2025 Positional Power Rankings: Second Base

As it was in the beginning, so it remains in 2025: Marcus Semien’s Rangers have the best second base situation in baseball for the third year running. In fact, it should be four seasons in a row. In 2022, Semien’s first season in Texas, the Rangers were less than a tenth of a win behind the Rays — less than irrelevance — even though Semien projected for more WAR than Tampa Bay starter Brandon Lowe. The difference was an erroneous projection that Rays backup Vidal Bruján would end up being a 0.2 WAR player. (Bruján ended up more than half a win below replacement level.)

All of this is to say that if you don’t know Semien by now, you will never, never, never know him. In odd-numbered years, he hits about .270 with middle-of-the-order power and great defense, and compiles about 6 WAR. In even-numbered years, he hits about .235 with everything else remaining the same, and is a four-win player. So we know what to expect in 2025.

Ketel Marte continues to be underrated, even after he finished third in MVP voting last year, with 6.3 WAR despite an ankle sprain that left him on the IL down the stretch. Marte’s 151 wRC+ was 10th among all qualified hitters, and third among up-the-middle players, trailing only Bobby Witt Jr. and Gunnar Henderson. He even graded out well defensively.

Should Marte need a day off, the Diamondbacks have youth and depth behind him. Blaze Alexander is no longer a rookie, but he’ll be a bench option once he returns from a strained oblique. Jordan Lawlar still is a rookie somehow. He’s entering Year 4 of being on the verge of a major league breakthrough, and could get some reps anywhere on the infield, including at second base.

Giménez is a serial PPR favorite; his Guardians teams were second in both 2023 and 2024. But it’s slightly surprising that the Blue Jays are as high as third now. It’s not like Giménez isn’t or hasn’t been good in the past, but he’s coming off a season in which he hit a meager .252/.298/.340 and got salary dumped to Canada. Still, elite second base defense and 30 stolen bases makes up for a lot of shortcomings at the plate, and even a modest bounce-back season would make Giménez an All-Star-caliber performer once again.

Giménez is good for 150 games a year, so it’s not worth spending too much time investigating the backups. Nevertheless, Toronto’s surfeit of intriguing infielders gives them some depth here. There’s hit-by-pitch wizard Leo Jiménez (surely the Giménez/Jiménez thing won’t be a nightmare for people covering Toronto this year), minor league walk machine Will Wagner, and Davis Schneider. Can Schneider actually play competent defense at second? Perhaps not, but he can stand there and hope the ball doesn’t get hit to him while he waits for his turn to crank dingers down the left field line.

The Yankees shocked the world last summer by acquiring Marlins center fielder Jazz Chisholm Jr. and immediately moving him to third base, a position he’d never played before. It quickly proved to be a master stroke, as Chisholm more than held his own at the hot corner while posting a 132 wRC+ with 11 home runs and 18 stolen bases in just 46 regular-season games in pinstripes.

Eight months after that trade, Chisholm is starting his first full season with the Yankees… at second base. Chisholm’s third position change in 24 months brings him right back where he started. Assuming he hasn’t forgotten how to play the position, Chisholm figures to provide a rare combination of power and speed (he hit 24 homers and stole 40 bases in total last year) at an up-the-middle position. With Juan Soto off across town and Giancarlo Stanton on the IL with bilateral elbow tendinitis, Chisholm is now the Yankees’ second-best hitter instead of their fourth-best. He’s probably stretched a little too far carrying that much of the offensive burden, but that’s not his fault. If Chisholm plays like he did last year, he’s absolutely a top-five player in the majors at his position. Building the rest of the lineup is someone else’s job.

The only player to beat Semien to the top of the PPR leaderboard during his Rangers tenure, Brandon Lowe has one of the strongest bats you’ll find on any infield in baseball. At least when he’s healthy. Lowe has averaged just 94 games per year since 2022, but he’s still a power threat when he’s in the lineup, slugging 21 dingers in each of the past two seasons.

But the extreme lift-and-pull approach that made Lowe a consistent mid-.500s SLG guy in his youth is starting to drift back toward averageness, and as he turned 30 last season, the tiniest little wisps of pop are starting to seep out of his bat. Even so, insofar as Lowe is declining, he’s starting from a great platform. If he stays healthy enough to put in this many plate appearances, he’ll be one of Tampa Bay’s most productive position players.

If not, the Rays might be in a bit of a fix. The next guys on the depth chart — José Caballero and Taylor Walls — don’t offer much in the way of offense, and Mead has struggled in the majors.

Matt McLain lost his entire sophomore campaign to a shoulder injury, but he hit .290/.357/.507 in an 89-game rookie year. That level of production over a full season is bumping up against five-win territory. It wasn’t too long ago that it was a defensible (albeit hipster-contrarian) position that McLain, and not Elly De La Cruz, was Cincinnati’s best young middle infielder.

