Every year, something crazy happens in baseball — and last year was no different. A shortstop doubled his best seasonal power output in his seventh season. A 34-year-old pitcher picked up that hot new pitch and nearly rode it to a Cy Young Award. A team turned out an incredible six young players who all look like impact bats (to different degrees), and then lost half of them due to various causes in the offseason. And that wasn’t even the team that pulled a similar trick in the American League and used it to finally make the postseason. Two wild cards that spent the season oscillating up and down finished strong and made the World Series. A team that had never won the World Series finally reached the mountaintop.

That’s one of the beauties of ball. And though the unpredictable happens all the time, you can’t stop us — especially in March — from trying to anticipate even the more unexpected outcomes. That’s the realm of the bold prediction.

Last year wasn’t a great year for these, but it fell in line with the general guidelines: Be so bold as to possibly get three out of 10 right. Last year, the Padres’ rotation did end up having the best ERA in baseball, and the Orioles made the postseason, so this column got two right. If only Riley Greene had stayed healthy, or Corey Seager had gone up against different competition for the MVP, or we’d put our J.P. Crawford predictions in a different column, we might have put up a decent batting average.

Ah well, nevertheless. Into the breach once more!

The Mariners have the best rotation in baseball

This worked last year, so let’s do it again. Maybe this isn’t bold enough, but it is worth pointing out that the Mariners rotation is “only” fourth over at FanGraphs’ depth charts. It is not fourth when you consider the physical qualities of their pitches, however (as Stuff+ does). Then it comes second to a behemoth.

So why will the Mariners end up first? Silly things like a park that’s friendlier to pitchers, but also not-so-silly things like better command than their Southern California counterparts. Location+ is a count- and pitch-type adjusted measure of command, and though it hasn’t shown to be as predictive as Stuff+, it has to be important on some level. New analysis from Alex Chamberlain provides us some hope that we can find command measures that are stickier year to year, and in the meantime, this one says that the Mariners’ top four will have the second-best stuff in baseball, and the best command in baseball.

The prediction here is that command savant George Kirby’s influence spreads and the Mariners’ starters take their rightful place atop baseball.

This wouldn’t have seemed bold in other seasons, but it is worth pointing out that Vladimir Guerrero, Jr. is not listed as a top-five favorite for American League MVP in most betting houses. Our collective eyes are on guys like Aaron Judge, Julio Rodríguez and Juan Soto, and that makes sense. Odds indicate that Corey Seager could make my 2023 bold prediction come true in 2024.

Everyone’s forgotten the guy who was a contender for the Triple Crown in 2021 and ended up second in the MVP to a superstar who just switched leagues. Vlad Jr. won a Gold Glove once, too! He’s projected to be the sixth-best hitter in the American League by The BAT X.

But those projections say he’ll hit more homers (34) than he’s hit since that glorious 2021 season, and it’s fair to wonder if that version of the player isn’t coming back. After all, that same system projected him to hit 42 homers in 2022 (when he hit 32) and 35 homers in 2023 (when he hit 26). More fool’s gold?

Something is changing, slowly, under the hood in Vladito’s game. The guy who has always hit the ball super hard is slowly, ever-so-surely, starting to lift the ball. Here’s his rolling, 50-ball in-play launch angle over his career — including the postseason and all spring training data.

This is the type of thing that ebbs and flows, but there’s a fairly clear progression here, and you can see that his 2021 featured more well-launched balls than much of 2022. Oh! And he looks svelte. Maybe this will be one of those “best shape of his life” things, or maybe it’ll be a “finally lifted the ball again with authority” things. Either way, his team, which slipped to 14th in runs last season, needs him and he looks ready to provide.

Sean Murphy will be the best catcher in baseball

Over at FanGraphs, Ben Clemens was having some fun with a statistic he called Whomps per Whiff. You won’t see it listed anywhere (other than here) because there’s a bit of whimsy in it — obviously — but the idea was to look at who barreled the ball the most per whiff, and of course it produced a list of the best hitters in baseball. Oh, and look who else was in the top 15.

It’s a bit of fun, but WpW is twice as predictive going forward as something like their current league- and park-adjusted offensive production (wRC+), and it does capture maybe two of the most important skills in modern baseball — the ability to make contact and hit the ball hard. Murphy’s number here is almost twice the league average.

This is probably most particularly meaningful for Murphy because he had such a weird season, with a .999 OPS in the first half and a .585 OPS in the second half. Possible explanations for the fade include injuries and “that Georgia heat,” and they certainly could impact Murphy again this year. The key takeaway from this list then is that despite whatever it was that kept his results poor in the second half, he was still showing the core skills that made him an important player for the Braves to acquire. Take baseball’s probable best defensive catcher, remove some bad injury luck and turn more of those whomps into homers, and you’ve got your best catcher in baseball.

