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.
| Player | BA | OBP | SLG | wRC+ | WAR |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| James Wood | .256 | .350 | .475 | 127 | 3.3 |
| Nolan Schanuel | .264 | .353 | .389 | 109 | 1.4 |
| Isaac Paredes | .254 | .352 | .458 | 128 | 2.5 |
| Marcelo Mayer | .228 | .272 | .402 | 80 | 0.4 |
| Joe Mack | .000 | .000 | .000 | 0 | 0.0 |
| Max Muncy | .214 | .259 | .379 | 72 | -0.4 |
| Vinny Capra | .125 | .157 | .177 | -11 | -1.0 |
| Gage Workman | .188 | .235 | .250 | 38 | -0.2 |
| Player | BA | OBP | SLG | wRC+ | WAR |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Luis Robert Jr. | .223 | .297 | .364 | 84 | 1.3 |
| Triston Casas | .188 | .277 | .303 | 56 | -0.6 |
| Josh Bell | .237 | .325 | .417 | 107 | 0.1 |
| Marcus Semien | .235 | .305 | .364 | 89 | 2.1 |
| Jordan Walker | .215 | .278 | .306 | 66 | -1.2 |
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.
Dan Szymborski is a senior writer for FanGraphs and the developer of the ZiPS projection system. He was a writer for ESPN.com from 2010-2018, a regular guest on a number of radio shows and podcasts, and a voting BBWAA member. He also maintains a terrible Twitter account at @DSzymborski.
I’m with you on Cags, Carter, and Wilson. I think Jacob Wilson is a lot of smoke and mirrors and I don’t understand why I feel like I’m the only one who can see it.
He hit for more power than I thought in 2025 but some of that was the stadium he played in. He would have had 14 if he played all his games at home, but his xHR was only 9.3. That threat keeps pitchers from treating him like Myles Straw, who has a 92.5% Contact rate in the heart of the zone and who gets pitches there about 30% of the time anyway. David Fletcher was in a similar situation, and his contact rate was even higher.
If he played his home games in Pittsburgh, I think he’d hit way worse even after adjusting for the park effects. But he still gets to play his games at home, so I think the range between Steamer and ZiPS (107 to 119) is a pretty good range for what to expect from him in the future.
Wilson went from a mid-major college program in 2023 to the majors in 2024 to a 3.5 WAR season in 2025. I’m impressed with that progression.
The bat to ball skills and ability to play a competent SS gives him a very high floor. But his swing…oof. I don’t know how he hits more than 12 home runs in a season.
So high floor + low ceiling. If I had to pick one player to neither boom nor bust, I might pick Wilson.
Oddly, to me… the next Ichiro. I know that sounds crazy but: Low walks, low power, the next great singles hitter. Well-timed singles at a high rate make a dangerous player in the right lineup. I agree with you: he could hit .279 with 8 homers in a bad year, but will hit .320 in a more fortunate one.
Ichiro was about twice as fast and also a LHH (he routinely was already running out of the box on contact). Wilson is a RHH (so does not have that advantage). I don’t see it. To me Wilson is Arraez with slightly more power, but can play short–which is still pretty darn valuable.
Can he though? He was roughly average at short by OAA but awful by DRS. Maybe Statcast is correct, but if not, he’s not nearly as useful in real life.
Well, he did hit 13 HR last year – in 125 games.
My boom, relative to ZiPS?
A young man named Aaron Judge – if he reaches 624 PA, a 175 wRC+ is my 30th percentile outcome, haha.
Also, Paredes was great last year! He just did his hammy *bad*.
I guess it would be cheating to pick Jack Caglianone as both a boom and a bust.
Phillies fan that I am, I wish I had more optimism about the Crawford boom pick, but I feel like Crawford’s correctly rated by the consensus. I think he’s basically Johan Rojas with harder ground balls but worse CF defense.
I think you’re underrating the value of those ground balls’ velocity…and their placement.
Crawford slashes grounders to the left side of the infield and yanks his balls in the air, which is a damn good combo for a lefty speedster.
Separately, the physicality isn’t comparable.
We have basically not seen a player who hits like this regularly in this entire century.
In 2025, he had a GB/FB of 3.36, he went to the opposite field 43.3% of the time, and he had a hard hit rate of about 40%.