As strong as the Reds’ double play combination figures to be, the rest of the infield (indeed, much of the rest of the lineup) is a collection of bounce-back candidates, prospects on their last legs, and bench guys in search of a bigger role. I guess the idea is to throw a bunch of below-average players together in the hope that a couple of them will get and stay hot; certainly few managers are better at juggling this kind of situation than new skipper Terry Francona.

Still, it’s an unstable mixture, and some of that chaos is bound to splatter over toward second base. You might remember that the Reds just traded for Gavin Lux, who’s currently trying his hand at third base but could see time at second. So could his rival/platoon partner, Santiago Espinal. Espinal is coming off a run of consecutive replacement-level seasons, but he was an average hitter in 2022, and maybe that’s still in there.

Let’s be optimistic, then: If the Reds get 140 or 150 games out of McLain, they’ll have one of the best second base situations in the NL.

Nico Hoerner is the platonic ideal of a second baseman: average offense overall with a high batting average and very little power, plenty of stolen bases, and great defense. But all of that’s contingent on getting him into the lineup. Hoerner had surgery in October to fix an injured flexor tendon in his throwing arm, but he’s still yet to take part in a Cactus League game, and he’ll miss the Cubs’ season-opening trip to Japan. (Which must be a bummer for him on a personal level, if nothing else. I like Mesa, Arizona, as much as the next guy, but Tokyo is a global capital of culture.)

The alternatives are mostly unappetizing. There are some fast veteran utility guys, namely Jon Berti, who actually hit pretty well in his last full big league season. Vidal Bruján pops up here again; his projected .227/.300/.341 in 98 PA — 28 of them at second base — would measure out to 0.1 WAR. If he did put up those numbers, it’d be the best season of his career by quite a large margin.

One intriguing off-the-wall option is Gage Workman, who was acquired from Detroit in the Rule 5 draft this winter. Workman is a good defender at short and a great one at third, and while his 6-foot-4 frame makes him an awkward physical fit at second, Matt Shaw seems to be fencing off the hot corner. As a hitter, Workman has solid power but apocalyptic contact issues; in 2022, he struck out 206 times in 515 PA at Double-A. He stopped switch-hitting last year and made modest gains when it came to his strikeout rate, but his swing is still riddled with holes.

Nevertheless, the 25-year-old former Arizona State player has been on fire this spring, and if Hoerner doesn’t get well soon, Workman stands to find himself in the infield rotation in some capacity.

Jackson Holliday probably wants a do-over on 2024. He entered the season as the no. 1 prospect in baseball, and when he didn’t make the Orioles’ roster out of camp, it looked like the nastiest bit of service time manipulation since Kris Bryant. Holliday did make it up to Baltimore by April 10, but his first trip through the majors made fools out of everyone who banged the drum for him to start the season with the big club, including me.

Holliday went 2-for-34 with two walks and 18 strikeouts in his first call-up. He didn’t get his career batting average over .100 until August 2, and while his second stint in the majors was better (.218/.385/.365 in 172 PA over 50 games), that doesn’t mean it was good.

It is worth remembering that Holliday is still only 21; for comparison, he was born the same day as presumptive no. 1 overall pick Jace LaViolette, who’ll spend this season at Texas A&M.

I think Holliday’s going to end up being just fine, but even if he isn’t, the Orioles have depth. Jorge Mateo is recovering from elbow surgery, but he should be back at some point this year. The Orioles also have eternal utilityman Ramón Urías, and once Coby Mayo gets integrated into the infield picture, that frees up Jordan Westburg to take some reps at second. This might not be the group with the highest projected WAR total, but the collection of upside (through Holliday) and depth make it one of the most enviable second base situations in the league.

Boston’s second base situation has been an inscrutable mystery all spring. Right now, Kristian Campbell appears to be the favorite for playing time. On one hand, Campell has absolutely earned an opportunity, having unlocked an extra grade or two of power and torn up three levels of the minor leagues in 2024; he was the no. 7 prospect in all of baseball in our recent offseason Top 100. This is the kind of player you make room for, although he might not make the Opening Day roster.

On the other hand, the Red Sox shelled out for the top third baseman on the free agent market (Alex Bregman) despite having an even better third baseman (Rafael Devers) under contract through the Rapture. No matter; had Bregman been drafted by any team other than the Astros, that’s probably where he would’ve been playing all along. And it’s where I’d play him now if I were in charge.

As if Alex Cora needed more options at second, he also has utilityman David Hamilton. The 27-year-old out of the University of Texas had kind a fringy 2024 at the plate (.248/.303/.395), but he can play both middle infield positions, and he stole 33 bases in 37 attempts over just 98 games.

So I guess I’ll say this: I can’t tell you who will end up as Boston’s nominal starting second baseman, but I’m confident this will be a position of strength no matter who ends up there.

