Baseball is back! To celebrate Opening Day, our staff made their picks for MVP, Cy Young, the World Series, the biggest flop, and more.
The smell of fresh-cut grass. The pop of the mitt. The roar of the crowd. With the start of the 2024 MLB season, the familiar sights and sounds of baseball are once again upon us. To celebrate, our staff gathered to register their preseason picks for the World Series, individual awards like MVP and Cy Young, this season’s biggest flop, and more.
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Ben Lindbergh: I’ve never had a harder time making playoff picks. Some of my forecasts came down to a single signing or injury; you could swap out a third of these teams in favor of some I snubbed—say, the Yankees, Blue Jays, Padres, and Giants—and I wouldn’t quibble with your calls. (I already regret my Cardinals selection.) The good news is that very few teams are totally out of it before first pitch: Only four (the Rockies, Nationals, White Sox, and Athletics) have single-digit odds of making the playoffs, per FanGraphs. That’s a dramatic decrease relative to every previous year in the playoff-odds archive, as shown in the chart below (which uses the 2020 figure from before the season was shortened and the playoff format changed):
Some of that has to do with the expansion of the playoff field from 10 teams to 12. But even in 2022, the first year with the current playoff format, 10 teams were out of it or extreme long shots when the season started. Heck, even after the 2020 schedule was reduced to a small sample and the number of available playoff spots swelled to 16, six teams were still close to being deemed DOA when the season started. (Granted, one of them—the Marlins—made it to October.) Remember 2018, when superteams strode the earth and almost half the league was on life support from the get-go? That seems like a long time ago.
The flip side is that only two current clubs, the Braves and Dodgers, can convincingly pass for superteams. No one else is a near-lock for the playoffs, or a prohibitive favorite to win their division. It’s just like Joe Morgan used to say—there are no (well, almost no) great teams anymore. What we have instead is an amorphous, mediocre middle. Check out this chart, which shows the number of teams as of each Opening Day that FanGraphs projected to win between 83 and 85 games, and between 80 and 85 (rounding projected win totals down from 0.4 and up from 0.5):
We’re trying to pin the tail on the playoff team while blindfolded, basically. Baseball Prospectus cofounder Joe Sheehan has a mantra: Variance swamps everything. He usually means that randomness reigns over short-term time frames, but in this case, the sport’s inherent randomness could be decisive even over 162 games. The teams in this swath of wild-card fodder are separated by so few projected wins that even someone with perfect information would lack the capacity to distinguish the ones that will make the postseason from those that will be also-rans. This might be the year that we finally get a meaningful, three-or-more-team tie—sadly, too late for that to result in riveting tiebreaker games.
Maybe it’s just cyclical that so many teams are in it, but not necessarily to win it. However, the unusual shape of the projected standings may also stem from structural changes to the sport, including anti-tanking measures in the CBA and the incentives imposed by the expanded playoffs, which encourage teams to be decent but not dominant. If playoff success is the standard that teams are judged by, but playoff success is impossible to secure, why spend on additional regular-season wins once you’ve given yourself a good shot at qualifying for the tournament? That mindset may help explain why some of this year’s best (albeit flawed) free agents remained unsigned deep into spring training. Then again, the teams that swooped in to sign Blake Snell, Jordan Montgomery, and their Boras Corp. comrades at discount prices may find that the marginal wins those players provide make a major difference.
Whether this year’s clouded postseason picture constitutes an improvement over the 4K clarity of past springs is almost a philosophical question. Which matters more in creating a great race: the performance of the pace setters, or the proximity of most competitors to each other? In this context, I lean toward the latter. MLB is probably better off with a ton of teams in contention, and talent distributed more evenly leaguewide, than it was a few years ago when the standings were historically stratified. After all, almost every team in 2024 has hope and faith (to borrow a Bud Selig line), even if few have confidence.
