Bold is the eye of the beholder, so this attempt to thread the needle between “so crazy it’s actually useless to consider” and “contains too much realism to really be an outlier” is doomed to fail from the start. Cries of ‘too bold!’ and ‘not bold enough!’ are part and parcel of this yearly package. It’s still fun to try and predict some of the weirder things that we will know happen in any given baseball season.
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Most years, three of these are right. Last year was a bad year, only two correct — Logan Gilbert was the Mariners’ best starting pitcher, and the Nationals did have the worst pitching staff in baseball — but the column came just three Nate Lowe homers short of hitting .300 as it usually does.
So which three predictions will be right this year?
Take your pick.
1. Mike Trout will set a career-high in homers and lead the league
The trick to this thing is to always have one prediction that’s just a few off what’s projected for this year. Projections are by their nature reasonable, they sum up the possible outcomes and give you a median one. And THE BAT X projections from Derek Carty over at FanGraphs project that Mike Trout will hit 37 homers and be second in the big leagues to Aaron Judge and Kyle Schwarber at 39 a piece. So Trout is totally in the mix for home run leader around the league.
But to set his career high, he’s going to have to hit 46 homers, which is significantly more than what he’s projected for. Why would he do that at age 31?
Two reasons. First, the numbers. Barrel rate is more predictive of future power than any other single power stat — probably because it’s actually launch angle and exit velocity wrapped into one stat, meaning it’s not really one stat, but that’s a digression — and Trout just keeps Barreling more balls as his career goes on.
But the second half of this is soft science, about motivation and where Trout is in his career. He has a teammate in Shohei Ohtani that looks like he’s the best player of all time, and who is in the last year of his contract. The Angels have made the postseason once with Trout on the team. Now he’s coming off a WBC run that he told Ken Rosenthal was “unbelievably fun” and “the funnest experience I’ve had on a baseball field.” He’s extremely motivated to win for two reasons: the obvious, annual need to win. And also, the need to convince Ohtani to stay.
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“I’m going to do everything I can,” Trout told reporters earlier this spring, “to keep Shohei here for sure.”
Hitting 50 homers might be a start. Too bad he can’t pitch.
2. The Padres will have the best rotation in baseball this year
Over at FanGraphs, they have the Padres with the seventh-best rotation going into the season. They finished last year ninth in WAR, and 13th in rotation ERA. They didn’t make a high-priced front-of-the-rotation acquisition. So why would the Padres have the best rotation in baseball this year again?
For one, they did improve their depth. Signing Michael Wacha, converting Nick Martinez back to starting, trading for Jay Groome, signing Seth Lugo and then stretching him out in the spring, getting Adrian Morejon back from injury, and working to improve Ryan Weathers’ pitch shapes and mix — all of these things will matter in the end. Teams use six or seven starters liberally, and ten starters total on average, and it looks like this Padres team is a little better set to deal with any setbacks at the top of the rotation.
The top of the rotation is plenty good, too. Perhaps underrated by traditional projections. But here at The Athletic, we have projections based on Stuff+, which is a metric that looks only at the physical properties of the pitch and has been shown to be powerfully predictive. And these projections performed admirably in testing, as well. And if you sum up all the players projected for at least two starts for every team, look at which team rises to the top of the projected ppERA (pitching plus ERA) for starters.
This projection includes park factors and aging, so that’s why you might see a higher Stuff+ for a team like the Yankees, but that’s also going to make it a tiny bit more likely that this prediction comes true. Some teams, like the Rangers and Marlins, were hurt by some of the projections deep in their depth chart — good health for them could mean a lot in terms of zooming to the top of the league.
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Oh and those Marlins look pretty good when you look at the fastest fastballs thrown by starters this spring, with four of the top 15 fastball velocities posted in front of the machines this spring.
But this post was about the Padres. Because not only are Yu Darvish, Joe Musgrove, and Blake Snell underrated, but the depth behind them has improved.
3. Ryan McMahon will hit 30 homers and be an All-Star
“I need to trust myself, not be afraid to trust my eyes,” Ryan McMahon told MLB.com this spring. “If I think it’s going to be a good pitch to hit, swing — instead of being so selective and so picky. (In the past), maybe I was firing a little late, just not being aggressive enough. That’s been a focus this spring and this whole offseason.”
Power lives out in front of the plate — that’s where homers are, at least. Pulled fly balls are the best-performing type of batted ball because hitters that pull fly balls get the ball out in front, where their swing will naturally provide a little more loft, and because pulled hard-hit balls in the air have less slice or fade to them. Think of the hardest-hit homers you’ve ever seen. Pull-side power alley. Missile. McMahon last year was 217th out of 240 hitters with 70 or more fly balls in terms of pulling the ball in the air.