I really wish Ozzie Albies would stop switch-hitting, but I guess that ship has sailed. The interesting thing here is how weak the rest of Atlanta’s infield depth looks right now. Albies is projected for 658 PA, which squeezes the Braves’ reserve second basemen into about seven plate appearances a month, collectively.

Albies has met that playing time threshold just once in the past three seasons. When he’s healthy, he’s one of the best second basemen out there. Albies has qualified for the batting title four times in his career, and in those four seasons he’s averaged an even 4.0 WAR. But if he’s unavailable, Atlanta’s top reserve middle infielder is Nick Allen, who wasn’t good enough to hang on with the A’s last year. That’s somewhat more troubling because of how bad shortstop Orlando Arcia was in 2024; a continuation of that downward trend could lead to him getting yanked from the lineup for cause.

In case of a long-term Albies injury, the best option might be 21-year-old Nacho Alvarez Jr., a 2022 fifth-round pick with unremarkable athletic skills but plus contact and plate discipline to go along with smooth defensive actions. He’s probably not a star in the making, but likely a major league contributor in the near future.

Bryson Stott has been a good, bordering-on-elite defensive second baseman and one of the best percentage basestealers in the league. But while he’s been a good major league player on balance, and an extremely tough out at times, Stott is a frustrating hitter to watch. He doesn’t hit the ball nearly as hard as his 6-foot-3 frame would suggest, and his selectivity at the plate has frequently veered into passivity (his in-zone swing rate was the fourth-lowest in the league last year) while producing neither exceptional walk nor power numbers.

The second base job remains Stott’s, because, like I said, he’s still a good player. And the Phillies have depth here. Edmundo Sosa hit .284/.347/.514 against lefties last year while deputizing at three infield positions, and he’s learning to play outfield this season. Also in camp is Kody Clemens, a good utility guy who makes an awkward fit on the Phillies’ roster by virtue of being a left-handed hitter on an extremely left-handed-hitting team.

Weston Wilson is basically Clemens, but right-handed, and currently out with an oblique strain. That injury could possibly open up a reserve role for Buddy Kennedy, the second-best major leaguer from nearby Millville, New Jersey. Or at least it’d keep Kennedy on the 40-man a little longer. If 40-man status isn’t a concern, Christian Arroyo could find his way onto the Opening Day roster. You might remember him as one of the players the Giants traded to Tampa Bay for Evan Longoria. Arroyo, now 29, didn’t play in the majors last year, but he’s turned some heads in Phillies camp as an NRI.

Poor Gleyber Torres. He left the Yankees, immediately grew a beard, and then looked on in horror as his old club finally ditched its infamous restrictions on facial hair. I’ve never been a big Torres fan; I’ve found his offense overrated and his defense intolerable for most of his career. But even I was staggered to see that he only got a one-year, $15 million contract at age 28. This could be one of the biggest bargains of the winter.

And he couldn’t have gone to a team that needed him more. Last year, the Tigers made the playoffs despite having, like, 1 1/2 above-average hitters. Even if you take a conservative view of Torres’ offensive corpus, he became Detroit’s best right-handed hitter the moment he arrived in camp. And Torres was legitimately excellent at the plate later in the year: He hit .292/.361/.419 after the All-Star break. That .361 OBP in the second half was second among second basemen and fifth among middle infielders. (And it allowed me to use the word “second” three times in six words just now.)

Torres figures to start every game for which he’s available, though Detroit has no shortage of utility infielders: Andy Ibáñez and Zach McKinstry, as well as Javier Báez, who’s already halfway through his six-year, $140 million contract.

Gelof was one of the few bright spots in Oakland in 2023, when he hit 14 home runs and stole 14 bases in a 300-plate appearance rookie campaign. But the 2021 second-rounder out of the University of Virginia suffered almighty struggles in 2024. Gelof hit just .211 with a .270 OBP, and worst of all, he struck out 34.4% of the time. That was not only dead last among qualified hitters, it would’ve been the highest strikeout rate for a qualified starting pitcher as well.

Gelof didn’t take his sophomore slump lying down; he’s trying out a new batting stance this spring. Best of luck to him.

Sacramento’s other options at second base include Max Schuemann, who’s been displaced at shortstop by 2023 first-rounder Jacob Wilson, and Luis Urías. The A’s are the third organization in the past 24 months to look at Urías and think, “I can fix him!”

The other player who deserves mention is 2021 first-round pick Max Muncy. He’s 22, a non-roster invite, and was solid but not world-beating in the minors last year. Mostly I bring him up because he’s been a massive inconvenience for our automatic player linking tool, because he shares a name with a certain Dodger mainstay. So it’s good to justify all that aggravation by mentioning him here.