There are only 135 hitters who had a GB/FB over 3 in the minors with at least 200 PAs from 2007 to the present. The only two that I could find who had good major league careers are Jason Bartlett and Denard Span.
If you narrow it down to players who went the opposite field more than 35% of the time, you’re down to 101 players, and two of the cuts are Bartlett and Span. The only one that I am sure made the majors is Travis Jankowski.
There are also zero hitters with at least 600 PAs in the major leagues, a GB/FB over 3, and a hard hit % of 30% or higher from 2002 to the present.
If we move the number of PAs down to 300 PAs and split by season, you do get some players who have done that occasionally. But the ones who did are also players who were able to hit the ball into the air occasionally in the minors. Christian Yelich had some ground ball issues but in 2013–the year before he was called up–it was 1.56. For Wilson Ramos, that year was 2010 and his GB/FB was 1.20 that year. Eric Hosmer quite famously hit the ball into the ground a lot. In the yar before he was called up his rate was 1.38.
Hitting the ball on the ground is probably not as as bad as everyone thinks it is at this point, but when you are hitting the ball on the ground in the minors at that ratio it usually means a skill deficiency of some kind.
As for the hard hit rate, I’m not really sure that’s giving me a lot of confidence.
I went to Baseball Savant and pulled up hitters at or under the age of 25 with at least 300 batted ball results in AAA.
Most of the ones with launch angles at or under 5 and hard hit rates between 40% and 50% are still prospects or have become non-prospects (apologies to Ed Howard).
But some have made the majors and the results have been very mixed.
Maikel Garcia has a career 93 wRC+, put up a good wRC+ and xwOBA last year, and is projected for a 103 wRC+ this year.
Gilberto Celestino (72 wRC+), Jordan Diaz (78 wRC+), and Alek Thomas (74 wRC+) have not been successful.
I have no idea what to make of all this when he has hit like this at age 22 in the minor leagues.
Also to add on, even if his hard hit rate continues to be very good, that actually hurts how his speed plays on left sided grounders rather than helps.
If he could bring back the art of the drag bunt, it could bring the third baseman in and open up a bigger hole on that side. It’s a very big if.
I think people see him and they think maybe he could be Jason Heyward, but Heyward typically ran a GB / FB in between 1 and 2.
I don’t think there is really any precedent for him, at least not recently. The closest is probably Alek Thomas, although it certainly feels like he could grow into a Garrett Mitchell type outcome. That seems to be how Eric sees him.
Heyward had the weirdest swing… Giving me PTSD remembering that bat path.
I just saw Chase Delauter and god I hope he works out because watching someone have success w that swing in the mlb would be awesome
He actually reminds me a lot of his father, though with less power because of an even higher ground ball rate. If he could manage to hit just a few more fly balls, he’d be the spitting image.
Vaughn was promoted too fast because that’s what the White Sox do and because he hit decently well in Spring Training in 2021, when they found themselves in their competitive window a little early. They suddenly were short a DH/1B/LF type when Eloy Jimenez suffered a bad injury late in Spring Training and didn’t debut till late July. They forced him to learn LF on the fly when the plan had been to have him split time at 1B with Jose Abreu and rotate all three guys through DH.
He is an indictment of the White Sox team building style (no depth) and out dated development strategies which amount to “coaching is overrated, let them get better by playing more.” Some of that falls at the feet of Rick Hahn, but they were like that before Hahn (Brian Anderson, Gordon Beckham), continue like that (Colson Montgomery), and Getz was the director of player development at that time.
In all fairness, the early returns on Montgomery have been awesome. I don’t see how any results he could’ve had by staying in AAA last year could have improved his stock more than his time in MLB.
Sure, montgomery could be good. Maybe even great. But it doesn’t make his development path less weird and certainly not reproducible.
He could still have Gordon Beckham’s MLB career, just with more power.
He’s only needed a weird development path because he stunk in AAA for a while, which isn’t exactly the fault of the White Sox.
Considering Montgomery was looking like a total lost cause in April, and winded up finishing fifth in ROTY voting, I’d say the White Sox did a remarkable job with his development path this year!
The early returns have been awesome, if you love strikeouts.
Directly related: Fear – New York’s Alright (If You Like Saxaphones!)
