The 2026 Underappreciated All-Stars

As awards season bores its way on to the baseball offseason calendar, we thought we’d take a moment to spotlight some guys who won’t get any of the love in those categories but had tremendous seasons nonetheless.

The following five players all found major success in 2026 by improving some specific part of their game, but their numbers didn’t jump off the page enough to make them an All-Star or a finalist for any major hardware. As such, we have a quintet of players who each finished the most recent campaign with less than 3.0 WAR, but were worth your attention all year, and stand to be even more enticing moving forward.

Dominic Canzone – Seattle Mariners

2026 stats: .264/.336/.484, 23 HR, 28 2B, 134 wRC+, 20.6 K%, 9.0 BB%, 2.8 WAR

Dominic Canzone, a left-handed swinger the Mariners acquired in their 2023 Paul Sewald trade, finally broke out of platoon jail this year. The bat-first outfielder spent time in Triple-A in both 2024 and 2025, becoming a full-time member of Seattle’s big league roster for the first time in ’26. As a result, he made 265 more plate appearances than he ever had in a major league season, a number reached because he consistently pounded the ball, but particularly against left-handed pitching.

In his previous attempts at sticking in Seattle — rather than riding the shuttle back-and-forth to Triple-A Tacoma — Canzone was hampered by a complete inability to hit same-handed arms. Two years ago was a literal example of that, as he went 0-for-13 in his limited looks against southpaws, striking out eight times. He got more chances in 2025, both because of Luke Raley’s injuries and Mitch Haniger’s release, and Canzone’s overall numbers made the Mariners front office look genius for flipping an aging reliever for him. Canzone hit .300 that season while cutting his strikeouts and finding a more regular line-drive stroke, but was held to just 268 plate appearances as Jorge Polanco, Mitch Garver, and Dylan Moore saw more reps against lefties. Of those 268 total plate appearances, just 68 came against left-handers, but Canzone mustered a 113 wRC+ in that abbreviated sample.

This past season was a different story, as the Mariners’ roster construction — plus more injuries to Raley and Victor Robles — forced Canzone into the lineup regardless of the opposing pitcher’s handedness. He stepped into the box 145 times versus a lefty and picked up where he left off the year before, improving his left-on-left wRC+ to 147 and drawing a walk in 15.2% of his lefty looks, also a notable jump from his 11.8% in 2025.

The granular improvements came against breaking stuff, and even more granularly, in the slugging department. By simply getting more opportunities to see left-handed pitching, Canzone seemed to grow more accustomed to the sweepers and curves that were vexing him, and the baseball gods also rewarded him. Though his 2025 slugging percentage against lefty breaking pitches was just .214, his xSLG was .368. Canzone truly couldn’t buy an extra-base hit against lefties in 2025, finishing the year with a whopping zero. In 2026, his slugging percentage trampolined up to .449, even though his xSLG dipped to .341. Sometimes it is better to be lucky than good, like when this lurching swing led to a ball finding some turf.

That video demonstrates something else that Canzone improved drastically, though. In 2025, that MacKenzie Gore two-strike slider would have almost certainly gotten a whiff out of Canzone, whose swing and miss percentage against left-handed breaking pitches fell from 43.9% to a much more palatable 33.0% in 2026. And if you hang ’em, Canzone — whose bat speed, barrel rate, hard-hit rate, and average exit velocity were all in the 75th percentile or better — will happily bang ’em.

Christian Scott – New York Mets

2026 stats: 23 starts, 110 innings, 3.85 ERA, 3.61 FIP, 28.3 K%, 9.9 BB%, 2.1 WAR

The biggest reason for Christian Scott’s a 2.1-win season over 110 innings is that his arm healed from a hybrid Tommy John and internal brace procedure that put him on the shelf for all of 2025. Scott was a much ballyhooed prospect ahead of his 2024 debut, but questions surrounded his health, mechanics, and college history as a reliever rather than a weekend starter. After beginning 2026 in the minors, things got off to a rocky start for Scott when he was called up to face the Twins on April 23, as the former Florida Gator recorded more walks (five) than outs (four). But in the 22 starts that followed, Scott was nasty, emerging as the Mets’ best starter not named Nolan McLean.