Out of all 360 PPR blurbs, I think this is the most disconcerting. Jose Altuve claimed the Astros’ starting second base job when he debuted in the majors on July 20, 2011. He hasn’t played every game since then; Altuve has actually gone to the IL seven times in his career, though only one of those stints lasted more than four weeks. But since Altuve’s debut, the Astros have played 2,068 regular-season games. Altuve has taken part in 1,821 of those, and started 1,751 of them at second base. Nobody else has even 100 starts at second for Houston since Altuve entered the picture. In the postseason — where Altuve and the Astros have gone eight seasons running and nine times in the past 10 years — he’s started 102 of 105 games at second base.

That’s a Jeter-on-the-Yankees-level run, and it’s coming to an end. The Astros have floated moving their veteran leader to left field for a while, originally to make room for Bregman and/or Nolan Arenado alongside the surfeit of young third basemen acquired in the Kyle Tucker trade.

Having struck out there, the Astros are moving Altuve nonetheless. Manager Joe Espada has said that while Altuve will still play second base occasionally, most of his reps will come in left. Out in left field, Altuve probably still be pretty bad defensively, but at least it’s harder to find a productive hitter at second base than in left field.

Sarcasm aside, the Astros did luck out in grabbing Brendan Rodgers on a minor league deal. He wasn’t good, so to speak, his last season in Colorado, but he was competent last year and basically average in 2021 and 2022. Houston could also plug in Mauricio Dubón, if they feel comfortable releasing him from his utility role, or Luis Guillorme, another NRI with plenty of major league experience.

Whatever they end up doing, it’s going to be weird having anyone but Altuve out there.

Nolan Gorman had a promising rookie year (a 105 wRC+ with bad defense), followed by a legitimately good second year (118 wRC+), and then it all collapsed in 2024. He hit .203/.271/.400, with is a wRC+ of 87, and he struck out 37.6% of the time, which makes me feel a little bad for ragging on Gelof for his strikeout rate two blurbs ago.

We have him splitting time at second with Brendan Donovan, who’ll also be playing left field. It won’t be a straight platoon, obviously, since Gorman and Donovan both bat left-handed, maybe more of a contact-versus-power situation. The right-handed option here is Thomas Saggese, the prospect the Cardinals got for Jordan Montgomery at the 2023 trade deadline who the team just optioned to Triple-A.

At the time of the trade, Saggese was lighting up Double-A, but since then he’s been pedestrian at best. Where we have pitch-level plate discipline data for Saggese, he’s been posting chase rates in the high 30s; major leaguers in that neighborhood include Nick Castellanos and Mickey Moniak. It’s not like you can’t be successful with that kind of chase rate, but you have to hit the ball hard and make a lot of contact. So, we’ll see.

I like Michael Massey despite my better judgment. The former Illinois standout is probably a couple notches shy athletically of being able to stay at second base. He’s a career .242 hitter with a 4.7% walk rate. He makes good contact, and lots of it, but he doesn’t hit the ball that hard.

Still, he pulls the ball and hits it in the air, which resulted in 33 extra-base hits, including 14 homers, in just 356 plate appearances in 2024. For the Royals, who had a lineup of Bobby Witt Jr. and eight guys who might as well have gone up there holding a table leg, that meant Massey started all six playoff games, five of them in the leadoff spot. And he did pretty well, going 7-for-23 with two walks.

Massey continues to play some second base, but he’ll also play the outfield regularly, because the Royals traded for Jonathan India, who is the same guy as Massey, except right-handed and even more hirsute. India doesn’t have Massey’s contact ability, so he hits for a lower average, but he also wears a couple dozen pitches a year, which usually floats his OBP into the mid-.300s.

Beyond these two, the Royals can draw on utilitymen Nick Loftin, who is definitely a human man with corporeal form and a soul, and Maikel Garcia, who would be a Hall of Famer if he could steal first base. Garcia will also make starts at third base and play some outfield.

Luis García Jr., who feels like he’s in his fifth consecutive age-22 season (he’s actually 24), took a massive step forward at the plate last year. García had always hit for at least a respectable average, but it was a lot of empty contact: lots of grounders, few extra-base hits, and even fewer walks. Over his first four seasons in the majors, García compiled a wRC+ of 86 and -0.4 WAR.

In 2024, García started lifting the ball a little more. Not much more, as he’s still pretty grounder-prone, but enough to set a new career high with 25 doubles, and to double his previous career high in home runs. The new and improved García hit .282/.318/.444, which is a 111 wRC+. His career highs in hard-hit rate and xSLG (41.2% and .452, respectively) were a step change above what he’d been capable of previously, and at least above-average relative to the league. Additional gains on defense (he went from the 14th percentile in OAA to the 89th) made García a 3.1-WAR player, and the undisputed king of the various Luises Garcia who populate professional baseball.

