The Seattle Mariners currently have one of baseball’s best farm systems, and its strength differs markedly from that of the big league roster. Pitching-rich at the major league level, it’s Mariners position player prospects who populate the top tier of our rankings. That’s welcome news — at least on paper — for a Seattle team that has recently excelled at keeping runs off the board, but has too often struggled to score.

Justin Toole is front and center in the organization’s quest to graduate productive bats into the parent club’s lineup. Brought on as director of player development following the 2022 season, the 38-year-old Council Bluffs, Iowa native has both the background and the acumen to help make that happen. Prior to coming to Seattle, Toole played seven professional seasons, then served four years as a minor league hitting coach, followed by three as a major league hitting analyst. All of his pre-Mariners experience came with Cleveland.

Toole discussed several of the system’s most promising prospects prior to heading to Arizona for the start of spring training.

———

David Laurila: What is the current strength of the system?

Justin Toole: “From a player development standpoint, I think the strength is the individuality with how we handle our players. When we get people into our system, we figure out their strengths, we figure out their weaknesses, we help them understand their identity. We work with our players to get a feel for where they think they are, and where they want to go.

“Our group has done an unbelievable job of creating good player plans that are clear, that are are easy to follow. They’re simple. I think that’s kind of been the strength of our player development group. Of course, any good player development group is going to be good because of the scouting group. They bring in good players, players that fit what we want to do, and who we want to be.” Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Rob Manfred’s Super Bowl cameo, the return of not-terrible uniforms, a new finding in the “familiarity vs. fatigue” debate about the times through the order effect, two more Dodgers signings, and an intriguingly timed alteration to the criteria for two-way-player classification. Then they preview the 2025 Minnesota Twins (46:06) with The Athletic’s Aaron Gleeman, and the 2025 Detroit Tigers (1:29:21) with The Athletic’s Cody Stavenhagen.

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Players have begun to report to Arizona and Florida, and the sights and sounds of spring baseball are beginning to emerge from the cold winter. 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.

Last year, we revamped our power rankings using 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 solution 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 2025 Steamer and 2025 ZiPS projections — and calculated an implied Elo ranking for each team. The delta column in the full rankings below shows the change in ranking from the last offseason run of the power rankings in November.

…

Not content with simply winning two World Series over the last five years, the Dodgers made it clear they intend to solidify their dynasty by becoming the first team to repeat as champions since the 1999-2000 Yankees. Not only did they land Roki Sasaki, but they also re-signed Teoscar Hernández, signed arguably the best starting pitcher and the best relief pitcher on the market in Blake Snell and Tanner Scott, respectively, and filled in their roster depth with a host of smaller moves. Los Angeles has become the premiere franchise in baseball since its current ownership group took over a little more than a decade ago, and implementing a salary cap to curtail that spending wouldn’t do much, if anything, to change that perception. Players want to win, and the Dodgers currently provide the best opportunity for them to do that. Why wouldn’t they want to join that kind of party?

The Braves suffered through what could easily be described as a nightmare season last year and still managed to win 89 games and narrowly slip into the playoffs. They haven’t needed to be very active this offseason because their foundation is so strong. The one move they did make, adding Jurickson Profar to bolster their outfield, addressed the one glaring hole on their roster. There might be a bit more variance to Atlanta’s win projection than you’d expect from a team with playoff odds over 90%; strong post-injury performances from Ronald Acuña Jr. and Spencer Strider and bounce backs from Austin Riley, Matt Olson, and Sean Murphy drive that high ceiling, but those are lots of conditions the Braves need to meet to reach their lofty projections. The good news is that, like last year, they don’t need to be hit their ceiling to be one of the most competitive teams in the NL.

As you’ll see below, there are a ton of competitive AL teams projected for around 83-85 wins, and a handful more a hair below that group. The Yankees stand above that fray, though not by much. After losing Juan Soto to their crosstown rival, their offseason could have spiraled. Instead, they signed Max Fried and Paul Goldschmidt and traded for Cody Bellinger and Devin Williams. As far as consolation prizes go, those four newcomers should prove to be difference makers, and the projections agree; the Yankees are favored to come out on top of the most difficult division in baseball.

With so much of their core carrying over into 2025, the Phillies didn’t have much work to do this offseason. Instead of resting on their laurels, though, they went out and bolstered an already stacked starting rotation by trading for Jesús Luzardo right before Christmas. They also filled out their bullpen depth by signing Jordan Romano and Joe Ross, though that group still looks a little thin, and added Max Kepler to their outfield mix. Even with those moves, the projections think Philadelphia is a fairly significant step behind Atlanta and pretty even with the Mets.

On the heels of their surprise playoff appearance last year, the Mets made the biggest splash of the offseason by signing Juan Soto to the largest contract in sports history. They also restocked their roster by bringing back Pete Alonso, Sean Manaea, and Jesse Winker, and their free agent signings of Frankie Montas and Clay Holmes provide their rotation with a bit of depth. That said, the Mets lack the high-end ace or two you’d expect from a playoff contender, and the bottom half of their lineup looks pretty punchless right now. The addition of Soto does a lot to cover for those last remaining holes, and the organization seemingly has all the resources at its disposal to continue to improve once the season gets underway.

The Diamondbacks missed out on the playoffs by a single game a year after their shocking run to the World Series in 2023. To ensure that doesn’t happen again, they went out and signed Corbin Burnes to anchor their rotation and traded for Josh Naylor to replace Christian Walker at first base. They didn’t need to make a ton of additions to push their ceiling any higher; the continued development of Corbin Carroll will carry their lineup a long way, and their core remains largely intact.

