparent to the job in 2023, backing up at short before Amed Rosario’s departure. But Arias scuffled, then broke his wrist at the tail end of the season. That injury might have lingered into last year, and whatever the reason, he struggled mightily, ceding the shortstop job to Brayan Rocchio. Luckily, in Cleveland, a contributing role is only one trade away, and now that second baseman Andrés Giménez is a Blue Jay, Arias heads into 2025 as a key part of the Guardians’ infield plans.

Plenty of the particulars of Arias’ 563 major league plate appearances are ripped right out of his last prospect report. Intermittent contact issues? Yeah, he strikes out a third of the time. Potential for power? He launched 10 homers in half a season in 2023. Defensive versatility? He’s logged time at every position other than pitcher and catcher. But the relative weights of each of those features of his game matter, and so far in his career, the contact issues have dominated.

It’s possible to succeed despite a high-strikeout game, and honestly, Arias is the right kind of player to do so. Teams will tolerate a player with a bad contact rate if he hits for power and contributes with his glove. The defensive component is already there, especially because of his versatility, but the power hasn’t arrived; his career .138 ISO is the domain of contact hitters, not boom-bust guys whose muscles have muscles.

Is that going to change this year? To be clear, I don’t know. Guys like Arias flame out all the time. It’s really hard to stick around and produce in the majors when you run even a 15% swinging strike rate – and he’s up near 20%. But if things work out, it’s fairly easy to see how they would. Really, one video is all I need to show you:

Read the rest of this entry »

12:01

Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks! Welcome to another edition of my weekly chat — the third week in a row I’ve been able to do this (please clap).

12:02

Jay Jaffe: Yesterday, I wrote about the Hall of Fame’s latest tweaks to Era Committee rules and (reluctantly) weighed in on the recent news regarding Pete Rose’s potential reinstatement https://blogs.fangraphs.com/never-is-a-long-long-time-permanent-inelig…

12:02

Jay Jaffe: There’s a lot of confusion circulating around the latter aspect of that, so I hope I helped bring some clarity to the matter.

12:02

Jay Jaffe: Beyond that, I’ve got a look at Jacob deGrom’s spring debut and the overhauled Rangers roster in the pipeline for today.

12:03

Jay Jaffe: And now, on with the show

Read the rest of this entry »

Cody Bellinger enters the 2025 season as the starting center fielder of the New York Yankees, after they acquired him from the Chicago Cubs over the offseason in a trade that was essentially a salary dump. A former MVP and Gold Glove winner who spent two seasons in Chicago after six with the Dodgers, Bellinger is coming off a 2024 campaign that saw him swat 18 home runs, log a 109 wRC+, and put up 2.2 WAR in 130 games.

In November 2016, Bellinger was a 21-year-old first baseman who’d spent the lion’s share of that year raking in Double-A. The Scottsdale native ranked second on our Dodgers Top Prospects list, which was published that month.

What did his FanGraphs scouting report look like at that time? Moreover, what does he think of it all these years later? Curious to find out, I shared some of what Eric Longenhagen wrote back in 2016 and asked Bellinger to respond to it. Read the rest of this entry »

One way to tell the difference between a baseball fan who has a life and a true sicko is whether they have strong opinions on players who sign minor league contracts and attend spring training on a non-roster invite. The person in a Cubs hat who’s stoked about the Kyle Tucker trade and knows all sorts of intimate biographical details about Shota Imanaga? That’s your friend. If they start talking to you about Travis Jankowski, they might be in a little too deep.

We sickos know that while championships can be won and glory earned on the major league free agent market, NRIs are nonetheless a meaningful collection of useful roster players. Sometimes more. I’d argue that these fringe hopefuls are the only players who truly stand to gain by their performance in camp.

Moreover, these players are by definition underdogs. They include former top prospects, guys recovering from injury, and itinerant Quad-A players hoping for one last spin of the wheel. If you weren’t interested in their progress on a competitive level, surely we can interest you in an underdog story. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Detroit Tigers. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as our own observations. This is the fifth year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers. The ETAs listed generally correspond to the year a player has to be added to the 40-man roster to avoid being made eligible for the Rule 5 draft. Manual adjustments are made where they seem appropriate, but we use that as a rule of thumb.

A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.

All of the ranked prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details (and updated TrackMan data from various sources) than this article and integrates every team’s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »

We’re a month into the college season, and while it’s too early to make definitive statements about players, enough time has passed for a few to begin setting themselves apart from their peers. As we head into conference play, I wanted to highlight a few guys who weren’t listed on The Board when we launched our initial rankings during Prospect Week, but who have stood out in the early going. One has been added to The Board, while the others might find their way there before Day One rolls around.

Liam Doyle, LHP, Tennessee
Weekend Line: 5.2 IP, 13 K, 2 BB, 0.00 ERA vs. St. Bonaventure

Liam Doyle stormed onto the scene to start the year and is looking like one of the top pitching prospects in the entire class. He’s had a nomadic career so far, spending his freshman year at Coastal Carolina before transferring Ole Miss as a sophomore. Now the Friday night guy at Tennessee, he’s made four starts, posting a 0.44 ERA with a 61.8% K-BB%, highest amongst qualified D-I pitchers.

What makes Doyle special is his fastball, which sits in the mid-90s, tops out at 99 mph, and boasts a unique movement profile. He routinely gets over 20 inches of vertical break on it to go with 13 inches of horizontal break, and he generates a shallow approach angle that helps it play up even more. For a variety of reasons, college pitch metrics tend to overstate the amount of movement a pitch will have once a player gets into affiliated ball, but it’s one of the best fastballs in college baseball. Read the rest of this entry »

As I’ve often said when evaluating the prospects of various controversial candidates for election to the National Baseball Hall of Fame, “forever” and “never” are very long times. Two reports from the last week could put that assertion to the test. According to ESPN’s Don Van Natta Jr., commissioner Rob Manfred is considering a petition from the family of the late Pete Rose requesting that he be removed from the permanently ineligible list, which would clear the way for his consideration for election to the Hall. Separately, on Wednesday the institution announced that its board of directors has adjusted the requirements for Era Committee candidates in a way that could eventually strip some of them of eligibility for future consideration — and could be subject to abuse.

Before addressing the Rose matter, which became politically charged after president Donald Trump posted to social media in support of him on February 28, it’s worth unpacking the ramifications of the Hall’s announcement. On February 26 in Orlando, Florida, chairman Jane Forbes Clark met with the 16-member board of directors (which includes Manfred) to address several matters, including the Era Committee process. Starting with the 2026 Contemporary Baseball Era Committee ballot for players, which will be voted on at the Winter Meetings in Orlando in December, candidates who don’t receive at least five out of 16 possible votes will be ineligible to appear on the next ballot three years later, when that particular pool of candidates is considered again. Candidates who don’t receive at least five of 16 votes on multiple Era Committee ballots will no longer be eligible for future consideration, period. To these eyes, the first part of that change is reasonable, but the second is unnecessarily heavy-handed and smacks of punishment — punishment merely for landing on a ballot at the wrong time. Read the rest of this entry »