So when a hitter who has managed to hit 20-24 homers with a ‘let it travel’ philosophy changes to a more aggressive tune, you take notice. Especially when that same hitter has hit the second-hardest-hit ball of the spring (in parks that have Statcast). Here are the ten hardest-hit balls so far in those parks:
| Player | EV (MPH) |
|---|---|
118.6 | |
117.7 | |
116.1 | |
115.9 | |
115.5 | |
115.3 | |
115.1 | |
114.9 | |
114.9 | |
114.6 |
In a Giancarlo Stanton sandwich is a good place to be, in terms of batted balls at least. He’s the king of Statcast.
And one ball, hit this hard, can make a difference! Rob Arthur once found here that a single ball hit harder than 108 mph matters in terms of projecting a player’s power.
Not being on this list can mean a lot of things. A player just hasn’t had the chance to connect on that one blast, or they haven’t played in the right parks. But being on this list is good news for the power potentials of young players like Jordan Walker and Jo Adell, good news for the current state of bounce-backers Trey Mancini and Franmil Reyes, and yeah, good news for the breakout potential of a certain Rockies infielder.
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4. The Baltimore Orioles will make the playoffs
Last year, we noted how many well-projected rookies the Guardians had, and incorrectly tabbed one of them as a Rookie of the Year. Getting a finalist in Steven Kwan still doesn’t count. So this year, we’re going to look at a team just laden with young talent, and we’ll make a team-based bold prediction instead.
Obviously, the fruits of the player development system have already produced Adley Rutschman (projected by Steamer projections to be the best catcher in baseball this coming season) and Gunnar Henderson (Steamer thinks he’ll be a top-ten third baseman). They join quality mid-career veterans like Cedric Mullins, Anthony Santander, Austin Hays and Ryan Mountcastle in a lineup that is projected to be exactly league average right now. That might be underrating this team because of the nature of projecting young players as well as the other prospects that could join the team this year — Jordan Westburg, Connor Norby, Heston Kjerstad and Colton Cowser are all knocking on the door, and part of the whopping 16 players projected by Steamer to be within four points of league average (or better) with the bat.
Where the projections might be most off, though, is on the pitching side. Those ppERA projections from above have the team sixth in the big leagues, while the standings page on FanGraphs has the Orioles giving up the seventh-most runs per game in the coming season. Take a look at the ERAs and strikeout rates projected using Stuff+, and you’ll get a very different sense of the quality of this pitching staff:
Player | ppERA | ppK% |
|---|---|---|
4.68 | 15.6% | |
3.97 | 19.4% | |
4.21 | 19.9% | |
3.64 | 24.1% | |
3.05 | 28.9% | |
3.70 | 22.7% | |
3.33 | 29.3% | |
3.63 | 23.0% | |
2.53 | 34.1% | |
3.70 | 19.9% | |
3.37 | 25.7% | |
4.24 | 20.5% | |
3.57 | 23.4% | |
3.65 | 24.2% | |
3.93 | 21.5% |
In Grayson Rodriguez, they have the best-projected rookie starter in baseball. In Kyle Bradish, they have breakout potential that’s shown top-15 Stuff+ this spring among starting pitchers. In Cole Irvin and Kyle Gibson, they have reliable innings. In Tyler Wells and DL Hall, they have two young starters who have already shown good stuff and just need to find consistency and reliability. In the bullpen, they have the best stuff in baseball in Félix Bautista, but also some other pitchers that are projected to be assets.
Even if the Orioles don’t make the playoffs this year, this won’t be as bold of a prediction to make a year from now. But sometimes a young team gels quickly.
5. Oneil Cruz goes 30/30 in his first full season
Last year, in his debut season, Pirates shortstop Oneil Cruz hit the hardest-hit ball of the Statcast era. It read 122.4 mph on the machine, but it made just as much impact aurally.
“It sounded like a bomb went off,” starter Mitch Keller told MLB.com. “It was crazy. I don’t even know how he does it.”
He also threw the hardest infield throw last year. He was also the fifth-fastest among players with at least 100 competitive runs last year. He can do anything on the field physically.
There is the matter of strikeouts, however. He had the third-worst strikeout rate in the majors among players with at least 300 plate appearances, and he struck out a whopping 53 percent of the time against lefties. There’s work to be done here, and just a little bit of evidence that he’s making progress. For one, contact rates generally improve until a player turns 25 or 26, which is good news for the 24-year-old Cruz. For two, his strikeout rate this spring is a much more palatable 27 percent so far, and spring strikeout rates actually have a little bit of predictive power. And then there’s the matter of his gently improving swing decisions as the season went along last year.
