Well look at that! It's time for baseball. I'm looking at my watch right now and it says "baseball."
That means that you, the baseball-enjoyer, are in desperate need of facts and information about baseball. Specifically, you hunger to learn everything there is to know about the teams and players who will be competing for glory in the 2025 MLB season. Hunger no more, my friend. You are about to be fed.
No time to waste. Devour this post!
New York Yankees
by Lauren Theisen
What is their deal?
If you’ve heard of "baseball," you have some sense of the Yankees' deal. They've got the stars, and the history, and all the attention, even when they're not one of the best teams in the league. But last year, they actually were. The Yanks used a blazing hot start to earn a division title and then put together clearcut playoff wins over the Royals and Guardians. But in their first World Series since 2009, they were destroyed by the Dodgers in just five games.
Who are their guys?
Last season, two guys carried the batting order, and one of them is still here. The big slugger Aaron Judge picked up his second MVP in three years with a campaign that was just as good if not better than his history-making 62-dong season in 2022. He's about to turn 33, which is a little concerning, but people thought 32 was concerning, too.
Secondary to Judge are two guys on the opposite ends of the career spectrum. Giancarlo Stanton turned in a solid 2024 and exploded in the playoffs after previously looking kind of washed, and the young shortstop Anthony Volpe still needs to get a lot better at plate discipline but contributes plenty at all the other aspects of the sport.
On the mound, the superstar is supposed to be Gerrit Cole, but after an injury-limited follow-up to his Cy Young year he's going to do Tommy John surgery and miss all of 2025. That's bad, The next guy up would be Luis Gil, who'd use his gnarly slider to take a step forward from his Rookie-Of-The-Year 2024 and assert himself as an ace, but now he's on the 60-day IL. Instead, the pressure is on newly arrived weak-contact king Max Fried, who still projects as a strong asset even if he won't hit the peaks of his dominant late 20s in Atlanta.
In the rest of the rotation, Clarke Schmidt is trying to make good on the promise he showed last season, while Carlos Rodón and Marcus Stroman are looking to recapture some past success before they watch the sun go down. The Yankees got a new closer, too: Devin Williams. They traded Nestor Cortés to Milwaukee to get him, and already he's catalyzed a major organizational change. Well, his whiskers did. In contrast to George Steinbrenner's old edict demanding players sport mustaches or nothing, the team's facial hair policy now allows "a well-groomed beard." And they try to tell me baseball is stuck in the past!
Are they good?
I left you hanging a little up there, but here's the other guy who carried the Yankees last season: Juan Soto. He's still a New Yorker, but he's playing in Queens now after the Mets showered him with the contents of Scrooge McDuck's vault. Soto's an irreplaceable player. But, well, you still need nine players for a batting order. The headlining new hitters in pinstripes are Paul Goldschmidt, who is 37 and finally declining; and Cody Bellinger, who salvaged his career when he moved from L.A. to Chicago, and showed up to Yankees spring training ready to smash some baseballs. He's still not as good as Juan Soto, though.
Are they actually trying?
Not as hard as the Mets!
Playoffs?
Probably, but there are plenty of teams across the entire AL itching to displace them, including Seattle, Detroit, Cleveland, Kansas City, Toronto, Tampa, and … yes, Boston. Their margins are pretty thin.
Boston Red Sox
by Chris Thompson
What is their deal?
Jeff Passan of ESPN had a big feature in February about how the Red Sox are doing big breakthroughs in hitting at their training complex in Fort Myers, Florida. They've got three hotshot youths coming up, all of whom are expected to hit the dick off the baseball, and Passan says it is all due to cutting-edge innovations in the hitting space cooked up by Red Sox training geniuses. There was a time, not very long ago at all, when a story of this sort would've had fascinating details about weighted bats, toe taps, opening or closing of stances, when to breathe and where to hold one's hands, where all the tinkering would've been done by spooky baseball mystics. Today the story is machines. That's the big deal in Boston: Machines that throw pitches and machines that provide feedback data. The Red Sox are revolutionizing hitting by having expensive machines. To which I say: Fuck off!
Not every MLB team is a type. Some are just out there, flailing around, God love them. Others are efficiently run sweatshops. Some are poorly run sweatshops that are also on fire. Still others are a crowded revival tent sinking into an alligator swamp. The Red Sox are the MBA-haver that you regret speaking to at a social gathering. They are the guy in the puffer vest with the bluetooth earpiece who visits the burning sweatshop and spends the tour excitedly taking notes on profit maximization. (It was not my choice to preview the Boston Red Sox; as payment for my services, I am allowed to be mean and unfair about them.)
Since winning the World Series in 2018, the Red Sox have had one (1) playoff appearance, and have finished third or worse in the American League East five times in six years. Last season they won 81 games and outscored their opponents by four runs. They had a productive, if somewhat quiet, winter, adding a couple big-name starting pitchers and a middle-of-the-order bat, and they've got those bitchin' youths headed for the majors. They've lately failed to score any of the really huge marquee free agents but it's not clear they any longer aspire to be that sort of team, in any serious sort of way. Still, the Red Sox are a team on the rise. The AL East is tough but the Yankees are crumbling into a pile of gory chunks and disembodied limbs, so there might be an opening at the top of the division. Generally you do not want to gain relevance the way that a vulture gains sustenance, but when you are being dramatically outspent by two teams within your division, your plan for relevance necessarily involves table scraps.
Who are their guys?
The Red Sox have some guys. Rafael Devers is being moved to designated hitter after initially making a big stink about keeping his position at third base following the team's hiring of Alex Bregman over the winter. Ceddanne Rafaela is very cool, and the Red Sox have now moved him back to center field, where his value as a glovesmith is enough to compensate for his difficulties with getting on base. Wilyer Abreu has some juice. Jarren Duran is a chud but one who is real good at baseball. It is impossible to come within 200 yards of a Red Sox fan without hearing about how lousy Trevor Story has become, but ZiPS expects him to be about a win better than replacement grade in 2025.
And don't forget the youths! Kristian Campbell stunk to high heaven in Grapefruit League action, but Marcelo Mayer and Roman Anthony look approximately big-league-ready, despite the latter suffering from an all-time case of backpfeifengesicht-itis. All three are expected to arrive in the majors in 2025. It might take an injury or some truly putrid performance from the bonafide big-leaguers for these debuts to come before July, but they're coming. Sox fans are pumped and jacked.
The Sox upgraded their pitching staff over the winter, by trading for Garrett Crochet and signing Walker Buehler. They did cool things last season by having their pitchers throw off-speed and breaking stuff basically constantly, and it's neat to think of what their pitcher whisperers might accomplish with these big-name hurlers in the rotation. Health will be a consideration, naturally: Buehler is a few years removed from the last time he was actually good, but when he was good he was good as hell. The Red Sox also have Lucas Giolito, who pitched for three teams in 2023, largely stank, and then missed all of 2024 with a dreaded UCL injury. Giolito made one appearance this spring, allowed three baserunners in one shitty inning, and then was pulled due to injury. Maybe this will blow over? Maybe he'll be fine! Probably not.
Are they good?
Maybe. The Red Sox might not yet be aiming for "good." Certainly they would be glad to snag a wild card and thrilled to challenge for the division, but if they could trade some autumn baseball for a big pop from a couple of those ballyhooed youngsters they definitely would. Still, it's good that they paid Bregman and upgraded their rotation: This is the behavior of a team that would like to be taken at least a little bit seriously.
Are they trying?
Sort of.
Playoffs?
Possibly.
Toronto Blue Jays
by Maitreyi Anantharaman
What is their deal?
I'd just stepped off my train at Union Station in Toronto one day last August when I saw a pair of teens heading the other way, scrambling down the escalator to the train platform, bound for somewhere like Oakville or Burlington. They each had a George Springer hockey jersey in hand—I recognized it as the giveaway at that night's Jays game. I looked at my watch. First pitch in 10 minutes. The teens had grabbed the giveaway and just gone home. And honestly, fair, I thought, watching Joey Loperfido strike out three times the next evening.
