The Opener

1. Shohei Ohtani fired five no-hit innings and walloped his 50th homer to become the first slugger to hit 50 in back-to-back seasons since Alex Rodriguez in 2001-02, as the Phillies defeated the Dodgers, 9-6.

2. Astros slugger Yordan Alvarez, who was crushing the ball to the tune of a .369/.462/.569 in the three weeks since he returned from an extended injury absence, badly sprained his ankle stepping on home plate and will be out … a while. How long a while? So glad you asked. "I'm not going to give you days, weeks, what we're going to do next,” Astros manager Joe Espada told reporters. “You're just going to have to sit down and wait." OK then!

3. The Diamondbacks have won four in a row, including the first two games in a series against the Giants, to position themselves as the top threat in the NL wild card race. They are 1.5 games back of the Mets (and have the advantage in the tiebreaker that kept them out of October last year). Snakes alive, as a wise man once printed on a sheet of paper.

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The Rebuild Rankings: What does 2025 mean for 2026 and beyond?

So, yes it’s September, and all eyes are on the postseason picture. But before we go full tunnel vision, we thought we would spare a thought for the also-rans. Which teams should feel OK or even good about their seasons when they pause on the golf course this October, gaze out over the treetops and take a longer-term view?

It’s time for the Rebuild Rankings. With fewer full tanks and a lot of wild card contention cosplay, this is an imperfect name these days. But essentially what we want to do is look at teams that wound up thinking about the future more than the present and gauging the success of their season on those terms. So we’ll be looking at 11 teams that are clearly out of postseason contention — sorry Braves, sorry Orioles, you just failed miserably at winning, you’re not included here but we’ll surely cover you at some point.

This is a renewal of an exercise I’ve done before, with a Bandwagon twist. It’s not scientific, but there’s at least some spreadsheeting involved. For each of these teams, I’ve tallied the number of top 100 prospects per MLB Pipeline, and the number of players in their first three MLB seasons who posted at least one WAR (Baseball-Reference, in this case) in 2025. Those are the “Promising Players.”

There are of course many degrees of promise and prospect-dom, and many more degrees of intrigue and fun. So the rankings reflect my subjective understanding of just how upward the arrow is pointing heading into the offseason, while Hannah provides a reason to care about, or even actively watch, each of these teams as they play out the string1.

– Zach Crizer

1. The A’s

Promising players: 9 | Top prospects: 3

Forget about limiting things to the young players or the also-ran teams. The A’s just have one of the most exciting lineups in baseball, full stop. It’s a top 10 unit by full season numbers, and a top five group in the second half thanks to Nick Kurtz, Jacob Wilson, Tyler Soderstrom and Shea Langeliers.

They’re going to need to figure out pitching — no small ask in their temporary home — but keep an eye on weirdly effective lefty Jacob Lopez and 22-year-old Luis Morales. A top prospect with seven strong starts under his belt, Morales has what looks like a diabolical two-plane sweeper.

Reason to Bandwagon: This one is almost too easy. Granted, it’s against the spirit of this exercise to cite a dude who was the main subject of an entire issue not two months ago, but we have a lot of bad teams to say something nice about so sometimes you gotta take the low-hanging dinger dude. Which is to say, here’s Nick Kurtz hitting a home run 493 feet — the furthest in over two years.

Oh, also it was a grand slam. Scroll to the last slide here for a close up of teammate Lawrence Butler instantly having the perfect reaction while watching from second base.

As of writing this, Kurtz has 32 homers on the season. In 2019, Pete Alonso set the rookie home run record at 53. Then, uh, 2020 happened. But since 2021, the most home runs by a rookie was Ryan Mountcastle with 33. With a dozen games to go, I bet Kurtz can match that. It’s at least something to watch for.

2. Miami Marlins

Promising players: 7 | Top prospects: 4

This feels like a team learning to win in fits and starts. A summer surge has cooled down, yet there are very positive takeaways. No team has gotten more plate appearances from 28-and-under bats, and Miami’s youth have played respectably. A few, headlined by Kyle Stowers and blazing hot second-half debutante Jakob Marsee, look like reasons to believe in better days ahead.

Reason to Bandwagon: Probably the fact that this bit — while funny and delightfully Billy Eichner-esque — does not actually comport with the current state of the Marlins.