Newcomer Amed Rosario should see some playing time against left-handed starting pitchers; he’s on his fifth team in the past two years (including two stints with the Dodgers), and hasn’t been very good since 2022. “We’re not selling jeans here,” is the baseball aphorism, but if you were selling jeans, Rosario would be great.

Washington’s depth at this position includes José Tena, best known as the second piece in the Lane Thomas trade, and Darren Baker, best known for his role in the 2002 World Series.

Brice Turang is the most stereotypically Brewers player I can think of, a guy who has never posted a .100 ISO and is a career .239 hitter, but who is nevertheless a playable second baseman — even a good one. Turang doesn’t hit much, but he walks enough (8.1%) to drag his OBP into the .300s, and once on base he can make his own power with his speed. Turang was 50-for-56 on stolen bases last year, and was one of the 10 best baserunners in the league overall.

That, plus good defense, got him into the 2.5-WAR range, but he’s still not a player you want with a bat in his hands and the game on the line, especially against lefties. So the Brewers have a couple other options here. First: Turang’s defense at second base is so good that Milwaukee might swap its middle infield combination, using Joey Ortiz at second and Turang at short.

Ortiz posted a 104 wRC+ last year and played good defense (mostly at third), but that wouldn’t introduce a new bat to the lineup. Caleb Durbin came over from the Yankees this winter in the Devin Williams trade; the 25-year-old posted a 124 wRC+ and a single-digit strikeout rate across three minor league levels in 2024. But he’s only 5-foot-7, so it’s one of those prospect profiles where you only know it’s going to work in the majors if you give him a chance to try.

The other contender is Vinny Capra, who is himself is only 5-foot-8. (Did the Brewers build their roster based on Fanatics putting 28-inch inseam pants on sale?) He’s 28 and has failed to stick in the majors so far, despite opportunities with three different teams. The other reserve infielder on Milwaukee’s 40-man is Andrew Monasterio, who slugged .272 in 142 big league plate appearances in 2024.

If Turang and Durbin get most of the reps here, this should be a pretty solid second base partnership, and a fascinating combination of skills.

Brooks Lee was pretty bad as a rookie: .221/.265/.320. Any time I see an ISO under .100 in the starting lineup, I hear warning sirens. But there are mitigating factors. Lee was a top-10 pick as recently as 2022 and put up good minor league numbers (.331/.391/.570) in 35 games across three levels, even as he struggled in the bigs. Lee also missed a month while battling biceps tendinitis. Given those worrisome numbers came in just 50 games’ worth of major league action, I’m inclined to grant a mulligan.

The Twins aren’t short on second basemen who are trying to rediscover their mojo. The sometime Davy Andrews muse Edouard Julien slugged 16 dingers and posted a .381 OBP as a rookie, causing an entire nation to wonder if Brian Dozier had a hitherto unknown French-Canadian brother. Year 2 was real bad, though; Julien’s batting average slumped below .200, and he’s not too far from sliding off a power ranking of Québécois second basemen from SEC schools who hit left-handed and walk a lot. (Shout out Émilien Pitre.)

If neither Lee nor Julien snaps out of it, the Twins could turn to Willi Castro. The 27-year-old played all over the place in 2024, including almost 300 innings at second in which he did not maim himself. He’s going to start somewhere, and could be at the top of the second base pecking order as soon as Opening Day.

I was going to say that the Mets looked better than this on paper, but this is paper, isn’t it? Or at least what passes for paper in The Future. Jeff McNeil is only getting older. And indeed, more injured, as an oblique strain is forcing him to start the year on the IL. After a 5.6-WAR season in 2022, McNeil’s batting average dropped to .257 over the past two seasons. And as McNeil has aged (he turns 33 in early April), he’s gone down the well-traveled path of striking out more in order to maintain his power. McNeil’s defense is also doing about what you’d expect for a player his age.

Luisangel Acuña could be the next man up. He had a brief but noisy major league cameo at the end of last season, hitting .308 with three home runs in just 14 games. Acuña checks all the boxes of a player who’s going to get famous — he was traded for Max Scherzer, and you’ve probably heard of his big brother — but despite his athleticism and power potential, his Triple-A stats were quite poor last year, and he might end up having to move to center field anyway. Nevertheless, he’s talented, and he’s earned a shot to prove himself.

Unless Brett Baty gets in the way, that is. I’ve been fixated on Baty for the past two and a half years, and he just will not hit. The emergence of Mark Vientos has forced him to move over a couple slots, and McNeil’s injury might put him right back into the lineup.

Baty’s killing it in the Grapefruit League, for what it’s worth. What is that worth? Probably less than 600-plus major league plate appearances in which he hit like a backup catcher. But hey, maybe the fourth time will be the charm.