That lack of confidence extended to my prediction process (not that I’m ever confident about baseball predictions). So, for my Fall Classic matchup, I went with the likeliest outcome in the NL, and the most fun outcome in the AL, where no one team clearly outclasses the others. The Mariners have holes, but they also have three of the top 10 betting favorites for the AL Cy Young Award. Would you want to face that trio in a short series? For once in the good people of Seattle’s lives, let them see what a pennant looks like, if not a flag.
Zach Kram: Atlanta has the best roster with the fewest holes in baseball; I don’t care that the team squandered 100-plus-win seasons with immediate playoff exits in 2022 and 2023, because a lineup and rotation with this many stars should do just fine in October. The AL race is more interesting, because the league’s best teams are much more tightly packed. (FanGraphs projections foresee a 15-win gap between Atlanta and the NL’s sixth-best team, versus only a six-game gap between the no. 1 and no. 6 teams in the AL.) So I went out on a thinner limb and selected Seattle, which boasts the AL’s best rotation and a lineup powered by star power (see my MVP pick) and increased depth. Odds are that a better-touted contender like the Astros or Orioles will claim the AL pennant instead, but what fun is picking favorites in both leagues?
Bobby Wagner: Even with the additions of Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto (which everyone online acted very normally in response to) it’s hard to say the Dodgers are the prohibitive favorite that the “buying a championship” narrative would have you believe. Atlanta has a roster that matches or even exceeds that of the Dodgers, depending on how you feel about their respective starting rotations. And there’s always Houston, so consistent and successful that it would be foolish not to assume the Astros will be tough to eliminate. Plus, the obligatory mention of the Rangers, who I’m hearing won the World Series in 2023? Strange.
But my oh my, the Dodgers roster is loaded. A typical L.A. lineup will feature MVP winners still playing at their peaks in the top three slots, newly minted Dodger-for-the-next-decade Will Smith at cleanup, and 40-homer threat Max Muncy fifth. If you make it through that grueling challenge unscathed, you’ll be greeted by Teoscar Hernández (career 116 wRC+), James Outman (118 wRC+ , 4.4 fWAR season as a rookie last year), the Jason Heyward–Chris Taylor platoon, and finally, mercifully, no. 9 batter Gavin Lux, a former top prospect with pretty good pop who was putting together a consistent stretch of big league success before losing all of 2023 to a torn ACL.
As with any team, there are question marks, like whether a patchwork young rotation will be able to hold down the fort while Walker Buehler works his way back into form and Clayton Kershaw … does whatever Clayton Kershaw needs to do to keep his surgically repaired shoulder healthy. But this is a baseball team that sports a lineup without a single hole, signed the best pitcher on the market, traded for and extended a very good veteran starter, is welcoming back Buehler (a former Cy Young contender), and pulls elite relievers out of its hat so often it’s become boring. Not a bad bet!
AL MVP
Lindbergh: Julio Rodríguez. Julio—you’ve gotta be good when you’re known by one name that’s not even uncommon—had a semi-disappointing season in 2023, and he still finished fourth in AL MVP voting and AL FanGraphs WAR. Not many players would post a 126 wRC+ on the season, catch fire after the All-Star break, and still opt to make major swing changes, but Julio’s appear to have paid off. (He hit .394/.512/.667 this spring.) Improbably, he was better than that last August, when he raked to the tune of a .429/.474/.724 slash line, which included a four-game stretch in which he produced a record 17 hits. That earned him AL Player of the Month; this year, he may level up to player of the season. I could absolutely see Juan Soto having a huge walk year—both bases-on-balls-wise and in the contractual sense—even if his swing isn’t set up to make the most of Yankee Stadium’s dimensions. But it takes a lot of offense for an iffy corner outfielder to equal the overall value accrued by a sterling center fielder, and Julio might match Soto bomb for bomb.