With the Cardinals retooling and the Brewers and Pirates resistant to invest in their rosters, the Cubs saw an opportunity to separate themselves from their division rivals this offseason. Bringing in Kyle Tucker was the first salvo, and they followed that move by going back to the Astros to pilfer Ryan Pressly. They didn’t do enough to be considered one of the best teams in the NL, but they’re clearly a step ahead in their division, and that’s good enough to be lumped in with the other contenders in this tier.

Here’s that huge group of AL contenders that I mentioned above. There are three teams from the AL West, and two each from the Central and East divisions. If you believe the projections, two of the teams in this tier won’t make the playoffs, but it’s anyone’s guess as to which two will fall short.

In a bit of a surprise, the Rangers enter spring training with the best odds to take home the AL West division crown. Granted, that division race is essentially a toss up between the two Texas teams and Seattle, but the Rangers shouldn’t be overlooked even after their disappointing follow-up season to their 2023 championship. Who knows how many innings Jacob deGrom has left in him, but he’s healthy right now. And the biggest task facing the team this offseason has mostly been accomplished; six new relievers populate the Texas bullpen now, and while none of them is a lights out closer, the ‘pen is in a much better state than it was in November.

Instead of acting aggressively to give their good, but not great roster the edge it needed to be considered one of the best teams in the AL, the Mariners opted to have one of their quietest offseasons since Jerry Dipoto started running the show. They re-signed Jorge Polanco and are moving him to a new position, and they signed Donovan Solano to play the short side of a platoon at first base. Technically, those moves addressed the major holes on their roster, but their passivity and lack of ambition are maddening to a success-starved fan base. Still, Julio Rodríguez, Cal Raleigh, and that vaunted starting rotation form such a strong core that the Mariners are projected to have the third-best record in the AL.

The Astros are in the middle of an awkward transition. They’ve been the best team in the AL for nearly a decade and have managed to thrive despite navigating the departures of Gerrit Cole, Carlos Correa, and George Springer. And now they’re trying to figure out another one of those inflection points. Opting to trade away Tucker was a shock, but Houston did well to acquire Isaac Paredes, a player who is well suited for the ballpark formerly known as Minute Maid Park, and signing Christian Walker should give this lineup a boost after José Abreu flopped. Seeing the Astros with the third-best playoff odds in their own division doesn’t seem right, but their roster just isn’t in as good a place as it was when those other stars departed. They still could re-sign free agent third baseman Alex Bregman, whose return likely would be enough for them to leap to the top of the AL West projections, but it would also require some roster maneuvering and positional shuffling.

The unresolved question of the Twins’ potential sale and what that transition could mean for their organization has put a freeze on any activity in Minnesota this winter. They’ve made just a couple of minor moves, but the good news is that they didn’t really need to overhaul their roster anyway. They have a strong lineup anchored by Carlos Correa and a deep pitching staff backed by a dynamite bullpen. Of course, the uncertainty surrounding the health of their biggest stars is enough to put a damper on their projections, though it seems like they’re a step ahead of their division rivals right now.

The Red Sox entered the offseason with a talented but flawed roster. The additions of Garrett Crochet and Walker Buehler bolster an already strong starting rotation, and even though the two of them come with lingering injury and workload concerns, they were enough to edge Boston ahead of Baltimore in our projections — though the Orioles still rate higher when looking at our raw WAR projections. The Sox also have two top prospects waiting in the wings, Kristian Campbell and Roman Anthony, both of whom should make their big league debuts early in the season. If enough things break their way, it wouldn’t be surprising to see them emerge on top of the AL East this year.

The same thing could probably be said about the Orioles, what with their seemingly limitless supply of talented young position players. But for whatever reason, Baltimore has been hesitant to invest heavily to push its roster over the hump. The departures of Burnes and Anthony Santander were met with the additions of Tyler O’Neill and Charlie Morton — a downgrade on both accounts, if only because O’Neill’s lengthy injury history limits his projected workload — and except for a few other moves for depth pieces, the O’s have been oddly passive this offseason. Their situation is a bit like that of the Mariners, where they have a strong young core as an enviable foundation but have thus far refused to actually do the hard work of building around that cohort to launch themselves into the stratosphere.

Following their surprise playoff run last year, the Tigers spent this offseason opportunistically supplementing their core with a few key additions in Gleyber Torres, Alex Cobb, and the return of Jack Flaherty. That trio doesn’t fix all the flaws of this roster, but these moves do tangibly raise the floor. Could Detroit have risen above the fray in the AL Central with a bit more ambition? Of course, but like so many other teams in the AL, the Tigers are banking on some internal development and a lot of luck as their path to success in 2025. After all, that same strategy worked for them last year.

It’s a testament to the Rays’ excellent development pipeline that they took a pretty significant step back last season and still project to be in the AL playoff mix in 2025. The return of Shane McClanahan from his Tommy John surgery and healthier seasons from Shane Baz and Drew Rasmussen will be key, and the Rays will need Junior Caminero to emerge as an anchor of their lineup. Last month, they made a splash in free agency and signed Ha-Seong Kim to the second-largest deal, by AAV, in franchise history. He’ll miss the start of the season recovering from the shoulder injury that cut his 2024 campaign short, but he should be back sometime in May. Overall, though, Tampa Bay lacks both the depth and upside to project as anything more than a middle-of-the-pack team entering spring training.

