Predicting the 2030 AL All-Star Team

Another look at the future, this time for the Junior Circuit

With the 2025 All-Star Game today, we’re back with our tarot cards (we like those MLB TV ads, sue us), predicting the 2030 AL All-Stars. If you somehow missed the media content of the century, check out the NL edition we published a few days ago.

Same rules apply here: the players have to be guys we covered at some point; talents like Gunnar Henderson and Bobby Witt Jr. certainly have a good shot at dominating five years down the road, but they came before our time and are thus eliminated from consideration (as always, our full projections can be found here).

This time, we’re crafting a batting order too. Leading off, it’s longtime Oyster darling…

SS Jacob Wilson (ATH/OAK/SAC/LVA)

During the awkward and rebellious teenage years of our model, Jacob Wilson was one of our top overall prospects, and we were shocked to see his lack of traction among the big outlets. In May of 2024, we cited him as an underrated gem:

And in July of 2024, we cited his elite gap power as a reason he’d reach a “superstar ceiling”:

(Back then, we used a different relative stats format where 1 was average, rather than our 0-centered current version)

Wilson has justified our excessive praises by starting his MLB career red hot, posting 2.9 fWAR in the first half, although he’s struggled a bit with injuries as of late. His contact is as promised, as he’s hitting .335, and he’s found some homer power as well, hitting nine in his first 85 games. Despite failing to replicate (for now) his gap-to-gap pop, Wilson hits more than enough singles to be a valuable bat.

His skill with the glove isn’t fantastic, but is around average; Fangraphs has him as a positive fielder, while Savant has him at one run below average. He won’t ever be an elite shortstop, but if he can continue even to be average, the bat will more than carry his weight. We’re curious to see how he develops as he continues to add strength. He’s a highly technical player without elite physical characteristics, and adding muscle could aid his mediocre power and increase his explosiveness in the field.

Unlike the other eight players here, we don’t have to hypothesize Wilson as an All-Star; he’s the lone rookie hitter to be named to this year’s team. 2030 Wilson is already a household name, Pirates fan Maxfield will finally stop accidentally calling him Jack, and he’ll be the franchise cornerstone of whatever the A’s are five years from now.

OF Wyatt Langford (TEX)

It wasn’t exactly a hot take to be high on Langford going into 2024, but we were very willing to join the sizable bandwagon. At the time, Langford had one of our highest star percentages of anybody in the early days of the model:

Since then, despite having one at bat completely taken out of his hands by an umpire who shall not be named, he’s mostly lived up to the hype. He was a 3.0 fWAR player last year and has already accumulated 2.0 fWAR this year, putting up a 112 wRC+, smashing 15 home runs, and adding significant value in the field and on the bases. But perhaps the most exciting thing about Langford is the room he still has to grow. In MiLB, he was typically an incredibly high walk rate guy who struck out less than 20% of the time. He did all that while playing against older competition and hitting for good power. So far in the show, the walk rate and strikeout rates haven’t been quite as impressive. That’s unsurprising, given the jump in quality and that he’s still only 23. But, our research has shown that in general, walk rates and strikeout rates end up being pretty sticky even into MLB. So we’re expecting both of those rates to improve as Langford continues to get more comfortable against top-flight pitching, turning him from an all-around player who is above average at the plate to a plus-plus slugger who can also do it with the glove and wreak havoc on the bases. The All-Star, MVP candidate Langford of 2030 has slightly better bat speed and much better whiff rates, putting more balls in play and doing more damage when he does.

OF Chase DeLauter (CLE)

DeLauter was another early model favorite–on June 6 of last year, we compared him favorably to CJ Kayfus and had him ranked as our number one overall Guardians prospect:

Since then, it’s been a struggle for DeLauter to stay on the field, and largely because of that, he’s lost his top-10 status in our model. Despite the drop, he’s still ranked a very impressive 29th overall in our latest update. Outside of Oyster, the hype surrounding him has subsided substantially as his bandwagon lost momentum due to all the injury issues. It’s only in the past couple of weeks that he’s gotten back to playing every day, but now that he has, we expect his stock to shoot up again soon. Despite many of these games serving as pseudo-rehab appearances, he’s still put up a 128 wRC+ so far in Triple-A and, most impressively, is walking as much as he strikes out (both rates hovering around 16%). DeLauter has a funky swing that puts some folks off, but it gets the job done, allowing him to spray line drives to all fields. He hits the ball on the ground a bit more than would be ideal, but he also hits the ball so hard that many of those grounders often turn into hits anyway.

All-Star Chase has upped his lift rate just a hair and is fully healthy in part thanks to his frequent role as a DH and comes into the Midsummer Classic with just 12 home runs but a boatload of doubles and an OBP flirting with .400.