Wagner: In 1980, George Brett won AL MVP while playing just 117 games (9.1 fWAR, 198 wRC+, .390 BA—what a year!). Since then—excluding 1981, 1994, and 2020 (three seasons shortened by strikes or COVID)—Corey Seager is the only position player to finish in the top three of MVP voting while playing fewer than 130 games, and he’s just one of three to finish in the top five. Seager managed that last season, when he played only 119 games.
Now, is any of that predictive in any way? Probably not! Seager is a bona fide superstar, one of the best hitters in baseball, and sure-handed enough at a key middle infield position to rack up value incredibly fast. We all know this. But injuries have disrupted enough of his campaigns at this point that it’s starting to feel like we’re just going to get a great Seager in three-month increments.
But, man, those 119 games and the 6.1 fWAR he put up in them are tantalizing. You have to be so much better than the rest of the competition to miss 40-plus games and still finish higher in MVP voting than your teammate Marcus Semien (who played all 162) and Julio Rodríguez ( who put up a 30-30 season). If Seager stays on the field for 10 to 20 more games in 2024, voters may want to reward him for how great he was in limited games last season, and how instrumental he was to the Rangers’ 2023 World Series win.
Kram: If I’m predicting a big season from the Mariners, I might as well predict a big season from their best player, too. Last season, Julio Rodríguez had a below-average batting line at the All-Star break and was still good enough to finish fourth in AL MVP voting. If he’s productive at the plate through all of 2024—and provides his typical value on the bases and in the field—he should become the third MVP in franchise history, joining Ichiro Suzuki and Ken Griffey Jr.
NL MVP
Lindbergh: Ronald Acuña Jr., Braves. Last spring, I made a “bold” prediction that Acuña would have a 50-50 season. If I set the same expectation today, in the wake of Acuña’s 40-70, unanimous-MVP campaign, it wouldn’t be bold. Would you believe that despite being the second-best hitter in baseball last year, Acuña underperformed his expected stats by the second-widest margin? Impressive as his unparalleled power-speed season was, there’s still room for him to be better: After the plate-discipline improvements he made last year, the 26-year-old’s skill level knows no ceiling. Only the knee that ended his 2021 season early, hampered him in 2022, and gave the Braves a scare this spring, can stop him.
Kram: Mookie Betts. I will continue to pick Betts until he becomes the first player since Frank Robinson to win both AL and NL MVP awards. I have to be right one of these years, darn it! (Now that he’s in the National League, Ohtani might beat Betts to that honor—but I don’t think it’s as likely to come this season, when Ohtani is only a DH rather than a two-way contributor.)
Wagner: If we could put on our “Just Asking Questions” hats for a second, allow me to pose this: Why was Ronald Acuña Jr. the unanimous MVP last year?
I know what you’re thinking! Acuña’s 2023 season was just the fifth in major league history in which a player hit at least 40 home runs and stole at least 40 bases. Cool club! Here are the MVP finishes of the other four players to do that:
1988, Jose Canseco: First
1996, Barry Bonds: Fifth
1998, Alex Rodriguez: Ninth
2006, Alfonso Soriano: Sixth
I’m not trying to pour cold water on Acuña’s achievement (though I’m aware that’s exactly what this ended up sounding like), I’m more so trying to figure out why that became the overwhelmingly decisive factor for voters between Acuña (8.4 fWAR) and Mookie Betts (8.3 fWAR) when 40-40 hasn’t historically clinched the MVP.
There are other factors, like the fact Acuña hadn’t won the award yet and Betts had, or that the Braves have been so dominant as a team recently.
I would’ve probably voted for Acuña last season, but I don’t think it should’ve been so cut and dry, which is my long way of saying that I think Betts is about as deserving a second-place finisher as we’ve had in some time, and that translates favorably to a narrative for him to be awarded in 2024.