If it feels like an era of Blue Jays baseball may be coming to a sad end soon, it's also hard to say why. The team did basically what you want a team to do with a pair of franchise-changing prospects. Vlad Guerrero Jr. and Bo Bichette have spent the last four seasons protected by the likes of George Springer, Marcus Semien, and Teoscar Hernández; somewhere along the way, Matt Chapman was there batting seventh.
Who are their guys?
For that reason, the trusty "blame the best player on the team" strain of criticism seems popular in Toronto. Sure, Vlad Jr. disappointed in 2023, but he gave Bobby Witt Jr. a late scare for the AL batting title last year and crucially regained much of his 2021 pop. His .323/.396/.544 season was a rare source of pleasure for a team that finished last in the AL East and sold at the deadline. True to the whack-a-mole vibe of this Jays era, Bichette made up for it with a totally miserable and injury-wrecked season. The two are now in contract years. Ideally, they will be good at the same time.
Are they good?
With Anthony Santander joining the lineup, the top of the batting order—Guerrero, Bichette, Santander, Daulton Varsho, Alejandro Kirk, Springer—actually looks pretty nice when I type it out here! Admittedly, paper tends to be kinder to the Jays than real life does. Same goes for the pitching staff: The veteran names (Kevin Gausman, Max Scherzer, Chris Bassitt, José Berríos) are encouraging, but it's an old rotation, with all the associated injury/washed-ness risk. Another complaint goes that the team over-indexed on defense after 2021: The Varsho, now-retired Kevin Kiermaier, and Springer trio rolled out last year looked something like an all-centerfielder outfield. The front office didn't exactly beat these allegations when they traded for Cleveland's Andrés Gimenez, a best-in-league infield defender still trying to recapture the juice of his 2022 bat. But solid defense will be a big help to a bullpen that was not good last year and a rotation whose strikeout stuff may be on the decline.
Are they actually trying?
The Jays are trying so hard their trying is now something of a joke; they have spent the last two offseasons as runners-up in everyone's free agency. But they need to give Vlad a reason to stick around, and the AL East never makes it easy.
Playoffs?
Why not?
Tampa Bay Rays
Baltimore Orioles
by Tom Ley
What is their deal?
After executing one of the longest and most cynical tanking campaigns ever seen in American professional sports, the Orioles are finally good. The question now is about how good they they actually want to be.
The Orioles won 192 combined games over the course of the last two regular seasons, and have a roster bursting with some of the best young players in the league. Despite these circumstances they have, distressingly, not indicated that they are in much of a rush to turn this good young team into a great one. Case in point: This offseason the O's let both their best starting pitcher (Corbin Burnes) and middle-of-the-order slugger (Anthony Santander) escape in free agency. You expect win-now teams to spend what's necessary in order to keep their best players in the house, but maybe Baltimore simply decided that Burnes and Santander weren't smart investments. Fair enough.
What matters more than Burnes and Santander leaving is how the Orioles decided to replace them. Rather than reallocating payroll toward a marquee signing or two, the O's decided to go We can recreate them in the aggregate mode. Tomoyuki Sugano, Charlie Morton, Andrew Kittredge, and Gary Sanchez all scored one-year deals, while Tyler O'Neill snagged himself a three-year deal.
Strictly speaking, the Orioles spent money in free agency, which is what any fan would ask for. But I don't know, man. Is this the kind of spending a team in the Orioles' position should be doing? Making a bunch of low-risk bets on veteran free agents might be what counts as savvy roster construction these days, but when Orioles fans close their eyes and envision this team winning the World Series, is it easy to imagine Charlie Morton and Tomoyuki Sugano lifting that trophy?
Who are their guys?
The Orioles are lousy with beautiful golden baseball boys. Gunnar Henderson is as valuable as baseball players get; Adley Rutschman is a true slugging catcher in an era when we don't make those anymore; Jackson Holliday is still too good and too young to make anyone worry too much about a rough rookie season; Colton Cowser might one day become a dude. Teams around the league would kill to have just one or two guys like this on their roster, but the Orioles have a whole bushel. It'll get even more fun when big lad Coby Mayo gets called up and starts hitting dingers.
The rotation is where things get a little bit dicey. With Burnes gone, the ace designation passes down to Zach Eflin, who was acquired at the trade deadline last season and is ... fine. Youngster Grayson Rodriguez has the potential to develop into a frontline starter, but he will begin this season on the IL after being sidelined with the the dreaded "elbow inflammation." That brings us right to Charlie Morton, who is 41 damn years old.
Are they good?
Yep, pretty good!
Are they actually trying?
Not as hard as they should be, in my damn opinion. This is a team that possesses a core of young stars who are all on dirt-cheap contracts, which means that the difficult portion of roster construction is out of the way. The Orioles made their draft picks, and developed their prospects, and are now in a situation where their arbitration players are good enough to turn them into a consistent 90-win team. The next step is supposed to be easy: Just spend some damn money on some good veteran free agents in order to maximize the advantages given to you by those young, cheap stars. Is making Charlie Morton and Tyler O'Neill the highest paid players on your team the best way to go about doing that? Maybe in a year when free agents were particularly hard to come by, but this team let Santander's 44 homers and Burnes's 194 innings walk out the door while watching the Dodgers spend the whole winter signing guys they didn't even really need.
Playoffs?
They better hope so!
Minnesota Twins
by Maitreyi Anantharaman
What is their deal?
Who are their guys?
Carlos Correa, Byron Buxton, Royce Lewis. Two can be healthy at the same time. Up to two, that is. Pabló Lopez didn't quite pitch like an ace last season, but there's some reason in the underlying data to believe he was a victim of bad luck. He, Joe Ryan with his sneaky fastball, and the quietly reliable Bailey Ober make for one of the better rotations in baseball.
Are they good?
They should be good. "Should" can be read in two senses of the word here: I expect them to be good this year, and I still don't really understand why they were so bad at the end of last year. Some of their historic late-season collapse can be chalked up to the plantar fasciitis issue Correa has dealt with for the last few seasons—it kept him out of the lineup for two months in 2024 and may well flare up again this year—but for most of the year, the Twins had a deep and talented group of hitters beyond him. After the slugger Lewis declared "I don't do that slump thing," he sputtered and groaned to the season's finish line, slashing .181/.245/.255 in September. Promising early season breakouts Jose Miranda and Willi Castro fizzled out late, too. I guess I'd just recommend they avoid another "everyone sucks at the same time" situation.
Are they actually trying?
The Twins are pretty much running it back. But maybe it's YOUR fault for chanting "SELL THE TEAM." The Pohlad family's plans to sell the team, announced this offseason, have not made them especially eager to add to the payroll. After a proposed sale to billionaire brothers Justin and Mat Ishbia fell through, the sale situation is still unresolved heading into the regular season.
Playoffs?
Yeah, sure.
Cleveland Guardians
by Ray Ratto
What is their deal?
The Guardians were a good team before abandoning the sociological eyesore that was Chief Wahoo, and they are good now. They just aren't the Yankees, a fact they were reacquainted with in the latest American League Championship Series. The Yankees have taken Cleveland out in 2020, 2022 and now 2024, and while that hasn't curbed local enthusiasm (attendance last year was the highest since 2008), it has served to remind everyone so inclined that there is a ceiling here and it isn't glass.
The Guardians are good almost entirely because of their devotion to pitching, and have been through the entirety of Terry Francona's 11-year managerial reign and now that of Stephen Vogt. (Francona retired after 2023, got the itch again and is now in Cincinnati trying to turn Hunter Greene into the new Tanner Bibee, unless it's him trying to turn Alexis Diaz into the new Emmanuel Clase. But enough about downstate Ohio.) The 'Ians have been on the cusp of breaking their 76-year ringless streak for more than a decade now, and they may be positioning themselves for winning a few hearts and minds who have abandoned the Browns, even if the attention windows are now being cleaned by Ohio State football and the Cavs. The advantages of being in the once-grisly AL Central are now largely gone, as the Royals, Tigers, and Twins are passable to troublesome after annual division-wide blahgasms, and with the Yankees in seeming retreat, this might be their moment.