Fresh off their first postseason appearance since winning the 2015 World Series, the Royals had an underwhelming offseason. They brought back right-handed starters Michael Wacha and Michael Lorenzen to restock their rotation, traded for Jonathan India to play… somewhere, and signed Carlos Estévez to lock down the ninth inning. These are all smart moves, but at this point, Kansas City has not addressed its most two glaring roster holes from last season — its corner outfield spots — and the club still lacks the necessary depth to weather the attrition of a long season. Bobby Witt Jr.’s ascent to stardom was a huge boon to the future of the franchise, but the Royals have done a woefully inadequate job of building a lineup around him. Their path to success in 2025 looks a lot like it did last year: An MVP caliber season from Witt, a deadly trio fronting their rotation, and just enough luck to squeeze into the Wild Card picture. Put another way, they need a lot to go in their favor.

It’s hard not to feel a little bad for the Blue Jays after they missed out on signing Shohei Ohtani a year ago and then fall short in their pursuits of Juan Soto and Roki Sasaki this offseason. While those “we tried” banners don’t count for anything, the Jays did accomplish something this offseason, signing Anthony Santander, Max Scherzer, and Jeff Hoffman, and trading for Andrés Giménez. Toronto’s roster is in a better spot than it was in November, even if it doesn’t include a marquee free agent. Unfortunately, the Blue Jays probably still aren’t good enough to make much noise in the competitive AL East. They’ve got a puncher’s chance at securing a Wild Card berth, but barring some big collapses from the teams ahead of them or another significant acquisition on their part, they’re stuck in the murky middle of the AL.

The Padres’ ugly ownership battle has cast a long shadow over their offseason, and even though they were a finalist for Sasaki, they’ve largely stayed on the sidelines this winter. Signing Jason Heyward and Connor Joe last week sort of settles their left field situation, but there’s still so little depth here that if just one of their stars misses any significant amount of time, it could have a disastrous effect on their entire season. They’ve been rumored to be shopping Dylan Cease to help them shore up other areas of their roster, but removing him from their rotation would just open up another hole that can’t be filled so easily.

The Brewers have always been asked to do a lot with few resources available to them. It’s not surprising, then, to see them stay pretty inactive this offseason even when faced with the departure of Willy Adames and a host of depth pieces from their major league roster. They leveraged Devin Williams’s final year of control into Nestor Cortes and an intriguing MLB-ready prospect in Caleb Durbin, but that’s pretty much the extent of their activity. Meanwhile, the Cubs surged ahead of Milwaukee in the projections following their flurry of moves this winter. Yet, despite all of this, the Brewers still have a decent shot at making the playoffs. That’s the benefit of playing in the NL Central.

Buster Posey’s reign as Giants president of baseball operations began with a splash, signing Willy Adames to the largest contract in franchise history. Then Posey convinced Justin Verlander to spend what could be his final season in San Francisco. Those two additions pushed their projections to the cusp of .500 and to the fringes of the NL Wild Card picture. Of course, that’s not a new position for the Giants, who’ve finished with no fewer than 79 wins and no more than 81 in each of the past three seasons.

For all the talk about taking a step back in 2025 to reset for the future, the Cardinals haven’t done much of anything this offseason. They haven’t found a trading partner suitable enough for Nolan Arenado to waive his no-trade clause, and they haven’t exchanged any other established talent for prospects. Considering this, it seems that getting out from Arenado’s contract is their sole focus until Chaim Bloom takes over for lame duck president of baseball operations John Mozeliak after the season. There is some solid young talent currently on the roster, but it looks like St. Louis is content to spend 2025 spinning its tires with the same mediocre group that’s fallen short of the playoffs each of the past two years.

Remember all those AL teams we discussed above who refuse to build around their young core and are instead fine with coin-flip odds of making the playoffs? Meet the NL version of that, except this team’s odds are significantly worse than a coin flip. The Pirates have an excellent young rotation fronted by Paul Skenes, one of the best pitchers in baseball, but they’ve done shockingly little to build a competent roster around him. Picking up Spencer Horwitz to help their lineup was a nice start to the offseason, but they followed that up by adding Adam Frazier and Tommy Pham, two pretty lackluster free agents. Skenes’ talent is such that he’s dragging Pittsburgh to the edge of the playoff picture, but he can only carry the team so far on his own.

The Guardians own perhaps the most surprising preseason projection, especially after winning 92 games and making the postseason last year for the second time in three seasons. They traded away the elder Naylor brother and Giménez and signed the ageless Carlos Santana to replace the former, but that’s not enough to truly bolster an offensive unit that was already one of the weakest in baseball. Cleveland really leaned on the pitching staff last season, the bullpen in particular, and it looks like that’s going to be the case again this year. The Guards are good enough to sit on the extreme fringe of the AL playoff picture, but their three AL Central rivals — the Twins, Tigers, and Royals — all look a bit stronger on paper.

The Reds brought in a host of depth pieces this offseason, trading for Brady Singer, Gavin Lux, Jose Trevino, and Taylor Rogers, and signing Austin Hays. That should help them raise the floor of their roster quite a bit, but the success of this team hinges on the development of Elly De La Cruz and the health of Hunter Greene and Matt McLain. There are good supplemental pieces up and down Cincinnati’s roster, but the projections see the sum of that talent as less than its parts.

Ahead of their inaugural season in Sacramento, the A’s have been busy spending to improve their roster. Granted, they needed to increase their payroll to avoid a grievance from the player’s union and maintain their status as revenue sharing recipients, but that’s neither here nor there. What matters is they signed Luis Severino to the largest contract in franchise history, extended Brent Rooker on a five-year deal, and traded for Jeffrey Springs. All that in an effort to impress in their new minor league digs, right?

