It’s 3:11 AM UTC and while the Winter Meetings are over, winter is still here. For most of the top free agents, trades are yet to be made and holes are left to be filled in the teams that are considered contenders. Every team fancies themselves as such, but none believe they have their full 2024 Opening Day roster in-house right now, not even the Braves, showing there’s still so much more to happen.
But which clubs have the biggest needs to address? In order to not list dozens here, we’ll set ourselves two rules:
- Only contending teams, which we’ll define as the top 24 teams in 2024 projected WAR at FanGraphs. Sorry, Angels and Pirates.
- We’re not going to bother with pitchers. You know who needs a pitcher right now? Everyone.
We’ll also use a little subjectivity here. For example, Houston’s first basemen do not rate very well (projected 25th-most fWAR), but since Jose Abreu is entering the second year of a three-year contract, it’s hard to see them actually making a change there. The same goes for Detroit at shortstop (29th), where it’s clearly Javier Báez’s job even though that hasn’t worked out very well so far.
Last year, we did this, and accurately predicted that the St. Louis rotation absolutely was not going to miss bats. We also said the Rangers’ outfield wasn’t going to be very good. Can’t win them all, we suppose.
The biggest current needs, as we see them, roughly ordered by position, with FanGraphs’ positional WAR projections in parentheses …
Red Sox: Catcher (projected: 28th)
Ahead of only the White Sox and Rockies is no place to be for a team that’s trying to improve. No team had a higher strikeout rate from its catchers than Boston in 2023, and none of the Red Sox backstops rated as a positive defender. (Connor Wong was outstanding at throwing out runners, but he gave that value back in framing and blocking.) It’s probably not as urgent as Boston’s more desperate need in the rotation, yet it seems like a new front office won’t simply roll back the same Wong/Reese McGuire combo, either.
Potential fixes: Sign Mitch Garver to split time between catcher and DH; trade for old friend Christian Vázquez (MIN)
Cubs: First base (projected: 26th)
Entering 2023, the Cubs had what seemed a perfectly reasonable plan for first base, which was to use veterans Eric Hosmer and Trey Mancini to buy some time for prospect Matt Mervis to reach the bigs. It didn’t go great. Hosmer was released in May, Mancini at the end of July, and Mervis struggled while collecting just 99 plate appearances. By the second half, Cody Bellinger was playing more first than center,