Who are their guys?
Clase is the best closer in the game, Jose Ramirez the most prolific third baseman, Steven Kwan the most persistently irksome leadoff hitter, and Lane Thomas the intriguing offseason pickup. The loss of meat storage refrigerator Josh Naylor doesn't help, but as we said, the pitching is efficient and without evident holes. Picking up former Diamonbdbacks closer Paul Sewald ought to be a sneaky good acquisition to keep the bullpen functioning properly so that Clase can do his duty without being so overtaxed that he gets Yankee'd, as he did in the LCS. Mostly, they'll be roughly as anonymous as they need to be, and as effective as anyone else in the league. As long as they figure out how to play anyone not from New York.
Are they good?
Yes. Good enough? Not yet. But while the Browns suck, they have a chance to win back a piece of the town.
Are they fun?
Not as much without The Better Naylor (Bo is still the catcher, if that helps brighten your day), but they can win 3–1 games with the best of them.
Playoffs?
Barring catastrophic injuries or a burst of budgetary cutbacks, which there shouldn't be given their preseason payroll ranking of 25th, absolutely. The issue is always how long they last. They are rapidly reaching the point where no residents of the town were alive the last time they won the World Series, so tick tick tick, kids.
Kansas City Royals
by David Roth
What is their deal?
In 2014, a tough young Royals team went to the World Series and lost in seven games. In 2015, an improved and even tougher but by definition slightly less young Royals team won the World Series in excruciating and relentless fashion. In 2016, the Royals finished 81-81. This is all worth mentioning because the Royals wouldn't finish with a winning record again until 2024, when they bet on the core of a team that had just lost 106 games, made meaningful free-agent signings for the first time in years, and improved their record by an even 30 wins. They finished second in the Central and commandingly swept the Orioles out of the Wild Card before losing to the Yankees in the ALDS.
The roster is still mightily lopsided and it's unclear whether there's the appetite for additional spending or capacity for the player development improvements to make them actual contenders. But hats off to them for trying, and succeeding, when so many similar teams—including a decade's worth of Royals ones—simply opted not to.
Who are their guys?
Bobby Witt Jr. was one of the very best players in baseball in 2024, doing more or less everything a shortstop can do as well as a shortstop can do it. He led the league in batting and hits, won a Gold Glove, was runner-up for the American League MVP, and was worth 9.4 WAR per Baseball Reference's reckoning, which makes it by that metric one of the best seasons a shortstop has ever had. We can spend all this time on that stuff because only three other Royals hitters had a triple-digit OPS+. Salvador Perez is still there; the team will build a statue of him some day and it will somehow be less physically imposing than Perez himself. Seth Lugo, one of the team's sensibly priced free-agent signings, was the Cy Young runner-up; Cole Ragans, who is eight years younger, was electric and finished fourth in the voting. Both are good, and although only Ragans seems very likely to improve, he already looks like someone who could win a Cy Young from one moment to the next.
Are they good?
Well, they're better, and they were pretty good in 2024. But something like two-thirds of the batting order is still both punchless and near-historically bad at taking walks; as Steven Goldman noted in the Baseball Prospectus Annual, the latter trait is something like an organizational value by now, but neither is necessarily what you want. A bullpen that was mostly awful in 2024 is somewhat better. And that decade of patient, pious, mission-driven sub-mediocrity still haunts the broader endeavor. They're much better than they were; they also went 12-1 against the White Sox last year and 74-75 against everyone else. So maybe the question is whether the White Sox somehow got worse.
Are they actually trying?
Again, only an annoying answer really fits here: They're trying more than they did for a decade, and they continued to make some peripheral but notable additions without really growing the payroll much. Maybe the best way to say this is that they're acting like the other teams in the AL Central act, which is to say that they are trying to do what's necessary to win the Central and not much more than that.
Playoffs?
Well it depends. If you had to pick between the Royals and the Tigers in terms of which one was likelier to hold onto the progress they made in 2024, you would … honestly, listen, this isn't about you and I'd appreciate it if you stayed out of it. But I think only one makes it, and honestly I don't know if either of them is actually good.
Detroit Tigers
by Maitreyi Anantharaman
What is their deal?
The Tigers' late-season run to the playoffs certainly had the flavor of miracle—diving catches; a go-ahead grand slam down to the last strike; tagging the Dodgers bullpen for five runs in the bottom of the ninth to get to extras—and there are parts of it that look a lot like luck. (For the playoff push to happen, the Twins also had to independently collapse.) But an encouraging foundation lay beneath it all. The Tigers started winning because their homegrown talent was healthy, because they played matchups wisely, and because they have quietly become the kind of pitching development factory every MLB team wants to be.
I am confident in the long-term health of this team in a way I have basically never been before, even when they were legit World Series contenders. Sure, they could run higher payrolls, but there are other ways to do this than signing Pete Alonso, and the Tigers would be wise to try them. For example, extend the good young players already on the roster! If I have to watch Riley Greene play for any other MLB team, I'll [redacted] Little Caesars headquarters with a [redacted].
Who are their guys?
Javy Báez might be the opening day centerfielder. More on this later. Greene's swing is as huge and lovely as his gait is strange. Let me quote the Giants announcers discussing his McCovey Cove splash hit in a recent exhibition game: "Really reminded us of Barry Bonds." Someone else said it! I'm just the messenger!!! Ace and reigning AL Cy Young winner Tarik Skubal works quick, doesn't nibble, strikes guys out, and carries himself like a psycho. Also Jason Benetti. He is our most important guy.
Are they good?
The Tigers were known for "pitching chaos" last year—a strategy of scripted bullpen games that made up for a lack of starters beyond Skubal. The rotation should be deeper this time around, with free agent Jack Flaherty re-signed and touted prospect Jackson Jobe ready for the bigs. But the other key piece of their run prevention was outfield defense, which the new front office has been wise to prioritize in a spacious home park. Sadly, the best defensive center fielder on the roster, Parker Meadows, is out for at least the first third of the season with a mysterious nerve issue, and both Plan B Matt Vierling and Plan C Wenceel Pérez in center field are hurt too. Free agent signing Gleyber Torres, who slides young Colt Keith to first base, makes the fielding situation even dicier. This is all why Javy may now be the center fielder, and why it is hard for me to imagine the Tigers winning in the way they’re designed to.
Are they actually trying?
Not really. But that didn't stop them last year.
Playoffs?
Spencer Torkelson might play right field.
Chicago White Sox
by Kathryn Xu
What is their deal?
Garrett Crochet, one of the very few bright spots of the 2024 Chicago White Sox's historic season, is now with the Boston Red Sox, joining other former White Sox teammates Lucas Giolito and Liam Hendriks. The front office has not yet managed to trade away Luis Robert Jr., who had a notable down year, and is the last remnant of the original core that gave people hope. Jason Benetti is still, in spite of presumably multiple deals made with vaguely devilish entities by the remaining cadre of White Sox fans, with the Tigers.
The Los Angeles Angels' spring training manifested a sentence in an MLB Trade Rumors blog that went like this: "If [Yoán] Moncada's thumb issue were to prove more serious, non-roster invitee J.D. Davis may be best positioned to take advantage of the vacant job at third base although fellow non-roster invitees Tim Anderson and Carter Kieboom could also theoretically be in the mix."
Who are their guys?