The Angels were one of the most active teams to start this offseason, bringing in Jorge Soler, Yusei Kikuchi, Kyle Hendricks, and Travis d’Arnaud before Thanksgiving. And then they kind of fell silent until waking up in time to sign Yoán Moncada last week to take over as their starting third baseman, with Anthony Rendon relegated to the bench. For a team as far out of the playoff picture as Los Angeles is, these moves are a bit head scratching. Taken together, the additions give the Halos a few more projected wins, but winning 75 games instead of 71 isn’t really much of an accomplishment. It’s worth mentioning that these power rankings were put together before Tuesday morning, when news broke that the Angels had signed Kenley Jansen to a one-year, $10 million deal. Like their other moves, Jansen also represents an improvement, but he isn’t enough to turn the Halos into a winning team.

The debuts of James Wood and Dylan Crews last year marked a turning point for the Nationals. They’re now on the clock to build a contender around those young stars in the making. They took baby steps in that direction this offseason, trading for Nathaniel Lowe and signing Josh Bell to anchor their lineup, and bringing in a ton of new relievers to restock their bullpen. Washington is probably a couple of years away from truly contending, but at least there’s a bit of forward momentum toward that goal.

The Marlins’ surprise playoff appearance in 2023 seems like a lifetime ago. The hesitant optimism that surrounded Miami after that season has all but disappeared after the front office quickly tore down that roster and entered what looks like another long, drawn out rebuilding cycle. This offseason, the Marlins traded away Luzardo and Jake Burger, and it wouldn’t be surprising to see Sandy Alcantara on his way out the door by August if he pitches well in his return from Tommy John surgery.

If you really squint, you can sort of make out the shape of a semi-competitive Rockies team led by Ezequiel Tovar and Brenton Doyle, but that future is at least a few years away. That Colorado has two core pieces to build around at all is a step in the right direction. The Rockies picked up two veteran infielders in Thairo Estrada and Kyle Farmer this offseason, and both should be serviceable depth pieces to offer in midseason trades. Let’s see if the Rockies remember how to use the deadline to their advantage this year.

A quick reminder that the projected win-loss records seen in the tables above are the median projections for each team, so it’s pretty outrageous for any team — even the White Sox — to have its median projection sit at 100 losses. Technically, that would be a 21-game improvement over their historically bad 2024 campaign. This offseason, they’ve done what all good rebuilding clubs do: They added low-cost veterans to soak up playing time early in the season and then get traded for prospects ahead of the deadline. Still, as Michael Baumann wrote in his piece from this morning, “It’s a long climb out of the pit, and we’re not even sure where the floor is yet.”

For much of last summer, it looked as though Enrique Hernández had reached the end of the line with the Dodgers. For as popular as the team’s longtime superutilityman had been, his production was dreadful, and it seemed only a matter of time before he got caught in a numbers game as the team ran out of roster spots. Fortunately for both him and the Dodgers, a visit to the eye doctor helped, his production improved dramatically, and he had some huge moments in October while helping the Dodgers win the World Series. On Sunday afternoon, just before the Super Bowl, Hernández himself announced that he was returning to the fold.

Walking through the open door pic.twitter.com/hsd4IOpva6

— Enrique Hernández (@kikehndez) February 9, 2025

The statement refers to general manager Brandon Gomes’ words at the Dodgers’ recent FanFest. “Obviously, we’ll never close the door to Kiké,” said Gomes of the free agent, who has played a vital part on all four of the Dodgers’ World Series teams during the Dave Roberts era. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

Imagine you’re stuck in a huge hole. A chasm, a pit, an oubliette.

You’re in this hole, and you have to get out. You’re not going to just jam your fingernails into the wall and start climbing straight up. Wouldn’t be much of a hole if getting out were so simple. You’d have to build stairs or carve handholds or piece together an improvised ladder. It takes time, with no guarantee of success, and progress is not necessarily linear.

The White Sox are in a metaphorical hole at the moment. (Wait, wasn’t the hole always a metaphor? Don’t worry about it.) They just finished 41-121, a record so poor it violates certain assumptions that underpin contemporary baseball analysis. For example: Replacement level — as in wins above — comes to a winning percentage of .294, which is a hair under 48 wins. That’s seven more than the White Sox managed last season. Read the rest of this entry »

I was hired as FanGraphs’ Lead Prospect Analyst just after the 2016 draft and took my first run at evaluating the entirety of the minor leagues on my own the following winter. Enough time has now passed that many of the players from that era of prospecting have had big league careers unfold (or not). Hindsight allows me to have a pretty definitive idea of whether my call on a player was right or wrong in a binary sense, and gauge any gap that may exist between my evaluation and what the player ultimately became. Looking back allows me to assess my approach to grading and ranking players so that I might begin to establish some baselines of self-assessment and see how I perform compared to my peers at other publications. Last offseason, I began compiling the various Top 100 prospect rankings from seven years ago for the purposes of such a self-assessment, an exercise that culminated in the “How’s My Driving?” piece that ran during Prospect Week 2024. This winter, I turned my attention to the 2018 Top 100, which I co-authored with Kiley McDaniel. Below are the results of that audit and my thoughts on them.