Betting against Freddie Freeman is a good way to go broke. He has had thirteen consecutive seasons of a 130 wRC+ or higher while playing in 2/3rds of the games every season or more usually a lot more.
Freeman is projected to be at 130-something next year and I think that’s probably what is going to happen.
I know logically he’s going to fall of at some point, but I am not going to be the one to predict that it is going to happen.
Just to follow up on this:
I don’t think anybody has posted a 130 wRC+ while playing in 2/3rds of the games or more who isn’t a known steroid user in literal decades. Bagwell is the only one I know about, and he was a suspected steroid user.
Aside from Bagwell I think you might have to go back to Hank Aaron, who had something crazy like 18 or 19 consecutive years at 140 wRC+ or higher.
If I’m not mistaken, I believe that all of Pujols, Thome, and Trout did in 12 consecutive years–Trout’s was weird because he got hurt for a few years so I don’t know whether that breaks the streak or not.
Rickey Henderson has 14 straight if you make the cutoff 127, which is pretty close to 130 (an arbitrary cutoff). I am not saying you are wrong or calling you out, just saying that he essentially did what you were talking about.
He missed a bunch of games in 1987, but aside from that you are right.
I’m also not ever going to complain if someone reminds me of Rickey Henderson. He and Pedro Martinez are the two baseball players that I will remember forever.
If you have to go back to Rickey, that’s a long way. That’s still “literal decades.” Putting Freeman’s continuous excellence in context and the people who are brought up are Rickey, Miggy, Bags, Thome, Pujols, Trout, and Hank Aaron, well, that’s pretty good company!
If you believe that Rickey Henderson wasn’t using steroids, I have a bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to sell you.
But man, was he awesome.
If you go with 129 Miguel Cabrera did it. From 2004 – 2016 he had 8655 PA and a 155 wRC+. But then it was a cliff. In 2017 he had a 92 wRC+, and from 2017 to 2023 only 2795 PA with a 93 wRC+.
Which is pretty typical for guys that were on their way, they did tend to fall off a cliff. Matt Holliday and Vlad are examples of aging gracefully, comparitively.
Holliday did it 9 years in a row, from 2006 – 2014. 5821 PA, 144 wRC+, then in his last 4 seasons only managed 1195 PA and a 110 wRC+.
If we relax to 129 wRC+, Vladimir Guerrero did it 11 years in a row, (with the 129 coming in the 11th season) from 1998 to 2008, 7038 PA, 144 wRC+, then his last 3 seasons managed 1640 PA and a 108 wRC+.
Lance Berkman did it 10 years in a row, 2000 – 2009, 6249 PA with a 148 wRC+, in 2010 he manages the PT but with a 114 wRC+, in 2011 he has a huge 163 wRC+ year in 587 PA, but in 2012 only 97 PA with a 124 wRC+, 2013 he has 294 PA but only a 90 wRC+, then he’s out of baseball.
Guys like Votto, Goldschmidt, and even Brian Giles all just fell off cliffs. There are a couple that did age gracefully but had 1 or 2 years that otherwise ruined their streak.
I think the best case scenario is a Chipper Jones. He had a 13-year run except with 122 wRC+ year at 25 and a 116 at 32. Year 13 he had a 174 wRC+, then a 116.. Then 119 and missed the 2/3. Then 120, 127, and out of baseball. I think this is kind of like the best case scenario. Something has gotta give, and he obviously wasn’t the same, but the bottom never fell out and he never had a Votto or Miggy or Goldschmidt or Vladdy or Berkamn or Holiday type year.
The actual best case would probably Edgar, but I don’t think it’s fair to even put it out as a comp because he was hitting a different level than Freddy and his path was just so…weird. And even Edgar, who aged like fine wine, (his problem was prior to age 31), still fell off a cliff. But from ages 32 to 40 he reeled off 8 of these seasons in 9 years, only missing by a few games with a 141 wRC+ his age 39 season. That was also the first time he was under 154 in this streak. His age 40 season he was at 142 in 145 games/603 PA.. Then in 2004, at the age of 41, he hit the PT, but was under 100 wRC+ for the first time since the 80s with a 92 wRC+ and was out of baseball. Ofc if Freddie goes this route and his cliff is at age 41 everyone would be thrilled.
