Every year for Opening Day, I ask the FanGraphs staff to predict the season’s award winners, playoff field, and eventual World Series Champion. Those predictions tend to be heavily influenced by our playoff odds, projections, and prospect rankings, and while I appreciate the instinct to lean on data to make our guesses more educated, the results can feel a little chalky at times. That’s why I’ve starting asking our writers to make another prediction — a bold prediction. One that might be a little spicy, or perhaps a little silly. A prediction that eschews the obvious, but is still grounded in reality, even if only by one foot. Nineteen of our writers across FanGraphs and RotoGraphs answered the bell, including me. Will any of these predictions prove to be correct? Who knows! Let’s watch 2,430 games and find out. – Meg Rowley

We’ll See a Front Office Gambling Scandal

I realize this isn’t the most fun prediction you’re going to read here, but this just sort of strikes me as next. We’ve seen coach scandals, player scandals, and interpreter scandals. Well, front offices feature plenty of hyper-competitive people, many of whom are experts in the kind of risk analysis involved in gambling, and I don’t see any particular reason that they’d be immune to a disease that has infected so many other parts of baseball over the last few years. I think it’s more likely that the next scandal we see involves more minor league players, but we’re supposed to go bold here. It would be harder for a front office member to get caught. They’re not subject to the same public scrutiny that players are, and they can’t affect the outcome of a game as directly. They’d probably have to screw up in a bigger way. But it certainly seems possible.  – Davy Andrews Read the rest of this entry »

At this time time last year, I made a series of predictions. I explained why each team might make it to the promised land, as well as why each team might find itself dead in a pit. We’re running it back this year. Will your favorite team win it all? Will it perish in a factory fire? Here’s how it might go down. Consider these the first- and 99th-percentile projections. If you missed the National League edition yesterday, you can check it out here. Today we’re on to the American League.

Baltimore Orioles
Why They’ll Win It All: After two years of struggle, Adley Rutschman will come back and play like a star again. He’ll be a six-win MVP candidate. He’ll instantly look like he did in 2022 and 2023. Where has that guy been the past two years? The answer is simpler than you think. He’s been hiding in the basement while his secret twin, Badley Rutschman has limped to league-average performance. That’s right, he uses a double. This two-years-on, two-years-off gambit used to work well enough. Badley was more than capable of tearing up the Pac-12 and the high minors, but the big leagues are another story. Badley couldn’t quite hack it, but Adley will return and Badley will be back in the basement. (Don’t worry, it’s a nice enough basement.) The secret twin life is a tough one, but it’ll bring the O’s back into the first division.

Why They’ll Lose It All: Playing behind Alex Bregman in the World Baseball Classic will mess with Gunnar Henderson’s head. Do you know the last time Gunnar Henderson was a backup? Neither does Gunnar Henderson. He’s not meant to play third base second fiddle. He’s feeling like a second-class citizen for the first time. Number two’s supposed man the six, not bat seventh. By the Fourth of July, he’ll be striking out a third of the time and batting fifth and seven ate nine. Read the rest of this entry »

Here at FanGraphs, we make a lot of bold predictions. The entire staff makes them in a site-wide exercise that will come out tomorrow. I made 10 more of my own on Effectively Wild. Historically, I made five bold predictions about the season in this space as well. But I’ve been crowded out! Bold predictions are everywhere now. Meg and I came up with a substitute last year, and I enjoyed it enough that I’m bringing it back again: Five big questions about the season. These aren’t the only big questions I have. They aren’t necessarily the biggest questions in baseball. I don’t know the answers to any of them. But all five of these are unresolved questions that will help to shape the 2026 season, and all five fascinate me.

1. Do the Brewers Still Know Best?
The kinds of nerdy fans who read (and write for) FanGraphs have always had a data-driven team to root for. The Moneyball A’s predate this website. The Rays took that blueprint and ran with it. Before the Astros went full banging scheme, they revolutionized player development. The Guardians develop pitchers better than almost everyone else. The Brewers are the latest model; they do things a little bit differently than the rest of the league, according to some internal blueprint, and their plan works. They have the third-most wins in the league over the last five years despite running one of the lowest payrolls. It looks like their run atop the NL Central might continue indefinitely.

Of course, it felt like the previous analytical darling teams would keep their runs going forever, too. The A’s fell off hard after their peak. The Rays look a lot less magical today than they did four years ago. No advantage lasts forever; if you have some kind of secret sauce that truly does work, every other team in baseball will be trying to figure out the recipe.

