For the 21st 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 and MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the next team up is the Boston Red Sox.

Batters

I have mixed feelings about the Red Sox. As a baseball fan, it galls me to see Mookie Betts in another uniform, and their complacency these past few trade deadlines has been frustrating. Yes, it’s good that they extended Rafael Devers to a long-term deal, but more often than not their forays into free agency end up in the We Tried bin.

But at the same time, even though Boston isn’t throwing its weight around like most large-market teams, this is a highly competent organization that makes smart moves. The Red Sox have developed a significant number of players internally – and more are on the way – and they’ve put those players positions to succeed. I have to admit that Jarren Duran and Wilyer Abreu have become far better than I expected, and though the experiment of moving Ceddanne Rafaela back to shortstop in the majors didn’t really work out, his upside was worth the gamble.

If anything, the Red Sox now look a lot like a 2010s St. Louis Cardinals roster. Not a single player in the lineup is projected to be an MVP candidate – no, ZiPS is not that high on Duran – but by the same token, almost every player is projected to be average or better, with decent depth at most positions. Even at catcher, which is projected to be their worst position (now that they’ve traded Kyle Teel), the Red Sox should get an acceptable level of mediocrity.

ZiPS holds out hope for Rafaela being just good enough offensively for his glove to play, and his WAR projection is a full win higher in center field than it would be at shortstop. A Trevor Story revival would be nice, but ZiPS isn’t particularly taken with him these days, and David Hamilton actually has a similar projection. It’s not something they’d announce, but I suspect the Red Sox would be happy to see Marcelo Mayer seize the shortstop job soon. At second base, ZiPS thinks Kristian Campbell would be one of the most accomplished offensive players to debut in the majors in 2025. Campbell and Roman Anthony project to be Boston’s third- and fourth-best offensive players, respectively.

Pitchers

Naturally, ZiPS doesn’t expect Garrett Crochet to carry an ace’s workload, but if he throws only his projected 135 innings, he should still be the best member of Boston’s rotation, which also features Tanner Houck, Kutter Crawford, and Brayan Bello. That group looks like one of the better starting staffs in baseball, though it’s a tier below the elite rotations of the Phillies and Dodgers.

I’m higher than ZiPS on Crawford, but I think it’s right about Houck as a borderline ace and Bello as a solid no. 2 or 3 starter. ZiPS is a bit of concerned with how Lucas Giolito will perform coming back from internal brace surgery, but he and Richard Fitts both project as reasonable fifth starters. Quinn Priester and Garrett Whitlock also project to be decent fifth starters, but Whitlock is also returning from an internal brace procedure, and I expect the Red Sox will use him conservatively once he’s healthy. It seems likely that he’ll see more innings out of the bullpen than in the rotation next season.

The bullpen projects to be solid, though ZiPS doesn’t rank them quite as highly as Steamer does. There’s some natural skepticism about Michael Fulmer coming off injury, and ZiPS is down on Justin Wilson and Luis Guerrero. But after these players, the projections see pretty much everyone else as either good or very good — but not elite — even edge options like Zach Penrod or Priester.

Like those Cardinals teams, these Red Sox can’t do much upgrading unless they get a superstar to raise their ceiling. The big problem here is the Red Sox play in the AL East, not the NL Central. ZiPS projects them to finish with a win total in the mid-80s. That’d be good enough to contend for a playoff spot, but it probably won’t cut it if they want to win the division. Still, considering the Yankees are trying to figure out how to fill the Juan Soto-sized hole in their lineup and the Orioles could be without Corbin Burnes, the Red Sox have improved enough to make those two teams sweat at least a little bit.

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 2025 due to injury, and players who were released in 2024. So yes, if you see Joe Schmoe, who quit baseball back in August to form a Norwegian Ukulele Dixieland Jazz band that only covers songs by The Smiths, he’s still listed here intentionally. ZiPS is assuming a league with an ERA of 4.11.

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.

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the qualifications for being a superstar, the Kyle Tucker trade from the Astros’ and Cubs’ perspectives, the Devin Williams trade from the Yankees’ and Brewers’ perspectives, and various other transactions, including the A’s trading for Jeffrey Springs and the Orioles signing Tomoyuki Sugano, plus thoughts on Caleb Durbin’s dimensions, the significance of financial terms in transaction analysis, a possible spending divide stemming from a disparity in TV revenue, and Rob Manfred on restoring the starter.

Audio intro: Alex Ferrin, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Xavier LeBlanc, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to Joe Sheehan Newsletter
Link to FG post on Tucker trade
Link to Rome on Tucker
Link to FG post on Williams trade
Link to Durbin photo
Link to FG post on Springs trade
Link to Pride Night story
Link to FG payrolls page
Link to Patrick’s post
Link to Manfred’s comments
Link to trial balloon wiki
Link to Langs tweet
Link to “Cody’s Only”
Link to “Superstar”
Link to EW gift subscriptions

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It’s probably been an awkward few weeks for Cody Bellinger. It’s been an open secret that the Chicago Cubs were trying to move him despite having signed him to a three-year, $80 million contract just one offseason ago. The emergence of Pete Crow-Armstrong as a credible hitter had already made Bellinger (and/or Seiya Suzuki) expendable, and once the Cubs won the Kyle Tucker sweepstakes, it was just a matter of waiting for the other shoe to drop.