Generally, he reduced his propensity to swing at pitches outside the zone (red) and improved his aggression inside the zone (yellow) and that had some impact on his overall results (blue). Hitters generally swing and chase less as they age and learn the game, so that should serve Cruz well. And any improvement in contact rates should help him break out, especially as a speedy lefty in the age of new rules regarding the shift and the stolen base. In fact, Ben Clemens over at FanGraphs found that players with a large difference between their 95th percentile exit velocity (raw power) and average exit velocity (game power) that also improved their contact rates broke out, as a group. And Cruz had the biggest gap on that list.
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According to those around him, Cruz is a quiet, self-driven, and competitive person on a day-to-day basis. Combine that with loud physical tools, and the gradual learning that comes with more reps at the higher level, and you have a massive breakout waiting to happen.
6. Riley Greene breaks out and goes 20/10
It’s always good when you share a breakout star with a colleague like Keith Law, but I’m going to take it a little further than the 15+ homers and .340+ on-base percentage predicted in his column. It’s for similar reasons, because it is good news that Riley Greene made powerful contact when he did make contact, and there is also some evidence that he could improve that contact rate. Qualified hitters with similar swinging strike (9.8 percent) and swinging percentages (45.3 percent) last year all struck out less than he did, for example.
But then there’s just the fact that, even given what he did do last year, he was a little unlucky. Barrel rates predict future power better than things like slugging percentage, and he Barreled the ball well but didn’t have a good slugging percentage. He had one of the largest gaps between his Barrel rate and isolated slugging percentage among the 278 hitters with at least 300 plate appearances last year:
| Player | ISO | Barrel | BRL RNK | ISO RNK | DIFF |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
0.103 | 9.3% | 109 | 238 | 129 | |
0.148 | 12.8% | 34 | 150 | 116 | |
0.109 | 9.3% | 108 | 224 | 116 | |
0.124 | 9.7% | 94 | 199 | 105 | |
0.144 | 11.3% | 57 | 157 | 100 | |
0.154 | 11.9% | 44 | 141 | 97 | |
0.123 | 9.4% | 105 | 202 | 97 | |
0.170 | 16.2% | 9 | 101 | 92 | |
0.117 | 8.4% | 119 | 210 | 91 | |
0.155 | 11.8% | 46 | 136 | 90 |
The hitters on this list all hit the ball hard and in the right angles and didn’t get rewarded for it as much as you’d expect. It’s possible there are some park effects on this list — which also makes Brian Anderson interesting, by the way, as he moves from Miami to Milwaukee — but then there’s even good news on that front for both Greene and teammate Spencer Torkelson. The Tigers are bringing in the fences and reducing their heights as well, in a plan to make a park that has played pitcher-friendly play more neutrally in the future.
Even if some of the growth only comes from the park playing more friendly to his power, we’ll take it. Still counts in the record book.
7. Corey Seager wins the AL MVP
Predicting any player to beat Shohei Ohtani in the MVP race seems like folly. But ask Mike Trout and Willie Mays what happens when a player is consistently the best player in the league, and maybe we’ve already seen some of that with Ohtani: at some point, there’s a little fatigue among voters, a sense that someone new deserves the award, or we’d just have to give it to this player over and over again. Mays in particular should’ve won as many as eight more MVPs while he was playing, as an example.
So could Corey Seager step to the plate and become the shiny new toy? He’s been a top-10 player in his league twice, but that was back in 2016 and 2017. What’s changed since?
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For one, the rules. Now teams can only play two guys on each side of the infield, and all the infielders have to have their feet on the grass. This will most likely help lefty hitters that hit hard ground balls to the pull side. So, who hit the most hard (90+ mph exit velocity) ground balls and line drives (zero to ten degrees launch angle) to the pull side last year?
| Player | Pitches |
|---|---|
28 | |
28 | |
28 | |
28 | |
27 | |
26 | |
25 | |
24 | |
24 | |
24 |
That’s right! Corey Seager. And he hit a hundred points lower on those balls than the league did on average.
Of course, even that discrepancy only means a handful of hits on these balls in particular, as you can see from the overall totals. Even if we add 15 hits to Seager’s total last year, they aren’t pushing his overall batting average much past .260. The low-water mark in the free agency era for an MVP winner (who didn’t pitch) is a .281 batting average.
But Seager has hit .300 in the past, and these new shift rules will help him on the way to hitting .300 again in the future. Also, since he was last a top-10 player in his league, he’s lowered his strikeout rate and increased his Barrel rate. He’s most definitely a better hitter now, and he just had his third-best defensive season by Ultimate Zone Rating, which powers FanGraphs WAR, which in turn is hugely influential in MVP voting. Team factors will also matter — the Rangers are projected to improve this next season, and if they push past the 83 wins in their projections, a large part of the credit will go to their slugging shortstop.
Give Seager a .300 batting average, a .375 on-base percentage, and a .525 slugging percentage — all possible if the first number is possible — along with above-average defense at shortstop for a team that makes the playoffs, and there will be a marriage of narrative and production that might just be good enough to get him some hardware.