While the Mets kept Scott on an understandably short leash coming off a major surgery — he did not throw 100 pitches in any game, topping out at 98 two different times — he made the most of his four- and five-inning outings. The standout skill for Scott became his ability to strike fools out, which he always showed in the minor leagues, but struggled with during his nine pre-surgery starts in the majors in 2024. When Scott hit the operating table, he had a 19.8% strikeout rate in his first 47 1/3 innings in The Show. New and improved in 2026, Scott finished with a sparkling strikeout rate of 28.3%.

Every pitch in Scott’s bag generated more whiffs upon his return, save for a splitter that was largely moved to the dustbin. His four-seamer not only missed bats more frequently — in the zone, specifically, Scott’s heater went from a 19.3% whiff rate in 2024 to 24.1% in ’26 — but it also bunny-hopped in velocity. When he needs to now, Scott can reach back and find 98 mph, like he did here to beat Aaron Judge at the top rail.

However, the most exciting toy at Scott’s disposal is a new shiny cutter. As a rookie, he threw it a grand total of two times. This year, he unleashed 372 cutters, making it his third most-used pitch (18.9%) after the four-seamer (47.1%) and a sweeper (22.8%), which is also quite good. The key to the cutter is that it’s about six miles per hour slower than the four-seamer and has proven effective against hitters on both sides of the plate. Whether it’s Kyle Schwarber or Ronald Acuña Jr., Scott has a putaway pitch for them, effective at both the top and bottom of the strike zone.

With a 25.0% whiff percentage, Scott’s cutter landed him in the same tier as well-known cutter merchants Drew Rasmussen and Kenley Jansen in that statistic. And while its .228 xBA points to some providence, the cutter spat out a .118 batting average against in 2026, the lowest of anyone who threw at least 300 of them. The same is true of its slugging percentage against, which at .184 was also the lowest mark in the majors, .352 xSLG be damned. Now I’ll show you Scott’s briefly aforementioned sweeper, the pitch of his that got the most empty swings and was responsible for 37 of his 134 strikeouts. It’s absolutely beautiful to behold when it’s dancing like this.

Brent Headrick – New York Yankees

2026 stats: 81 games, 78 1/3 innings, 2.18 ERA, 2.46 FIP, 30.1 K%, 8.3 BB%, 2.1 WAR

Among pitches that were thrown at least 100 times during the 2026 season, Brent Headrick’s split-finger of death was one of the 15 hardest to hit, placing it among legendary whiffers like Jhoan Duran’s sweeper, Mason Miller’s slider, and Tyler Glasnow’s curveball. At a ridiculous 51.3%, the whiff rate on that pitch shot up into the air like Tony Hawk at the X Games. In part three of Davy Andrews’ pitching superlatives, the offering also earned the prestigious Veganest Pitch honors, as only one of the 162 splitters that left Headrick’s hand ended up being a meatball. With that insane ability to avoid the middle of the plate, one can understand how Headrick’s splitter gets so many fruitless swings. But even when it did get put in play, the average exit velo on the pitch sputtered at 77.7 mph.

Headrick has now participated in four major league seasons and thrown 235 splitters. Nobody has ever hit one over the fence. Only two people have ever even recorded an extra-base hit against it, and they were both doubles that happened early in the 2026 campaign. Since this Mark Vientos grounder up the line on May 16 that you’re about to watch, every hit against Headrick’s splitter (and there were only five!) went for singles.

While David Bednar hogged up the Yankees’ saves, and Adrian Morejon stole the shine as the game’s prominent non-closer lefty reliever, Headrick was squarely in the conversation for best relief pitcher of the 2026 season. Developing this supreme splitter — which ran a 41.2% chase rate against righties — made Headrick an invaluable part of the Yankees’ third straight 90-win season, and yet another feather in pitching coach Matt Blake’s hat. Against righties, as a matter of fact, the splitter elicited 17 strikeouts and 17 balls in play. This all from a guy who was far from a guarantee to even make the team when he got to spring training, let alone become an inner-circle high-leverage dude.

“When I first started getting into those high-leverage situations, the first one or two, it was more stressful because I hadn’t been in that situation before,” Headrick told Alfred Santasiere III for MLB.com. “But once you keep doing it over and over again, it becomes normal.”

Sure, but this splitter — and the astounding stats Headrick put up because of it — are anything but normal, man.