From the outside, it’s clear that the Brewers do at least three things very well: They develop good pitchers, find fast and athletic position players who deliver plenty of WAR without gaudy batting statistics, and proactively trade established players for prospects who fit their preferred pitching and hitting archetypes. Read the rest of this entry »

Looking at the best rotations in baseball is a great way to learn about how the best teams in baseball build their staffs. Recently, they’re coalescing around a common plan. It’s hard to get through a 162-game season these days. Five pitchers certainly won’t do it. Every team used at least eight starters last year. Only five teams used fewer than 10 starters, even. You can’t just fill your rotation with five great pitchers and move on with life.

Many of the best teams in the game have solved that issue by building a rotation in two parts. At the top, you’ve got your elite starters, as many as you can get. The top four teams in our rankings have all gone out and proactively added aces in recent years, whether they had some homegrown ones to start with or not. These are the guys who, health willing, have guaranteed spots in a potential playoff rotation.

That said, it usually isn’t possible to assemble an entire playoff rotation out of elite starters, even though you only need four guys instead of five thanks to the postseason schedule. The Dodgers managed it by a) having more money than Croesus and b) signing a unicorn who moonlights as a playoff-caliber starter when he isn’t busy being the best DH in baseball. Everyone else has to solve for two constraints: having enough innings to fill an entire season, and having enough upside that at least one or two of your mid-pack starters will be good enough to pitch in October. Read the rest of this entry »

In football, they say that defense wins championships; in the baseball version of that adage, it’s pitching that leads to rings. The rotation plays a huge part in determining a team’s trajectory over the course of a season; a good one can carry you to October, while a bad one can sink you. To that end, it’s not terribly surprising that only two of the 15 teams in this portion of our power rankings are projected for records over .500; three others are right at .500, while the rest, of course, check in beneath that mark, ranging from the 79-win Padres down to the 66-win Rockies.

Still, pitching is also an avenue to greatly outperform the projections. Injured guys come back stronger than expected, prospects make a leap, established arms enjoy some unforeseen development — it happens every year. And while injuries can end a player’s season, they can also create opportunities for pitchers who are currently stuck further down the depth chart. The teams in the 16-20 range are generally a stone’s throw from winding up in the top half of the rankings, so it wouldn’t be too shocking if one of them made the playoffs. And while the teams at the bottom face a particularly steep climb, three teams in the bottom 10 of last year’s rankings reached the postseason — the Cubs, Guardians, and Blue Jays — and there is a good chance we see something similar this season. In fact, it could be two of the same three teams, with Houston taking the place of the defending AL pennant winners, who have climbed into this year’s top 10. I also wouldn’t be surprised if the Padres made the playoffs from this group, though these projections are a sobering reminder of where they are right now. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome back, baseball! Opening Day is almost upon us and with it comes new hopes and dreams for each team. The aspirations for the best teams in the league are more lofty than those of the clubs building for the future, but anything can happen over the course of the long regular season. Over the next two days, I’ll lay out what the best- and worst-case scenario might look like for every team in 2026. Today, I’ll cover the teams projected to finish under .500 in 2026, with those forecast for a .500 or better record to follow tomorrow.

Our power rankings use a modified Elo rating system. If you’re familiar with chess rankings or FiveThirtyEight’s defunct sports section, you’ll know that Elo is an elegant ranking format that measures teams’ relative strength and is very reactive to recent performance. For these Opening Day rankings, I’ve pulled the Depth Charts projections and calculated an implied Elo ranking for each team. First up are the full rankings presented in a sortable table. Below that, I’ve grouped the teams we’re covering today into tiers, with comments on each club. The delta column in the table below shows the change in ranking from the pre-spring training run of the power rankings in February.

…

The Rays are in the middle of a roster reset after missing out on the playoffs in each of the last two years. Fresh off a star performance for the Dominican Republic in the World Baseball Classic, Junior Caminero looks set to truly establish himself as a superstar. Shane McClanahan is finally healthy, too, even if his stuff has looked a little diminished this spring. With their perpetual — and fairly successful — commitment to wringing every last bit of value out of their roster, it would be foolish to completely count out the Rays this season. Even so, considering the strength of the other four teams in the AL East, as well as the other AL wild card contenders, it feels unlikely that Tampa Bay will return to the postseason in 2026. Read the rest of this entry »

