Sarris: 10 bold predictions for the 2025 MLB season

There’s good news and there’s bad news about last year’s bold predictions. The good news? We went 5-for-10, the high-water mark of this series. Even if you count it differently, that’s well beyond the normal 2-for-10 or 3-for-10 that is the goal when you’re being bold.

That’s the bad news, too. We didn’t push it far enough. Not spicy enough. We’ll try to find a way to push the needle without getting ridiculous, because the point of this exercise is to try to anticipate the outlier events, but to do so in a way that highlights current research and trends and makes for an interesting read. The Marlins won’t win it all this year, and predicting them to raise MLB’s Commissioner’s Trophy doesn’t really lead anywhere enticing.

So here’s this year’s version — bolder, spicier … but not too crazy. It’s a fine line we walk with these things.

The Phillies have the best pitching staff in baseball

No projection system has the Phillies in the top four among pitching staffs in baseball. Baseball Prospectus has them 21st in runs allowed this coming season. Clay Davenport has them 11th.

While most everyone thinks they have a great starting rotation, some may be casting more aspersions about the bullpen. To be fair, Jordan Romano’s health and stuff is a question mark, José Alvarado can be as wild as anyone, and though Orion Kerkering and Matt Strahm might be underrated by the general public, most bullpens have that nasty dude who nobody knows about.

So why will this staff rise above the questions in the pen? Because the rotation goes deep, and that will save the pen. Former Phillies research and development staffer Lewie Pollis wrote recently that “each additional out a starter records is associated with a four-point improvement in bullpen ERA,” which makes sense because a team in line for the win will use its best receivers. Perhaps more impressively, “each inning a starter pitches today lowers their team’s relief ERA by seven points tomorrow.” The Phillies’ starters all throw two or three fastballs, which helps them turn the lineup over more often, and were top-10 in innings per start last year. They added Jesús Luzardo to the mix, have him throwing two fastballs this spring and Philadelphia projects to lead the league when it comes to starters going deep into games. Here’s the OOPSY projection from FanGraphs for team quality starts from pitchers projected for a minimum of 50 innings:

So maybe the bullpen in Philadelphia will be fine. Because of the starters, if that makes sense.

The Red Sox return to the World Series

Here’s a weird thing that happens if you cruise around different sites’ win projections for teams. FanGraphs, Baseball Prospectus and Clay Davenport don’t have an American League team projected for more than 90 wins. They all have between four and six National League teams reaching that mark, but none of them have the Orioles, Rangers, Yankees or Astros winning 90 games. That side of the bracket seems wide open.

But how will the Red Sox, who have an average projected win total of around 83, do it? That’s the bold part.

It has to do with needs and potential solutions. Boston is really strong in a lot of places, and maybe understatedly so in the rotation, where FanGraphs has them fourth. By those same projections, the Sox are worst at catcher, shortstop and one of the corner outfield situations. They probably won’t be able to find a better catcher than Connor Wong, particularly after they traded away Kyle Teel. But the other two positions? They’ve got a couple of studs who are just about ready to hit the big leagues.

“He’s got a chance to be a 30-homer, high-average, high-OBP guy in right field, maybe with plus defense there, which is a “best player in the league” profile,” wrote Keith Law about Roman Anthony, whom he had as the top prospect in baseball. “He could easily be a plus defender at second and at worst should post high OBPs with 20-30 steals and 50+ extra-base hits a year,” he wrote about Kristian Campbell, who he has ninth.

The news that Campbell is making the team pushes David Hamilton to an important spot. He’s the glue guy who can play any position on the infield — and well, at that. “Our internal defensive metrics always had him at plus plus even at short,” said one executive with the team, and Defensive Runs Saved seems to agree. With Ceddanne Rafaela being a similar player in the outfield, that means the Sox have veterans, depth and high-end youth all over the diamond. Sounds like a good recipe for success.

James Wood is this year’s Elly De La Cruz

So often, the guys who swing the bat hard are not the guys who move the legs fast. But when they do both things, they tend to be special. Take a look at these 16 players who are in the top 100 when it comes to bat speed and sprint speed.

Not a clunker in the bunch, even if Luke Raley is one of those surprising athletes who sneaks up on you. This list does establish that James Wood, a rising star in the Nationals’ outfield, has something in common with the current star in the Reds’ infield. But Elly stole 67 bases last year, and Wood doesn’t have a single stolen base this spring. Even if we lower the bar for a successful prediction to something like 45 or 50, why would Wood run that much?

Well, it turns out that how much a team steals in the spring is tightly correlated to how much they steal in the regular season. Last year, the Nationals stole a ton of bases in the spring, and then led the league with 223 steals in the regular season. That mirrored what the league did. This spring, the league has attempted steals about two percent more often than they did last year according to Jason Collette, and the Nationals have attempted more steals than anyone not named the Royals, Pirates or Brewers, signaling that the light is still green for those Nationals base runners.