If you pushed me to pick out of the White Sox's active roster of Justin Anderson, Cam Booser, Sean Burke, Jonathan Cannon, Brandon Eisert, Fraser Ellard, Tyler Gilbert, Jordan Leasure, Davis Martin, Penn Murfee, Martín Pérez, Shane Smith, Drew Thorpe, Mike Vasil, Bryse Wilson, Korey Lee, Matt Thaiss, Jacob Amaya, Brooks Baldwin, Bryan Ramos, Josh Rojas, Lenyn Sosa, Miguel Vargas, Andrew Vaughn, Andrew Benintendi, Luis Robert Jr., Austin Slater, Mike Tauchman, and Michael A. Taylor—well. I'd probably choose my 2024 positive WAR warriors of Jonathan Cannon and Luis Robert Jr., Opening Day starter Sean Burke, and the members of the Chicago White Sox prospect pipeline.
Are they good?
No.
Are they actually trying?
No.
Playoffs?
No.
Houston Astros
by Chris Thompson
What is their deal?
Here was a huge stupid mistake that I made, several weeks ago, when these so-called MLB previews were still largely hypothetical:
I acknowledge here that Tom Ley referred to these as "toilet teams," and that I was offered an opportunity to trade for better ones. But was it really so naive to think that "toilet" might in this context be a reference to these teams' expected performance? Give me some bad teams, sure, but at least make them interesting ones! What I failed to realize was that by "toilet teams" Tom was warning me that my colleagues—people whom prior to this exercise I had never considered enemies—had left me the three least interesting teams in all of baseball. Swine!
What is the deal with the Astros, you ask? The baseball-enjoying world was sick of these jerks and repulsed by their whole deal seven freakin' years ago. They've made the playoffs every year since, made the World Series twice, and won a championship. Now the dreaded Jose Altuve is a left fielder, and Yordan Alvarez is a full-time designated hitter, and Alex Bregman is a Red Sock. But their deal is largely the same; thus, as ever, they can truly go screw.
Who are their guys?
Alvarez and Altuve are familiar guys. Isaac Paredes and Christian Walker were fun and good veteran pickups at the corners, and Jeremy Peña is a fun and handsome shortstop. I like to watch Framber Valdez and Ronal Blanco pitch. Josh Hader appears to have recovered from a downish 2022 and is for sure good again. It's fun to say "Spencer Arrighetti" in an ostentatious Italian accent. They've also got youths. Top prospect Cam Smith will be on the Opening Day roster. Brice Matthews, second baseman of the future, appears to be cool, but he had a lousy spring, and was shipped back to the minors for reps. Zach Dezenzo appears to be blocked for now by Paredes and Walker, but if he balls out at Sugar Land he could make either of them into trade bait. Jacob Melton has a fun mustache. This is way more than I want to be saying about the Houston damned Astros.
Are they good?
I am concerned at this point that the Astros all simultaneously losing all of their fingers would not prevent them from contending within their division. "Good" doesn't even come into it. The Astros are a curse.
Are they actually trying?
Sort of. They enjoy being good, but they do not "try" on the level of the teams that actually try.
Playoffs?
God help us.
Texas Rangers
by Chris Thompson
What is their deal?
See? I was told Defector was a worker collective; that is supposed to mean something. This is bullshit, man.
The Rangers won it all in 2023, upgraded their roster the following winter, were subsequently kerploded by injuries, won 78 games last season, and missed the playoffs. They are among the Tryers, God bless them: The Rangers are one of five teams in baseball that have allocated at least $200 million in total salary for the 2025 season, per Spotrac. A worryingly large portion of this is going to perma-crabbed ace pitcher Jacob deGrom, whose big plan for surviving the 2025 season is to throw slower. Maybe it works. What I would like to understand is why I of all people got stuck with Lone Star teams.
Who are their guys?
Corey Seager and Marcus Semien are going to make your own team's middle infield look so dumb and dopey by comparison. Wyatt Langford has huge round muscles for such a young person. Adolis Garcia is due, cosmically, for a bounce-back. Evan Carter was horrendous in 45 big-league games 2024, and was shit in the Cactus League, and might have to spend this season in Round Rock. Jake Burger and Joc Pederson have names that I would've made up for offensive linemen in Madden '97.
I am excited as hell for the arrival of Kumar Rocker. He was absolutely dreadful for most of the spring, but he had an encouraging outing last week against the Colorado Rockies, striking out eight batters in four-plus innings. Manager Bruce Bochy indicated that the opportunity is there for Rocker to seize a spot in the rotation, but it would be a bummer for Rocker enjoyers if that chance comes prematurely and he spends a few months getting socked around. Besides, injuries are sure to provide several opportunities over the course of the summer (see: Jacob deGrom).
Are they good?
I would like for them to be good. Not because I will watch any of their games, but because it is karmically good when the few teams that are trying to be good are rewarded for their efforts. Also it would mean that maybe someone who is not the Astros could win the AL West.
Are they actually trying?
Yeah!
Playoffs?
Maybe.
Seattle Mariners
by Kathryn Xu
How a Ship having passed the Line was driven by storms to the hopeful Country towards the World Series; and how from thence she made her course to the purgatorial Latitude of the American League Wild Card Race; and of the strange things that befell; and in what manner the Ancyent Marinere came back to his own Country.
PART I
Throw out concepts of form, all ye who enter here. The Jerry DiPoto–John Stanton Seattle Mariners start their 2025 as they started their 2024: with a solid chance to reach the coveted 54-percent threshold and somehow wild-card their way into a World Series ring. But only a chance. Looking too hard into the abyss makes the mind start to believe in it, that variance will fall in your favor, that an above average pitching staff with an average offense will some day be enough—no. The Mariners will not be bad this year, but the Mariners should be better this year.
That they are not remains the fault of their ownership, not the fault of their current roster, which is lovely and infuriating in equal measure. A north star—even an all-star—in Julio Rodríguez, if he can just turn it around. A full five-man rotation of nasty, unique starting pitchers in Logan Gilbert, George Kirby, Bryce Miller, Luis Castillo, and, importantly, Bryan Woo. Matt Brash will return from injury to bolster the bullpen. Fun is rarely in doubt for the Mariners of recent years, so long as you don't factor in expectations of long-term future contention into your definition of fun. The Mariners will gather up and dance each time a win comes their way; even if the starting rotation is let down, they will give you five innings of joy. That is more than can be said for many other teams in the league.
PART II
[REDACTED FOR LEGAL REASONS]
[Whatever] Athletics
by David Roth
What is their deal?
They have the worst owner in the sport, and maybe in American sports. That is the most important factor here. John Fisher is a reclusive nepo-dunce who lost a clammy and protracted attempt to extort the city of Oakland; haphazardly stripped down a winning team that had been something like the gold standard for Doing More With Less for two decades without extracting much in the way of useful future assets, more or less on pure pissy principle; first alienated and then radicalized one of the most passionate fan-bases in the game; and is currently halfway through duffing his attempt to move the team to Las Vegas despite a wholesale lack of interest in that outcome from more or less any stakeholder but him. In the interim, however long that is, the A's will be stadium-surfing at the home of the Triple-A Sacramento River Cats. There are a decent number of worse teams in baseball, but none are more small-time in more ways than the A's. It’s an inspiring American story, in a sense: If your parents invent The Gap, someday you can fuck up one of the easiest money-making gambits on earth such that you become the junior roommate in a minor league ballpark for several years.
Who are their guys?
Brent Rooker hit 39 homers and OPS'ed .927 last year, which is Dude-grade production. There are some other hitters with promise, all of them younger than Rooker—he's 30 and a full-time DH, and the A's are his fourth big-league team—but you only really need to know about J.J. Bleday and Lawrence Butler if you play in a fantasy league with more than 12 teams in it. Mason Miller is one of the coolest closers in the sport and still improving. Luis Severino is, at this point, pretty much exactly Luis Severino, but the A's signed him to a deal that could be worth as much as $67 million over three years, which is the most expensive free agent acquisition the team has ever made; they did it for a preposterous and entirely on-brand reason that you can learn about below. Hilariously, the contract Severino surpassed was given to Eric Chavez, in 2004.