AL Cy Young
Lindbergh: It probably says something about the state of starting pitching—especially in the absence of Gerrit Cole—that looking nasty for a fraction of a season is all it takes to place Detroit’s Tarik Skubal and Kansas City’s Cole Ragans among the leading candidates for the Cy. And sure, those guys are good: Skubal led all MLB pitchers in fWAR from his July 4 season debut on, and Ragans surpassed Skubal (and everyone else) starting on August 2, when he joined the Royals’ rotation for good after coming over in a trade with Texas. Both have the stuff to support the stats; all they lack is long track records. Well, maybe it makes me old-fashioned, but I’m going old guard over young guns: For the third straight season, I’m picking Corbin Burnes, who was also my 2020 breakout candidate. I go way back with Burnes in Ringer preseason predictions, and though he wasn’t his usual lights-out self early last season, he was strong down the stretch.
Kram: Tarik Skubal. This race is wide open, as the top four finishers from last season are either currently injured (Gerrit Cole, Kevin Gausman, Kyle Bradish) or now in the NL (Sonny Gray). So let’s get wild: A pitcher who’s never reached 150 innings or won more than eight games in a season is going to win the AL Cy Young. From August onward last year, the sport’s two most valuable pitchers were Skubal (2.2 fWAR) and the Royals’ Cole Ragans (2.3), who is also a worthy dark-horse pick for this award. Skubal records lots of strikeouts, few walks, and even fewer home runs, and across a full season—after he missed half of last year due to elbow surgery—he’ll post the best overall numbers in a crowded field of potential first-time winners.
Wagner: Luis Castillo. With the news that Gerrit Cole will miss a good chunk of the season, a pretty open AL Cy Young race just became wide open. Castillo had a pretty standard (which is to say, wonderful) Luis Castillo season in 2023: 3.4 fWAR, 27.3 percent strikeout rate, 94th percentile in pitching run value according to Baseball Savant.
He is an ace. He is very good. He is durable as hell. But he hasn’t gotten the type of results that Cole, Kevin Gausman, or new American League member Corbin Burnes have been able to manage. Some of that is because, while he strikes out a lot of batters, he’s the type of pitcher who challenges hitters directly, so the contact he gives up tends to be harder than that of other elite starters. According to Baseball Savant, his hard-hit percentage was 2.8 percentage points higher than league average last year, which is tough to overcome if you want to prevent runs at the clip other elite starters do.
The stuff, though, is so addictive. And so is the windup, the overall aesthetic, and the fact that Seattle’s rotation is as formidable as any in the game. I think being the clear no. 1 amongst a great group of arms—coupled with some more favorable batted-ball results in 2023—will do a lot to bolster Castillo’s profile when we look back on his candidacy at the end of the year.
NL Cy Young
Lindbergh: Spencer Strider, Braves. In an earlier era, Strider’s 20-5 win-loss record—in a season when no other pitcher recorded more than 17 victories—might well have won him this award. If it had, he wouldn’t have been a bad choice—not because of his wins, but because of his wins above replacement, which nearly led all pitchers (at FanGraphs, whose flavor of WAR wasn’t fazed by the roughly one-run gap between his ERA and FIP). Strider has led all NL pitchers in fWAR over the past two campaigns, despite starting 2022 in the bullpen, and he’s recorded by far the highest strikeout rate of any hurler who’s thrown even 150 frames over that span. He’s done all that while throwing his four-seamer or slider on a combined 94 percent of his deliveries. Unsurprisingly, he possesses baseball’s best fastball as assessed by Stuff+, which has made it more than possible for him to excel as a two-pitch starter. But this spring, he’s incorporated a curveball en route to conceding just two runs in 22 2/3 innings, with 35 Ks. Last year, he struck out a major-league-leading 281 batters without the curve; with it, he could join Cole, Justin Verlander, Max Scherzer, Chris Sale, and Clayton Kershaw as the only pitchers to reach the 300 mark since Pedro Martinez, Randy Johnson, and Curt Schilling made it look routine in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Kram: Spencer Strider has struck out 37 percent of opposing hitters in his career. No other starting pitcher in MLB history (minimum 100 innings) is north of 31.3 percent. Granted, strikeout rates have risen over time, but Strider’s K% relative to the league average is about as high as those of famed strikeout artists Bob Feller and Pedro Martínez. Pitching on the best team in baseball, Strider has a realistic path to the first pitching Triple Crown in a full season since Justin Verlander and Clayton Kershaw both accomplished the feat in 2011.