The Yankees will have the top offense in the American League

They added Juan Soto. They added Alex Verdugo. Anthony Volpe has a year of making adjustments in his rearview mirror. Anthony Rizzo and Giancarlo Stanton have another chance to put in healthy years. There are things that you can point to that should improve this offense. But they were 25th in runs last year. Could adding two guys and hoping for better health really rocket them up this list that much? In a word, yes. Partially because they did things right under the hood and should’ve had better outcomes last year. Take a look at their Barrel rates and runs scored compared to other top barreling teams last season.

They hit the ball hard and in the air, and didn’t score as many runs as the other teams that did. Even ones that played in cold, tough pitcher’s parks. It’s not like they didn’t walk much (they were sixth in walks) or that they struck out too much (tenth-most strikeouts, so maybe a little of this). Mostly, they just didn’t have the right guys healthy at the right time, or the right hits at the right time, and so on.

In fact, this isn’t very bold at all — they’re projected to be a top-five offense. But it feels bold given how bad they were last year. And it might ensure that I get at least one right next year, so there’s that.

The Pirates win a wild-card spot

Let’s just go to the bullet points.

• Ke’Bryan Hayes lifted the ball this spring (11-degree launch angle, career average was 5 degrees until last year), which was a big part of his second-half power surge last year.
• Oneil Cruz hit the absolute snot out of the ball (three of the top 10 tracked exit velocities this spring) and is healthy again.
• Top pitching prospect Jared Jones just showed his nastiness (top-10 spring Stuff+) and made the rotation.
• Henry Davis spent the winter working on his swing plane and smoked the most tracked line drives this spring.
• Jack Suwinksi, who does everything but make contact, struck out less than the league average this spring.
• The team added major-league depth (Marco Gonzales, Martín Pérez, Eric Lauer, Domingo Germán and Aroldis Chapman) to their rotation and bullpen in free agency.
• Paul Skenes, possibly the best pitching prospect in baseball, is lurking in the high minors.
• Andrew McCutchen is back.

FanGraphs has the Pirates winning 77 games, but this is a young team on the rise, and those team projections have 10-win error bars. On this same date last season, the Orioles and Diamondbacks were both projected for 78 wins.

The Tigers’ first-round picks are resurrected

In 2016, the Tigers took high school pitcher Matt Manning in the first round. In 2018, they went to college and took Casey Mize with the first pick in the draft. In the short 2020 draft, they took college bat Spencer Torkelson with the first overall pick. Picks this high are supposed to work out. They’ve combined for fewer than four wins since, meaning none of them have even shown average major-league production for a full season.

That should change this year.

The best power hitters pull their balls in the air, barrel the ball and don’t chase. Here are the 10 batters that did all three of those things at an above-average rate in more than 400 plate appearances last season.

It’s a good list, and if you added contact rates, Torkelson would pull himself off the bottom of even that smaller list.

Mize used his time rehabbing to change the shapes on his pitches and now has a plus four-seamer in place of the fastballs he came to the big leagues with. The splitter is still there, and the breaking balls are both comfortably above average. The control wasn’t always there this spring — it’s a new mix, and he’s coming off of surgery after all — but he struck out 20 in 20 1/3 innings and took a rotation spot.

Matt Manning’s four-seamer also looks good this spring, and his changeup was his best pitch by stuff metrics. All three breaking balls are still there (as well as his command of them), and though he was never known for striking guys out before, he got 19 strikeouts in 16 innings this spring. He didn’t make the rotation, but is very much the next man up in a league that needs its sixth starters for 100-plus innings on average.

Four wins combined so far. They’ll get six this year alone.

“I see the ball, I hit the ball hard,” said Benito Santiago after he hit a game-winner sometime when I was an impressionable lad. And though Christopher Morel doesn’t always make contact, he does follow suit in these terms.

Does he see the ball well? He chases on pitches outside the zone at about a league-average rate. What he does do really well is swing at strikes. Robert Orr at Baseball Prospectus made a statistic that quantifies the fact that discipline is not only about laying off the bad pitches, it’s also swinging at the good ones. It’s named SEAGER because Corey Seager is the best at it, naturally. And Morel is a top-50 hitter in SEAGER, which might surprise people staring too big of a hole into his strikeout rate.

And he hits the ball hard. Here are the top 10 players 25 and under who had 400 or more plate appearances last season, ranked by their Barrel rate, which is a strongly predictive measure of batted-ball power. Let’s also include these players’ maximum exit velocities as a measure of their raw power.

That is a fun list of baseball’s best young sluggers. It’s fair to wonder about his defense, but it looks like the Cubs are going to give him a regular spot and let him play a ton. Early returns are mixed on his glove at third, but the resolve is there.

“We have high expectations for him, he does too,” Cubs coach Jonathan Mota told Sahadev Sharma about Morel’s defense. “But mistakes are going to happen.”

