1 Sentence to Describe Every MLB Team Entering Spring Training 2024

Spring training begins in earnest this week, so let's not waste time in summarizing where each team in MLB stands with the 2024 season looming. One sentence will do.

Well, sort of.

Though I will be summing up the state of all 30 teams in a single sentence, this situation also called for a little more analysis. As such, each summary will be followed by a few short paragraphs that flesh the idea out.

In any case, the goal here is to give everyone at least a passing understanding of where each team is right now by getting into where it's been and where it might be going.

We'll proceed one at a time in alphabetical order by city.

One Sentence Summary: Don't let that other team in the National League West distract you from how dangerous this one is.

When you share a division with a consistent 100-win juggernaut that just dropped over $1 billion on new additions, you're going to have to work to get everyone's attention.

Yet let's not forget that the Diamondbacks made quick work of the Los Angeles Dodgers in last year's playoffs, sweeping them out of the National League Division Series. Or, for that matter, that the Snakes only had one bad month last year. Including their run to the World Series, they went 90-57 on either side of that brutal 7-25 stretch between July 2 and Aug. 11.

Since then, Arizona has fortified the two weakest spots in last year's lineup with Eugenio Suárez and Joc Pederson and also added a quality No. 3 starter in Eduardo Rodriguez. The resulting team looks no weaker than a wild-card contender.

One Sentence Summary: They have everything they need to finish their unfinished business.

When an 88-win season is followed by a 101-win season and then a 104-win season marked by all sorts of historic offense, the general picture should be that of a team that's peaking.

But this, of course, requires ignoring that Atlanta's 88-win effort in 2021 was capped with a World Series championship, whereas neither of the latter two produced even a single series victory in the playoffs. Frustrating, to say the least.

Yet lest anyone anticipate further frustration for Atlanta in 2024, just know that the odds (particularly those at FanGraphs) are rightfully against it. This is pretty much the same roster that did so much damage last year, only now it has Chris Sale in the rotation and potentially another power-speed threat on offense in the form of Jarred Kelenic.

One Sentence Summary: Wait 'til you get a load of them with a true No. 1 starter and their best shortstop prospect since Cal Ripken Jr.

If an 83-79 season in 2022 didn't do the trick, the 101-win campaign the Orioles embarked on last year surely closed the book on their years-long rebuild.

What the Orioles must now prove is that 2023 is not as open as their current contention window is going to get, and it's only recently that they properly situated themselves for the task by trading for 2021 NL Cy Young Award winner Corbin Burnes. He's the ace they needed.

Otherwise, it's about time for Jackson Holliday, ranked by B/R's Joel Reuter as MLB's No. 1 prospect, to join a lineup that's already built on a foundation of homegrown batsmen. He's just your standard plus-plus hitter with plus power, speed and fielding tools. It'll be a surprise if he isn't eventually in the running for the American League Rookie of the Year.

One Sentence Summary: Alas, ownership has forced Red Sox fans back into a habit of keeping their expectations in check.

Red Sox fans used to know better than to get their hopes too high. An 86-year championship drought does things like that to a fanbase, you know.

After a 20-year break in which four World Series titles materialized, is it fair to say these days are now back? Nobody has especially high hopes for the 2024 Red Sox, and that's not just because the team has finished in the AL East cellar in three of the last four years.

It has more to do with how little the Red Sox's ownership literally has invested in the team, as last year's payroll cut is slated to be followed by yet another. It's a crying shame not just for fans, but also chief baseball officer Craig Breslow, who would be justified in thinking this is not what he signed up for.

One Sentence Summary: All this team really needs is Cody Bellinger, so what's taking so long?

The Cubs probably should have won seven more games than they did in 2023, so you have to admire them for pushing the envelope by hiring Craig Counsell and for filling Marcus Stroman's shoes with Japanese ace Shōta Imanaga.