Wagner: Logan Webb. When it comes to young aces, Logan Webb and Spencer Strider act as tremendous foils. I don’t mean that in the sense that Webb is a hero and Strider is a villain, or vice versa. Rather, they are bizarro versions of each other, achieving similar levels of run prevention and overall success through polar opposite paths. Last year, Webb struck out 22.8 percent (29th-best among 44 qualified starters) and walked an impressive 3.7 percent (third-best in MLB) of batters faced. Strider, meanwhile, struck out 36.8 percent (best in MLB, comfortably) while walking 7.6 percent (15th-best in MLB) of batters faced.
Their pitch profiles are about as different as two aces get in today’s game. Webb attacks hitters with a throwback combination of sinkers (33.6 percent of pitches thrown) and changeups (41.6 percent), mixing in a healthy dose of sliders (21.2 percent) as a put-out pitch when he’s ahead in the count. Strider, meanwhile, throws 58.9 percent four-seam fastballs and 33.8 percent sliders. All gas, no brakes (though he seems to be attempting to mix in more changeups and has added a curveball this winter)! Even where they overlap—the slider—they differ. Strider’s slider is tight, with close to league average movement both horizontally and vertically. But he throws it hard, and tunnels it off his elite fastball to get strikeouts. Webb, on the other hand, throws a looping slider with a horizontal break 82 percent greater than average. Much of the difference in the sliders can be explained aesthetically, as Strider’s release point is much more over the top, while Webb slots his arm lower upon release, allowing himself to achieve that gorgeous frisbee action.
The two make a fascinating pair. I’d like to have either of them on my team! In a field where the consensus seems to be that it’s Strider’s time, I’ll zag and take Webb.
AL Rookie of the Year
Lindbergh: The NL’s Rookie of the Year favorites are veterans of foreign WARs. The AL’s are domestic youngsters: the Rangers’ 22-year-old Wyatt Langford and 21-year-old Evan Carter, and the Orioles’ 20-year-old Jackson Holliday. Holliday’s surprising demotion to the minors last week gave Langford and Carter—not to mention other rookies who are breaking camp with the big club (such as Colt Keith, Ceddanne Rafaela, and the Orioles’ own Colton Cowser)—the inside track to the award, but because my colleagues select the two Rangers below, I’ll make the case for Holliday, who’s the son of former seven-time All-Star Matt, and the sport’s top prospect.
Holliday is blocked at shortstop by Gunnar Henderson, last year’s award-winning Baltimore blue-chipper, but wherever he winds up—he’ll be starting at second in Norfolk, though the keystone is crowded with prospects too—he’ll offer more defensive value than Langford and Carter, the Rangers’ DH and left fielder, respectively. This year, he may follow the trajectory of yet another Orioles prospect who ranked first overall, Adley Rutschman: The catcher came up in late May 2022, which relegated him to a no. 2 finish in a Rookie of the Year race with Julio, who started that season on the Mariners roster. Holliday hit well this spring—albeit not as well as Langford—and Orioles GM Mike Elias said he’s “very, very close.” The O’s can’t keep him down for long unless he struggles, which he didn’t do as he speedran four minor league levels last year. When Holliday does get the call, he may be good enough to make up for lost time and overtake the rookies who had a head start. There are all sorts of performance-related reasons to root for his arrival, but here’s one based on spite: To be frank, it would be funny if the O’s, having held him down partly to suppress his service time, lost out on a draft pick and a year of team control because Holliday won the award anyway.
