Szymborski’s 2026 Booms and Busts: Hitters

When you run a lot of projections, one thing you have to get used to is being very wrong, very often. The ZiPS projections generally run about 4,000 players every year, meaning you should expect around 800 players to either achieve their 90th-percentile projection or fall short of their 10th-percentile projection. Those hundreds of results will invariably be quite a distance away from the standard midpoint projections that you see.

As is my ritual, it’s time to run my two articles discussing my favorite booms and busts of the upcoming season, starting with the hitters today and concluding with the pitchers next week. But just to keep the ritual of humiliation fully transparent, we’ll start by looking at last year’s booms and busts.

Oof, ritual humiliation indeed! The booms did not pan out well in 2025, even if you give me generous credit and mark my picks of Joe Mack and Gage Workman as incomplete. The busts worked out much better — from my point of view, at least — but it’s a lot less fun to be right about the bad stuff. Well, let’s get to 2026, and remember to give your picks in the comments so that you can join me in this exercise!

The Booms!

Andrew Vaughn, Milwaukee Brewers
Vaughn definitely showed signs of a breakout after joining the Brewers last summer, but the projection systems have all been really slow to adjust their sights upward. I suspect Vaughn is much closer to his Milwaukee wRC+ last year (142) than the projections suggest, and I think that the drastic change in his approach is something that’s hard for a computer to capture. His out-of-zone swing percentage suddenly straightened from a question mark into an exclamation point, and that has continued into the spring. He’s always hit the ball hard, and he was developed very oddly by the White Sox, promoted very aggressively to the majors without really ever hitting much against minor league pitching. And once he started having trouble in the majors, the White Sox appeared to have no idea how to fix things. The Brewers are really clever at this kind of thing, and I see Vaughn as a good All-Star candidate, and certainly better than the roughly 100 wRC+ that the projections are giving him.

Carter Jensen, Kansas City Royals
Salvador Perez is a franchise icon, so supplanting him as the starting catcher will be a challenge for Jensen. But along with Kevin McGonigle, Jensen is one of my AL Rookie of the Year favorites, and he has the tremendous offensive upside that the Royals sorely need. He’s not a Gold Glover, but he’s a far more accomplished defensive player than MJ Melendez, the last Kansas City catching prospect that failed to push Perez to DH for good.

Jac Caglianone, Kansas City Royals
I was campaigning hard last year for the Royals to take a chance and promote Caglianone as quickly as possible, since he had the potential to remedy their serious offensive problems in the outfield. They did promote him and… it didn’t work out all that well. To the organization’s credit, Kansas City didn’t panic and banish him to Triple-A after his first week or two. But he never did turn things around, and was hindered for a time by a hamstring injury. I still think that was the right thing to do, and I think it’ll work out this year.

Brice Turang, Milwaukee Brewers
But Dan, Turang already had a boom season last year! He did, but I think there’s actually more in his bat. He added an absurd amount of velocity to his swing in 2025 — four mph from his 2024 level — and the result was a hard-hit rate that jumped a shocking 60%. And you saw the approach become more and more power-centric as the season went on; in the second half of the season, he pulled the ball in the air with more loft and hit 12 home runs in 63 games. So I don’t think a 25-homer season, about 10 more than the most bullish projections expect, would be a weird result.

Justin Crawford, Philadelphia Phillies
Crawford still hits too many groundballs, and has had a generally lousy spring, but I think he’s mostly underrated as an overall player. He makes good contact, and with his speed, he ought to be able to maintain a surprisingly high BABIP in the majors. Also, the Johan Rojas suspension removes a possible obstacle for Crawford to get regular playing time even if he gets off to a bad start. He’s probably not ever going to be a big loft guy, but I can definitely see him racking up a billion doubles if some of those grounders can become liners into the gaps.