There's nonetheless a "Is this it?" vibe hanging over the Cubs, and it has everything to do with how they still haven't re-signed Bellinger. The good news is that they seem pretty much all alone in his market right now, which could mean they're simply waiting for him and Scott Boras to blink first.

Until the Cubs actually do bring Bellinger back, however, they'll continue to look one piece short of being obvious favorites to win the NL Central. And if he ends up elsewhere, there won't be many places left to turn for a Plan B.

One Sentence Summary: As rebuilding seasons go, this one might not be too bad.

Last year was an ugly one for the White Sox, who didn't even wait until the end of a 101-loss season to fire their whole dang front office. It's now on player-turned-general manager Chris Getz to rebuild.

But while neither I nor any projection system can argue that the 2024 White Sox are good, actually, one also doesn't need to squint that hard to see how they might not be that bad.

Dylan Cease is still around, after all, and he's joined in the rotation by two other high-upside guys in Michael Soroka and reigning Korean Baseball Organization MVP Erick Feddie. Throw in Luis Robert Jr. and a couple bounceback candidates in Eloy Jiménez and Yoán Moncada, and you have the makings of a team that could at least give fans an excuse to watch.

One Sentence Summary: It feels like this season will either be a whole lot of fun or a sizable step back.

It's fun to look back at FanGraphs' playoff odds for last year and see the Reds starting out with a 1.7 percent chance before later peaking at darn near 50 percent in July.

They came out of nowhere, alright, and Reds fans should like what they see when they look at a lineup that stands to benefit from having Jeimer Candelario alongside Elly De La Cruz and his fellow upstart sensations. Further, a pitching staff that coughed up a 4.83 ERA last season now has Frankie Montas and Nick Martinez among its new faces.

It's nonetheless hard to argue with projections that have the Reds pegged as the fourth-best team in the NL Central. They have the potential to rise above that level, but they could just as easily be hit by a bunch of simultaneous sophomore slumps and more bad pitching.

One Sentence Summary: Worshiping at the altar of run prevention could actually get them somewhere this year.

The Guardians ended up fourth from the bottom of MLB in runs last season, and easily in last place with a meager output of 124 home runs. Somehow, though, a check for the best hitter they added this offseason basically returns a 404 Not Found.

And yet the Guardians are...arguably right there with the Minnesota Twins as favorites in the AL Central? It's not as if the Twins have gotten appreciably better in their own right after last year's 87-win season, after all, and the Guardians may not have to score many runs anyway.

You don't need to score runs in bunches if you never allow any, and that seems to be the plan in Cleveland. And if for no other reason than Shane Bieber, Triston McKenzie, Tanner Bibee, Logan Allen and Gavin Williams could form a lethal starting five, it's a solid one.

One Sentence Summary: It's hard to argue with projections that rate them as the worst team in all of Major League Baseball.

There's a team elsewhere in MLB that lost 112 games and got outscored by 339 runs last season, yet FanGraphs and Baseball Prospectus are in agreement that the Rockies will be even worse than that one in 2024.

It's as if the Rockies didn't make any forward momentum after losing 103 games last season. Perhaps that's unfair to newcomer hurlers Cal Quantrill and Dakota Hudson, but it's hard to imagine a worse place for them than Coors Field. It's no country for pitch-to-contact types, and they are exactly that.

Save for maybe the AL East, it's also hard to imagine a worse place for the Rockies than the NL West. They went 14-38 within the division last year, and the competition level figures to be more or less the same this time around.

One Sentence Summary: For the first time in a long time, a return to the playoffs feels like a realistic possibility.

After enjoying a 12-win improvement from 2022 to 2023, what the Tigers did with their offseason feels disappointing. Mark Canha, Kenta Maeda and Jack Flaherty are nice guys to have, but the potential should have been there for a bigger splash.