Kram: Wyatt Langford. Since the introduction of the Rookie of the Year trophy, 28 rookies have crushed at least 30 home runs in a season, and 18 of them (64 percent) won the award. Increase that threshold to 35 homers, and nine of 10 rookies (90 percent) won the award; the only exception was Al Rosen, all the way back in 1950. Langford has the potential to join Pete Alonso, Cody Bellinger, and Aaron Judge, the most recent players in that rarefied air: The Rangers rookie, who will start on Opening Day for the defending champs, slugged .714 in spring training and .677 in the minor leagues last season.
Wagner: Evan Carter. A sexier pick for 2024 AL ROY would be Carter’s ascendent teammate, highly touted prospect Wyatt Langford, who will break camp with the team in somewhat of a surprise. On the 20-to-80 scale that scouts often use to evaluate talent, Langford has 70 potential game power and 70 raw power, according to scouts at FanGraphs. Meanwhile, Carter was rated a 45 in both of those metrics, essentially average.
But there’s something dependable about Carter’s profile that I like here. Call it familiarity bias, but watching him look like a seasoned veteran just weeks after getting called up to the team that went on to win the World Series ought to hold some weight. And the underlying numbers back it up. Carter walked in 16 percent of his plate appearances last season, and (no pun intended) the eye test bears out those numbers. He immediately identified and tortured some of the best pitchers in baseball last September and October. I think Langford (and Jackson Holliday) will be splashier stars, but I’ll go conservative here.
NL Rookie of the Year
Lindbergh: Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Dodgers. This winter’s lackluster free agent class was salvaged by big-name Asian players, all of whom landed with Senior Circuit clubs. Well-established stardom in another country’s major league doesn’t preclude players from claiming MLB Rookie of the Year laurels, so Yamamoto—who won three straight Sawamura Awards in Nippon Professional Baseball and left Japan to sign a $325 million deal with the Dodgers—will vie for the hardware along with countrymen Shota Imanaga and Yuki Matsui, and South Korean standout Jung Hoo Lee. Apologies to the Jacksons (Chourio and Merrill), Michael Busch, Kyle Harrison, Jared Jones, Victor Scott II, Yamamoto’s teammate Gavin Stone, and other unproven-but-promising prospects on Opening Day rosters, but if Yamamoto doesn’t follow in former Dodger Hideo Nomo’s footsteps and win this award, something will have gone wrong. (As it did during his one-inning, five-run Dodgers debut last week.)
Kram: Yoshinobu Yamamoto. Would the Dodgers have committed $325 million over 12 years to a player who’s not capable of being the best rookie in his league? Yamamoto might not finish this season with an ERA below 2.00, as he did in each of his last three seasons in Japan, but he’s already proved himself, over and over again, in the second-best league in the world.
Wagner: Jackson Chourio. For the same reasons Langford commands attention in the AL rookie race, Chourio draws my eye here. He’s toolsy, which is another way of saying he’ll be fun as hell to watch if his profile translates to the bigs. And the Brewers certainly think it will. They inked him to a historic eight-year, $82 million deal before he ever saw a pitch in the show. Young center fielders bursting with talent never get old.
Breakout Player
Lindbergh: Ke’Bryan Hayes, Pirates. No, I’m not going super-obscure here. In fact, I’m risking a violation of one of my cardinal rules of selecting breakout candidates, which is that their breakout can’t already have happened. (Seems self-evident, but it’s rarely respected!) However, my hipster approach to breakout eligibility saddled me with Andrew Vaughn last season—and so, stung by that experience, I’m pivoting to an ego-restoring safe pick, even if it means I must compromise my principles. Hayes may be the most popular breakout pick this side of CJ Abrams, but to this point, he hasn’t been a star (though he looked like one for a month when he was called up in 2020). He’s 27, he’s three years removed from last appearing on prospect lists, and he’s a career below-league-average hitter who was just one percent better than that baseline last year. The rosiest of his ratings on defense paint him as a roughly 4-WAR player overall, but he’s never been an All-Star, never received MVP votes, and never won an offensive award. I’m guessing he’s going to check off at least two of those three achievements this year.