But I think Chipper is more the best case-scenario. So I’m not sure I’d pick Freeman myself, but I definitely get why Dan would speculate on Freeman, even though it’s Freeman.
There’s a logical reason to not bet against Freeman, as outlined. But for me the illogical claim is more powerful, that Freeman has been so consistent that we bet on him even if the writing is on the wall, emphasizing how he breaks the gravitational laws of baseball. If Skenes toed the rubber tomorrow against Ichiro in a friendly, you might just see a slicing line drive into the gap. I wouldn’t bet against it, for reasons of aesthetics and allegiance.
If you make the cutoff a 129 wRC+, you get Miguel Cabrera with 13.
“I love me some Freddie Freeman” as well and hope to still be around when he is inducted into the HOF. He has figured this game out so well that I can’t see him going over the falls yet. Father Time has never lost but I don’t want to see one of the players I respect most go out anywhere but on top.
Maybe I don’t understand the point of the article. But I also found predicting Freeman as a bust a little weird because zips projects him for 139 wrc+. I thought previous iterations of this article was who zips was projecting as booms or busts.
That’s a crazy stat you have about consecutive seasons above 130 wrc+ and that he’s the only player since Aaron to do it without the steroid taint.
Yeah pretty much everyone has either gotten hurt and missed most of a year or has had a down year. There are also a bunch in the 10-12 range and they’re pretty much the players you expect.
Also we don’t know for sure that Bagwell was juicing. And I may have missed someone. And obviously Hank Aaron was way better than Freddie Freeman.
But the consistency Freeman has shown both in playing and in performance is unbelievable. Nothing lasts forever but I am just going to assume he’s going to do it every year until he doesn’t, and I will be surprised when it happens.
Definitely possible his offseason training with Ken Caminiti had nothing to do with him and Biggio doubling their ISO…and cap size!
But Gary Sheffield was [X]
I’ll finish your idiotic sentence for you: Gary Sheffield was robbed when he wasn’t elected to baseball’s half-assed museum in Cooperstown (outclassed by Kansas City’s NLBM).
…do you think I disagree, haha?
We know for sure bagwell was juicing lol
Do we? You can connect the dots and maybe even say it’s probable, but it’s not like with players who were caught, where people testified against them in court, where there are records of the injections, etc.
Even the physical transformation isn’t on the same level as someone like Sammy Sosa. Although Sosa almost certainly did, so that’s not really a great standard.
I can’t think of another player who I underrate more than Jeff Bagwell. I get blown away every time I look at his stats. I was more focused on all the other stars when I was growing up when he played.
Sometimes I wonder if the steroid era makes projections too optimistic for late career arcs of today’s all-stars. I recall zips projecting Freeman to have a decent shot at 500 career homers when Dan wrote that article about Judge’s chances at 600. Dan seems to think Zips is too optimistic about Freeman. I’d be curious to hear his thoughts on the discrepancy between his gut and zips.
Freeman had the third-biggest decline in Contact% out of all hitters who qualified in both 2024 and 2025, but unlike the two ahead of him (Tyler Stephenson and Brice Turang), there wasn’t any improvement in his power (in terms of bat speed or barrel/hard-hit rate) to compensate. For a guy at this age, that seems less likely to be the result of a conscious change and more likely to be a legitimate decline in talent.
“Theres wind boys!!”
As a mets fan its hard to like any brave. As a baseball fan its hard to dislike freddy freeman.
As a Braves fan, I remember when Brian McCann died in the 2013 offseason. RIP
Agreed, though an important caution is that a hitter he resembles in some ways, Ichiro, not only began his decline at age 37, he fell through the basement.
But in terms of productivity as a hitter, he’s basically producing identical seasons to what he was doing in Atlanta ten years ago. Year in, year out. Count me part of the “I’ll believe it when I see it” club.
Robert’s ’25 ‘bust’ status was largely a product of poor batted-ball luck. Historically, his wOBA has been about neutral or better than his xwOBA, but last year it was 32 points in the red; his .274 BABIP was 45 pts below his career average. Under the hood he had a respectable bounce-back year at the plate.