Before we get to a couple of big, fun tables and my notes, I want to quickly go over why I’ve taken the approach I have here and discuss its flaws. There are absolutely deeper avenues of retrospective analysis that can be done with prospect lists than what I have attempted below, approaches that could educate us about prospects themselves, and probably also about prospect writers. (Last year, in the first edition of this piece, I proposed a few such potential methods of evaluation and included my thoughts on their limitations. For the sake of brevity, I’ve cut that discussion from this year’s edition, but if you’re curious about that stuff specifically, you’ll want to go back and read the paragraph that begins, “Eventually, someone could pool the lists…”) Read the rest of this entry »

The Angels were the busiest team in baseball during the first month of the offseason, signing Yusei Kikuchi, Travis d’Arnaud, Kyle Hendricks, and Kevin Newman, and trading for Jorge Soler. Then, after a quiet period throughout December and January, they returned to action last week, agreeing to a one-year, $5 million pact with Yoán Moncada. He will reportedly take over for Anthony Rendon as their primary starter at third base.

Meanwhile, the Padres are waking from an even longer hibernation. While the Dodgers, Diamondbacks, and Giants have been hard at work improving their rosters this winter, the Padres have been quiet. Their only notable move prior to February was re-signing catcher Elias Díaz. On Friday, they finally broke their silence and added not just one, but two major league free agents: Connor Joe and Jason Heyward. The two are expected to share duties in left field. Joe will earn a guaranteed $1 million on his one-year deal. The terms of Heyward’s contract, while presumably quite similar, have not yet been reported.

Angels Sign Yoán Moncada

We should have seen this coming. Back in December, the Angels reportedly expressed interest in a trio of third basemen on the offseason trade market: Nolan Arenado, Eugenio Suárez, and Alec Bohm. They were also linked to a pair of big-name free agent sluggers entering their age-30 seasons: Pete Alonso and Anthony Santander. So, of course, the Angels found a way to get the best a mediocre approximation of both worlds.

Moncada has had a career trajectory that few, if any, can relate to. There was a time when his star was so bright that he was often mentioned in the same breath as fellow international phenom Shohei Ohtani. Even as a teenager, he looked like such a stud that the Red Sox shattered international signing precedent to give him a $31.5 million bonus, which cost them another $31.5 million in penalties. Less than two years later, he was such a highly regarded prospect that some wondered if the Red Sox made a fatal mistake by trading him to the White Sox for Chris Sale.

Of course, Moncada wasn’t the first prospect to garner so much hype, nor was he the first top prospect who failed to reach his full potential. What makes him so interesting is that he did discover his ceiling – he just couldn’t stay there. In 2019, his age-24 campaign, Moncada played 132 games, swatted 25 homers, swiped 10 bases, and produced a 139 wRC+ en route to a 5.2-WAR season. That’s the kind of player the Red Sox thought they were signing when they gave him a record-setting bonus. That’s the kind of player the White Sox thought they were acquiring when they gave up one of the greatest starting pitchers of this generation to get him.

Sad to say, Moncada has never been that kind of player again. Everyone has a theory about the cause of his decline, from long COVID to the deadened ball, but regardless of the explanation, the fact of the matter is that Moncada was not able to make a consistent impact for the White Sox from 2020-24. His bat dropped off a cliff in 2020. He bounced back to post 3.7 WAR in 2021, but after that, injuries and underperformance became the defining themes of his late 20s. From 2022-23, he put up an 86 wRC+ and just 2.0 WAR over 196 games.

Moncada got off to a nice start in 2024, slashing .282/.364/.410 over the first two weeks of the season before a left adductor strain forced him to the injured list. Although he was initially expected to return in July, his rehab was put on pause for six weeks in the summer, first due to whatever on earth “anticipated soreness” is and later because he was oh-so-vaguely “still kind of feeling something.” He finally got back to Chicago in mid-September, after tearing up Triple-A on a rehab assignment, only to sit on the bench for the worst team in modern baseball history.

The White Sox had a dozen more games to ride out and roughly 450 plate appearances to fill. And yet Moncada appeared in just one of those games and took just one of those trips to the plate. If you blinked at the right moments, you might not have realized he ever came off the injured list at all. Over those final 12 games, White Sox batters produced a 70 wRC+ and -0.6 WAR. Their designated hitters went 9-for-50 with a 49 wRC+. Their third basemen were even worse, going 4-for-44 with a -2 wRC+. Yet, the only work the White Sox offered Moncada was a 12th-inning pinch-running gig against the Angels on September 18. He struck out the following inning in his only plate appearance of the month. Nonetheless, he somehow finished the season as the most productive offensive performer on the team, because of course he did:

All that to say, Moncada’s performance in 2024 can’t tell us much about what to expect from him in 2025. Could he be the 5.2-WAR player we saw in 2019, or even just the 3.7-WAR player we saw in 2021? I mean, sure, I guess. He’s done it before, and he won’t even turn 30 until May. But Moncada put up 2.2 WAR over 208 games from 2022-24, and that’s the kind of player our Depth Charts projections expect him to continue to be in 2025 (1.3 WAR in 118 games). ZiPS is a little higher on him, while Steamer is a little lower, but ultimately, we’re talking about a slightly-below-average everyday player – if he can stay on the field enough to play every day. For many teams, that wouldn’t be enough to crack the starting lineup. For the Angels, however, Moncada could be a nice addition.

From about 2015 to 2020, Rendon was one of the few third basemen one might have picked over Moncada. The latter was a future superstar, but the former was already playing at that level. These days, Rendon is one of the few third baseman upon whom Moncada is, more likely than not, a meaningful upgrade. Here’s how the two compare according to several projection systems:

Saddled with unfair expectations as a teenager, Moncada has developed a bit of a reputation as a prospect bust. The truth, however, is that he was worth every penny the Red Sox paid him; they used him to get Sale, and Sale helped them win a World Series. What’s more, he gave the White Sox 13.8 WAR over parts of eight seasons and contributed to the team’s first two playoff runs since 2008. Overall, he provided Chicago about $110 million in value (using a simplistic $8 million per WAR estimate) while earning just a little over $70 million in salary. Perhaps he didn’t become everything he could have been, but he gave both of his teams more than he took. He can do the same for the Angels in 2025.