And what a grand, stripey shoe it is. The New York Yankees have graciously agreed to take Bellinger off the Cubs’ hands, and to absorb all but $5 million of his remaining contract. Chicago also gets right-handed pitcher Cody Poteet in the deal. Thus the Great Cosmic Balance of Codys remains undisturbed. Read the rest of this entry »

The Winter Meetings always feature trades, but two stood above the fray last week. First, the Guardians traded Andrés Giménez to the Blue Jays in a two-part transaction that briefly left Cleveland with three lefty-hitting first basemen. Then the White Sox traded Garrett Crochet to the Red Sox for four prospects. The best of that group, Kyle Teel, happens to play catcher, the same position as Chicago’s top prospect Edgar Quero. They even have the same future value grade of 50, which is the cutoff for top 100 prospects.

The Guardians made an extra trade to avoid doubling up on similar archetypes, sending Spencer Horwitz to the Pirates for three young pitchers, but the White Sox just kept both catchers. I heard a lot of murmured questioning of that decision as I walked around the Dallas hotel that briefly hosted the center of the baseball universe. But I think both teams were acting rationally, and that worrying about Teel and Quero overlapping is silly. I can’t prove it for you – but I did come up with some data that will hopefully sway your opinion.

Cleveland’s case was straightforward. Steamer projects Horwitz as a 2.5 WAR/600 PA player. It projects Kyle Manzardo as a 1.8 WAR/600 PA player. Josh Naylor? Steamer has him down for 2.4 WAR/600 PA. Three players for two positions — first and DH. (Yes, Horwitz has played second base, too, but he really shouldn’t be a second baseman, and I don’t think the Guardians would’ve used him there.) One of them would ride the bench despite being an above-average contributor, a poor decision for a team that’s trying to maximize its resources. Something had to give.

On the other hand, there are the White Sox. They, too, traded a young star, and the best player they got back plays a position where they already had a similar option. Teel was our 42th-ranked prospect on our updated Top 100 list in 2024, a polished all-around catcher who we expect to reach the majors at some point in the next two years. Quero was our 40th-ranked prospect, and you’re never going to believe this, but he’s a polished all-around catcher who we expect to reach the majors at some point in the next two years.
Read the rest of this entry »

12:01

Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon! And welcome to (finally) my first FanGraphs chat of December 2024. It has once again been too long, and as evidence for how rusty I am, I promoted this on the socials for being at 2 pm (ye olde slotte) instead of noon. So, thank you to those who figured it out without my help.

12:03

Jay Jaffe: I had a great time with my FG colleagues at the Winter Meetings last week. After illness and other issues cut into our group last year, we had a very full lineup, and we ate well and had a lot of laughs.

12:03

Jay Jaffe: I’m deep into my Hall of Fame series. The King Félix piece went up yesterday https://blogs.fangraphs.com/jaws-and-the-2025-hall-of-fame-ballot-feli…

12:03

Jay Jaffe: The Russell Martin one is planned for tomorrow.

12:08

Jay Jaffe: Dick Allen’s election was so overdue that I felt more relief than joy. It’s a bittersweet moment — he’s gotten the recognition he deserves, but isn’t around to enjoy it. In retrospect, the Phillies’ move to retire his number in September 2020, just a few months before his death, looms large as he did at least get that moment in the sun. And for whatever my perturbances are when it comes to squaring Dave Parker’s lackluster JAWS with his election, I’m glad he’s around to accept the honor because these post-death elections are really not the best way to do it.

Read the rest of this entry »

Proposition No. 1: Identifying the smartest front office in baseball would be a difficult task even if it weren’t such a loaded question to start. How do you weight scouting versus development? How do you factor the influence of ownership, for good or ill? Or injuries, or luck, or other elements of force majeure?

So I’ll state my premise this way: The Braves seem to be a competently run organization. They’ve made the playoffs seven years running — six of those by winning the NL East — and are set up well to continue contending in the future. They’ve had internal developmental successes, savvy trade wins, and the occasional opportunistic buy-low move for a veteran free agent. Are they the best-run team in the league? I don’t know, but I’d hear out an argument to that effect.

Surely they wouldn’t go out of their way to acquire a player coming off a historically bad season. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

On Friday the Athletics and Rays completed a four-for-two trade centered around 32-year-old lefty starter Jeffrey Springs, who heads to Northern California. The A’s also got lefty swingman Jacob Lopez, while the Rays received wild, hard-throwing righty Joe Boyle, two minor leaguers (first baseman Will Simpson and right-handed pitcher Jacob Watters), and the 36th overall pick in the 2025 draft.