Around no. 11 or 12 on this list, the various second base options went from great to just fine, and this is about the point where they go from fine to wanting. Still, Tyler Fitzgerald was actually extremely productive as a 26-year-old rookie in 2024, hitting .280/.334/.497 and collecting 3.0 WAR in just 96 games.

Now, the new Giants front office, led by Buster Posey, is being depicted as a throwback to the days when baseball men were baseball men, and didn’t need any of that computerized nonsense. Back in my day, the only number we cared about was under the W column in the newspaper. Raw meat, hairy chests, etc., etc. That said, I know Posey, or someone in his employ, understands the significance of Fitzgerald’s strikeout rate (31.7%) and/or BABIP (.380) last year. He was so productive (a 132 wRC+ and 15 home runs in a little over half a season) that there’s plenty of room for him to regress and still be a productive starter. I’m thinking the one-size-smaller figurine inside the Dan Uggla matryoshka doll.

I can all but guarantee that Fitzgerland, who was displaced from shortstop by the signing of Willy Adames, will be an improvement on the outgoing Thairo Estrada.

Second on the depth chart is Brett Wisley, a diminutive left-handed hitter who struck out 23.9% of the time in 2024 without walking frequently, or hitting for much average or power. Utilityman Casey Schmitt has a little more pop, and will compete for playing time with rookie Osleivis Basabe and former shortstop of the future Marco Luciano, who biffed it pretty bad last year.

My favorite thing about the Mariners’ second basemen is that if Dylan Moore, Ryan Bliss, and Cole Young ever sit on the bench together in the right order, it could make for a powerful photo illustration about the joy of youth.

Bliss is listed at 5-foot-7. I don’t know if that’s legit or just what he told the guy at Six Flags so he could ride the big rollercoasters, but either way, he hits the ball hard for a short guy with a compact swing: Six extra-base hits in just 71 major league plate appearances last year. In 2023, he actually had 65 XBH (including 23 homers) in 128 games across Double- and Triple-A.

Dylan Moore has had a fascinating career; this is his seventh major league season, all with the Mariners, but he’s never broken in as a full-time starter. The highly specific and arbitrary stat of the day: Moore’s streak of six straight seasons of between 150 and 450 plate appearances is the longest active run in baseball with a single team. (Nobody else has more than four.) If you count players who have changed teams, he’s tied with Travis d’Arnaud and… drumroll please… Donovan Solano!

Solano’s been a pretty dangerous part-time utility bat-for-hire for six seasons now. Those of us who remember him as a Punch-and-Judy hitter with the Marlins in his early 20s are still getting used to the new Solano, but he’s pretty reliable now. He and Jorge Polanco could both play either second or third base.

Whoever ends up here early in the year might just be keeping the seat warm for Young, the Mariners’ 2022 first-round pick. The 21-year-old Yinzer only made it as far as Double-A in 2024, but if he forces the issue, a big league debut this year is possible. Young is capable of playing shortstop, but J.P. Crawford has already spoken for that position, so if he does make it to Seattle by season’s end, it’ll probably be at second.

I doubt very much that the Dodgers will be in the bottom quarter of the league in second base WAR at the end of the season, but I also don’t really know who’s going to play here. Tommy Edman and Mookie Betts will start… somewhere. Chris Taylor and Enrique Hernández have both been bouncing from position to position at Dodger Stadium for so long I think they both platooned with Jim Gilliam.

But I worry that they’re both pretty well cooked at this point. Last year, Taylor hit .202/.298/.300 and played left field more than any other position. He’s also on a streak of three straight seasons of a 30% strikeout rate, which is not ideal for a guy who hit four homers in 2024. Hernández remains one of the best hangs in the National League, and as a platoon/utility guy you could do worse, but he hasn’t played up to his reputation for a couple years now. The last time Hernández posted a wRC+ over 90 against lefties was 2022. Still, these guys have built up more social capital with the Dodgers than most players accumulate in a lifetime. Get along with your co-workers and you’ll keep getting hired.

Both Taylor and Hernández benefited when Hyeseong Kim, the much-heralded free agent signing from Korea, didn’t set the world on fire upon his arrival at Camelback Ranch. Kim hit .207 in 15 Cactus League games and found himself optioned to minor league camp before Pi Day.

Nevertheless, I still agree with the prediction that Kim will play more games at second base for the Dodgers than anyone else. At 26, he’s still fairly young and a rookie. He probably, like an immature arrabbiata sauce, just needs more time and seasoning. I like to toss a couple anchovies in the pot, myself.

In 2024, Luis Rengifo traded some power (of which he did not have much to spare to begin with) for about 35 points of batting average. Rengifo walked just 5.3% of the time, posted a .117 ISO, and his defense was pretty bad. But even an empty .300 average is good for a wRC+ in the 110s.