Padres Sign Jason Heyward and Connor Joe

On Opening Day in 2023, Juan Soto stood in left field for San Diego. The following season, the Padres braced for what could have been the worst downgrade since The Fresh Prince recast Aunt Viv. Jurickson Profar, he of the lowest WAR in baseball the year prior, was Soto’s replacement. The Friars dropped from first to 30th on our left field positional power rankings. Yet, things sometimes have a funny way of working out. Against all odds, the 2024 Padres had the top left fielder in the National League, according to WAR, for the second year in a row.

Unfortunately, the Padres then found themselves looking to replace their All-Star left fielder for a second consecutive winter. This time around, their solution is a platoon of the lefty-batting Heyward and the righty-batting Joe. And you know, for what it’s worth, both Heyward and Joe have better projections now than Profar did entering 2024:

To be crystal clear, those projections say far more about Profar’s remarkable 2024 season than they do about either Heyward or Joe. They do not suggest that Heyward and Joe this year are likely to outperform Profar last season. Nor do they suggest that either one of them has more upside than Profar did at this time last year. Heyward was an All-Star caliber player in his early 20s, and to his credit, he has enjoyed multiple bounce-back seasons over the past several years. Indeed, he is only two years removed from a strong 2023, when he put up a 120 wRC+ and 2.3 WAR in 124 games with the Dodgers. However, his 38th-percentile xwOBA that year suggested he was due for regression, and regress he did. Over 87 games with the Dodgers and Astros, he produced a 94 wRC+ and just 0.8 WAR in 2024. While the Padres are surely hoping to get something like the 2023 version of Heyward, a repeat of his 2024 is far more likely. He’s already 35 years old (he’ll turn 36 in August), and I’m more convinced by his overall 91 wRC+ and .301 xwOBA from 2021-24 than I am by his brief resurgence in 2023.

Joe is three years younger than Heyward but has never shown anything close to Heyward’s All-Star ceiling. In fact, he has never even had a year as strong as Heyward’s 2023. (There’s a reason the Pirates non-tendered Joe rather than pay his projected $3.2 million arbitration salary.) All things considered, Joe’s production over the first four proper seasons of his career has been pretty similar to Heyward’s declining performance in the same time frame. Joe has been the more consistent hitter, but Heyward makes up the difference as a better baserunner and outfield defender:

Heyward is used to working in a platoon; since 2021, only 12.9% of his plate appearances have come against left-handed pitchers. Joe, on the other hand, could benefit from less exposure to opposite-handed hurlers. He has a career 107 wRC+ against lefties and a 91 wRC+ against righties. His managers in Colorado and Pittsburgh made an effort to shield him from right-handed pitching, but they haven’t had enough quality options to use him in a genuine platoon role; 38.2% of his career plate appearances have come against lefties. Excluding his eight-game cup of coffee with the Giants in 2019, when 14 of his 16 plate appearances came against lefties, he has never had a season in which the majority of his plate appearances have come with the platoon advantage.

Are the Padres such a team to change that? They should be, although that is contingent on their making further additions. Ideally, Heyward would take the bulk of the work in left field, health allowing, while Joe would handle the short side of the platoon. However, the Padres might need Joe for more than just outfield duties – and more than just a platoon role. Considering his defensive success at first base (5 DRS, 2 FRV in 170 career games), and the massive hole San Diego has at designated hitter, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Joe playing plenty of first with Luis Arraez as the DH. Joe’s projected 95 wRC+ (per Steamer) against right-handers would be pitiful at first base, but the Padres don’t currently have many better options for either first base or DH — whichever position that Arraez is not occupying. The only player on their 40-man roster with a higher projected wRC+ against righties who isn’t already penciled into the lineup at a different position is Tirso Ornelas, a prospect who has yet to make his MLB debut.

If San Diego is going to beat its 33.2% playoff odds without making any major additions, it will need someone to step up to replace its most productive hitter from 2024. If that hero exists, it almost certainly won’t be Heyward or Joe. Instead, that production will need to come from Fernando Tatis Jr., Xander Bogaerts, Manny Machado, or, in a best-case scenario, some combination of all three. Still, Heyward and Joe are proven big league players, and there’s no doubt the Padres needed more of those on their roster. And hey, you never know. It’s not so long ago we were saying the same thing about Profar.

Walker Jenkins is more than just the top-rated prospect in the Minnesota Twins system. Drafted fifth overall in 2023 out of Southport, North Carolina’s South Brunswick High School, the soon-to-turn-20-year-old is one of the game’s top prospects. His left-handed stroke is a big reason why. As Eric Longenhagen notes in Jenkins’ forthcoming Top 100 prospect report, the outfielder “has exciting feel to hit and barrel control. He tracks pitches exceptionally well and can move his hands all over the strike zone.” Longenhagen goes on to note that while Jenkins is likely a left fielder (the Twins have primarily deployed him in center so far), he “should hit enough to be a heart-of-the-order hitter and impact regular regardless of position.”

His first full professional season was impressive. In 368 plate appearances split across four levels — he finished the year in Double-A — Jenkins had a 139 wRC+ to go with six home runs and a .282/.394/.439 slash line. Moreover, he swiped 17 bases in 20 attempts.

Jenkins discussed his hitting approach in the final week of January.

———

David Laurila: How would you describe yourself as a hitter?