Keibert Ruiz – Washington Nationals

2026 stats: .280/.316/.443, 10 HR, 24 2B, 105 wRC+, 10.5 K%, 4.5 BB%, 1.9 WAR

During Keibert Ruiz’s tumultuous 2025 season — in which he suffered two concussions, ran a career-low 63 wRC+, and was graded as one of the worst defensive catchers in the sport — the Nationals also held internal discussions regarding his defensive positioning. Those conversations centered on the question of whether Ruiz should move back in his crouch to limit his amount of foul tips to the face, not even whether the Nats could find something to turn their supposed cornerstone catcher from a liability behind the plate (-2 blocking runs above average, -9 framing runs, -10 FRV in 2025) into something passable.

But lo and behold, in 2026, the age-27 season of his embattled career, Ruiz finally righted the ship. The thing that earned him a shoutout here was the wholesale turnaround in framing, where he was worth 3 runs above average in 2026 and showed a knack for stealing strikes at the bottom of the zone and the part of the plate that’s inside to lefties and outside to righties.

The gallery-level framing, plus going from bad to merely neutral at blocking, gave Ruiz a 1 FRV, his first ever positive mark in a season with at least 500 defensive innings at catcher. This — along with a 105 wRC+, and personal bests in batting average, on-base percentage, slugging percentage, and ISO over a full season — could not have come at a better time for the Nats, who need someone, anyone, outside the CJ Abrams–James Wood duo to pop.

Nick Gonzales – Pittsburgh Pirates

2026 stats: .303/.367/.388, 7 HR, 27 2B, 111 wRC+, 16.3 K%, 7.1 BB%, 2.2 WAR

And finally, we have pint-sized Pirates infielder Nick Gonzales, one of just seven qualified batters to hit .300. It is somewhat funny that Chandler Simpson, the best American League comp for Gonzales, is a Silver Slugger finalist at his position despite Gonzales far outpacing him in wRC+ (111 to Simpson’s 93), finishing just three points behind him in batting average (.306 for Simpson and .303 for Gonzales), and playing a position with far fewer mashers (the average wRC+ for an American League outfielder in 2026 was 99, whereas the average wRC+ for an NL third baseman was 93).

Nevertheless, Gonzales enjoyed a magical run in 2026. Even if he was bogged down by the same lack of power that fuels Simpson’s haters — and, rightfully so, led to Alex Bregman and Max Muncy being the NL’s Silver Slugger finalists at the hot corner — Gonzales deserves greater acclaim. A 31-point spring in wRC+ from 2025 to 2026 is bananas in its own right, but so is the way Gonzales did it. As mentioned before, he is not a power threat, and clubbed only seven homers while his ISO declined for the fourth straight year. A sky-high .360 BABIP tells much of the story of his pleasing batting average, with his exit velocities still mostly residing in the 80s. It’s not like he hits the ball so hard that defenses have issues fielding it. In fact, the area that Gonzales refined was his plate discipline. Drill into that, and you’ll find that the key was not swinging at all.

Pete Crow-Armstrong will win an MVP for his 2026 season, one that saw him lead all qualified hitters in swing percentage decline. The Cubs’ center fielder swung at 60.1% of the pitches he saw in 2025, and whittled that down to 50.1% in 2026, good for a neat and tidy -10.0 difference. Not far off of that is Gonzales, who went from 57.4% to 52.5% (-4.9). There’s only 10 hitters on that board between PCA and Gonzales, and many of them — including Jackson Chourio, Elly De La Cruz, and Junior Caminero — also had their finest offensive seasons to date.

Unsurprisingly, with fewer swings came fewer whiffs for Gonzales, a contact hitter who wasn’t swinging and missing all that much to begin with. The Pirates knew what they were getting too when they drafted Gonzales — a five-foot-eight scrapper who hit .435 over his final two years of college ball at New Mexico State — with the seventh overall pick in 2020. Even if his registering 133 singles out of 167 total hits presents a bit of an empty-calorie offensive profile, Gonzales still has value in his .367 OBP, which was top-20 in the league and should continue to climb as he gets more discerning at the plate. Swinging less often predictably led to a higher walk rate and lower strikeout percentage, but that unfortunately doesn’t lend itself to video quite like the other skills highlighted in this article.

That is, unless you get your rocks off on sick 3-1 and 3-2 takes that hold up after ABS challenges.