All the same, this is as solid as the Tigers have looked going into a season in a long time. Spencer Torkelson, Riley Greene and Kerry Carpenter put themselves on the cusp of stardom last season, and the Tigers have already concluded that Colt Keith, MLB's No. 13 prospect, is ready for his shot. And that Tarik Skubal fella? He's a No. 1 in waiting.

Though they're third in the pecking order after Minnesota and Cleveland, Detroit's path to the top of the AL Central is hardly closed off. Which is to say that one of MLB's two longest playoff droughts could indeed end this year.

One Sentence Summary: It feels weird to not think of them as de facto favorites in the American League.

Look, I'm not trying to dunk on the Astros here. Jose Altuve, Yordan Álvarez, Kyle Tucker and Alex Bregman are as good an offensive foursome as there is, and I don't know if there's a better relief trio than Josh Hader, Ryan Pressly and Bryan Abreu.

Further, the Texas Rangers have ceded ground in the AL West after darn near taking it from the Astros during the regular season last year and, of course, later finishing the job in the playoffs. Texas' total offseason spending isn't even half what the Astros gave just to Hader.

Yet it's also not much of a leap to imagine the Rangers or the Seattle Mariners finishing ahead of the Astros. Also factoring in that all but one team in the AL East is a solid match for them, their grip on the wider American League race just isn't as firm as it used to be.

One Sentence Summary: It's overdue, but good on them for giving their fans reasons to hope.

Short of making several clones of the 1980s versions of George Brett and Bret Saberhagen, nothing the Royals did this winter was ever going to make them an immediate contender after last year's 106-loss slog.

There's nonetheless cause for a sincere "At least you tried" here, specifically relating to the $109.5 million the Royals spent on free agents. Michael Wacha and Seth Lugo figure to at least stabilize a rotation that had a 5.12 ERA in 2023, while Hunter Renfroe brings some much-needed power to the lineup.

The 11-year, $288.7 million extension with Bobby Witt Jr., meanwhile, is something to be celebrated. Beyond an affirmation of how awesome he is, it's a sign that Royals owner John Sherman didn't buy the team just to let it fester, a la Bruce Sherman in Miami.

One Sentence Summary: That's a solid bullpen they've got there, but how many leads is it going to get to protect?

The Angels spent $52.9 million on free agents throughout the offseason, and all but $1.8 million of that went toward relief pitchers. As choices go, this is...uh, A Choice.

The bullpen is indeed an area where the Angels were lacking as they lost 89 games in 2023, but to fix that and nothing else implies that they're unaware that Shohei Ohtani A) exists, B) is no longer under their employ and C) that both their offense and their rotation are a lot worse off because of it.

Rebuilding is the route the Angels should be taking, but they're not interested in that. One would thus hope that they'd still be interested in signing Blake Snell and/or Bellinger, but even then all they'd be doing is putting nice tires on a junker.

One Sentence Summary: The only downside of generating this much hype is what awaits them if they don't live up to it.

Holy smokes, what an offseason. Even if you subtract Ohtani's $700 million contract, the Dodgers still made more than half a billion dollars in commitments to Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Tyler Glasnow and others.

All they have to do now is live up to the hype, and that's not something to be characterized as inherently undoable. The 100-win threshold would seem to be the floor for these Dodgers, with the ceiling consisting of something like 110 wins and a World Series title.

Yet the Dodgers aren't obviously the best team in the National League, and they share a division with the Arizona Diamondbacks, who have already proved capable of punching above their weight. They shouldn't be scared, necessarily, but they'd do well to follow Han Solo's advice about getting cocky.

One Sentence Summary: From how they acted this offseason, you'd swear this wasn't a playoff team last year.

The Marlins are not to be mistaken for a team that's utterly hopeless going into 2024. They did play October baseball last year, after all, and that rotation of 20-somethings is still formidable even without Sandy Alcantara.

It is, however, shocking how little Miami did to improve its chances of returning to the playoffs. Among their inventory of new players is not a single major league free-agent signee and a mere handful of bench jockeys acquired via trade.

