The 2025 Start of Spring ZiPS Projected Standings: American League

There’s still more winter to go, but this week gave us a sign of spring that’s way more promising than any silly groundhog in Pennsylvania. Pitchers and catchers have reported to Florida and Arizona for spring training. As usual, this is also the best time to do the first mega-run of ZiPS projected standings, to gauge where every team stands at the prelude to the 2025 season. Naturally, these are not the final projected standings, but they’re accurate through every bit of knowledge ZiPS and Szymborski have as of the morning of Tuesday, February 11.

These standings are the result of a million simulations, not results obtained from binomial or even beta-binomial magic. The methodology isn’t identical to the one we use for our playoff odds, which we recently launched to both acclaim and dismay. So how does ZiPS calculate the season? Stored within ZiPS are the first- through 99th-percentile projections for each player. I start by making a generalized depth chart, using our Depth Charts as a jumping off point. Since these are my curated projections, I make changes based on my personal feelings about who will receive playing time as filtered through arbitrary whimsy my logic and reasoning. ZiPS then generates a million versions of each team in Monte Carlo fashion.

After that is done, ZiPS applies another set of algorithms with a generalized distribution of injury risk that changes the baseline plate appearances or innings pitched for each player. ZiPS then automatically and proportionally “fills in” playing time from the next players on the list to get to a full slate of PAs and innings.

The result is a million different rosters for each team and an associated winning percentage for each million of them. After applying the new strength of schedule calculations based on the other 29 teams, I end up with the standings for each of the million seasons. I promise this is much less complex than it sounds.

The goal of ZiPS is to be less awful than any other way of predicting the future. The future is tantalizingly close but beyond our knowledge, and if anyone figures out how to deflect the astrophysicist Arthur Eddington’s arrow of time, it’s probably not going to be in the form of baseball projections. So we project probabilities, not certainties. If this does not satisfy you, just assume that any deviation from the actual results are due to flaws in reality.

Over the last decade, ZiPS has averaged 19.2 correct teams when looking at Vegas preseason over/under lines. I’m always tinkering with methodology, but most of the low-hanging fruit in predicting how teams will perform has already been harvested. ZiPS’ misses for teams from year to year are uncorrelated, with an r-squared of one year’s miss to the next of 0.000541. In other words, none of the year-to-year misses for individual franchises has told us anything about future misses for those franchises.

We’ll cover the American League today before getting into the National League tomorrow.

Right away, when glancing at the projections, you can see the theme of the American League: There are no dominant teams. The AL East is a good example to remember that the 50th-percentile projections don’t mean that the top team will actually win the division. Neither the Orioles or Yankees are projected with an over/under of 90 wins, but either team would need to win 96 games to have a 50% chance at taking the division.

Once again, ZiPS projects the O’s with the tiniest sliver of an edge over the Yankees. ZiPS thinks there’s a good chance that Baltimore can replace Anthony Santander’s production – or at least what he was likely to do in 2025 – and is a surprisingly big fan of Tyler O’Neill. But losing Corbin Burnes is a very big deal, and a few lower-key pitching signings can’t really replace that. It reminds me a bit of Buzzie Bavasi’s quote nearly 50 years ago that when the Angels lost Nolan Ryan, they could just replace him with “two 8-7 pitchers.” How’d that work out for them? There’s some downside in Baltimore’s rotation, but ZiPS thinks the offense is quite resilient.

The Yankees lost an even more important piece than the O’s did this offseason, when Juan Soto signed the largest contract in sports history to play for the Mets. That said, the Yankees made a number of solid upgrades at other positions after losing the second coming of Ted Williams. I prefer Devin Williams and Cody Bellinger to Clay Holmes and Alex Verdugo, and Max Fried is a very good addition. Paul Goldschmidt is well on the back end of his career these days, but he still represents an upgrade over Anthony Rizzo. Still, they lost Gleyber Torres to the Tigers, and with Jazz Chisholm Jr. set to slide from third base to second, the task of replacing Torres’ production falls to a platoon of Oswaldo Cabrera and the shell of DJ LeMahieu at third base. The Yankees didn’t quite hold serve in the exchange, but the O’s had losses of their own, so the status quo largely prevails.

ZiPS has projected the Red Sox to finish last in the AL East over the last few seasons, but they’ve always been within shouting distance of .500. The last bit stays true in 2025, but on the sunny side this time. Even though you’d be crazy to pencil him in for 180 innings, Garrett Crochet is a big addition to Boston’s rotation, and the bullpen has become sneaky good. The computer really believes in Kristian Campbell, though the question remains how quickly the team will integrate him into the lineup. The Red Sox, of course, would look even better with Mookie Betts, but that’s old news at this point.