Wood, who hit .264 with nine homers and 14 steals in 2024, should be good for .250, 25 homers, 45-plus stolen bases, and a whole lot of excitement in our nation’s capital in 2025. Book it.

Wyatt Langford is an All-Star

On the left is Wyatt Langford when he got to the big leagues. That hitter had a .384 slugging percentage despite good walk and strikeout totals and a refined approach at the plate. On the right is Langford in September. That Langford had a .610 slugging percentage and put up more production (by Wins Above Replacement) than any player in baseball not named Shohei Ohtani.

“I was more upright in the second half of the season, yeah,” said Langford, after admitting that early last season was the first time he’d ever really struggled. “I was getting under balls. Guys up here have more velocity, and a lot more pitches. When I was taller, I was shorter to the ball, more direct. Before, I had to go down and back first.”

This is obviously just one adjustment, of many he might have to make. But when he was called a “somatic genius” by a hitting coach in a reaction to our top-100 position player rankings, that’s what the coach was talking about. Langford felt this was a situation that “solved itself,” that the velocity and stuff of major-league pitchers necessitated this change, but he seemed to have a good sense of when good enough wasn’t good enough, and the change had to be made. It’s hard to know when this is just a hot month when it comes to analysis like this, but when it’s paired with pedigree and prodigious tools, it feels right. If he’s hitting .300 with speed and patience and contact — and the power that he showed late last year is real — he’ll be an obvious selection for the All-Star Game.

The Guardians have a top-five rotation

Well here’s a fun leaderboard. It’s the top 10 starters in spring training by Stuff+ through Monday’s games.

Now, some pieces are missing from spring data, like arm angle, and those are important to the model. Also, this doesn’t include all the parks where Statcast doesn’t have their full setup, so it’s not every pitcher. But among the pitchers who were tracked, Gavin Williams was No. 1 and Tanner Bibee also had a top number (122), and despite some spring troubles so did Luis L. Ortiz (119). Ben Lively was just below average (96) but he also benefits from a funky, deceptive delivery that hides his release point well. If his 90 mph fastball and low strikeout rate prove to be not enough this year, though, they have some solid depth in changeup artist Joey Cantillo and multiple-breaking-pitch spinner Slade Cecconi.

In terms of upside beyond last year, Williams has the benefit of good health and a better slider this spring.

“With the elbow, that affected things. I also got way too deep in the back,” said Williams this spring about his health and mechanics last year. “That bled over into the slider, and I wasn’t able to stay behind it. Now I spike the slider grip, to get a little more two-plane movement, more depth than on a cutter.”

This spring, Williams has three inches more drop on his hard breaking ball than he did last year, and though it’s a few ticks softer, it’s been a very effective pitch. He’s top 10 in spring training in strikeouts-minus-walks, which is another stat (like Stuff+) that can be powerful in small samples. His locker neighbor Bibee is adding a sinker.

“Actually I’m bringing it back, it’s the two-seamer I used to throw in college,” said Bibee this spring. “It’s kind of like a reverse cutter boring in on righties.”

Add some more spice around what was already one of the best five sliders in baseball by outcomes last year, and he might just have another level.

If this all sounds like a rotation that could be called top-five without being bold, it probably makes sense to point out that FanGraphs has them 27th right now.

Nolan Arenado gets back on the Hall of Fame track with a 30-homer season

It wasn’t a great offseason for Nolan Arenado. All that talk about where he’d be playing this coming season was probably exhausting enough, just to see the trade talks fall apart while he was trying to get ready for spring training. But throughout it all, Arenado has seemingly been plugging away at getting back to being himself. And one way he’s shown some promise is how hard he’s been swinging. Here are the top 10 players who have at least 150 tracked pitches this spring, and have added the most bat speed.

Gabriel Arias might’ve just won the starting job in Cleveland, Ben Rice is hitting the crap out of the ball and Jake McCarthy might be the starter in center for the Diamondbacks on Opening Day, so some of these players are riding improved bat speed into bigger playing-time shares right now. But one thing Arenado has compared to most of these guys is the ability to make contact. Though bat speed has improved our ability to project power, it can be associated with swing-and-miss. Arenado’s swing is a little longer this spring, and he is swinging and missing a little bit more, but he still only has a 10.6 percent strikeout rate in the Grapefruit League.

After 2020, there was some question if Arenado was in decline, and the Rockies decided to pay down the contract and ship him out of town. In St. Louis, he pulled more fly balls than ever and had a three-year resurgence going as 2024 started. But the bat speed slowed last year, and despite a furious effort to get it back on track, he only spent a week or two with above-average bat speed. His current spring bat speed would be in the top 40 if he kept it up all year. And yeah, that’s why this one’s bold, we’re forecasting more power based on five spring swings.

