Five Big Questions About the 2026 Season

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.

This year, the Brewers are trying to do all three of those things at once. They traded two starting position players and their top starting pitcher. They’re filling in those slots with a mixture of their own prospects and the guys they acquired in those deals. Last year, the Brewers beat their projections in large part because of surprise seasons from guys they’d recently acquired. This year, they’re going to try to do it again, with a different group of guys they’ve recently acquired. That’s hard!

The market isn’t efficient. The Brewers really have proven their ability to find edges that other teams don’t see or can’t put into practice. But those advantages aren’t permanent, and it’s difficult to know in advance when their effectiveness will degrade. Brandon Sproat, Kyle Harrison, and Luis Rengifo weren’t Brewers last year, and they didn’t help their respective teams out all that much. This year, they’re all projected starters for Milwaukee. If the Brewers still have the magic touch, it’ll all work out. If they don’t, it’ll be easy to question them in retrospect. But you never know when your One Stupid Trick will stop working, at least until that actually happens.

2. Can the Padres Keep Kids off Their Lawn?
The Padres have been one of the most exciting teams of the 2020s. They promote their own prospects aggressively, make splashy trades, spend in free agency, and overall act like they are truly in a must-win situation at all times. I think of them as young upstarts in the established order of things, with their bright uniforms and delightful young stars top of mind when I imagine what’s going on in San Diego.

The uniform part of that is still true. The age part isn’t, though. Padres hitters are the third-oldest group in baseball, based on our aggregate playing time projections. Sure, Tatis is nicknamed “El Niño,” but he’s 27. All those years of trading minor leaguers for veteran performers have left Jackson Merrill as the only hitter on the 26-man roster younger than Tatis. In fact, those two and Gavin Sheets are the only three starting position players who will be in their 20s on Opening Day, and Sheets turns 30 next month.

I can understand how A.J. Preller ended up in this situation. He’s proven adept at finding value from reclamation-project veterans in recent years. The math keeps lining up – get a star for some good-but-not-great minor leaguers, then replace those minor leaguers on your depth chart with the likes of Miguel Andujar or Nick Castellanos. But this team has gotten very old, because its best players are aging at a rate of one year per year (yep, math checks out), while the rotating supporting cast isn’t getting get any younger, thanks to the constant churn of exchanging prospects for veterans.

The rotation is more of the same. It’s not the oldest in baseball, but San Diego is one of six teams whose average starter age exceeds 31. For the record, the others are the Cubs, Blue Jays, Tigers, Rangers, and Rockies (?!). Where many teams would fill in the back of their rotation with prospects, the Padres are going with vets looking to rebound: Germán Márquez and Walker Buehler are both starting the year in the rotation. Ignoring relievers, the Padres are the oldest team in baseball. Adding relievers, they’re part of a five-way tie for the oldest; the Dodgers, Yankees, Blue Jays, Phillies, and Padres all project for an average age between 30.27 and 30.35.

This trajectory can’t continue forever. The Padres have gotten by because their stars are great and because Preller is maxing out the veteran retread pipeline (and the NPB/KBO pipeline, too, it should be noted). But the stars won’t stay this great forever, the veterans he brings in won’t always pan out, and a prolonged farm system deficit is making it ever harder for the Padres to retool during the season when they need depth. I don’t know if this is the last year the current Padres core will compete for a title, but surely that time is coming soon.

3. How Long Until the Challenge System Feels Normal?
Challenges are so hot right now. I can’t go a day without seeing a new leaderboard on Baseball Savant, or reading an article about how a team plans to deploy its challenges this year. Questions about them pepper my inbox. Will they help hitters? Pitchers? Will they change the nature of catching? Will certain pitches become overpowered due to weird interactions between the new rulebook zone and the extreme break that some slower deliveries can produce?

This isn’t a bold prediction article, so I’ll make a milquetoast projection instead: In a few years, we’ll all feel totally normal about this system. The question, in my mind, is how long it will take before challenges feel not like an area for teams to derive an advantage but merely a normal part of the game.

My point of comparison for this is tennis, which instituted a challenge system for in/out line calls in 2006. It used the same Hawk-Eye technology that powers Statcast today. It was a curiosity when it came out – and then pretty quickly, it was just part of the game. Tennis announcers and fans went from marveling at the cameras and discussing challenge strategy to just ignoring it. More calls were made correctly. (By definition: a challenge system is the old system plus some chance of correcting an incorrect call.) The calls that changed made the game better by correcting an oversight. Everyone prospered. I think baseball will follow the same path.

The optimal challenge strategy probably isn’t interesting. It involves challenging rarely or not at all in early innings, particularly in situations where the call doesn’t lead to a strikeout or walk. In later innings, you can widen your threshold for challenging, both because some situations will have extremely high leverage and because you don’t get to take the challenges home with you if you fail to use them. Every called strike three in the ninth inning – and every pitch that could have been called strike three but was instead called a ball – is fair game for a challenge because the rewards are just that high.

You could always challenge if you’re very sure the call is wrong, too, but in practice, no one has been all that accurate at challenging so far. That was true in tennis, too, and the uncertainty is amplified in baseball. It’s just how the human brain works; the ball is moving too fast for your eyes to actually see it continually, so your brain makes some assumptions about where it goes in the interim. There isn’t even a physical strike zone; you have to guess where that is, too.

In 10 years, the zone will probably be called completely by computers. But long before we get there, I think the challenge system will become a completely accepted part of the game, a small tool that mainly helps correct two things: obviously wrong calls, and wrong calls in important situations. It’s just a matter of how long it takes to get there, and how hyperbolic we all get about the importance of challenges in the meantime.