There are some positions for which a cleaner, wider gap exists between the top teams and the bottom, where we can more definitively say that some teams are better than others. For instance, the talent that the Dodgers and Astros have at DH separates their projections from the rest of baseball in a meaningful way. Relief pitching is not one of these positions. As you digest the forecasts and player details below, make sure to note how thin the margins tend to be from one team to the next. Also know that relief inning sample sizes are small enough that this is where WAR is the least good at properly calibrating impact and value, a dynamic heightened in the playoffs when the remaining bullpens are all turbocharged by the way the postseason schedule allows for rest, or for an elite starter to work an inning on his bullpen day. Things like coherent managerial usage, roster management, and good or bad health luck tend to play a huge role in the way bullpens perform throughout a season, and those are factors we can’t totally control for here. I felt free to point out the situations in which I think the projection is off base. Read the rest of this entry »

I love relievers. Sure, starters are the belles of the ball, making the big bucks and responsibly scaling back their velocity and throwing six pitches. They’ve got it all together. Not relievers. Relievers are freaky. They’ll throw it crazy-style. They’ll spam a million breaking balls. They’ll have 20-grade command, or an 85-mph fastball, or a pitch you’ve never seen in your entire life. They will burn bright and fast, and then you’ll never see them again.

These are not the best bullpens in baseball. In fact, they are the worst. But every single one has something fascinating going on inside of it. Usually, it’s more than one something. So come along with me on a journey into the deep, dark wilderness of baseball’s mediocre bullpens. This one is for the sickos. Read the rest of this entry »

During the championship game of the World Baseball Classic, a Nolan McLean sweeper made me jump off of my couch. It wasn’t even a strike; it just moved so much from such an innocuous starting point that I reacted instinctively. I clearly wasn’t alone; Davy Andrews wrote about how nasty McLean’s pitches look last week. “Dang,” I thought to myself after I’d calmed down. “It’s too bad someone hasn’t gotten PitchingBot to take a look at that one.”

Then I thought about that slightly longer and chuckled. That someone is me. PitchingBot lives in the cloud, but I have a duplicate copy isolated in a sandbox on my computer. MLB records Statcast data for WBC games. I have a machine that ingests Statcast data and turns it into pitch modeling grades. This wasn’t rocket science (give or take how you feel about the machine learning algorithms powering the model) – I took the data, fed it into the machine, and tinkered with the exact settings until I got model grades to come out.

The tournament features a wide variety of skill levels, from Paul Skenes down to semipros and high schoolers. Setting the population average equal to the average quality of WBC pitching would mean that the grades aren’t comparable to the ones we’re all used to looking at. Thus, I ran the PitchingBot model for every pitch in the WBC, but instead of using the WBC average to mean a 50 grade, I used the 2025 MLB average. That means the model is calibrated to how you’d expect the pitches thrown in the WBC to perform against average major league opposition. Read the rest of this entry »

Trey Yesavage profiles as a strong Rookie of the Year candidate, but he won’t have a chance to begin building his case in the near term. The 22-year-old Toronto Blue Jays right-hander landed on the injured list due to shoulder impingement and won’t be ready when the season gets underway later this week. His return is expected to come sooner rather than later — fingers are crossed throughout Canada — but for now, Yesavage is on the shelf.

Five months ago he was turning heads in the World Series. With just six MLB outings under his belt — three in the regular season, and three across the ALDS and ALCS — Yesavage bedeviled LA batters with an array of high-riding heaters and diving splitters. He was especially dominant in Game 5, fanning a dozen Dodgers while allowing three baserunners and a lone run over seven frames.

His meteoric rise and eye-popping postseason performances raised his public persona, but the Pottstown, Pennsylvania native hasn’t otherwise changed since being drafted 22nd overall in 2024 out of East Carolina University. He’s still polite and unassuming, and his overpowering arsenal has remained in place.

“I’m pretty much the same dude,” Yesavage told me at Blue Jays camp last week. “The pitches are the same. The velocity and movement are the same. I also don’t look at [the metrics] all that much. Whenever Trackman is up on the board, all I really look at is the vert on my heater, and the velo. The only questions I’ll ask my pitching coach are to make sure that my most-used pitch is in line.”

That would be his four-seam fastball, which averaged 94.7 mph and 19.5 inches of induced vertical break across his smattering of regular season outings. Thrown at a 45.2% clip, the offering was augmenting by a slider (28.4%) and a splitter (26.4%), the last of those offerings being the righty’s most lethal weapon. A quintessential complement to his well-elevated heaters, Yesavage’s splitter induced a 57.1% whiff rate and a .111 BAA against big-league hitters.

He began tinkering with his signature pitch in the middle of his three collegiate seasons, but it wasn’t until his draft year that the efforts bore fruit. Read the rest of this entry »