Hayes has long been a great glove guy who makes grounders disappear. But to balance the scales in some cosmic batted-ball equation, he’s also generated more than his fair share of worm burners with the bat, which has muted the impact of his high hard-hit rate and suppressed his potential at the plate. But last July, while on the IL, he changed his approach, and after he returned on August 2, he slashed .299/.335/.539 (129 wRC+) the rest of the way. Combined with his fielding prowess, his offensive adjustments—which helped him more than double his average launch angle from 2022—propelled him to just outside the top 20 position players over that span, ranking him right around Austin Riley, Aaron Judge, and Yordan Alvarez. “That’s the type of player I want to be,” Hayes said last October. “I want to be able to do it for a whole season.” He may be about to: His .412/.434/.657 performance this spring has made him one of the top 10 batters in exhibition action (minimum 50 plate appearances). If I’m going to forecast a breakout by a good player, I have to think he’s gonna be great. Hayes could be incredible.
Kram: Paul Skenes. If I define a “breakout” player as someone who can make waves on a national scale, a Pittsburgh Pirates minor leaguer probably wouldn’t be the top choice—even the most recent no. 1 pick. But when casual sports fans who don’t watch MLB might know the names of Ohtani, Judge, and no other active baseball players, it will take something beyond pure performance or talent to break out in this sense. And Skenes offers MLB’s best opportunity for a “Taylor Swift watches the NFL” phenomenon. That’s not because of the former LSU pitcher’s high-velocity fastball or devastating slider; it’s because he is way less famous than his girlfriend, LSU gymnast and social media star Livvy Dunne.
Wagner: Davis Schneider. Let’s do a passing check-in on the Davis Schneider bio, in case you’re like me (didn’t know who this man was before September 2023): Drafted in 2017. Round 28. Pick 24. A round that no longer exists. Rec specs. 80-grade mustache.
You’ll notice that bio did not contain a lot of stats, or a lot of scouting highlights, or really any baseball analysis. That’s probably because he came out of nowhere to amass 2.0 fWAR in just 35 games for a Blue Jays team that had a solid but ultimately underwhelming 2023 campaign in which they were bounced in the wild-card round.
Here’s some baseball analysis (data scientists avert your eyes). For players who had at least 100 plate appearances in 2023 (the sample is fine, leave me alone!), Schneider’s 176 wRC+ ranks second behind only Shohei Ohtani—just ahead of Aaron Judge, Ronald Acuña Jr., and Yordan Alvarez.
Pretty much no one thinks he can keep this up. But … what if he did? That’d be quite a breakout.
Flop Team
Lindbergh: Yankees. Even after a season many New Yorkers considered disastrous, the Yankees are the FanGraphs favorites to win the AL East. Then again, they had the highest division odds last year too, and they finished fourth. The Yankees’ deep (but not bottomless) pockets afford them a high floor, but the Bombers also have a high bar for flopping: For them, failure is anything other than winning the World Series. (By that self-imposed standard, they’ve failed an awful lot lately.) They’re at least as likely to return to the playoffs as they are to snap their streak of 31 winning seasons, but the downside risk is real. The lineup should be better than a two-man show—though its top two men, Judge and Soto, can carry an offense—but given the uncertain status of Cole’s elbow, there’s some serious collapse risk in a pitching staff that ranks 17th in projected WAR and depends on big bounce backs by Carlos Rodón and Nestor Cortes. This team has missed the playoffs in back-to-back seasons only once since the strike, and that was only a few years after its last title. If it happens again this year, the Bronx may burn.
Flop is always hard to define, and inevitably feels harsh when it’s uttered. But after 101 wins in 2023 and sky-high expectations lavished on a bunch of early-20s stars, I think there is some real regression potential in Baltimore’s profile this year.
