Which Pitchers Have Seen Their 2026 Projections Change the Most?

I spend a lot of time saying the word “April.” It’s a convenient excuse to wave away any notion of changing my mind drastically on a player after two or three weeks of the season. But April isn’t actually meaningless, and as we head toward June, we’re already nearly a third of the way through the season. A lot of the stuff we’ve seen isn’t just a rough patch or a freak BABIP, but career trajectories changing, and that has consequences for the players and their teams. One of the most common questions about players I get in chats is some variation of “What does ZiPS think now?” I can’t answer them all, mainly because “doughy middle-aged nerd talks to his magical baseball box for an hour” sounds like the worst episode of Black Mirror ever. That said, because I do full in-season runs of ZiPS in the middle of every month, now seems like a good time to get some projectionist changes of heart for the overachieving and underperforming players.

So whose changing fortunes are most likely to lead to changed destinies? Well, to get an idea of which trajectories have changed the most, I took the current 2026 projected numbers for each player and compared them to the 2026 ZiPS projections from before this season began. We’ll start with the good news, because I’m a Baltimore native and an Orioles fan, so I need something sunny first. These are park-neutral projections, and I eliminated anyone who is projected as below replacement level, since we’re focusing on major league-relevant players.

Yesterday, sometimes known as “one Orioles loss ago,” I took a look at the hitters whose 2026 projections have changed the most since the start of this season, so now it’s the pitchers’ turn. Since we’re talking about pitchers, I also took out the guys who have missed most of the season due to injury, or the bottom 25 would just be a list of pitchers who might need Tommy John surgery.

Here are the pitchers whose 2026 ZiPS projections have improved the most since the beginning of this season, sorted by the greatest gains in projected WAR:

Entering this season, ZiPS expected Nathan Eovaldi over the next two years to be a gently declining, solid no. 2 or 3 starter who could eat innings. However, he’s been much more than that so far in 2025. Over his first 10 starts, he has a 1.61 ERA and a 2.19 FIP across 61 1/3 innings, good for 2.1 WAR, and his 73% contact rate against is the best of his career. His cutter has been a more important part of his arsenal, as he’s been going to his conventional fastball less and less now that he’s no longer regularly hitting 97-98 mph on the radar guns. Michael Rosen wrote a bit about this when discussing Eovaldi last week.

If you head down I-45, you’ll eventually reach the no. 2 pitcher on this list, Hunter Brown. His improvement might be even more impactful than Eovaldi’s because Brown is in the early stages of his career. Unlike the veteran Rangers righty, whose resurgence ZiPS views as the fending off of Father Time for a little while longer, Brown is still developing, and thus his gains have heightened his expected ceiling. As such, Brown is now projected to enter ace territory; ZiPS has him in the top 15 for pitchers in 2026. Brown and Framber Valdez, along with the bullpen, have been instrumental in keeping the Astros from being dragged down by a lot of underperformers.

Max Fried, at least so far, is providing ample proof that not every lefty the Yankees sign is doomed to become Ed Whitson. Fried’s been healthy so far — and so he’s picked up 15 innings in next year’s projection — and even added a bit of velocity. He’s been a bit fortunate in the homer and BABIP department, and his major league-leading 1.29 ERA is not going to last, but even taking some of the air out of those numbers leaves him in pretty good shape.

The Phillies traded for Jesús Luzardo so he could be the world’s best fifth starter, but he’s arguably been their ace this season (though I’d personally still take Zack Wheeler). Tyler Mahle has stayed healthy for the first time of years, which alone would give him a pretty good jolt, but ZiPS also thinks his strikeout rate is too low for his OK contact rate, meaning there will be some kind of bounce back there.

Tarik Skubal and Garrett Crochet both land on this list for the simple fact that ZiPS is just that much more confident in their standing as two of the best pitchers in baseball.