One-third of all pitches next year will be sinkers, cutters, or splitters

In the marketplace of pitches, stock in sinkers was performing awfully in the pitch-tracking era. Between 2008 and 2021, the use of sinkers was down over 40 percent as teams focused on high-spin riding fastballs and pitching for whiffs at the top of the zone. Sliders picked up the slack at first, and are still up at peak usage. But advances in seam-shifted wake and recent research showing the importance of having a wide arsenal combined to set the scene for a resurgence in sinkers in particular. But cutters and splitters also benefited from this study — pitches that have been considered a little finicky in the past were now more trainable given high-speed cameras and pitch-tracking equipment.

If you look at the use of different pitches, you can see that uptick in sinkers, cutters and splitters in the past couple of years.

Last year, only 27 percent of the league’s pitches were sinkers, cutters or splitters. But teams like the Mets, Phillies, Mariners and Giants are emphasizing multiple fastballs — pitchers throwing new sinkers this spring include Kodai Senga, Griffin Canning, Jackson Jobe, Jared Jones, David Festa and Jack Leiter. Perhaps they saw the success Hunter Brown had last year when he added his sinker, or maybe they just want more wrinkles on the fastball. You could say the same about teams like the Dodgers, Cubs and Blue Jays leaning into the split-finger — it could be because of some high-profile splitters like the ones thrown by Yoshinobo Yamamoto and Kevin Gausman, or it could be that they’ve found better ways to teach that pitch.

In any case, a little lurch forward in each type of pitch and we could see these old-school pitches taking over a third of the modern pitching environment.

The Giants have the best bullpen in baseball

Filed in a folder somewhere called “things I believe that have some evidence but I can’t prove” is the belief that having many different types of arm angles in your bullpen is a good idea. We know that there’s such a thing as “shape fatigue,” where hitters get better at solving pitches the more often they see them, even if the stuff is constant. We know that hitters get better at relievers the more often they see them in a short series. And we know from Stuff+ research that the relationship of arm angle to movement is incredibly important in a general sense.

Last year, some of the best bullpens had great numbers despite only middling fastball velocity — the Giants, Yankees, Rays and Diamondbacks, in particular, had great numbers and were also full of very different release points in the bullpen. The Giants lapped the field in arm angle variability, actually, and in no small part due to Tyler Rogers alone. Here’s what this year’s Giants pen looks like, in terms of arm angles, if you overlay them all onto one body thanks to the visualizations at Baseball Savant.

That’s a lot of different looks coming at batters in San Francisco. So while OOPSY projections (which include Stuff+ and Location+) have the Twins, Mets and Guardians putting up the best ERA, and the Dodgers and Braves second and third in projected strikeouts-minus-walks, something funny happens if you also score the bullpens on arm angle variance.

Their Funk+ floats the Giants to the front.

Joey Ortiz goes .260/20/20 as the Brewers’ new starting shortstop

For the first two, almost three months as a Brewer, Joey Ortiz was cooking. He was hitting .274 with six homers and a .448 slugging percentage in late June when something grabbed in his neck.

“Couldn’t move my neck, that’s all,” the infielder said dryly at spring training last week. “That’s why I had to take some time off. Just happens, it happens.”

You could immediately see the downturn in his ability to put the ball in play with authority. Here is his 50-balls-in-play rolling exit velocity chart for last year, with the removal from that late-June game annotated.

He hit four more homers all year with a .345 slugging percentage afterward and admitted it was really hard to move the way he wanted to. His exit velocity average was down almost two ticks after the injury. So after he suffered through 11 hitless postseason at-bats, he went to work on the neck. Rest, rehab, strengthening the muscles around it, the whole deal. He feels good this spring and is slugging .698, and though those are just spring results, new research suggests that spring results are about 75 percent as valuable as regular-season results when it comes to predicting the future.

If the projection here doesn’t seem bold, there’s only one other Brewers shortstop who’s ever hit those benchmarks: Robin Yount.

Hayden Wesneski is the Astros’ newest coaching win

Research on the best practices in baseball often winds its way back to the past. Stuff+ research led to pitchers wanting to throw their nastiest pitches all the time, but the newest work in the public space has shown that there’s value in variety. Down on the Farm showed that mixing pitches is a way to success, and Baseball Prospectus similarly found that changing velocities, shapes and pitch types can help a pitcher beat their projections. All of this is why Clay Holmes looks poised to bust out, but there’s another reliever conversion getting less attention on a team that maybe doesn’t get as much love as it should.

The Astros helped Justin Verlander and Gerrit Cole get better. They produced Framber Valdez, Cristian Javier and Luis Garcia off of tiny signing bonuses. Last year, Hunter Brown busted out under their tutelage. Could Hayden Wesneski be another name on the wall in Houston?

We don’t have that much tracked from Wesneski this spring, but here are the pitches we do have. They describe a wide range of velocities and movements.

He’ll go to the sweeper a lot because it’s his best pitch, but Wesneski is mixing it up well. He was already in the top quartile for the arsenal-size statistics at Baseball Prospectus as a reliever, and the Astros look like they’re having him focus on being unpredictable. That’s pretty old-school, and it works.

(Top photo of James Wood and Elly De La Cruz: Diamond Images via Getty Images)

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