The rotation and a potential return to All-Star form on Jazz Chisholm Jr.'s part could get the Marlins back to the playoffs anyway, but one thing is already certain in the meantime: Kim Ng picked a good time to get out of Dodge.

One Sentence Summary: It's hard to look at this team and not see the huge absences.

The Brewers are going to begin 2024 with decent odds to win the NL Central for the third time in the last four years. At the least, they should have a run at a wild-card spot in them.

I'm basing this assumption in part on the notion that their offense should be better. A healthy Rhys Hoskins should be a huge upgrade at first base, and Milwaukee fans are sure to take a quick liking to MLB's No. 2 prospect, Jackson Chourio. He's a plus-plus runner with plus power who'll only be weeks removed from turning 20 come Opening Day.

At the same time, there's no ignoring the Corbin Burnes-sized hole in the rotation. Nor is there any ignoring Craig Counsell's absence in the manager's chair, from where he had a knack for getting the Brewers to overachieve. These losses are going to hurt. The only question is how much.

One Sentence Summary: All eyes are on the offense, particularly where shortstop and center field are concerned.

The Twins had arguably the best top-to-bottom pitching staff in all of MLB last season, but a big part of it was lost when Sonny Gray left for St. Louis. Covering that up won't be easy.

What would help, though, is if the Twins got even more from an offense that co-led the American League with 233 home runs in 2023. Having Royce Lewis and Edouard Julien around for the whole year after both had breakout seasons as rookies will help, but the onus to lift the lineup is mainly going to be on Carlos Correa and Byron Buxton.

If healthy, they could return to the form that allowed them to produce a combined .833 OPS and 50 home runs in 2022. If not healthy, the .718 OPS and 35 homers they produced last year may more or less stick.

One Sentence Summary: Will all that low risk ultimately yield high rewards?

The Mets tried the high-risk, high-reward approach to building their roster for the 2023 season, and we all know how that worked out. They're now playing the long game, albeit with owner Steve Cohen's checkbook still open.

The Mets signed 10 free agents—most notably Luis Severino, Sean Manaea and Harrison Bader—yet didn't even spend $70 million in the process. Their depth is better for it, but whether any stars will emerge from this group to help Francisco Lindor, Pete Alonso and Kodai Senga shoulder the load is the question.

If yes, the Mets could at least chase a wild-card spot after losing 87 games last year. If no, what could be Alonso's last season in Queens ahead of free agency figures to go to waste.

One Sentence Summary: The projections had better be right, because this year could otherwise be a tremendous waste.

The Yankees might just be the team to beat in the American League this year. That's at least according to projections, including the ones at Baseball Prospectus that put both their record and their World Series odds on par with Houston's.

This reflects how the Yankees shouldn't just be the Aaron Judge and Gerrit Cole Show in 2024. Juan Soto should love hitting at Yankee Stadium, and Cole could have not one, but two co-aces if Carlos Rodón and Marcus Stroman remain healthy and effective.

Yet this is mostly the same team that won just 82 games last year, and Rodón and Stroman are just two of several prominent Yankees—others include Giancarlo Stanton and DJ LeMahieu—who demand crossed fingers at this stage of their careers.

If it all doesn't work out, well, that'll be a drag. The Yankees will have wasted two more years of Judge's and Cole's primes, not to mention the one and only year they could have Soto for.

One Sentence Summary: Bleh.

And this is coming from a guy who's probably more bullish on the A's than most. The Zack Gelof-Brent Rooker-Ryan Noda lineup trip is underrated, and I'll say it right now: Mason Miller is going to be your new favorite closer this year.

But even if the floor for the 2024 A's is high enough to avoid another catastrophic 112-loss season, there's simply not enough upside to even dream of a good season. The struggle will be to get under 100 losses, not to get over .500.