At this moment, Rengifo is on the shelf with a hamstring strain, which opens up opportunities for the Angels’ boneyard of contact-heavy 2010s middle infield prospects: Tim Anderson and Kevin Newman. (Lumping Anderson in with Newman is more than a little disrespectful to his overall body of work, for which I apologize, but it’s an appropriate assessment of his skills at this point in time.)

The hope is that Christian Moore forces his way into the conversation. Moore was the heart, soul, and muscle of the national championship Tennessee Volunteers. If you’re not sure why the Angels drafted him eighth overall last year, you should familiarize yourself with the concept of “middle infielder with a .797 SLG.”

Moore is the latest high-profile college bat to be strapped to the Angels’ prospect rocket ship, like pilots of the “automated” Soviet moon probe in Omon Ra. After just two games at Single-A, the Angels promoted him to Double-A in his draft year, and he hit .322/.378/.533 in 23 games there. Now, just 110 plate appearances into his professional career, Moore is a serious contender to start at either second or third. Is this the best developmental environment for Moore? I don’t know. But I think he’s talented enough to turn into a good player anyway.

Plan A: Nick Gonzales. He was fine last year, to the tune of a .270/.311/.398 line. That’s a wRC+ of 94 and 1.3 WAR in 94 games. Plus, you have to account for the fact that Gonzales spent a month on the IL with groin discomfort. I think we can all agree that nobody wants an uncomfortable groin.

Gonzales being a bang-average big league second baseman is good news for an organization that is obliged to have nine men standing on the field 162 games a year, and at this point it seems the Pirates don’t aspire to achieve much more. A more ambitious organization might be ever so slightly disappointed that Gonzales didn’t continue to destroy opposing pitching the way he did at New Mexico State, where his college performance persuaded Pittsburgh to pick him seventh overall in 2020. C’est la guerre.

Plan B: Hope that Adam Frazier pulls on that yellow and black uniform and immediately flashes back to 2021. Frazier’s career has taken the shape of a bell curve: A couple seasons of unremarkable utility work, then two-thirds of a season where he was basically skinny Luis Arraez, and then back on down the mountain ever since.

Most of the other names here are too depressing to contemplate, with the exception of Nick Yorke. Yorke went 10 picks after Gonzales in 2020 and was the most shocking selection of the night by a huge margin. But he quickly proved the Red Sox right and turned into a pretty good infield prospect. (I was interested to see if the Pirates had cornered the market on 2020 first-rounders named Nick. No, it turns out. They still have to collect both Nick Loftin and Nick Bitsko to get the whole set.)

After a moderately paced progression through the minors, Boston traded Yorke to Pittsburgh at last year’s deadline, and he made his debut in the last two weeks of last season. Yorke played six defensive positions in the minors; in fact, in 11 games in the majors, he’s started at four positions. But he’s hit wherever he’s gone. Perhaps this Nick will be more to Pittsburgh’s liking.

Otto Lopez hit .270/.313/.377, and was a 2.5 WAR player in just 117 games because he put up some truly outrageous defensive numbers. Statcast credited him with 17 outs above average, which was seven more than Hoerner, the 2023 Gold Glove winner. The only two players ahead of him, Semien and Giménez, led their teams to no. 1 and no. 3 on this list, respectively. To say nothing of the fact that both played more than 1,330 innings at second base, while Lopez put up those numbers in 850 1/3 innings. On a per-game basis, he almost laps the field.

Xavier Edwards, whom I dubbed Zoomer OG Luis Castillo back in January, is slated to play shortstop but could see time at second as well.

There are two other guys with a line on semi-regular playing time here. One is 22-year-old rookie Javier Sanoja. He’s only 5-foot-7 (is it just me, or are second basemen really short this year?), but he posted a strikeout rate of just 6.1% in 492 plate appearances at Triple-A last season. No, that is not a typo. He makes so much contact he sent John Hurt into space for cancer treatment.

The other is Max Acosta, who hit .288/.353/.425 in 434 PA for the Frisco RoughRiders last year. He came to be in the Marlins’ system thanks to the Jake Burger trade last December. At 5-foot-11, 187 pounds, he looks like Patrick Ewing next to some of the other second basemen listed here, but if he ends up as Miami’s regular starter, something truly weird has happened.

The vaunted all-shortstop lineup falls to the bottom five of the second base ranking, thanks to some truly depressing projections for Jake Cronenworth and Jose Iglesias. (I’m in a Diamond Mind league that’s about to start a sim of the 2024 season, and I literally have a second base platoon of Cronenworth and Iglesias. Clearly I’m more optimistic than our brain-in-a-jar.)

Cronenworth is on a run of some pretty grim batting average numbers — he’s hit a combined .237 since 2022. But he still hits the ball hard; he had 17 homers and 29 doubles last year. Cronenworth isn’t Joey Votto or anything, but he walks enough to boost a low-.200s batting average into an average-or-better OBP. Last year, he played 155 games, had a wRC+ of 105, and despite making 85 of his 151 starts at either first base or DH, he still compiled 2.1 WAR. He’s been around a while now, but he’s only 31, and is an average player at worst.

