Hi friends-
Programming note: All readers are invited to our Opening Day marathon chat, tomorrow in the Substack app! We will start chatting at 9 AM PT/12 PM ET, and keep it rolling until the final pitch is thrown tomorrow night. You’ll receive an email with a link to the chat tomorrow morning, or you can find it in the Substack app. Hope to see you in there! <3
Welcome to our second annual edition of Ten Bold Predictions! Last year I went, uh, 3/10. Neither Corbin Carroll nor Gunnar Henderson were betting favorites to win the Rookie of the Year award when the season began, but I picked them both and they both won—so I got those right. I also had Ohtani winning the AL MVP.
The rest of my picks were… off.
I whiffed on the Angels and Mariners making the playoffs (LOL), and the Braves winning the World Series (though they were definitely the best team!). I thought Trea Turner would win the NL MVP, but he was atrocious in April and May—before turning it on down the stretch and salvaging a decent season. I missed on both Cy Young award winners.
But I *did* predict the Dodgers would go further than the Padres (which they did, because San Diego did not make the playoffs and the Dodgers flamed out in the first round lol). I also had AL Cy Young favorite Jacob deGrom’s arm falling off again (RIP). I strangely made Ronald Acuña Jr. the cover boy of my 2023 predictions piece, and wrote about how his return to health for a full season, post-ACL tear, was going to be enormous for the Braves. Yet I failed to predict Acuña as the NL MVP, because I bonked my head before I hit “publish” or something.
Since no prediction I made was *that* obvious, I’m not embarrassed for swinging out of my shoes and going 3/10. That kind of batting average earns one millions of dollars in real life. I could, for sure, juice my average this year by forecasting that nepo baby John Fisher will continue to be the worst owner in professional American sports, Rob Manfred will put his foot in his mouth during a crucial moment when MLB needs him not to do that, and that the Guardians, Twins and Reds owners will stay as cheap as possible when spending even a little bit would go a long way. But pointing out what we all know will happen isn’t as fun as taking wild stabs. So! Here is Part One of my 10 bold predictions for 2024. I’ll do five from the AL today, and the other five from the NL tomorrow.
Julio Rodriguez will win the AL MVP.
At press time, Las Vegas has Aaron Judge and Juan Soto neck-and-neck as odds-on favorites to win the award, with Rodriguez and Corey Seager tied for a (somewhat) distant third. We all know that both Judge and Soto have huge talent and power. Judge hit 62 (!) homers in 2022, and when Juan Soto’s mind is right, he is perhaps the greatest hitting prodigy since Ted Williams.
But
Judge is now dealing with a chronic toe injury after literally smashing through a Dodger Stadium fence last summer, and Soto went through a really rough adjustment period the last time he changed teams. If Soto gets off to a torrid start, Yankee fan intensity could propel him to a monster season and he could win the MVP award in a walk. But if he struggles out of the gate? Well, then he’ll have to deal with the back pages of the New York Post and Daily News finding new puns every day to call him a loser. It was kinda eye-opening for everyone that he struggled so badly with feeling pressure in San Diego, of all places, the chillest major city in America. But in Soto’s defense, he’d been with the Nationals his whole career before that trade and was said to have felt betrayed that the club leaked to the media that he turned down a $440 million contract extension.
I will give him a pass on being in his feelings two years ago, because he’s older now, he didn’t get traded to the Yankees mid-season and he’s playing for a free-agent contract that could be worth half a billion dollars if he rakes this year. Hmm... Am I talking myself into voting Soto for MVP? No, because I think Yankee players are often overhyped (Anthony Volpe was Vegas’ 2023 pre-season Rookie of the Year odds-on favorite, for instance, and he received only one third-place vote). There’s also a scenario where Judge and Soto are both awesome this year and split votes.
Julio Rodriguez is entering his third year in MLB, and I had to double-check that information, because it feels like the dude has been around forever. He just turned 23 on Dec. 29. I am predicting that he will become the first person ever born in the 2000s to win an MLB MVP award.
There are a few reasons for that. The first is that voters don’t just look at offensive stats anymore when deciding who’s most valuable. Rodriguez is an excellent defender. Soto is not. Judge’s toe injury is going to require “constant maintenance,” which doesn’t sound good for someone whose job is to run around the outfield for a living.
I like Corey Seager a lot, but he’s also recovering from a sports hernia surgery that scares me. He’ll be fine, but maybe his swing will start the season too slow to catch up to the field.
Rodriguez won the AL Rookie of the Year award in 2022, and finished 4th in the MVP voting last year. I think he’ll hit 40 homers and steal 40 bases and win the big prize this year. I will NOT, however, be picking the Mariners to make the playoffs ever again, after what they did to me last season.
Jackson Holliday will win the AL Rookie of the Year.
Two Rangers’ Rookies—Evan Carter and Wyatt Langford—are the current favorites to win the award. This is because the Rangers are not stupid enough to start either player in the minors. Fresh off their first-ever World Series victory, they’re coming for everyone’s neck by rostering Carter and Langford and placing them in their starting lineup immediately.
The Orioles are… trying to give me a stroke.
As you all know, I’ve been screaming all off-season about how the Orioles have an ungodly amount of young talent that they need to build around RIGHT NOW, and begging the Angelos family to sell the team. They did sell the team, and GM Mike Elias did well to trade for Corbin Burnes.
It absolutely grinds my gears that the O’s could have signed Jordan Montgomery for $25 million this year and did not do it, despite having only $94 million committed to payroll this season (23rd-most out of 30 teams).
The only reason Jackson Holliday is not favored to win the Rookie of the Year award right now is because he’s starting the season in Norfolk, which is 230 miles from Camden Yards. Holliday is thought to be the most talented player under age 23 in all of baseball, and he smoked the ball all spring.