This is to say it'll be another slog of a season in Oakland, which won't even have the, ahem, privilege of hosting the A's after 2024. They stand to be a ghost ship franchise from 2025 to 2027 before moving to a city that could take 'em or leave 'em.

One Sentence Summary: Atlanta isn't the only team in the NL East that has all it needs to finish unfinished business.

That the Phillies ended up losing to the Diamondbacks in last year's National League Championship Series still boggles the mind, but the time for lamenting it has long since passed. It's now time for redemption.

Getting to that point won't be easy, as the Phillies will have to go through Atlanta in the NL East with the Dodgers looming elsewhere in the wider National League race. If the Phillies or anyone else takes a top seed and a first-round bye from them, it'll be a surprise.

Then again, the last two postseasons prove that the Phillies don't need no stinkin' byes to go deep into the postseason. And with Bryce Harper, Trea Turner and all the main characters from last year back for 2024, they're still a team that nobody will want to face in October.

One Sentence Summary: Their playoff odds are higher than zero than one might think.

Only a little bit higher if you take it from Baseball Prospectus, which gives the Pirates a 6.1 percent chance of making the postseason. Yet a more bullish projection exists at FanGraphs, where the Pirates' chances are calculated at 19.5 percent.

The latter is somewhere in the realm between generous and not too outlandish. The Bucs improved by 14 wins from 2022 to 2023, and right now they can look forward to a healthy Oneil Cruz and a pitching staff made deeper by a handful of low-risk adds headlined by Aroldis Chapman.

You know what would make the staff even deeper? The arrival of Paul Skenes, of course. And assuming he stays on a fast track to the majors after going to Pittsburgh with the No. 1 pick in the 2023 draft, that moment could come at some point this season.

One Sentence Summary: Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

At least according to FanGraphs, only Atlanta went into last season with better World Series odds than the Padres. It was a real "Nothing could possib-lie go wrong" situation.

The question now isn't so much how much excitement for the Friars has faded, but whether it even exists at all. And that's on them, as hype is the last thing you can expect when you trade a potential Hall of Famer, lose a respected manager and ace closer and, oh yeah, lop close to $100 million off the previous year's payroll.

It'll still be fun to watch Manny Machado, Xander Bogaerts and Fernando Tatis Jr. do their thing, and Joe Musgrove and Yu Darvish are a proper ace duo when healthy. But at least for this season, this is a team aimed squarely at the middle.

One Sentence Summary: There's still time to make a bigger splash, you guys.

Though they spent $207.3 million on free agents, traded for a Cy Young Award winner and hired the previously mentioned respected manager, it still feels like the Giants had an underwhelming offseason.

They were in on Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto, meaning they at least had the right idea for where to go after boring everyone to tears amid an 83-loss campaign in 2023. But with the Giants having missed out on both, they're aimed just as squarely at the middle as the Padres.

The difference between the two, though, is that the Giants remain a candidate to make a splash on Blake Snell, Cody Bellinger, Jordan Montgomery or Matt Chapman. In fact, the sizable gap between their 2023 spending and projected 2024 payroll will mean they'll have some explaining to do if they don't get one of them.

One Sentence Summary: Their win projections for 2024 fall in the mid-80s range, because that's just where they're meant to be.

In case anyone's not getting the reference here, it's to when Mariners president of baseball operations Jerry Dipoto said the quiet part out loud about the team's plans to win 54 percent of its games annually:

In fairness to Dipoto, the Mariners have averaged 89 wins and made the playoffs once over the last three seasons. And they're heading into this year with a postseason-caliber roster, in part because of Dipoto's trades for Jorge Polanco, Mitch Haniger, Luke Raley and Gregory Santos.

In context of how guys like Eugenio Suárez and Jarred Kelenic are now out of town, however, Seattle's improvements feel marginal. With the Astros and Rangers having made one impact move between the two of them, the feeling is that of a missed opportunity to gain ground. Now the Mariners will have to gain it the hard way.