Walker Jenkins: “Above all things, I’m a hitter who is going to go up there and try to get my best swing off. You have guys that get categorized as, ‘Oh, they’re hitters, but they have no power,’ while for others it’s, ‘They’re all power, but no hit.’ I want to be a good hitter. I’m going to hit first, and when I get my A-swing off, that’s when my power is going to come.

“If you can continuously hit the ball on the barrel, good things are going to happen. That’s what I try to do, because I don’t like striking out. I don’t like giving at-bats away. But when I get in a hitter’s count, I’m not going to get cheated.” Read the rest of this entry »

Hello, and welcome to Prospect Week! (Well, closer to Prospect Fortnight — as you can probably tell from the navigation widget above, the fun will continue well into next week, including the launch of our Top 100.) I’m not your regular host – that’d be Eric Longenhagen – but not to worry, you’ll get all the Eric you can handle as he and the team break down all things minor leagues, college baseball, and MLB draft. I’m just here to set the stage, and in support of that goal, I have some research to present on prospect grades and eventual major league equivalency.

When reading coverage of the minor leagues, I often find myself wondering what it all means. The Future Value scale does a great job of capturing the essence of a prospect in a single number, but it doesn’t translate neatly to what you see when you watch a big league game. Craig Edwards previously investigated how prospect grades have translated into surplus value, but I wanted to update things from an on-field value perspective. Rather than look at what it would cost to replace prospect production in free agency, I decided to measure the distribution in potential outcomes at each Future Value tier.

To do that, I first gathered my data. I took our prospect lists from four seasons, 2019-22, and looked at all of the prospects with a grade of 45 FV or higher. I separated them into two groups — hitters and pitchers — then took projections for every player in baseball three years down the line. For example, I paired the 2019 prospect list with 2022 projections and the 2022 prospect list with 2025 projections. In this way, I came up with a future expectation for each player.

I chose to use projections for one key reason: They let us get to an answer more quickly. In Craig’s previous study, he looked at results over the next nine years of major league play. I don’t have that kind of time – I’m trying to use recent prospect grades to get at the way our team analyzes the game today. If I used that methodology, the last year of prospect lists I could use would be 2015, in Kiley McDaniel’s first term as FanGraphs’ prospect analyst.

Another benefit of using projections is that they’re naturally resistant to the sample-size-related issues that always crop up in exercises like this. A few injuries, one weird season, a relatively small prospect cohort, and you could be looking at some strange results. Should we knock a prospect if his playing time got blocked, or if his team gamed his service time? I don’t think so, and projections let us ignore all that. I normalized all batters to a 600 plate appearance projection and all pitchers to a 200 innings pitched projection.

I decided to break future outcomes down into tiers. More specifically, I grouped WAR outcomes as follows. I counted everything below 0.5 WAR per season as a “washout,” including those players who didn’t have major league projections three years later. Given that we project pretty much everyone, that’s mostly players who had either officially retired or never appeared in full-season ball. I graded results between 0.5 and 1.5 WAR as “backup.” I classified seasons between 1.5 and 2.5 WAR as “regular,” as in a major league regular. Finally, 2.5-4 WAR merited an “above average” mark, while 4-plus WAR got a grade of “star.” You could set these breakpoints differently without too much argument from me; they’re just a convenient way of showing the distribution. There’s nothing particularly magical about the cutoff lines, but you have to pick something to display the data, and a simple average of WAR projections probably isn’t right.

With that said, let’s get to the results. My sample included 685 hitters from 45-80 FV. Allowing for some noise at the top end due to small sample size, the distribution looks exactly like you’d hope:

Consider the 55 FV line for an explanation. Of the players we graded as 55 FV prospects, 17% look washed three years later – Jeter Downs, a 2020 55 FV, for example. Another 17% have proven to be backup-caliber, like 2022 55 FV Curtis Mead, or 2019 55 FV Taylor Trammell if you don’t think Mead’s trajectory is set just yet. Continuing down the line, 30% look like big league regulars – 2021 55 FV Alek Thomas, perhaps. A full 31% appear to be above-average major league contributors three years later, like 2019 55 FV Sean Murphy or 2021 55 FV Royce Lewis. Finally, 6% project as stars three years later – Jackson Merrill, a 55 FV in 2022, feels appropriate as an example.

Two things immediately jump out to me when looking at this data. First, the “above average” and “star” columns increase at every tier break, and the “washout” column decreases at every tier break. In other words, the better a player’s grade, the more likely they are to be excellent, while the worse their grade, the more likely they are to bust. That’s a great sign for the reliability of our grades; they’re doing what they purport to do, essentially.

Second, each row feels logically consistent. The 45 FV prospects are most likely to bust, next-most-likely to end up as backups, and so on. The 45+ FVs look like the 45 FVs, only with a better top end; their chances of ending up above average are meaningfully better. The 50 FVs are a grab bag; their outcomes vary widely, and plenty of those outcomes involve being a viable major leaguer. By the time you hit the 55 and 60 FV prospects, you’re looking at players who end up as above-average contributors a lot of the time. The gap between 55 and 60 seems clear, too; the 60 FVs are far more likely to turn into stars, more or less. Finally, there are only six data points above 60 FV, so that’s mostly a stab in the dark.

This outcome pleases me greatly. Looking at that chart correlates strongly with how I already perceived the grades. For a refresher, roughly 30 prospects in a given year grade out as a 55 FV or above, give or take a few. Something like three quarters of those tend to be hitters. That means that in a given year, 20-ish prospects look like good bets to deliver average-regular-or-better performance. The rest of the Top 100? They’re riskier, with a greater chance of ending up in a part-time role and a meaningfully lower chance of becoming a star. But don’t mistake likelihood for certainty – plenty of 55 and 60 FVs still end up at or below replacement level, and 45 FVs turn into stars sometimes. Projecting prospect performance is hard!