The Red Sox have a top-five American League rotation

Nick Pivetta did this in his last spring start:

Nick Pivetta with a sensational sweeper.

pic.twitter.com/xy5WRkjYmE

— Red Sox Digest (@RedSoxDigest) March 24, 2024

It’s just one pitch, but it represents all the real work Pivetta has done over the past few years. He always had the sizzling riding fastball, and the 84 mph diving knuckle curve, but then he added a hard slider, and the final cherry on top was this sweeper that, though it’s usually a sideways pitch that works best for sinker slingers, he can still play with off his high release as this video indicates. He implemented this pitch more heavily in the second half last year and had a 3.30 ERA.

Kutter Crawford had five pitches that were above-average by Stuff+ last year (the cutter of course, but also the curve, the four-seamer, the sweeper, and the hard slider), and away from Fenway, he pitched like it, with a 2.49 ERA and pristine strikeout-minus-walk rates to support it. He has gone to work this spring and is “putting up 20s” — he has an induced vertical break of 20 inches on his fastball this year, something that only Pivetta and five other pitchers did regularly last season. Oh, and his sweeper has 12 inches of sweep.

Tanner Houck looks like Chris Sale flipped around to the right hand, and against righties he’s been that dominant, holding them to a .214/.282/.283 line that is good enough to keep giving him attempts at starting. That .253/.343/.420 line from lefties is the problem, so Houck came in this spring with better health, and a better cutter to try and figure out the southpaw problem.

Garrett Whitlock has had up-and-down health, which led to losing nearly two ticks off his fastball and more like four ticks off his breaking ball last year. He’s come in this spring sitting 95 again, and his slider is back into the mid-80s, with improved sweep this spring.

Bryan Bello is a top prospect who always had the changeup, and just needed a better slider. His slider kept getting harder all year last year, and this spring Stuff+ says it’s his best pitch. This spring, he’s basically turfed the four-seam fastball (which gave up a .607 slugging last year) and has worked to find ways to use the sinker against opposite-handed hitters.

This spring, the Red Sox rotation had the fifth-best strikeout-minus-walk rate in the American League, and that’s usually a powerful predictor. This team has a great offense; if these pitchers pitch as they are capable, the team will do well and they might even add a rotation arm at the deadline. At the very least, this situation doesn’t seem as dire as some make it.

Young Royals hitters fuel wild-card run

Start with raw power (maximum exit velocity here), and game power (Barrel rate), add in an attempt to define hit tool (swinging-strike rate and hard-hit rate), and then throw in a dash of plate discipline (zone swing minus outside of zone swing). Call it the secret sauce, or, since you used z-scores to add it all up, Process Z. Take every player under 26 and give them a Process Z score. Then count the number of young hitters each team has with above-average Process Z. You’ll get:

• The Royals with six
• The Reds with six
• The Cardinals with five
• The Rangers and Tigers with four
• Six teams with three

“Those guys are also blessed with physical talent to hit the ball hard,” said Royals manager Matt Quatraro this spring. “They have bat speed, they’re strong, but it’s also a byproduct of putting a good swing on the ball.”

“I don’t try to do much,” said Nelson Velázquez, who doesn’t have the raw power of some of his teammates but gets to it on the regular. “Pitchers are throwing 95-plus, if you do a 100 percent swing of power against the 98 mph fastball, you have no chance. When you can control your power, you can hit the ball on the barrel more consistently, that’s what I focus on. I know I have power, they know I have power, I have to find a way to put my swing at 70 percent in order to put the ball in play and be consistent.”

Can Bobby Witt Jr. improve on last season, when he hit 30 homers, stole 49 bases and led the majors with 11 triples? (Joe Camporeale / USA Today)

These young Royals — Bobby Witt Jr., MJ Melendez, Velázquez, Maikel Garcia, Vinnie Pasquantino and Michael Massey — hit the ball hard. They’ve been trying to improve the pitching development process and have added a star pitcher (Cole Ragans) and some credible veterans (Michael Wacha and Seth Lugo) over the past couple of years. They even made some trades for relievers to help shore up the pen. There’s something cooking in Kansas City, and it’s not just burnt ends.

A team will steal more than 200 bases this season

Is this bold? How about this: No team has managed this feat since the 1996 Rockies. But the rules changed recently and runners were successful 80 percent of the time. The breakeven point is around 75 percent of the time and the only natural conclusion is that teams will run more this season. They’ll run until they hit the breakeven point again.

Who will do it? You want bonus points? The good news is that teams usually show their hand in the spring, and spring attempt rates carry over pretty well into the regular season. Here are the teams that have taken off the most this spring.

Your leaders in the clubhouse are the Angels (with Jo Adell, Zach Neto, Mickey Moniak and Aaron Hicks taking off the most), Nationals (Lane Thomas, CJ Abrams and their other young outfielders) and Brewers (Brice Turang, Sal Frelick and Jackson Chourio) taking off the most. So there’s your bonus prediction: CJ Abrams will steal 75 himself. Break some long-unbroken ground, fellas!

(Photo of Oneil Cruz: Kim Klement Neitzel / USA Today)