Projecting 2025’s Biggest Bounce-Back Candidates

The new year in baseball resets everyone back to zero, meaning that every team gets a chance to avenge their disappointments from 2024. Since this is a hopeful time, I asked the ZiPS projection system to crunch the numbers for the biggest bounce-back candidates for the 2025 season.

Determining what exactly constitutes a bounce-back season is a bit of a philosophical exercise, and since I can’t ask a complex bucket of algorithms to read the vibes, I narrowed down the list of candidates with a few qualifiers. I didn’t want any stone-cold sample size flukes, so I only looked at hitters who received at least 200 plate appearances in 2024, and limited the pitchers to those who threw at least 90 innings for those who started at least a third of their games, with a 30-inning threshold for relievers. I also only wanted to include players who were 2025-relevant, so I required the same minimums for projected playing time this year, based on our Depth Charts.

For hitters, I looked at those who underperformed their projected OPS+ by at least 20 points. I used OPS+ rather than wRC+ because I’m going for broad simplicity here. Starters and relievers have drastically different ranges of miss, so I just went with the top 15 starter and reliever misses by ERA+. I then ranked the hitters and pitchers by the amount of “missing” 2024 performance they’re projected to claw back in 2025. Let’s start with the hitters:

Teams appear to be getting better and better at identifying the completely lost causes and not giving them plate appearances in the future. All of the hitters who underperformed their projections by at least 20 points of OPS+ and kept their jobs at least partially intact are forecast to take back some part of what they lost, even if it’s only a small percentage.

Jackson Holliday and Miguel Vargas are the most interesting hitters on this list, as despite their down seasons in the majors, ZiPS actually likes them slightly better in 2025 than it did entering 2024! In Holliday’s case, ZiPS was the most conservative of the projection systems entering 2024. It still missed quite high, of course, but not to quite the same degree as some of the other systems. Holliday was a mess in the majors, but a few factors cancel out some of this doom and gloom. He was very good in the minors, actually performing better in 2024 than in 2023, as his performance on the farm was all in Triple-A rather than mostly scattered across the lower levels. ZiPS also is less concerned about his struggles due to the fact that he was very young — he turned 21 just this winter — and because his experience in the majors came with very quick promotions. So while we shouldn’t be happy about Holliday’s anemic 2024, we shouldn’t panic either.

Vargas was terrible in Chicago, but he was terrible and unfortunate, a combination that was prevalent across the board for the Sox last year. Batters have a lot more control over their BABIP than pitchers do, but there are still limits, and Vargas’ .128 BABIP in Chicago is absolutely an unsustainable number. During the Divisional Era, there were 476 pitchers who accumulated 200 plate appearances over their careers. Only five (Brian Moehler, Don Carman, Mark Clark, Tommy Hanson, and Claudio Vargas) had a BABIP worse than .128. Wring just a bit of the horror out of Vargas’ 2024 big league campaign, and his excellent performance in the minors gives the White Sox at least some reason to be optimistic. Steamer’s projection for Vargas also ticked up slightly, so ZiPS isn’t on an island here.

Kyle Stowers bombed with the Marlins after the Trevor Rogers trade, but like the others, his minor league performance still leaves the hope that he should be at least an acceptable stopgap. Being an acceptable stopgap makes him one of Miami’s best offensive players!

Javier Báez’s bounce back is one of the more depressing ones, as he still projects to be one of the worst hitters of this group, it’s just that his abysmal 2024 performance probably overstates the case. That shouldn’t be a reason for the Tigers to give him playing time, or for you to draft him in your fantasy league, though.

ZiPS is generally not quite as excited about catchers bouncing back, in part because, well, catchers are weird. There’s a high washout rate for catchers who see their performance suddenly evaporate. The one big exception here is Bo Naylor, who ZiPS remains high on. Ronald Acuña Jr. gets a solid projection for 2025, but he is also coming off a projection that had him leading all position players in WAR by more than a win, so it’s hard for any projection system to assume that he’ll initially bounce back from his torn ACL that much. Now let’s look at the pitchers:

ERA+ is a much weirder stat for pitchers than OBP/SLG measures are for hitters, so you have a handful of pitchers here with big improvements despite missing their projected ERA+ marks.

ZiPS basically looks at Jhoan Duran’s 2024 with the same disbelief I express when one of my cats insists they were never fed… about an hour after dinner. Duran’s FIP was better in 2024 than 2023, and ZiPS is a lot happier about the walk per nine he shed than the strikeout per nine he lost. ZiPS is the most optimistic of the projection systems on Duran, so I don’t think I can trick you into spreading the blame to Jared and Jordan if its forecast is off.

Since home runs allowed for a pitcher is a terrible statistic in terms of predicting the future, ZiPS isn’t worried about Josh Hader either. His 62% contact rate was his best since 2019 and a significant improvement over recent years, and he set a career-best for first-pitch strike percentage.

Brandon Pfaadt has arguably been the pitcher with the biggest gap between his traditional and sabermetric stats in recent years, with his xERA, the in-ZiPS equivalent, and FIP telling the story of a solid mid-rotation pitcher, while his actual career ERA is 5.06. He’s young enough and still near enough to being considered a prospect that I suspect he has a lot of rope, but I can’t imagine that it will last forever. If Jordan Montgomery had been better last season, Pfaadt might be in a precarious position, roster-wise.

ZiPS isn’t that concerned about Camilo Doval’s walk rate spike in 2024, given that first-pitch strike percentage is a leading indicator and he actually was better by that stat than in 2023 or 2022. It’s weird to think of Logan Webb as an underperformer, but he’s consistently been among the leaders in projected rest-of-career WAR among pitchers, and ZiPS hasn’t seen much of a reason to stop loving him.

On the negative side, while ZiPS still thinks Zach Eflin is a valuable no. 2 starter, a lot of his indicators went backwards in 2024, as he was simply a more hittable pitcher for the Rays and O’s. The dip in his strikeout rate has caused ZiPS to have some mild worry about Luis Castillo, and there’s little optimism that Kyle Hendricks will bounce back to a place where the Angels should be giving him playing time.

Who are your favorite bounce-back candidates in 2025? Let us know in the comments!

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