Kram: St. Louis Cardinals. Projection systems believe in the Cardinals, despite their last-place finish last season: Both FanGraphs and Baseball Prospectus predict that St. Louis is the most likely team to win the NL Central this year. But while Sonny Gray is a considerable upgrade over St. Louis’s other rotation options, Lance Lynn and Kyle Gibson are mediocre at best and harmful at worst (see: Lynn’s league-leading 44 homers allowed last season). The Cardinals should score a lot of runs, but they might allow even more and struggle to climb back to the top of their division.
Wagner: Here we go … [gulp] I don’t know if I believe in the depth of the Baltimore Orioles’ roster! It would be disingenuous not to acknowledge the overwhelming young talent dotting the lineup, but young talent sometimes regresses a bit. The Orioles clearly caught magic in the regular season last year, but were quickly exposed by the (admittedly future World Series champion) Rangers. And despite the Corbin Burnes trade this offseason, this rotation has more questions than answers. John Means is coming back from Tommy John, which is never a sure proposition. And Kyle Bradish is trying to dodge TJ, which doesn’t leave a great taste in your mouth. To legitimately compete in a very tough AL East, they’ll need Grayson Rodriguez to expeditiously show that he can be the ace who was promised. Not to mention, we know that GM Mike Elias is … we’ll say … hesitant to make all-in moves.
Surprise Team
Lindbergh: Padres. The Padres missed the playoffs last season, then followed up that notable bust by trimming talent and payroll from the star-studded, expensive roster assembled through the largesse of late owner Peter Seidler. They traded their best player (Soto) and lost a large part of their pitching staff to free agency, shedding the most net 2023 WAR of any team. They also share a division with three teams that ranked first, second, and fifth in net 2023 WAR gained. Nothing I just said screams “surprise team.” And yet … the Padres still have so many stars. (Ignore all the scrubs for a second.) Their timing/luck can’t be worse than it was last year, even though they did start this season with a game-altering equipment malfunction. And they’ll definitely lead the league in shortstops, if nothing else. The Padres are a post-hype sleeper, which is not a natural role for them considering GM A.J. Preller is almost always awake. I’m guessing their bats will be less somnolent in high-leverage spots this season, and we can’t put any midseason upgrade past Preller, who pulled off the improbable feat of trading away his best hitter and trading for his projected best pitcher (Dylan Cease) in the same offseason. These Padres may not be as talented as last year’s squad, but that doesn’t mean they won’t win more games.
Kram: The Mariners have never reached the World Series—not even when they had Griffey and A-Rod and Randy and Edgar, not even when they won 116 games, not even when Ichiro and Felix were winning awards. So I think it’s safe to say they’d offer a pleasant surprise if they made their first Fall Classic appearance in 2024.
Wagner: At the time of publishing, the Brewers are projected by FanGraphs’ playoff odds to finish third in the NL Central. To me, this division is a toss-up. The Cardinals have the most “known quantities” anchoring their lineup (Nolan Arenado and Paul Goldschmidt). The Cubs are the most ascendant (adding Shota Imanaga and potentially calling up top prospects like Pete Crow-Armstrong). But the Brewers, to me, are the dark horse that could upset the balance of the Central.
Milwaukee’s rotation took a big hit when the team traded Corbin Burnes to Baltimore earlier in the offseason. It took an equally big hit when it was announced that Brandon Woodruff would miss the entire 2024 season. When it comes to starting pitching, the Brewers are hanging on by a thread. But, behind the strength of Devin Williams and Trevor Megill (not to be confused with Mets ace-in-waiting Tylor Megill), they had the second-best bullpen ERA in baseball last season. Organizationally, they always seem to pull middle relievers out of their you-know-what.
Milwaukee also added Rhys Hoskins, who, for all his defensive deficiencies, I am confident will rake. And if Chourio breaks out, I like their lineup considerably better than the others in the Central.
Last, but certainly not least, you’re never gonna get me to quit Gary Sánchez. Thirty-homer season coming! Lose your GM, lose your ace, lose your manager. It doesn’t matter. You can still have it all.