ZiPS thinks Tampa Bay’s lineup is rather lackluster, and it doesn’t see a huge offensive upside here, but it does think the Rays have pretty solid depth. The big upside comes from the rotation because of the health questions surrounding Shane McClanahan, Shane Baz, and Drew Rasmussen. If any or all of these three pitchers are healthier than the projections currently expect, even small positive shifts in their workload assumptions would have pretty large effects on the whole AL East race.

Anthony Santander was a necessary addition for the Blue Jays, but was his signing enough? ZiPS is unsure, and while it’s projecting bounce-back seasons from guys like Bo Bichette and Kevin Gausman, there’s no certainty there, and this a tough, tough division. This is one of the best last place teams I’ve ever projected, so take from that what you will!

ZiPS projects the Guardians to win the AL Central over the Twins, but like in the AL East, the lead comes from the tiniest of mathematical margins. Their bullpen is terrific, but their offense has a bit too much merely OK floating around, and their rotation is adequate at best. Despite being projected as the AL Central leader, ZiPS only projects Cleveland as a coin flip to make the playoffs.

The Twins project to have an elite bullpen and a very good – and probably underrated – rotation. But it’s less than enthralled by the lineup once you get past Carlos Correa and Byron Buxton during their healthy moments, and it gets really hard, as with the Guardians, to see a scenario in which Minnesota gets far above 90 wins.

I don’t want to harp too much on Kansas City’s offense, since I did that at length last week, but the fact is it’s a very Bobby Witt Jr.-reliant lineup with a ton of holes. This might be the best projected Royals pitching staff in ZiPS history, and that may be enough for Kansas City either to keep pace with the Guardians and Twins or outright topple them. There are benefits to playing in a division with no truly ambitious teams.

Bringing back Jack Flaherty was a necessity for the Tigers, and they got him at a cheaper price than necessities tend to cost. They still project just behind the top three teams, but this division remains quite unclear. I would not want to be paying Alex Bregman in 2029 or 2030, but I’d seriously consider it if I were a team like the Tigers, with so much to gain by having him around the next few years.

The White Sox are projected to have one of the largest improvements in baseball, but a lot of that is simply because winning only 41 games in a season requires many things to not go your way. They are good bet to veer toward “ordinary awful” territory, even if they may not have hit rock bottom yet. Whatever happens, don’t mistake any win-loss improvement as organizational competence. Chicago’s most interesting pitchers will likely start the season in the minors, and the big question for the offense is how many of the aging role players the team signed will somehow be stuffed into the lineup for no particular reason.

The Astros are a lot less likely to be a juggernaut than they were a few years ago, but they’ve handled the myriad star departures well. ZiPS thinks Isaac Paredes and his pull-happy power will feel quite at home in Minute Maid Daikin Park, and Christian Walker is a far better idea to fill their gaping hole at first base than José Abreu was a few years ago. Yordan Alvarez is an absolute beast offensively, and ZiPS projects Jose Altuve to continue to age gracefully. The Astros aren’t really lousy anywhere, and that’s basically what quality team building in a 12-team playoff league looks like.

The common perception of the Mariners is they have a bad offense, but that’s been demonstrably untrue, and playing in a poor offensive park is the big culprit here. What is true, though, is that after Cal Raleigh and Julio Rodríguez, they’re just not amazing anywhere in the lineup, and they’ve been particularly unambitious there. The rotation, however, is dynamite, and though ZiPS is unimpressed with Seattle’s depth, if this team generally remains healthy, it can challenge Houston.

ZiPS likes the Rangers’ offense a lot. The rotation? Not so much. Jacob deGrom naturally projects very well, but given his extensive injury history, both ZiPS and I are coming way under the 132 innings that Depth Charts currently projects for him. He’s not the only Texas pitcher with injury concerns, and as a result, ZiPS sees this rotation as having one of the deepest downsides in baseball, which holds the Rangers’ projections down quite a bit.

Congratulations, A’s, you’ve moved up to a fourth-place projection! Their lineup is actually pretty decent, though not at first base, where ZiPS is bearish on Tyler Soderstrom. OK, the computer’s not quite as high on Jacob Wilson or JJ Bleday as is Depth Charts, but it wouldn’t be shocking to see a team with a lineup like this be a Wild Card contender. Where ZiPS has its doubts is the rotation, and though Luis Severino and Jeffrey Springs give this starting five some real upside, the other three guys are far less exciting.

I suspect the Angels think they’re better than this, but ZiPS really isn’t seeing it. The team’s been active this offseason and added a ton of familiar names, but largely ones that are familiar because of things they accomplished a long time ago. Getting a healthy Mike Trout would be fun for the Angels, and certainly for fans, but it probably wouldn’t be enough.

As usual, I’m including the ZiPS playoff chart, which shows what the chances are that a number of wins is achieved by the division and Wild Card winners. For example, ZiPS projects the team that wins the AL West to have, on average, 94.4 wins, but 20% of the projected AL West winners finish with only an 89-73 record.