Iglesias, well, I can’t begin to understand what he did last year. For more than a decade, he was a slap-hitting all-glove shortstop, a double play machine on both sides of the ball. Then, after not playing in the majors at all in 2023, Iglesias popped up with the Mets, hit .337/.381/.448 (and .402/.455/.543 against lefties), and found himself in the middle of the order for a team that went to the NLCS. He was so good I keep forgetting he also performed the team’s victory anthem. Wild stuff. I don’t think he’ll come within 25 points of his 2024 wRC+, but if Solano can carve out a second career as a slugger, anyone can.

Over the winter, the Guardians got rid of Giménez. Then they flipped Spencer Horwitz to Pittsburgh before the fax paper from the first trade was cold. Horwitz is technically a second baseman, in that he started there 37 times for Toronto last year. But in much the same way that you could BASE jump off Half Dome 37 times without anything bad happening, that doesn’t mean it was a good idea.

I digress. The point is that the Guardians traded away two players with… let’s call it “second base pedigree” in an afternoon in December. Surely they have someone just as good ready to take over, right?

No!

Second base for Cleveland is an honest-to-goodness spring training position battle, pitting rookie Juan Brito against Gabriel Arias. Cactus League numbers aren’t the whole story, unless your batting average starts with a zero, which Brito did until a few days ago. That puts Arias in pole position; that’s the same Arias who hit .212/.274/.350 with a 32.3% strikeout rate and a 2-to-1 groundball-to-fly ball ratio over 563 career plate appearances. Ben Clemens might be optimistic, but I remain skeptical of anyone who hits like upside-down Ben Broussard.

Let’s be real: This is all just a charade to kill time until last year’s no. 1 overall pick, Travis Bazzana, is ready. Bazzana’s professional career consists of 27 games at High-A at the moment, but he was such a monster in college I expect him to move quickly. I oohed and aahed over Christian Moore’s draft year a couple blurbs ago, but get an eyeful of this: Bazzana hit .407/.568/.911 in his junior year at Oregon State. I expect he’ll be quite quick to the majors, and put the Guardians much closer to the top of next year’s PPRs.

In writing these capsules, I’m trying to give the most charitable possible reading of each team’s depth chart. These players are all pros, and the GMs who signed them are not dummies; they’re due a certain measure of respect, I think. Besides, if you’re reading this, you’re probably excited to follow your favorite team in the coming season. The last thing you want to read is some national writer trashing your ballclub before Opening Day.

With that said, I’m finding it very difficult to fake enthusiasm for a Lenyn Sosa-Brandon Drury partnership here.

You know what? I take some of that snark back, because if Chase Meidroth gets into the lineup, he could be interesting. A 2024 fourth-rounder out of the University of San Diego, Meidroth was the third player out of four in the Garrett Crochet trade, and he could be fun even if he’s not that good. Meidroth is 5-foot-10, 170 pounds (another short guy) with some unusual plate discipline numbers.

In 1,147 minor league plate appearances, Meidroth has 199 walks against 180 strikeouts. In Triple-A games where we have Statcast data, Meidroth posted an in-zone contact rate of 93.6% but an overall swing rate of just 30.7%. If Meidroth put up those numbers in the majors, he’d be one of the best contact hitters in the league, and also the most passive hitter in the league by a huge margin. But in the minors, where nobody can throw strikes, it allowed Meidroth to post a career .425 OBP without having enough power to scare anyone. The White Sox aren’t going to be good this year, but I’d settle for them being weird.

Speaking of bad and weird. The Rockies jettisoned Brendan Rodgers over the offseason, which is fair enough; he wasn’t great last year, and was only going to get more expensive in arbitration. What I don’t get is turning around spending that money on Thairo Estrada.

Estrada was a very useful player for the Giants from 2021 to 2023; he can play anywhere, and his defense at second base is very good, and occasionally elite. Over that three-year span, he posted a 105 wRC+ and averaged a little over 20 stolen bases per 162 games played.

But in 2024, he hit .217/.247/.343; out of 286 position players with 300 or more PA, he was in the bottom five in OBP and the bottom 10 in wRC+. His walk rate, 2.6%, is so absurdly low it doesn’t make sense unless you chant it like you’re in the live studio audience for a taping of Wheel of Fortune: “Two! Point! Six! Percent! Walk Rate! (cheering)”

Estrada’s competition is utilityman Kyle Farmer, who was also OK from 2021 to 2023, but pretty poor in 2024: .214/.293/.353 in 242 plate appearances. But like Estrada, Farmer ought to be very good in the field, so the Rockies have that going for them.

Maybe Coors Field will help.