8. Lars Nootbaar will be a top-25 hitter in the big leagues
Hitters can use weighted implements to increase their bat speed just like pitchers can with weighted balls, and so Lars Nootbaar went to Driveline before last season and went on a mission to increase his bat speed. He nearly tripled his Barrel rate and increased his maximum exit velocity by three-and-a-half ticks. He went back this year to work on pulling the ball in the air — you can hear more about it here in an interview on the Rates & Barrels podcast. The Cardinals led the league in pulled fly balls, and joining the party can only mean good things for Nootbaar.
But he’s already on a great list. Here are all the players with at least 300 plate appearances last year that were in the top quartile of the league in both contact rate and Barrel rate.
Player | Team | SwStr% | Barrel% |
|---|---|---|---|
HOU | 9.0% | 21.00% | |
NYY | 8.6% | 13.70% | |
SDP | 6.0% | 12.40% | |
LAA | 8.3% | 12.10% | |
STL | 8.6% | 12.10% | |
MIN | 9.0% | 11.40% | |
SFG | 8.7% | 11.10% | |
CHC | 8.0% | 11.00% | |
NYM | 5.9% | 10.60% | |
LAA | 8.6% | 10.40% | |
LAD | 7.20% | 10.30% | |
LAD | 8.30% | 10.10% |
That’s a good list to be on. Contact, power, speed, and a winning smile, and it’ll all come together this year.
9. Hunter Greene, Nick Lodolo and Graham Ashcraft are the best young big three in 15 years
As a group, Reds youngsters Hunter Greene, Nick Lodolo and Graham Ashcraft averaged 97.4 mph on the fastball last year. And not without movement! Greene’s got ride, Lodolo’s got sink, and Ashcraft’s got a wicked cut fastball. By Stuff+, Greene was fifth, Ashcraft was 35th, and Lodolo was 59th. Only the Yankees, Rays, and Astros had more starters in the top 60 by Stuff+.
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But another fun aspect of this trio is how they’ve come up together, and they’re so young. They have the chance to be the best trio of starters on one team that young and that good in a long time. This century, there have been four teams with three starters 25 and under that each had at least 2.5 Wins Above Replacement (about a top-50 starter in the league most years)
- The Giants in 2008 with Tim Lincecum, Matt Cain and Jonathan Sanchez
- The Marlins in 2006 with Dontrelle Willis, Josh Johnson and Scott Olsen
- The Marlins in 2003 with Josh Beckett, Dontrelle Willis and Brad Penny
- The Athletics in 2001 with Mark Mulder, Tim Hudson and Barry Zito
Before that you might remember such luminaries as the 1991 Braves (Tom Glavine, John Smoltz, and Steve Avery) and 1997 Pirates (Jason Schmidt, Esteban Loiaza, and Francisco Cordova), but there’s been a general trend away from the youngest of starters in the game, and so you have that long break. The Reds’ young threesome, with good health, has the stuff to join this exclusive club.
10. Kevin Gausman will win the AL Cy Young Award
Not every team pitches in front of the machines in spring training — the Florida teams are better set up to receive Statcast information so far — but we do get the blessing of pitch movement and velocity numbers from a good portion of the spring parks. And those numbers give us a look at their Stuff+, which is probably the most powerful small-sample stat in the business. Once the season gets going, you can find this stat on FanGraphs here, and read about the validation work and the explanation of the statement over there too. But for now, here’s a look at the pitchers that have thrown at least 100 pitches, with more than 40 pitches per appearance, and have had the biggest improvement in their Stuff+ this spring.
Player | Pitches | STUFFplus | ppStuff+ | Diff |
|---|---|---|---|---|
236 | 129 | 110 | 19 | |
153 | 98 | 82 | 16 | |
136 | 120 | 106 | 14 | |
101 | 115 | 104 | 11 | |
106 | 123 | 112 | 11 | |
189 | 110 | 102 | 8 | |
195 | 115 | 107 | 8 | |
103 | 91 | 83 | 8 | |
243 | 111 | 103 | 8 | |
120 | 95 | 87 | 8 |
Looks like the balk rule change is not a big deal for Kevin Gausman. This spring, he’s showing the most ride on his fastball in seven years, and his slider has changed shape and is registering as a good pitch for the first time too. Other things he has going for him are that he had a weird bad-luck batting average on balls in play last year that should regress, he’s going to face in-division foes less often this year due to the rule changes, and his team will score plenty of runs behind him for the voters that like wins.
Gausman was already the second-best pitcher in the American League last year by WAR, so maybe this isn’t so bold — there are plenty of names on this list that would make for bolder predictions, but you can’t blame a person for shooting for .400 once in a while.
(Top photo of Seager: Brace Hemmelgarn / Minnesota Twins / Getty Images)