Springs, who is under contract through at least 2026, had a breakout 2022 season when the Rays moved him from the bullpen to their rotation, and he amassed 3.1 WAR across 135 1/3 innings. He got hurt a few starts into 2023 and needed Tommy John surgery, which cost him the rest of 2023 and most of 2024. After he returned from a prolonged, 12-start minor league rehab period, Springs had good surface-level stats in the big leagues – 7 GS, 33 IP, 37 K, 1.36 WHIP, 3.27 ERA – but showed reduced stuff compared to his pre-TJ form. Ken Rosenthal reported that Springs was shut down in September on the advice of his surgeon.

Springs joins an Athletics team flush with exciting young hitters but badly in need of pitching, which they’ve addressed with not only this trade but the recent signing of hard-throwing veteran Luis Severino (analysis here). The trade also adds payroll to the Athletics’ ledger, which they likely must continue to expand in order to avoid a grievance from the MLB Players Association. Read the rest of this entry »

For the 21st 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 and MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the next team up is the Washington Nationals.

Batters

While Washington had a below-average offense in 2024, many of the spots in the lineup are coming on nicely, though not enough yet for ZiPS to believe in a huge run-scoring turnaround. James Wood and Dylan Crews are young and project to be three-win players right now, and CJ Abrams is right there, too. With Abrams, the oldest, still just 24, that’s a trio to build around, and ZiPS sees them all as having significant superstar potential, especially the first two. Luis García Jr. is projected to regress a bit from 2024, but he still should be a solidly above-average player overall. If Andrés Chaparro can play third base, ZiPS likes him well enough, but it doesn’t think he’ll truly provide enough offense to be valuable at first base or designated hitter. The scouting consensus is generally more negative than ZiPS here, which is based on ball location data from the minors.

After these five, things get less exciting quickly. Probably the most interesting in 2025 is Jacob Young. ZiPS is conservative on Young given the volatile nature of defensive statistics, and it was less impressed by him in the minors, but if he’s as good defensively as he was this year, his WAR projection would get comfortably over two wins as well.

Former top prospect Keibert Ruiz’s projection has gone in a negative direction. Last year was a disappointment, and while some of that was undoubtedly due to his losing 20 pounds from influenza in the spring, his struggles were more extreme versions of what went wrong for him in 2022 and 2023. Ruiz is a good contact hitter, but he’s developing in the mold of David Fletcher, a hitter whose contact skills are too competent for his own good. Ruiz swings at a lot of crappy pitches — pitches that nobody should swing at because they are difficult to drive — and puts them in play. Maybe if he were an ultra-speedy type with a low launch angle who could leg out a bunch of junky grounders, that would be fine, but he just dishes out a stew of weak grounders, popups, and flies, leading to a lot of uncompetitive at-bats. He should be healthier this season, so he should add a few mph of exit velocity to his balls in play, but unless his plate discipline improves, his ceiling is going to be limited.

Another concern is that with Wood and Crews now in the majors, ZiPS doesn’t believe the Nationals have any strong hitters coming up next to buttress them. ZiPS thinks little of Brady House – and Steamer likes his bat even less – and doesn’t think Juan Yepez is an impressive short-term solution at first. Except for catcher Drew Millas, every Nationals batter projected to have five or more WAR over the next five seasons is likely to make the Opening Day roster, and Millas’ projection is simply that of a low-upside backup. If the Nats don’t develop hitters, they’re going to have to spend more aggressively to fill the team’s depth in the lineup.

Pitchers

MacKenzie Gore is fine, but ZiPS has a general ambivalence about the rest of the rotation. DJ Herz is the most interesting of the pack. He misses a ton of bats, and his results from his limited time in the majors are promising, but ZiPS is still on the fence about whether he’s really shed some of his walks from the minors. He has some of the darkest downside scenarios of the staff but also the second-best upside after Gore, and a rebuilding team ought to be interested in riskier pitchers. The computer sees Jake Irvin and Mitchell Parker as competent inning-eaters rather than pitchers with big upsides. Cade Cavalli is risky, and once you get past him, ZiPS is decidedly lukewarm everywhere.

ZiPS may be ambivalent about the rotation, but when it comes to the bullpen, it’s far more opinionated, in a bad way. The Nationals are no strangers to having terrible bullpens – they won a World Series with at most three relievers they could trust – and for rebuilding teams, the bullpen tends to be the last thing to come together. ZiPS thinks Derek Law and Robert Garcia are good parts of a competent pen, but the rest of Washington’s relievers are expected to be below replacement level. None of the names even project particularly well, which suggests to me that unless the computer is quite wrong, the team’s next good relief pitchers likely are not currently in the organization, and if they are, they’ll probably be failed starters who convert to the bullpen.

For the first half of 2024, the Nationals stayed on the edge of the exurbs of the NL Wild Card race, close enough to .500 to believe that maybe they could push for a playoff spot if everything broke right for them. However, their 32-47 record from July onward ended that whimsy, and their 71-91 record was a fair representation of where they stood. Short of some major changes, Washington is likely to make some progress and finish with a win total in the mid-to-high 70s. That’d would be a step forward, but it wouldn’t be enough to return to the postseason.

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.