Many of the booms make sense to me except for Jordan Lawlar, who I think is going to be a huge bust, and Justin Crawford who I think is rated appropriately. I also think Brice Turang should be able to maintain what he did last year but I think a 25 homer season is a real stretch.
Aside from Steer and Andujar, the guys who really scare me are Zach McKinstry, TJ Friedl, and Gavin Lux. There is a pretty high chance the bottom falls out on all three of them.
The other guy who I think is going to have a rough go of it is Alex Bregman. He has never posted a wRC+ under 114 in the majors leagues, and I think there is an awfully good chance he does next year. He should still be a positive contributor offensively but it’s going to be a lot less than what he did last year and his Steamer projection. Interestingly ZiPS sees a pretty big drop.
I think Friedl’s proven ability to pull the ball in the air, in a homer-friendly ballpark, will prevent pitchers from giving him the Myles Straw treatment, assuming that’s the concern. It’s a weird profile, but I think it works in GABP specifically.
Bregman’s also not as extreme a pull hitter as the general consensus seems to believe, so I’m not sure Wrigley is going to hurt him as much as people think.
Oh, Bregman’s top of my bust list – can’t wait for his Cubs Paredes era.
He’s not going to crash like Paredes did because he walks almost as much as he strikes out, and he does have more actual power than Paredes does. But it’s still not good.
His EV90 over the last 3 years is 198 out of 229 qualified hitters. Paredes is 213. I think his batting line is going to look a lot like Carlos Correa’s 2025 going forward, which isn’t bad, but he’s not going to look like a star either.
I think Turang will regress a little in the HR department, do better with the glove though, and basically settle into being Nico Hoerner (which is damn good).
Matt McLain played over his head (or peripherals) his rookie year, and I think folks will be disappointed if they expect him to reach those heights again. He doesn’t have enough raw power to make up for the lack of contact.
On the recently retired from being prospects side, I’m very nervous about Crews and especially Mayer.
To try to end on a more positive note, I think Chourio and Langford both have good shots at their first 30-HR seasons. A longer shot, but I think Rafaela may be this year’s PCA with the stick and the glove.
I am all in with you on Lawlar. There are limits to just how poorly a player performs, even in a very small sample. Alex Bregman wasn’t included in Dan’s article but you have given me some cover for a bold prediction that I have been waiting to find the right place to make and that is that Caleb Durbin amasses a higher WAR, b or f, than Alex Bregman.
It is strange how every discussion of Lawlar focuses on him being blocked in the middle infield. His challenges are, in order of importance from most to least: (1) he can’t stay healthy, (2) he can’t hit, (3) he can’t play the infield.
It sure looks to me that his power potential and general hitting ability has gone missing due to repeated injuries. Whether that will come back if he ever manages to stay healthy, I don’t know but I am guessing the prospect everyone was expecting is gone.
Friedl has a reverse platoon split that will keep him in the lineup even in this platoon-happy era.. He’s kind of a unicorn.
I am often downvoted on this site for adding my eye test to the computer analysis in assessing the value of players. I enjoy Dan’s analysis systems very much and give them considerable weight in my valuations and it is always nice to see that his valuations often agree with mine. I point here to Brice Turang who I rated as the second best 2nd baseman for the very reason Dan puts forth. If he does hit for the power that we foresee then it is difficult not to put him near the very top of players at the 2nd base position.
Hey man!
I replied late on the other thread, but…the advanced metrics tell us that Bichette sucks at going to his right and has a noodle for an arm!
Anyone familiar with both his skillset and the what, why, and how of 3B defense would IMMEDIATELY question a projection system that blindly says he projects as a plus defender there.
Technically neither of those things are actually remotely disqualifying.
There are other good third basemen who have less than ideal range to their right. They are positioned closer to the line more often so they can go to their left more often.
Ke’Bryan Hayes also has a noodle arm relative to the position. I presume we are not calling the best infield defender (on a rate basis) bad because he has a noodle arm?
I am skeptical of the defensive projections myself but let’s also consider that Chapman (the player he was compared to in the previous thread) is actually not an elite player relative to his range. He merely has very good range (75 percentile ish) combined with elite error avoidance.
I doubt Bichette will be able to avoid errors at the rate Chapman has but I don’t think it’s insane to think any given shortstop may be able to do better than 75th percentile in range.
