It’s baaaaack
Every year, Lookout Landing profiles the 40-man roster in a leadup to the start of the season, which has sometimes meant Spring Training and sometimes Opening Day. This year it’s the latter, with a twist on how we do the 40 in 40s. Since the Mariners chose to run it back with their roster, we chose to not run it back with the traditional 40 in 40 series. Rather than write a third—or fourth, or fifth, or sixth—iteration of an article about the career arc of Cal Raleigh or Mitch Haniger, we’re going to assume a baseline familiarity with most of these players and instead look to the future: what do projection systems (PECOTA from Baseball Reference and ZiPS from FanGraphs) see for this player’s 2025, and, based on the information we have plus a good old dose of gut feeling, are we taking the over or the under on that mark?
Obviously, where the situation warrants we’ll spend time recapping the career of Donovan Solano or educating you about where Casey Legumina went to grade school or whatever detail we can turn up. The 40s are a site tradition and one we don’t abandon lightly. But to be honest, the Mariners’ uninspiring off-season led to a similarly uninspired feeling among the staff, so we’re taking an approach that’s more collaborative and future-looking this year rather than sentencing one writer to stay awake through the night feverishly trying to churn out an article about a reliever who’s ticketed for Tacoma for the second straight year. Initially, I (Kate) had toyed with the idea of not doing the 40s at all, instead just focusing on profiling the few players new to the roster, but this is the compromise we came to as a staff. That debate led to us getting a bit of a later start this year, so one more bit of housekeeping: these articles are scheduled to run twice a day, every weekday, up until Opening Week, so check back often. (please)