How should you use this table? I like to think of Future Value in terms of outcome distributions, and I think that this does a good job of it. Should a team prefer to receive two 50 FV prospects in a trade, or a 55 FV and a 45 FV? You can add up the outcome distributions and get an idea of what each combination of prospects looks like. Here are the summed probabilities of those two groups:

Another way of saying that: If you go with the two-player package that has the 55 and 45 FV prospects, you’re looking at a higher chance of developing a star. You’re also looking at a greater chance of ending up with at least one complete miss, and therefore lower odds of ending up with two contributors. Adding isn’t exactly the right way to handle this, but it’s a good shorthand for quick comparisons. If you want to get more in depth, I built this little calculator, which lets you answer a simple question: For a given set of prospects, what are the odds of ending up with at least X major leaguers of Y quality or better? You can make a copy of this sheet, define X and Y for yourself, and get an answer. In our case, the odds of ending up with at least one above-average player (or better) are 40.7% for the two 50s and 41.4% for the 45/55 split. The odds of ending up with two players who are at least big league regulars? That’d be 28.1% for the two 50 FVs, and 16.1% for the 45/55 pairing. Odds of at least one star? That’s 4% for the two 50 FVs and 6% for the 45/55 group. In other words, the total value is similar, but the shape is meaningfully different.

For example, you’d have to add together a ton of 50 FV prospects to get as high of a chance of finding a star as you would from one 60 FV. On the other hand, if you have three 50 FVs, the odds of ending up with at least a solid contributor are quite high. Meanwhile, even 60 FV prospects end up as backups or worse around a quarter of the time. That description of the relative risks and rewards makes more sense to me than converting players into some nebulous surplus value. Prospects are all about possibility, so representing them that way tracks analytically for me.

Take another look at the beautiful cascade of probabilities in that table of outcomes for hitting prospects, because we’re about to get meaningfully less pretty. Let’s talk about pitching prospects. Here, the outcomes are less predictable:

I have tons of takeaways here. First, there are substantially fewer pitching prospects ranked, particularly as 50 FVs and above. Clearly, that’s a good decision by the prospect team, because even the highest-ranked pitchers turn into backups at a reasonable clip. Pitching prospects just turn into major league pitchers in a less predictable way, or so it would appear from the data.

Second, there are fewer stars among the pitchers than the hitters. That’s true if you look at 2025 projections, too. There are only six pitchers projected for 4 WAR or higher, while 42 hitters meet that cutoff. It’s also true if you look at the results on the field in 2024; 36 hitters and 12 pitchers (22 by RA9-WAR) eclipsed the four-win mark. You should feel free to apply some modifiers to your view of pitcher value if you think that WAR treats them differently than hitters, but within the framework, the relative paucity of truly outstanding outcomes is noticeable.

Another thing worth mentioning here is that pitchers don’t develop the same way that hitters do. Sometimes one new pitch or an offseason of velocity training leads to a sudden change in talent level in a way that just doesn’t happen as frequently with hitters. Tarik Skubal was unmemorable in his major league debut (29 starts, with a 4.34 ERA and 5.09 FIP). Then he made just 36 (very good) starts over the next two years due to injuries. Then he was the best pitcher in baseball in 2024. Good luck projecting that trajectory. Perhaps three-year-out windows of pitcher performance just aren’t enough thanks to the way they continue to develop even after reaching the majors.

There’s one other limitation of measuring pitchers this way: I don’t have a good method for dealing with the differential between reliever and starter valuation. Normalizing relievers to 200 innings pitched doesn’t make a ton of sense, but handling them on their own also feels strange, and I don’t have a good way of converting reliever WAR to the backup/regular/star scale that I’m using here. A 3-WAR reliever wouldn’t be an above-average player, they’d be the best reliever in baseball. I settled for putting them up to 200 innings and letting that over-allocaiton of playing time handle the different measures of success. For example, a reliever projected for 3.6 WAR in 200 innings would check in around 1.2 for a full season of bullpen work. That’s a very good relief pitcher projection; only 20 players meet that bar in our 2025 Depth Charts projections.

In other words, the tier names still mostly work for relievers, but you should apply your own relative positional value adjustments just like normal. A star reliever is less valuable than a star outfielder. A star starting pitcher might be more valuable than a star outfielder, depending on the degree of luminosity, but that one’s much closer. This outcome table can guide you in terms of what a player might turn into. It can’t tell you how to value each of those outcomes, because that’s context-specific and open to interpretation.

This study isn’t meant to be the definitive word on what prospects are “worth.” Grades aren’t innate things, they’re just our team’s best attempt at capturing the relative upside and risk of yet-to-debut players. Being a 60 FV prospect doesn’t make you 17% likely to turn into a star; rather, our team is trying to identify players with s relatively good chance of stardom by throwing a big FV on them. And teams aren’t beholden to our grades, either. They might have better (or worse!) internal prospect evaluation systems.

With those caveats in mind, I still find this extremely useful in my own consumption of minor league content. The usual language you hear when people discuss prospect trades – are they on a Top 100, where do they rank on a team list, what grade are they – can feel arcane, impenetrable even. Breaking it down in terms of likelihood of outcome just works better for me, and I hope that it also provides valuable information to you when you’re reading the team’s excellent breakdown of all things prospect-related this week.