Are they good?
Not really, but they're a lot less bad than you might expect given basically everything you've read so far. The A's were right around .500 down the stretch last year and have unearthed some decently promising talent through a series of low-wattage challenge trades, vigorously churning the roster, and hitting on a few draft picks after years of missing. The veteran talent they added this offseason isn't great, but this was a roster that needed an infusion of real Major League talent to knit itself together into something more coherent, and they got some of that. Given the purgatorial context, this team winning something like 77 games and having a couple of legitimately feisty months is, while not good, actually pretty fucking astonishing. And they absolutely could do that.
Are they actually trying?
Well that’s interesting. The short answer is "Not really," and the longer is "They are trying harder than they have in years," but the most accurate answer is that the organization is mostly trying not to get sued by the MLB Players Association over its longstanding refusal to spend the required amount of league revenue-sharing money it receives on paying baseball players. You can't really call the club's offseason a spending spree—the A's signed Severino and Jose LeClerc and Gio Urshela and traded for Jeffrey Springs and extended Rooker and Butler. But, the various merits of those moves notwithstanding, it was a success in the way that matters most to ownership, which is to say that the A's are now in compliance and out of the legal jeopardy that their serial fuckery got them into.
The team will be somewhat better as a result of those additions, although that seems like a secondary concern. For all of ownership's big talk about Going For It once they get to Las Vegas, it is also true that the task of describing "the hardest they have tried in an offseason in five years" also involved me mentioning them signing Gio Urshela. It is much, much harder to take this team's owners at their word on that than it is to believe that they will just continue being puds until the sun goes out.
Playoffs?
No.
Los Angeles Angels
by Ray Ratto
What is their deal?
They are the team most likely to replace the Chicago White Sox as the one with the team photo done Jackson Pollock–style. The Angels have not won with Mike Trout, they did not win with Trout and Shohei Ohtani, and they have not won after having an entire draft class of pitchers (2021) and then nearly replicating it (2024). Owner Arte Moreno even tried to sell the team and couldn't get anyone to meet his price, which explains to even Bloomberg junkies what is wrong here.
The Angels are extremely not good without ever being noticed for not being good, as evidenced by their 99 losses a year ago, their worst record ever, while Ohtani was annexing the universe 31 miles to the north. They are defined by Ohtani and Trout, but also by Anthony Rendon, who has two more years left on a seven-year, $245 million deal dominated mostly by 11 trips to the injured list. He is currently out for a long but undetermined period after hip surgery. Nothing about this is good, has been good or is likely ever to be good. Their World Series victory happened in 1657 and they have been wrapped in a cloak of invisibility ever since.
Who are their guys?
Old, mostly. Three of the Angels' top four hitters, starting pitchers, bench players and their closer (former Dodger Kenley Jansen) are over 30, and their big offseason get, third baseman Yoán Moncada, will be 30 in May. Their most appealing young'un, catcher Logan O'Hoppe, is still such a work in progress that they signed 36-year-old Travis d'Arnaud to school him on the finer points of being better than the Angels deserve. They also saw signs of improvement from highly touted but lowly performing Jo Adell last year, so there's that.
Are they good?
They used to be, but that was 10 years ago. We're all older, wiser, slower, and far more embittered now.
Are they fun?
Depends on your idea of fun, you sadistic bastards. If it's having arguments with your friends about whether the Angels are better or worse than Colorado, Miami or their Triple-A team in Salt Lake City, sure. They're fun as hell.
Playoffs?
Three games in 15 years, all of them losses. What do you think?
New York Mets
by David Roth
What is their deal?
Steve Cohen bought the Mets right around the time Defector launched, and they have been several strikingly Mets-y teams since then. In 2021 they were dreary, ramshackle, and relentlessly, implausibly self-thwarting; that's Mets. But by 2022, thanks to Cohen's splashy free-agent spending, they were a classic Wobbly Colossus, a rare but valuable Mets Type Thing; they won 101 games and went out like absolute suckers against the Padres in a game that involved their manager demanding that umpires inspect Joe Musgrove's ears. In 2023 they spent some more, brought back the same lineup, and were just miserable; this one is a much more common specimen of Mets.
They jettisoned what they could and climbed into the basement, and when the season was done they hired David Stearns, the former Brewers President of Baseball Operations they wanted all along. It was at this point that the Mets became something that they have basically never been, which is a State Of The Art Baseball Operation. They hit on a bunch of low-risk moves, missed on others, and then just kept churning and tweaking until they were, briefly but pyrotechnically, really one of the best teams in the National League. That was supposed to be a bridge year, and it ended in the NLCS. They are doing a lot of the same smart, contemporary stuff that the best teams do, and betting that those methods will work—that they'll make former closer Clay Holmes into a good starter and reigning worst-guy-doing-it Griffin Canning into an adequate one and help Sean Manaea keep the gains that made him an actual ace in 2024. Also they signed the best free agent in recent memory to a record-setting contract. This helped to make the admittedly risky gambit of "We are going to turn Max Kranick into Andrew Miller through the power of computers and coaching" a little less risky.
Who are their guys?
Francisco Lindor is the heart of the team and its most important player, a no-shit superstar and a delight and very probably a Hall of Famer. Juan Soto, the free agent who got that record setting contract, is by basically every metric better than that; he's 26, signed to a contract that will take him well into his forties, and the only approximate comps that baseball history offers in terms of what Soto has already accomplished are absurd—age-wise, per Baseball Reference, these are names like Bryce Harper and Ken Griffey Jr. and Frank Robinson and Mickey Mantle. Those are the most important guys, but also: Pete Alonso will get real red and hit some number of homers; Edwin Diaz will have cinematic entrances for every save opportunity, although what happens after that is less certain; Mark Vientos became a swaggy godhead down the stretch and should at least hit some more homers; Manaea and Kodai Senga could both be quite good, or entirely unavailable. Kranick I've already mentioned.
Are they good?
They're good. It remains to be seen how good, and it's hard to do the Team Of Destiny thing two years in a row, but they should be good. I'm talking to myself, now. They're good.
Are they actually trying?
They are trying.
Playoffs?
I'd rather not say. Superstitious is all.
Washington Nationals
by Lauren Theisen
What is their deal?
I get all of my Nationals info from Andrew Flax. Let's see what he's thinking:
Thanks, Andrew!
Who are their guys?
Cade Cavalli, obviously. But also, the Nationals' uneventful 71-91 season last year was notable entirely for the early glimpses their fans got of highly touted prospects who might one day soon reverse that record. Chief among the little rascals is James Wood, the 6-foot-7, 22-year-old lefty outfielder who loves hitting to opposite field. He put up a solid .781 OPS in his first 79 major-league games—better than all but his traded teammate Jesse Winker. Complimenting Wood in the outfield is 25-year-old Jacob Young, who couldn't hit all that much as a rookie but provided plenty of value with his glove; and the former LSU superstar Dylan Crews, lying in wait for his first full season. I also like CJ Abrams at short; he's powerful and quick.
Paul DeJong is here now, too. It's his sixth team in two years.
Are they good?
The pitching is pretty concerning. The 26-year-old former No. 3 overall pick Mackenzie Gore is seemingly taking steps toward greater consistency, but even if he's a decent ace, there's a lot of starts left to fill. According to one Nats blogger, the fledgling Mitchell Parker "might be the worst fielding pitcher I have ever seen at the big league level." At least Patrick Corbin, one of the most frustrating stories in baseball, has mercifully been set free after yet again leading the league in hits and earned runs allowed.
Most of the Nats' wins should come from their bats, but I don't think there’s enough of them to make a dent in the NL East. With Wood and maybe Crews and some of the other mid-20s talents, however, they might at least be a fun opponent to check out when they come to town.
Are they actually trying?
The Nats do not give the impression that they mind spinning their wheels for another year of talent development.