4. Who’s the Best Hitter in the AL West?
For quite awhile now, the three best hitters in baseball have been Aaron Judge, Shohei Ohtani, and Juan Soto in some order. You can throw Ronald Acuña Jr. and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. into the mix to make a top five if you’d like. Maybe you could add Bryce Harper if you value reputation over recent results, or Bobby Witt Jr. if we’re talking about overall offensive value instead of merely batting. I think that one AL West hitter will crack this list this year. I’m just not completely sure who that will be.

Could it be Cal Raleigh? Certainly. He just hit 60 homers and finished second in the AL MVP voting. He posted a 161 wRC+ with solid peripherals, and he’s in the prime of his career. The Mariners DH him plenty to keep his legs fresh even though he’s a great defensive catcher, because they know his bat is just that valuable. He walks a ton, strikes out an acceptable amount, and does it from both sides of the plate. But he’s actually the least likely answer to this question out of the three names I’m considering here.

Could it be Yordan Alvarez? No doubt. Yeah, Raleigh had a career year, but Alvarez’s career wRC+ is actually better than Raleigh’s single-season 2025 mark. Injuries held Alvarez back last year, but even then, he walked almost as much as he struck out and smashed the ball to all fields with authority. He rarely chases, makes a shocking amount of contact for a man with 97th-percentile bat speed, and puts the ball in the air without popping it up.

Don’t forget about Nick Kurtz, either. The Athletics phenom exploded into prominence last year, posting the best batting line for a rookie since… well, since Alvarez debuted in 2019. Kurtz has a Yordanian game, too. He’s a mountain of a man, and he takes big hacks aimed at getting the ball in the air to all fields. He struck out 31% of the time in his debut, which is a minor worry, but I’m willing to grant him the benefit of the doubt. Kurtz got drafted in 2024 and barely played in the minors; adjusting to big league pitching while posting a 170 wRC+ is just further evidence of his precocious talent and ability to improve rapidly.

The best hitter of this trio isn’t guaranteed to make the playoffs, just so we’re clear. Baseball rarely works that cleanly. But all three of these guys have huge error bars on their projections in 2026. Raleigh just put up the best season of his life and has to repeat it. Alvarez has to show that he’s healthy again. Kurtz has to prove that he’s not just a flash in the pan. We’ll know a lot more about the future of the division at year’s end, because I think we’ll have a much better idea of how good these superstars are. I’m not sure who will come out on top – or whether Julio Rodríguez, Brent Rooker, or Corey Seager will crash the party – but all three have the talent and track record to finish the year in the pantheon of baseball’s very best.

5. Will Anyone Throw 200 Innings?
In 2021, major league pitchers were still reeling from the shortened pandemic season. With little workload to build off of from the previous year, innings totals and readiness fell precipitously. Only four pitchers crested the 200-inning mark, the lowest full-season mark in baseball history. It was a shocking downturn; 15 pitchers hit the mark in 2019, and a full 28 had done so as recently as 2015.

In 2022, pitchers rebounded somewhat; eight starters threw 200 or more innings. But there was more contributing to the broader trend than just the pandemic. In 2023, only five pitchers did it. Only four did in 2024. And in 2025, only three pitchers – Logan Webb, Garrett Crochet, and Cristopher Sánchez – tallied 200. That’s the new all-time low, but if the trends hold, it won’t stay that way for long. We’re eventually going to have a year with no 200-inning pitchers. The question is when.

Webb is the best bet to do it. He’s topped 200 innings for three straight seasons. But it’s been a near thing; he had 204 2/3 in 2024 and 207 in a league-leading 34 starts in ‘25. One short start or one skipped turn could leave him short. Crochet and Sánchez are first-time 200 Club members, and each has an interesting outlook in ‘26; Crochet certainly looks the part of an old-school innings eater, but he missed so much time due to injury early in his career that he’s new to hefty workloads. Sánchez looks like a natural Webb successor – same sinker-based game, same good command – but it’s had to project another 200-inning season from him when he’s only reached that mark once in his career.

While I’m fascinated by each of those pitchers, the macro view is even more interesting. Take a look at how teams have behaved in recent winters. Bulk starter innings are extremely valuable on the free agent market. Everyone’s looking for seven starters, not five. There are so many innings to fill that teams are aggressively pursuing all kinds of solutions. Older starters from foreign leagues? Reliever conversions? Justin Verlander and Max Scherzer? Everything’s on the table.

But despite that hunger for innings, concentrated volume keeps declining. Pitching is valuable in part because it’s so fragile, and teams have gotten caught between preserving the long-term availability of their best guys and managing the short-term necessities of fielding a full roster. Sure, you’d love 230 innings from your ace. But if you perceive the injury risk of those 230 innings to be high, maybe you’d accept 180 from your ace and 50 from a random veteran. Come playoff time, this trade-off goes away, but now that everyone makes the playoffs, the difference between 50 average innings and 50 elite ones is increasingly a price teams are willing to pay for health.

There’s no rule that says it has to keep going this way. My view is that processes like these generally self-perpetuate until they’ve gone too far, but then the snap-back can happen quickly. There’s no way to tell whether we’ve hit the bottom yet, though. The simultaneous search for bulk innings and the restriction of top-end starter workloads has defined major league roster construction for quite awhile now. I’m interested in seeing whether it continues apace this year, or whether we’ve reached some kind of local minimum in workloads for the best starters in the league.