3B Arjun Nimmala (TOR)

After a big slugging start to the year, Nimmala has cooled off substantially, pushing his hype levels back down after they started to get elevated with the likes of fellow-High-A ballers Luis Peña and Jesus Made back in April and May. We’re not deterred–the hype should remain. Everything Nimmala has done this year screams green flag, and his recent struggles look unlikely to continue. Since June 1, Nimmala is hitting just .174 with a .544 OPS, but, as crazy as it may seem to say, the underlying numbers look ok. He’s still walking at a nearly 11% clip, his strikeout rate remains below what it was at a level lower last year, and his BABIP of .231 suggests a lot of bad luck contributing to the cold streak. We expect Nimmala’s second half to bump his OPS up from the mid .700s to the low .800s, a very impressive performance for a 19 year-old in High-A.

All-Star Nimmala is a guy who has continued to make adjustments as he’s progressed through pro ball. We wrote before the year about some of these adjustments that he’s already made:

“Nimmala has made impressive adjustments to his swing since entering pro ball, getting in a more athletic position when he hits that should enable him to adjust more effectively to both velocity as well as nastier and better-located breaking stuff.”

That comment seemed even more prescient in May when he was lighting up the league, but the results still support the idea that these changes have led to tangible benefits. He has upped his contact rate from 69.9% last year in A-ball to 73.5% this year in High-A and reduced his strikeout rate by nearly 10 percentage points without sacrificing power or discipline. That ability to adapt and improve even when facing tougher competition is something that should serve Nimmala incredibly well as he climbs the ranks and goes on to what we expect will be a fruitful MLB career. We have him playing the hot corner here thanks to his plus arm and the presence of Wilson at SS, but we’re by no means ruling out his chances of sticking at short.

1B Samuel Basallo (BAL)

We haven’t spent as much time discussing Basallo as perhaps we should have, because he’s an absolutely special hitting prospect. A prime example of why you shouldn’t be scared of young prospects with less than elite hitting numbers, Basallo posted a solid but not elite 125 wRC+ in 2024 as a 19-year-old in Double-A before a pedestrian 66 wRC+ in 86 Triple-A plate appearances later that season. Typically, those numbers aren’t incredibly intriguing, but when it’s a 19-year-old catcher posting those stats, you need to pay attention. Basallo has rewarded those who never strayed with a massive 149 wRC+ in Triple-A so far this season. Furthermore, he upped his ISO from .171 in 2024 to .315 in 2025, improved his sub-10.0% walk rate to 15.7%, and increased his contact rate from 65.3% in his small Triple-A sample to a career normal 73.7%. He’s swinging less, walking more, doing more damage, and striking out the same; impressive maturity for a 20-year-old.

Basallo has passed all the tests at the dish in 2024, but he is still a catcher in development. O’s GM Mike Elias said this to the press in late June:

“Catching is the area that there’s still a lot of development left for [Basallo], and not all of that’s gonna be in the minors. But his bat is more ready than the catching, and that tends to happen, and it’ll be developing in the majors, too. But I think the experience that he’s getting, catching in Triple-A right now, is still really, really valuable.”

One struggle (if you can call it that) for young, sweet swinging catchers is that their bat can outpace their glove, forcing teams to either hold a big-league bat down in the minors or play a minus defender in the show. Basallo has that issue to some extent; his glove seems to be below major league quality, but there are plenty of spots for him to make a splash in the Orioles' struggling lineup, giving him the ability to snag playing time at both DH and first base.

For All-Star Sammy, we’re going for first base, where he can play every day without worrying about catching duties and focus solely on mashing baseballs. We wouldn’t be shocked to see him in some unique part-time catcher/full-time hitter type role in the bigs, we think he’s good enough to stick at least a bit behind the plate.

C Josue Briceño

Look, our model doesn’t get everyone right right away, and given how much we’ve been talking up our correct calls here, it seems only right to also highlight a guy our system was late to the party on. Josue Briceño now ranks as our 23rd-best hitting prospect, but back in the fall of last year, we had him in the basement at 297th. His breakout in the AFL led to us writing about him for the first time, highlighting raw power that had been absent in games so far, depressing his rating in our model.

Looking back, we were still a bit surprised the model didn’t like Briceño all that much after his 2024 season. As we noted, he was already an OBP machine and good contact hitter despite the lack of power, and he was a well-above-average Single-A hitter at just 19. We think the problem for him in the model’s eyes was not just the lack of home run power, but the dearth of gap power. Briceño hit just five doubles and two triples in 40 games to go with his paltry two home run output. The model likely saw this and bucketed Briceño as a guy with no power potential whatsoever, docking his projections heavily as a result.

Briceño has sure proved that wrong. He’s knocked 15 long balls already this year while also improving his contact game (he’s flirting with a .300 average). All-Star Briceño is a power-hitting backstop who can also give you a .270 batting average and .390 OBP. He also hoses people at second at a ferocious clip. To say Briceño could be one of the premier throwing catchers of his generation is hardly an exaggeration–he’s gunned down 10 of 26 base stealers this year, good for a 38.4% caught stealing rate.