Just to clarify: I think he’ll probably make enough errors to drag down his defensive value regardless of his range. But that’s not guaranteed and it’s pretty hard to predict whether a player will commit more or less errors with a position change.
I’m a massive Bo Bichette fan.
Please walk me through the avenue towards 40th percentile arm strength and an inability to cover the line adding up to a functional 3B…much less a plus one.
He has more arm strength than Hayes and one mph less than Arenado. Arm strength is not a problem.
He was actually better at covering the third base side last year than any other direction. Even while physically compromised.
Last year was also more than twice as bad as any other year of his career. I would say very likely due to lower body injury.
All any of this is is conjecture anyway. And honestly, SS being a significantly harder position and thus third being a better defensive home is arguably a better argument from the model than any that you or I have made.
Frankly, I should have mentioned that the single worst thing Bichette does on defense is attack balls in front of him…which happens to be Hayes’ super power.
Let’s leave aside the fact that “SS is the harder position, so trust the projection model” comes off as pablum to anyone who’s seen Hanley Ramirez play LF.
And the fact that FGDC is projecting a 14 run swing, year on year, for a positional change with a 5 run adjustment.
…I’d expect a reasonably informed person in the year of our lord 2026 to instinctively question individual outputs of a predictive model, while accepting its accuracy in the aggregate, rather than commanding others to ignore the evidence of their eyes and ears in deference.
I fell out of my chair when you brought up Hanley Ramirez and his “problems” trying to play LF. Unfortunately I remember them well. There can be no more convincing evidence that it isn’t written in code that a player who was a major league SS could easily move to another position than the abysmal and, often, comical travails that Ramirez suffered during that ill-advised fiasco.
My dad might have ruined my rooting preferences, but I’m still a 30-something who grew up on the green line!
I remember what they did to Hanley.
Anyway, the fact that I’ve since moved across the Atlantic means I’m allowed to say that only an idiot would trust the output of a predictive model implicitly…and that the response of anyone even remotely tech savvy to a predictive model’s output is “Why?”
The second is “How.”
Ahh yes! How many times have I parked at Riversiide and taken the Green Line into The Hub. Kenmore in the summer and the Red Sox, North Station in the winter for the Bruins, my lady is a fanatic Bruins fan. The trips are less often now but the precious memories, how they linger!!!
Rating a 3B for range to his right is not really fair. A rangy 3B will cheat towards the hole because there is literally a line on the field. Source: author is (was) a rangy 3B.
I’m rating an SS’s ability to convert based on how he handles going to his right, in fairness.
I think Bichette would be great at the keystone…but his defensive issues at SS boil down to lack of twitch and a weak arm.
I don’t see 3B hiding either problem, even as I think the Mets are making the right decision here.
I freaking adore the Statcast numbers BECAUSE they verify, refute, and quantify eye-tests on how and where fielders struggle
So is this where I get to say “I told y’all Cags wasn’t ready last year” 😉
I would add a 3rd Brewer to the Boom list in Brandon Lockridge. The Brewers are a sharp org, and they targeted him for a reason. it seems like his swing change may have actually unlocked some power in his bat.
With Perkins optioned, and Mitchell looking rusty after a 2 year layoff, he at least has a very good shot of blowing way past the 161 PA’s hes currently projected for, I bet he finishes with around 400 PA’s, comes close to 10 HR, and around a 100 wrc+
I like the odds for Eugenio Suarez to go Boom if he gets a full season at the Great American Boombox… er, Bandbox. For a guy approaching his mid-30s, his bat speed has held remarkably steady from ’23 through ’25, and he was on his way to a career-best hard-hit rate last year before the trade to Seattle sent his season downhill. A full year of the pace he was on last April through July would be, if not a career year, at least his best season of this decade.
Does Dylan Crews already count as a bust, both as a 2026 prediction and as a #2 overall draft selection?
Obviously, it’s too soon to say, but, man, the Nats under Rizzo really stunk at 1st round draft picks other than Strasburg and Harper.
This is more related to your 2025 picks, but curious whether you consider yourself right or wrong on Luis Robert given his wonky statline. Got hurt…again. Hit for terrible average…again. Mediocre WAR. BUT, still also managed 14hr/33sb in only 110 games.