Kemp Alderman, Miami Marlins
The projections do not like Alderman. ZiPS has him with a wRC+ of 89, and that projection system is the nice one on him. But he also has an absolutely obscene amount of power, and if the Marlins are competitive, they’re going to spend the summer trying to get as much offense into that lineup as possible. He only reached Triple-A for part of last season, but his 62% hard-hit rate was almost rated NC-17.

Matt McLain, Cincinnati Reds
Maybe call this the re-boom? It’s easy to forget just how good McLain was as a prospect, and in his rookie season, he hit .290/.357/.507 for a 129 wRC+ and 3.2 WAR in barely half a season of games. McLain looked lost at the plate in 2025, but he was also coming off a serious labrum tear in his left shoulder that cost him the entire 2024 season. It feels like he was basically written off for a bad year, which I think was an overreaction. Spring training means something, and he’s been one of the best hitters in baseball this spring. Across 15 games and 49 plate appearances in the Cactus League as of Friday morning, McLain is slashing .545/.592/1.045 with six home runs and a 311 wRC+. It would be malpractice to ignore that.

Jordan Lawlar, Arizona Diamondbacks
Now that the Diamondbacks have moved Lawlar to the outfield, I don’t think he will have a great deal of trouble getting playing time the same way he did as an infielder. Let’s not forget that Lawlar was an elite prospect even as multiple injuries — including to his shoulder, hamstring, and thumb, among other body parts — kept him off the field. The good news is that down the stretch last year, he finally appeared to be fully recovered from the ruptured thumb ligament that ruined his 2024 season. No, he didn’t have an impressive cup of coffee in the majors, but thankfully front offices no longer put much stock into 74 plate appearances. His potential is still there, and barring any more injuries, he should get plenty of opportunities to make good on his former phenom billing.

The Busts!

Jose Altuve, Houston Astros
Altuve has been able to wring a lot of offensive performance out of rather ordinary hit metrics, but that’s a dangerous game for a 36-year-old, and his plate discipline eroded a bit last season. ZiPS has generally been much more forgiving of Altuve than his Statcast xSLG has been, but it saw a lot to dislike about his 2025 season. He already has showed some signs of decline, and I think this may be the year we really start to see his homer count start to fade.

Freddie Freeman, Los Angeles Dodgers
I love me some Freddie Freeman, but anything that can’t go on forever, won’t, and he’ll turn 37 before the end of the season. While his stats haven’t really reflected it yet, his contact rate took a big dip in 2025, and a change in contact rate is one of those Statcast indicators that is predictive of big downside risk. I’m hoping this isn’t how things play out, but I think this might be the first year in a long time in which Freeman won’t have a case for being the NL’s best first baseman. Either way, I look forward to checking his name on a Hall of Fame ballot sometime in the 2030s.

Jacob Wilson, Athletics
I think Wilson will be fine in the long run, but I’m a bit worried that 2026 will feel like a bit of a letdown. I think he’s going to have a period of adjustment; it’s proven very hard for gifted contact hitters without much power to avoid the temptation of leaning too much into their contact ability, and as a result, start chasing more and more pitches that they can only hit weakly. Until Wilson shows he can avoid this trap, I’m going to give his statline a bit of a side eye.

Spencer Steer, Cincinnati Reds
Steer was a nice story, and unheralded prospect who had a really nice rookie season in 2023. But he hasn’t really developed further since then, and for a hitter who absolutely has to hit for power to have value, he just doesn’t crush pitches with much authority. I think by the end of the season, Steer will be looked at more as a nice fourth outfielder and bat off the bench than a starter.

Miguel Andujar, San Diego Padres
This isn’t a projection piece, but so many red sirens go off with Andujar that I have to include him here. While his .318/.352/.470 slash line looks a redemption tale for a prospect who had a strong rookie season but never quite panned out, his hit metrics were more like those of a punchless middle infielder than a corner outfielder. Of all players with 300 plate appearances last year, ZiPS had him with the biggest difference between his actual performance and Statcast metrics; the computer estimated that Andujar had the peripherals of a guy hitting .263/.301/.385, a galaxy away from his actual line.