DH Colt Emerson (SEA)

Let’s get this out of the way first: we are cheating by having Emerson at DH. We just had too many guys we wanted to include. In reality, we expect him to be at short or third. Moving on.

For a brief moment in August 2024, Colt Emerson was king of our model. This was before Leo De Vries solidified his hold on the top spot and before Emerson’s struggles upon his promotion to High-A.

We were early on our confidence in his performance in High-A, but it increasingly seems like we weren’t wrong. Emerson’s rough go of it in his 29 games at High-A last year knocked him down our list a ways going into the season–we had him as our 21st ranked prospect to start the season–but he’s clawed his way back towards the top ten this year with a stronger performance while repeating the level. It hasn’t been an exceptional season for Emerson–he’s putting up a 109 wRC+ slashing .268/.366/.422–but it’s nonetheless been an impressive bounce back for a guy who at 19 is still three years younger than his average opponent. The trend is Emerson’s friend, at least right now. He’s hitting for the most power in his MiLB career, and since June 1 he has posted a 143 wRC+/.

All-Star Emerson has moved to third base, but as we are always droning on about, the fact that he’s stuck at short for so long suggests he will be a plus defender there. He’s realized some of the raw power that we haven’t seen so much of in game yet (understandably given his age) and is a slightly above average contact hitter. We don’t expect to see him in the MVP debate, but he’s a consistent 3+ WAR producer in the show.

2B Mikey Romero (BOS)

Romero is someone we were a bit trepidatious about highlighting as our 16th-best hitting prospect in our preseason top 50, and it still makes us nervous to be so much higher on him than almost anyone else (right now we’ve got him at 11 overall). Gut feel, we’d have him still highly ranked but maybe further towards the 35 or 40 mark. But the model rules supreme, and we’re deferring to it here in making Romero our starting AL second baseman in 2030.

We’ll profile Romero by answering two questions: why does our model like him so much, and why are most people a bit skeptical of him?

To answer the former, we can look no further than Romero’s young age (21) at a high MiLB level (Double-A) combined with above-average power and a knack for knocking base hits. Our model loves players who succeed even though they are playing against much more experienced competition, and it also greatly rates players who hit a lot of doubles and triples that may start clearing the fence as they develop further. The fact that Romero is currently a shortstop also helps in the eyes of the model, even though he’s unlikely to stick there full-time. Romero’s numbers may not immediately jump off the page, but there are no other 21-year-olds playing up the middle in Double-A putting up a wRC+ as high as his (131).

So if this guy is so great, why does no one seem to rate him? Well, the reportedly sketchy defense doesn’t help. We’re less concerned with that–the mere fact that he’s still seeing game time at short suggests he’ll be at least fine at second. The lack of plate discipline and above-average strikeout rate is a concern that we take more seriously. Those tools are tough to develop–often you either have it or you don’t. We are big believers in discipline as one of the key building blocks of a successful big leaguer. It’s not a rule without exception of course, but it’s something of an uphill battle to be successful if you never find your way on after four wide ones. The good news is that Romero has dramatically improved his walk rate in 2025, nearly tripling it from its paltry 2.7% rate in Double-A in 2024. Now, he’s flirting with a league-average walk rate while continuing to hit for both average and power. That’s the All-Star Romero we expect to see in 2030.

RF Gabriel Gonzalez (MIN)

This is a bit of a wild-card pick, but hear us out. Gonzalez is putting up gaudy numbers in Double-A as a relative youngster (he turned 21 in January), slashing .369/.454/.524. Don’t call it a comeback!

Ok fine, call it a comeback. After turning heads in 2023 when he mashed 18 home runs across both levels of A-ball, he had a disappointing 2024 marred by back problems, where he put up a wRC+ of just 106 despite repeating High-A. But this year, he’s back! He’s a contact and OBP machine who walks almost as much as he strikes out and peppers balls into the (usually left-center) gap.

The big concern with Gonzalez is the evaporation of his power. Reports of his demise in this regard have been greatly exaggerated. Let’s hold off on ruling out Gonzalez as any kind of power threat just yet. It is certainly true that the power regressed after his back troubles, but this year it looks to be on its way back. While in 2024 Gonzalez hit just five tanks and 21 other extra base hits across 337 plate appearances, this year he’s hit seven and, more impressively, smacked 31 doubles and triples in 353 plate appearances at a higher level. He’s on a 162-game pace of 62 doubles/triples and 14 home runs this year at just 21 years of age and just a year and a half removed from a serious injury. By the way, you know that home run-mashing Twins stud Byron Buxton? He hit only six home runs in his 60 career Double-A games, 59 of which came when he was the same age as Gonzalez is now.

Anyway, we back Gonzalez to be an average power producer in the majors who is a far above average contact bat. All-Star Gonzalez comes into the break with 10 tanks, a cool .300 batting average, and several outfield assists with his hose of an arm from right field.

Thanks, as always, for reading! We’d love to hear who your 2030 teams would be!