Playoffs?
Not unless that aforementioned talent development gets very, very speedy.
Miami Marlins
by Luis Paez-Pumar
What is their deal?
You know them, you love them, you probably forget they exist except when you laugh at them. The Miami Marlins are as bleak as baseball gets for my money, a collection of castoffs and prospects in search of nothing more than grinding through another lost season. Every time the Marlins get good, the fire sales begin, and even when "good" is a low bar to clear—I'd be thrilled with a .500 record at this point—the Marlins managed to fail the limbo and slam into the bar every single time, picking up a concussion and so many losses.
This year's Marlins have little to get excited about, so it's about par for the course. They play in a tough division with three championship contenders and also the Nationals, and they have the lowest active payroll in baseball by a wide margin, almost half that of 29th-place Tampa Bay. No one goes to their games (only the Athletics, in their final season in Oakland and with an owner openly antagonizing the city, had lower attendance last year, but not by much!), and any time a good player plays well, he gets traded. It's rough being a Marlins fan, with only the distant memory of two World Series rings on either side of Y2K, as well as some cool hats, keeping me warm at night. God, I'm depressed, and I have barely started this preview.
Who are their guys?
They do have some guys! Not a lot of guys, mind you, but there are two guys you should know, and two others that might come into play if their health cooperates.
Let's start with the former. Sandy Alcantara is the Marlins' best pitcher, best player really, by a country mile. He's a former Cy Young winner (in 2022), and he's broadly affordable for his talent level, and he's only entering his age-30 season. He's also coming off a missed season-plus thanks to Tommy John surgery, and his 2023 campaign wasn't great before said surgery. However, he's had a good spring so far, and if he's healthy, he could be a key for the Marlins—if the Marlins were nearly any other team in baseball, one in search of wins. Instead, if Alcantara is anywhere near his 2022 form, he'll almost certainly be traded before the deadline this summer, because that's just what the Marlins do and have done for as long as I can remember. Let's move on.
Jesus Sanchez is another player who will likely be traded this summer, provided he shows continued production in the outfield. Sanchez is just 27, he's a good (not great) hitter on a team full of garbage bats, and while I wouldn't call him a good fielder, he could be a nice trade piece for a team that actually wants to win. I'll enjoy watching him until he gets shipped off, though.
As for the two injury concerns, they're both pitchers, and they both have wild variance based on their health. Edward Cabrera was once a hot commodity for the Marlins, yet another incredible pitching prospect for a team that seems to only produce pitchers worth a damn. (Unfair exaggeration, sure, but move with me.) He also seems to get hurt every time he gets on a roll, and has never hit 100 innings in his major league career.
On the other hand, I'm very excited for the return of Eury Perez, the 21-year-old pitcher (See? Pitchers.) who also underwent Tommy John surgery in April of last year. He's targeted for an all-star break-ish return to the mound, and while the hype he had coming out of spring training in 2024 before his surgery might have died down, he's a beacon of potential on a team that will be a slog to watch. He's huge—6-foot-8—and throws hard, and I'm a simple enough baseball fan that it would be enough to see that for a couple of months of healthy starts.
Are they good?
God, no. The Marlins are going to lose something like 100 games this season, and they'll probably get worse before they get better. That's the Marlins Way, as much as there is one, and with Alcantara and Sanchez both likely dangled to better teams at the deadline, the last couple of months of 2025 might be as bad as anything the Marlins have put fans through over the last, oh I don't know, two decades-plus.
Are they actually trying?
The Marlins are definitely trying to do something, but I've never quite understood what that something is. The cycle of "get good prospects, play good prospects, immediately trade good prospects for more good prospects" is a grinding process to watch as a fan, but in theory, the Marlins' plan could work. Load up on enough prospects that all come good at the same time, add in some veterans by flipping the prospects who aren't quite ready, and you could have a season like the 2023 edition, in which the Marlins made just their fourth postseason ever. (The less we say about what happened there, the better.)
However, the Marlins are almost too good at churning through their potential stars, so most teams feel like this year's version: a bad team full of bottom-of-the-barrel nobodies and a couple of gems, and those gems track to be on the team for just about half of the season. So, are they trying to win this season? Absolutely not. Are they trying to game the system, collect revenue sharing money in the meantime, and eventually stumble into another playoff team when the stars align? Maybe!
Playoffs?
This blurb is over.
Atlanta Braves
by Kathryn Xu
What is their deal?
More like the Atlanta Barves, am I right?
Who are their guys?
I apologize for my uncouth behavior in answering the previous question. It is admittedly very unfair and unjust that the people who feel most strongly about the Atlanta Braves on this site are Phillies fans, so let's recalibrate. I remain fundamentally ill-equipped to enjoy a team that actively signs players like Ronald Acuña Jr. and Ozzie Albies to the sort of deal that they have, and rarely re-signs free agents. However, the Braves are one of those teams where you can go down most of their starting roster and be impressed by the quantity of names—a rejuvenated Chris Sale, a member of the White Sox diaspora in Reynaldo López, a member of the Oakland A's diaspora in Matt Olson, former rookie of the year Michael Harris II, and so on.
Even if they let Max Fried go to the Yankees, the Braves helped multiply their intangible cool factor by signing Jurickson Profar, and will be getting several players back from injury this year in Acuña, notable leftist Spencer Strider, and Albies, who, per advanced statistics known as superficial pattern recognition, is due a full, injury-free season.
Are they good? Are they actually trying? Playoffs?
Yes. Yes. Yes.
If the Braves were severely hampered by injury at the start of last season, they were half-dead by the time they limped in through a goofy doubleheader to make the Wild Card series, where they then lost to the Mets. This is not likely to repeat. The Dodgers stole all the thunder this offseason, but fully healthy, the Braves still have the kind of roster that no team wants to face, on a far less enraging scale of investment—so long as the Mets and Phillies and their pesky whimsy don't get in the way.
Philadelphia Phillies
by Kelsey McKinney
The Philadelphia Phillies (my team) are a good team, a great team even. They went into the playoffs with the second-best record in baseball last year. They sent half the starters on the team to the all-star game. They were so hot in the first half of 2024 that it felt like they would never lose. And then what happened? There were a couple of injuries, sure, but nothing massive after the all-star break—the team just … performed worse in the back half of the year.
Maybe they were tired. Maybe they told all their little secrets to the other guys at the all-star game and could be destroyed. But what's strange about this team, more than any other baseball team I've ever watched consistently, is how hot-and-cold they feel to watch. There were games in which they were great, but when they were bad, they were atrocious.
All teams do this to some extent. Hot and cold streaks are not exclusive to Philadelphia, despite how obsessed Philadelphia fans are with blowing leads. But this team in particular is a team of hotheads who throw their helmets in the dirt and charge the mound, which means that their tempers are more important than ever. If their tempers are balanced, they are unstoppable: Hit a lead-off home run, and a game full of high-fiving strangers would follow. But if the vibes shifted just the wrong way, buckle-up, baby, because Alec Bohm was about to kick three ground balls, and Nick Castellanos was gonna strike out on three pitches outside and in the dirt. I went to several games last year where within two or three at-bats we turned to each other and knew it would be a bad, sloppy, stupid game. And it was.
That vibe turned bad and stayed bad starting in August. Even though the record of the team for the year was still great, something was off. They didn't feel good to watch. They didn't play well. I don't think anyone who watched last season really believed that they would go very far in the playoffs because the sparkle that this team is so dependent on had faded.
The spirit of hope here is that the organization seems to know that this is a talented, capable team that could win a World Series, if they just stayed hot at the right time. And that is, after all, what winning the World Series is always about when you have a good team. The question is how to create the precise alchemy that makes a good clubhouse, and well … if I knew the answer to that question I would be drinking champagne in a suite every game instead of having a real job.