Amusingly — if that’s the right word — ZiPS places Jacob deGrom among the pitchers whose projected WAR totals have increased the most, even though it expects him to be less dominant in 2026 than it did before this season began. That’s because after five years of brutal health, deGrom has recorded 51 innings across nine starts and has not missed a turn in the rotation entering his scheduled outing tonight against the Yankees. His durability, as Rosen wrote about earlier this month, is a testament to his changed in approach; he’s leaning on his best-in-baseball slider command and taken a couple of ticks off his fastball velocity. He isn’t baffling batters the way he did during his peak, but WAR is a cumulative stat, and a healthy deGrom with slightly diminished stuff is more valuable than the Bully Ball version of deGrom, who was hardly ever available.

Jack Dreyer may be the least recognizable pitcher here, and ZiPS was unsure about him given his short career and struggles with command in High-A ball in 2023, though that year he was returning from his 2021 Tommy John surgery. Dreyer is fascinating in that he’s a young lefty reliever who is basically a command pitcher even as he misses a lot of bats; that’s a fairly unusual archetype in modern baseball. It’s somewhat maddening that the Dodgers, with all their financial resources, are also really good at finding talent like this — Dreyer was an undrafted free agent.

Now, let’s move on to the pitchers whose projections have dropped the most, sorted by the greatest declines in projected WAR.

I could very well have left Quinn Mathews off the list as he’s had shoulder problems, but his Wohlersian 15 walks in 12 1/3 innings have been enough to cause ZiPS some theoretical headaches. Joey Estes has been rather middling after a couple of brutal starts with the parent club, and ZiPS had wanted to see some growth from him by this point. Cal Quantrill is pitching like he didn’t actually leave Colorado. Bradley Blalock did pitch in Colorado this year, but he’s now in Albuquerque after 16 abysmal innings.

It’s sad to see Sandy Alcantara here, considering how excellent he was before his Tommy John surgery. The Marlins surely had hoped he’d at least resemble the ace he once was — even if he weren’t all the way back yet — because that version of him would’ve generated a lot of interest ahead of the trade deadline. The good news, if there is any here, is that Alcantara didn’t leave his velocity on the IL, but he seems to have forgotten his command there. A 49% hard-hit rate suggests there’s a lot of work left for him to do to restore his trade value.

Tanner Houck is a wait-and-see member of this list; he had pitched most of the season but was shut down last week due to the dreaded flex pronator strain. Houck doesn’t blow away batters, so he needs to avoid mistakes, and he made a lot of them in the early going. Teammate Walker Buehler showed signs of his old self during the 2024 postseason and then briefly early this year, but he’s since regressed back to the struggling form he displayed for much of last year after returning from his second Tommy John surgery injury and, later, a hip injury. The Red Sox ought to be thankful that Hunter Dobbins has pitched so well, because a third Red Sox starter, Lucas Giolito, is also in this section.

ZiPS used to like Triston McKenzie more than most projections, but it got off that bandwagon following his rough performance last year. The Guardians apparently have too, as McKenzie was outrighted to Triple-A after four awful appearances, after he went unclaimed on waivers. ZiPS is also not encouraged by the brief glimpses we’ve seen of Lance McCullers Jr. in his first appearances since 2022. I don’t think anyone is surprised to see Roki Sasaki here. Nor will anyone be surprised by Charlie Morton’s inclusion. Perhaps in the eyes of the Orioles, at least, Trevor Rogers has had a better season than Morton, in the sense that Rogers isn’t inflicting his dreadful pitching upon the O’s — because he’s stinking it up in Triple-A with the Norfolk Tides.

No pitchers who were expected to be below replacement level in 2026 before this season began have seen those projections jump by a win, so unlike in yesterday’s piece, we have no table here today. The pitcher who came closest, oddly enough, was Patrick Corbin. His FIP is just about where it was the last few years, but at least he’s no longer underperforming it by a run. I still think Corbin, if used at all, would be best utilized as a reliever who is allowed to throw only sinkers and sliders, under the threat that if he uses any other pitch, he’ll be traded to the Rockies. Anyway, as things stand, Corbin has been a pleasant surprise for the Rangers, who signed him only as a last resort. In eight starts (42 2/3 innings), he has a 3.59 ERA, though as I mentioned, his peripherals suggest his success won’t last.