One Sentence Summary: Don't let their last-place finish from last season trick you into underestimating them.

I'm not saying that the Cardinals deserved better last year. They deserved what they got, as their Pythagorean record and actual record were exactly the same.

Yet the big wrong of last season for the Cardinals has since been righted. Sonny Gray is the ace they didn't have, while fellow newcomers Lance Lynn and Kyle Gibson will do nothing worse than eat up innings after him in the rotation. A repeat of last year's 5.08 ERA thus seems unlikely.

Otherwise, you're looking at potentially the best lineup in the NL Central even if Paul Goldschmidt and Nolan Arenado don't turn back the clock to 2022. Between Jordan Walker, Nolan Gorman and top prospect Masyn Winn, the young guys can help pick up the slack.

One Sentence Summary: It's hard to be optimistic, but the smart play is to put them down for 90-plus wins anyway.

It feels like a lifetime ago that the Rays started 2023 off with a historic 29-7 record. And as much as any team ever has good odds of doing something like that again, theirs aren't great.

With Shane McClanahan, Jeffrey Springs and Drew Rasmussen recovering from elbow surgeries, the Tyler Glasnow trade didn't help the Rays' pitching depth nearly as much as it helped their payroll. That they're also down an elite reliever with Robert Stephenson now in Anaheim isn't exactly an advantage either.

Even still, Baseball Prospectus and FanGraphs both project the Rays for the 86-win range. That gets at how a diminished team is not necessarily a bad team, especially when the team in question is one that A) is coming off 99 wins and B) hasn't won fewer than 86 games in a full season since 2017. They'll figure it out.

One Sentence Summary: It's all about the second half of the season.

Technically speaking, the Rangers will begin their defense of their first World Series championship on March 28 opposite the Cubs at Globe Life Field.

Yet their season won't really begin until the second half. That's when they expect to have Jacob deGrom and Tyler Mahle back from Tommy John surgery and Max Scherzer back from surgery for a herniated disk, at which point their rotation will finally be at full strength. Between now and then, suffice it to say much will be riding on Nathan Eovaldi and Jon Gray.

It's all too easy to imagine the Rangers falling behind the Astros and/or Mariners in the interim. But if ever there was a team that merely needs to worry about getting into the playoffs, it's this one. We know what this lineup is capable of in October, and that rotation would be nothing but an asset if it can make it there in one piece.

One Sentence Summary: Doubling down on run prevention was an interesting choice.

After leading the American League in home runs in 2021 and in hits in 2022, the Blue Jays' offense excelled at nothing amid an 89-win season last year. So when GM Ross Atkins set out to add position players, one might have assumed bats would have been his priority.

But apparently not. Justin Turner might only be a marginal upgrade over Brandon Belt in the designated hitter slot, and Toronto's other three big signings consist of two glove-first types (Kevin Kiermaier and Isiah Kiner-Falefa) and a pitcher who didn't log any professional innings in 2023 (Yariel Rodríguez).

In effect, the Blue Jays have set themselves up to once again specialize in run prevention more than run production in 2024. Maybe the approach will work better this time, but they'll be hearing "Told you so" from all directions if it doesn't.

One Sentence Summary: That outfield is looking a little thin, but just wait.

Apart from the Rockies, the Nationals are the only other team that Baseball Prospectus projects to lose 100 games. A bit harsh, perhaps, but not exactly unfair given that the team's rebuild is very much ongoing.

This is not to say that Nats fans don't have anything to look forward to. CJ Abrams is on an upswing after hitting 18 bombs and going 47-for-51 in stolen bases last year, and it's just a matter of time before a thin outfield gets some heft.

That means you, Dylan Crews and James Wood. Otherwise known as MLB's No. 5 and No. 7 prospects, the two should make the leap from Double-A Harrisburg at some point this year. When they do, the Nats' future will be that much more in focus.

Stats courtesy of Baseball Reference, FanGraphs and Baseball Savant.