But I know one thing for sure: I absolutely would not have optioned back-up catcher Garrett Stubbs to Triple-A. It makes sense on paper to send Stubbs down. He is kind of small for a major league catcher, had a .207 average last year, and struck out 50 times in his 56 games played. But Stubbs has been the player who made the playlists for playoff wins and did things like turn a Budweiser box into a hat. He is a central cog in the experience of the team. Maybe the tattoo of the Phanatic that Bryce Harper got in the offseason will be a strong enough vibe-creator to overcome this loss. Or maybe, in April, they'll realize it was a mistake and call Stubbs back up. Only time will tell!
It is rare to be able to say that you enjoyed watching a team for an entire season in baseball, but last year it was true. I have hope that this year it will be too. The great thing about a vibes-based team, after all, is that they are always entertaining.
Pittsinati Pireds
by Ray Ratto
What is their deal?
They're an amalgam of two like teams, which is significantly different from being teams you like. Their history in the last 30 years is essentially identical, and thus identically drab. They have played a total of 26 postseason games since 1995 (one of them was against the other) and won only eight. The Cincinnati half of the franchise occasionally spends a tiny bit more than $100 million on salaries and wins slightly more games than the Pittsburgh half, which has never spent more than $100 million on salaries. Their Forbes valuations are almost identical at the bottom end of the list, and the combined net worths of the two owners, Bob Nutting and Bob Castellini, would barely buy them the homeless and industry-hated Tampa Bay Rays. Their mutual vows of poverty long ago stopped amusing their fan bases, and their rare forays into the public for self-examination are almost uniformly laughable.
And yet there is one other way in which they are interchangeable, and that is that they each have one very fun everyday player who makes them watchable in ways that most of the rest of the roster does not, and we'll get to them momentarily. Just know this: As of this date, their highest paid players are Nick Martinez and Mitch Keller, and we suspect you neither know nor care who plays for whom. Remember, they are the same team only with different branding.
Who are their guys?
The aforementioned guys in question are Cruzes—Oneil and Elly De La, and both are remarkably distinct from their contemporaries for, first of all, their body types. Elly (the Cincinnati branch) is 6-foot-5, 200 pounds, and broke out in 2023 as a potential Face Of The Franchise and then achieved it last year. He now sits at the heart of the order as a speed/power combo plate who is impossible to not watch. Oneil, who just finished his first full season, is an even more imposing 6-foot-7, 240 pounds, but is now essentially a center fielder after starting out at shortstop as well. Their flaws are ones of commission (they swing big and often), which makes them both maddening and mesmerizing, but when you're looking for something or someone who can define what you want to be, always go with the 13-foot-two-inch, 440-pound monolith.
The Pittsburgh wing of the building also has the wondrous pitcher Paul Skenes, who is very good and knows it to his very cellular structure. He was the National League Recrue de L'année, finished third in the Cy Young voting, and might have been higher if his much-demanded debut hadn't been delayed until mid-May. Of course, pitchers scare sensible folk because of baseball's maddening way of diverting them all toward elbow surgery as quickly as possible, so Skenes and his 1980s mustache to die for is a watch while you can get him.
Are they good?
They haven't been, which is why we have merged them, and they won't be, which is why we haven't spent much time analyzing the short- and long-term implications of acquiring Tommy Pham or Gavin Lux. In fact, we're not even going to tell you which locker room they dress in because it really doesn't matter one way or another. Would that this were different, but the reality says they aren't (one was 77-85 last year, the other 76-86). At least they never bother you with playoff ticket purchase texts.
Are they fun?
Hell yeah, as long as you don't get all hung up on scoreboard detritus.
Playoffs?
I think they'll enjoy them, though individual viewing habits may vary.
Milwaukee Brewers
by Lauren Theisen
What is their deal?
Who are their guys?
New team owner Pete Alonso mostly kept the Brewers intact, with the notable exception of the closer he hit that home run off: Devin Williams has been banished to the Yankees. Still here after a second straight NL Central–winning season and early playoff crashout are William Contreras at catcher, Gold-Glove winner and serial base-stealer Brice Turang at second, 21-year-old Jackson Chourio at Young Hotshot, and Christian Yelich at Old Guy.
Are they good?
I couldn't really mention him in the above paragraph for the sake of the first line, but the Brewers did take damage when the team's dong leader, Willy Adames, signed with the Giants this winter. The only way I can see them making up that production is if Rhys Hoskins bounces back from a down year or Garrett Mitchell makes good on the promise he showed in a limited 2024.
The pitching is aggressively fine. Freddy Peralta is as B-plus as they come. Nestor Cortes is here and possibly all right. Aaron Civale? Yeah, whatever.
Are they actually trying?
I can’t read minds!
Playoffs?
PECOTA says no.
Chicago Cubs
by Lauren Theisen
What is their deal?
It's been one of the most painful curses in all of baseball: seven straight seasons without the Chicago Cubs winning a single playoff game. What did fans do to deserve this? Why does God hate them? And is there any hope that back-to-back 83-79 seasons portend something better this third time around? Let's find out.
Who are their guys?
The most interesting thing that happened to the Cubs this offseason was their trade for Kyle Tucker, who replaces new New York Yankee Cody Bellinger in right field. That's probably an upgrade! When Tucker was healthy last year, he was rockin', smashing a .993 OPS for the Astros. That "when healthy" qualifier is usually a red flag, because you worry about an injury reoccurring, but in Tucker's case he was blitzed in the shin by his own foul ball, which statistically isn't any more likely to happen now than it was before.
The only other hitter I really need you to know is Seiya Suzuki. He's been demoted, in a sense, to DH, which was a bit of a kerfuffle for a moment. But he was still the Cubs' most well-rounded dude at the plate last season.
Shota Imanaga is the coolest pitcher in a solid rotation, earning strikeouts with his superb splitter. Flanking him are the homegrown, high-ceiling lefty Justin Steele and the steady vet Jameson Taillon, coming off one of his better campaigns.
Are they good?
Well, they’re already 0-2, because the Dodgers beat them twice in Japan. But we can cut them some slack. In probably the softest division in baseball, this team has some room to screw up a bit and still keep hunting.
Are they actually trying?
Compared to what, the White Sox?
Playoffs?
Believe in miracles!
St. Louis Cardinals
by David Roth
What is their deal?
Who are their guys?
I just really love that photograph, but that is not entirely Their Deal. The Cardinals are the damn Cardinals, still, but they are in a down phase and seem to recognize as much. There are some fun guys coming—Tink Hence is both fun to think about and fun to say in the voice Daniel Craig used in Knives Out—but those guys are not quite there yet, and the last few installments of Cardinals Guys have not quite hit the previous specs. There are some recognizable guys still around—Willson Contreras, Sonny Gray, Nolan Arenado—but the team would happily deal away any of them if they could, and will if they can. Everyone else is A Cardinal.
Are they good?
At winning MLB games in the season that's about to start, no they probably are not. But no organization has ever been better at Being The Cardinals, both in terms of building and maintaining successful internal processes and being obnoxious about it. They simply never break character. There is going to be a story this year where executives and maybe even some players criticize Willson Contreras, on the record, for not saying "bless you" quickly enough after Alec Burleson sneezed on the team plane. "That's not who we are," a dirty-looking 27-year-old with four Zyn pouches in his mouth will say, sourly. "That's not how we do it here." Their fans will greet that statement with a vigor they usually reserve for ostentatiously applauding a sacrifice fly. The guy's name will be like Trevor-Brendan O'Tom.
Are they actually trying?
In a sense, yes. They're still the damn Cardinals, and there is talent percolating up through a player-development program with a strong if now faintly dusty track record of getting the absolute most out of just about everyone. But the big-league cupboard is decently bare, the generation of prospects that were supposed to keep things going hasn't produced, and they are hitting a very reasonable pivot. So they are not trying to be good right now, and will be trying harder to get cheaper/worse by shedding whatever veterans they can than they are to actually win games this year. They signed just one MLB free agent this offseason, and it was a reliever they added a couple weeks ago. They'll still probably be better than they should be.