In a radio appearance on 590 The Fan in St. Louis yesterday, his father, the former All-Star ballplayer Matt Holliday, questioned the O’s decision not to include him on the Opening Day roster. “[There’s a] business element to this, and there’s no way around it,” the elder Holliday said. “[GM Mike Elias] had gone on record as saying that he [Jackson] had a great chance to make the team if he played well, and I think that was his goal and he went out and played well.”
Elias is lucky Jackson is not my child, because I would have embarrassed everyone involved by calling Elias a weasel, the Orioles cheap and the universe unfair.
Baseball is better when the Orioles are good. We want the Orioles to be good. Do the people who run the Orioles want the Orioles to be good? Because starting with Jordan Montgomery and Jackson Holliday on the Opening Day roster would have signaled that they’re standing on business this season. Instead, they will probably keep (a fully ready) Holliday in the minors for a month or so, until the deadline passes that grants them an extra year of team control of the Scott Boras client. Boras also reps Henderson, whose service-time clock has already started, and we know he won’t be giving the O’s any hometown discounts.
Regardless of when Holliday is promoted, I think he’s good enough to catch up to, and surpass, whatever Langford and Carter have done, and win the ROY award. Langford was drafted last summer and tore through the minors. And while he’s inarguably incredible, he’s bound to take some lumps adjusting to hitting in pro ball at SOME POINT, because everyone does.
Corbin Burnes will win the AL Cy Young.
Is this turning into an Orioles newsletter? Maybe a Shohei Ohtani/Oriole hybrid? Only time will tell!
Last year I predicted that neither deGrom nor Gerrit Cole would win the Cy Young. I was proven wrong when Cole went out and turned in his best season since 2019.
Well, now he’s hurt. After scaring the baseball world that he might have a UCL tear, Cole was officially diagnosed with nerve inflammation in his elbow. Despite the news that he might miss 1-2 months with the injury, the Yankees insist they’re not sweating.
Reader, I am sweating.
How many times have we heard about a pitcher trying to rehab his way through something that probably should be cut open and stitched back together, only to watch the inevitable knife find its way to said elbow? Walker Buehler is reportedly throwing hard and talking trash, but he has not pitched in a major league game in 22 months.
The Vegas oddsmakers like Kevin Gausman to win the AL Cy Young, but whatever the Blue Jays are doing remains an absolute mystery to me. The last time we saw this team, they were getting picked off the bases in playoff games because their stadium was loud and they had failed to work out a system to communicate with their coaches. I cannot, in good conscience, count on any of them for anything until conditions improve.
But I know Burnes is going to shove like he always does, and those baby Orioles are going to play excellent defense behind him. Plus, Burnes will benefit from facing a bunch of hitters in a new league that haven’t seen him much at all before. I’m picking him for the top award.
The Rangers will repeat as AL champions.
I was going to pick the Astros to win the AL pennant, then I remembered that Bruce Bochy is a witch.
The guy now has four World Series titles as a manager, two coming as the skipper of a wild-card team. He is 6-0 in winner-take-all games, and he’s won 14 elimination games. He led the Padres to one of their two pennants, the Giants to their only three titles in San Francisco and the Rangers to their only championship, period.
Had he been managing the Dodgers over the last decade, they would probably have at least three banners to show for it, instead of one.
The Rangers lost Jordan Montgomery to free agency and did not replace him. They’re hoping to have Max Scherzer back in June and deGrom back in August. But the thing is, they won in October last year with a very limited contribution from Scherzer, and without deGrom at all. And they’ll have a full season of Langford and Carter. Their offense is potentially as terrifying as the Braves’, and GM Chris Young will make the necessary moves to bolster the rotation, should he need to, in August.
I don’t think they’ll repeat as World Series champions, because that’s damn near impossible, but I expect to see them back in the Fall Classic.
The Yankees will be fighting for the last wild-card spot on the final day of the season.
I know this is very specific, but I just… don’t know what to say about the Yankees before we know if Cole can come back and be effective this year or not. Without Cole, their rotation is led by Marcus Stroman, a guy I like, but whom Yankees GM Brian Cashman had to apologize to for calling him mid back in 2019. Judge is banged up. Giancarlo Stanton has played in more than 110 games only once since 2018.
I’m bullish on shortstop Anthony Volpe’s ability to improve, but the Yankees’ infield situation is so dire that fans breathed a sigh of relief when the team swung a deal for the Marlins’ Jon Berti (who has 23 career homers in six seasons) to play third base earlier today.
Vegas currently has the Yankees winning the AL East, and their over/under win total is set at 91.5. (Maybe they’re also questioning whether the Orioles care about 2024.)
This team is giving 86-win vibes to me, however—which means they’re going to be battling the Rays, Blue Jays, Astros and Mariners in the wild-card hunt (assuming the Rangers and Orioles win their divisions and everyone in the AL Central stinks but the Twins).
The Yankees’ luxury-tax payroll currently sits at $302 million—third-highest in MLB behind the Mets and Dodgers. If they fail to make the playoffs for the second season in a row, there would be no sugar-coating the disaster. The good news is their final three games of the season will be at home against the Pirates. The bad news is that MLB’s top pitching prospect, Paul Skenes, might be awesome, and they might just have to beat him to advance to October.
Wouldn’t that be fun to watch?
Can't WAIT for the NL edition (which is what I assume Part 2 is going to be). And I'm equally excited for you to pick another Jackson (Chourio) as the NL Rookie of the Year. My bias might be showing... but I'm excited and hopeful!
This was really fun. I agree the Yankees should be very worried and I'm taking them not to make the playoffs. Here in Dallas confidence is high in the Rangers and Chris Young. The goal for the first half is to stay close to the Astros -- maybe 4 or 5 games back -- and then hit the jets.