Playoffs?
It is with no small amount of pleasure that I can say Absolutely Not.
San Diego Padres
by Kelsey McKinney
Everyone loves a good villain. They're sexy. They're mean. They're an absolute blast to watch as long as they aren't up against you. No one in the 2024 season was more of a villain than the San Diego Padres. I wrote about this team's villainy in my Baseball Prospectus essay this year, and it was such a delight to go back and watch their playoff games. There's such a snark, a venom, a sex appeal to the Padres. Fernando Tatis Jr. stuck his whole giant tongue out of his mouth to taunt Dodgers fans. Jurickson Profar pretended not to rob a home run ball for so long that they put the celebratory graphics on the screen. It's always fun to watch a team like this, that has as much personality as it does talent.
Plus the Padres got so hot. In the final stretch of the season, they went 43-19. There was a swagger there that was earned. The question is not whether or not the Padres are a good team. They are. The question is whether they can stay that way. If they can manage to keep Dylan Cease, Michael King, and Yu Darvish healthy, they may be great this year. But their 2024 season ended with a brutal loss to the Dodgers. To be our World Series champions this year, the Padres must become the team they were before that loss.
Colorado Rockies
by Tom Ley
What is their deal?
The Rockies, perhaps more than any other team in the league, know how to enjoy a revenue-sharing agreement. Following a period of time in which the franchise at least gave the impression that it was trying to develop a way to win while playing home games at altitude, the Rockies have officially given up.
And why not? Blessed with a semi-engaged fanbase that will still reward the team with solid attendance numbers just because the ballpark is a nice place to hang out for a few hours, the Rockies have realized there's no real point in trying. This is a team that hasn't won more than 46 percent of its games since 2018, and yet nothing changes. All the same players have once again returned for another spin. This will be Bud Black's 10th season as manager; the analytics department is still just some guy sitting in a closed room with two iPads; the owner's son is still the director of the scouting department; the guy who thought it would be a good idea to throw $182 million at Kris Bryant is still the general manager. Nothing matters here.
Who are their guys?
I dunno, man. Ezequiel Tovar, I guess? Tovar is a quintessential fake good player. A 23-year-old shortstop with a Gold Glove who hit 45 doubles and 26 homers in his third season can get you rubbing your hands together like a greedy little pig, right up until the moment you notice his .290 OBP and the 200 strikeouts he collected last season. There are worse players to root for than Rocky Mountain Javy Baez, I guess.
Are they good?
No!!!!
Are they actually trying?
No!!!!
Playoffs?
No!!!!!!!!!!
Arizona Diamondbacks
by Kelsey McKinney
This team is full of little shits, and I say that with affection. The Diamondbacks are sneaky. You must not underestimate them. For several years now, they have gone to the playoffs, and every member of their team looks like he could be cast in a play about the Old West. That should terrify you! They have two Corbins on their team this year (Burnes and Carroll). This should fill your body with unease. Like with a real Diamondback snake, you should keep your eye on them, warily.
San Francisco Giants
by Ray Ratto
What is their deal?
Put simply, the Giants are beginning a tentative, even nervous tightrope walk between repudiating analytics and pretending to repudiate analytics while still using analytics because nobody doesn't use analytics. This is the new public face of the franchise now that it has the Bay Area to itself, because the fan base had its fill of the very word under the now-deposed Farhan Zaidi tenure.
The Giants under Zaidi were aggressively uninteresting except for 2021, when every one of their uninteresting players had a career year and they won 107 regular season games. This would have satisfied even the pickiest nits in the fan base if not for the fact that they couldn't escape the Dodgers in the divisional playoffs and swiftly reverted to their base line of uninteresting. Zaidi went from being allegedly signed to a contract through 2026 to actually being signed to a contract through 2025 and eventually fired after 2024. There's a lesson in that, and that's that when the face of your franchise is the head of baseball operations, you are ... wait for it ... OK, now ... uninteresting.
Where the analytics thing comes in is in Zaidi's replacement, Buster Posey, who is trying to bring the team back to its scouting-centric base of the World Series years, trying to recreate the more ephemeral culture that carried them through the ... wait for it ... OK, now ... Buster Posey years. That will take wiser drafting (like when they drafted Buster Posey), more effective player leadership (like when they made Buster Posey the centerpiece without making him be the out-loud leader) and some potential Hall of Famers (like Buster Posey). Seeing a thread here?
Who are their guys?
Well, Willy Adames comes immediately to mind, given that he signed a seven-year, $182 million deal that has no deferred money and a full no-trade clause, the biggest and most secure contract ever signed by a Giant. With that, Posey got a bigger name in three months than Zaidi got in six seasons. He then re-upped third baseman Matt Chapman with a six-year, $151 million deal, and even squirreled away $15 million to pay for a year of Justin Verlander.
None of these players move the needle in ways that the Giants' utterly quixotic attempts at Shohei Ohtani and before that Aaron Judge might have had they succeeded, but until they get something meaningful from any of the Zaidi drafts—of which new second baseman Tyler Fitzgerald, catcher Patrick Bailey and fifth starter Kyle Harrison are the only players to be on the likely Opening Day roster—they'll be doing what they've done since 2019: backing and filling with a largely uninteresting roster.
Are they good?
Well, Posey reaches the Hall of Fame ballot in two years, if that's your idea of good. But in a division that has two clearly superior teams (the Dodgers, Padres and Dodgers again) and a probably superior team (the Diamondbacks), these Giants look like a year away from being a year away. Posey has never had a job like this before, and he will certainly make his share of mistakes even if he has Brian Sabean on speed dial. But he represents a glorious past that had nightly sellouts and alternate-year parades, so he'll get some rope. We'd say that he and they should be fully formed in Year Three, but that didn't do Zaidi any good.
Are they fun?
You know what they say: Meh don't lie.
Playoffs?
There will be playoffs. There are playoffs every year. Just not here. Fully formed teams don't hire a new baseball ops boss.
Los Angeles Dodgers
by David Roth
What is their deal?
They're the defending champs and the ultimate baseball organization. Pretty much the apex predator that the sport has produced in this century, and the winners of nearly 60 percent of their games since Barack Obama was re-elected. They're the best and most sophisticated at basically everything a ball club is supposed to do—player development, player evaluation, ultra-cynical bleeding-edge fungibility-intensive executive scuzz, creative accounting, adaptive coaching, whatever—and also as rich as any other team or richer. Is more or less what the deal is. The whole sport spent the offseason talking about them as if they were an existential threat to the very concept of competitiveness, which says more about how annoying baseball discourse can get about stuff like this. They're really good, but October baseball is random enough and mean enough that they are not entirely inevitable.
Who are their guys?
It's not quite Most Of the Guys, but it’s a lot of guys. Shohei Ohtani, Freddie Freeman, and Mookie Betts have all won MVP’s, and Teoscar Hernandez was clutch throughout their World Series run; Blake Snell has won two Cy Youngs, and Tyler Glasnow is one of the most dominant pitchers in the sport when he’s healthy enough to pitch, and Roki Sasaki was the top international free agent signing since Yoshinobu Yamamoto last year, and Tanner Scott was the best reliever on the free agent market, and all of those guys are their guys, but also not all of their guys. As noted, it’s a lot of guys. Also some talent evaluators believe that Zyhir Hope, an 11th-round pick whom the Dodgers got from the Cubs in a minor trade after the 2023 season, is one of the very best prospects in the sport.
Are they good?
Pretty good, yeah.
Are they actually trying?
Yes.
Playoffs?
I have simulated this season over 30,000 times using proprietary Defector technology and the only outcomes in which the Dodgers do not at the very least make the playoffs all involve King Ghidorah, the three-headed lizard from the Toho Godzilla Cinematic Universe, destroying Los Angeles. Weirdly the Pirates win all of those simulations.
