30 teams, 9 tiers: Where does your club fit in '26?

By Mike Petriello | March 4, 2026

Our annual tradition is back. Each spring, we look forward to the upcoming season by breaking down the 30 teams into eight or nine somewhat-subjectively defined tiers, grouping together those in similar situations. We've done it for several years now, and it's a fun way to get ready for the season by really understanding where teams are and what their goals are for the next seven (or eight) months.

As we've said in the past, it's not explicitly a 1-30 ranking of "good to poor," though directionally you can read it that way. It's about grouping teams together, and if that means that a team in a lower tier might be better positioned to win games in 2026 than a team in the tier directly above, so be it; this is more about finding the stories we expect to see.

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Of course, there's really only one possible team we could start with here, and it's the only team that stands alone, in its very own tier. You already know we have to get started with ...

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Tier 1: History is in sight.

When you’re the back-to-back champs, you get your own tier.

... the two-time defending champs. Obviously.

The Dodgers had three notable issues to improve, and they solved two of them, adding Kyle Tucker to an underwhelming outfield and Edwin Díaz to a talented-but-inconsistent bullpen. (The third issue, the rising age of the offensive core, was mostly punted for another day.) But because they are indeed the two-time-defending champs, no one cares that they had areas of improvement. Nor, really, should they. The 2026 Dodgers go into the season with FanGraphs World Series victory odds a wild three times higher than any other club, in part because this looks like the only truly great roster in the sport right now. Their goal: Becoming the first team in National League history to win three consecutive titles.

They'll be good, obviously, but keep an eye out for the funniest possible outcome. After the 2024-25 Dodgers won rings off 98-win and 93-win seasons – i.e., quite good, but not exactly historically meaningful, and fueled last year by some truly unexpected moments – watch the 2026 Dodgers rip off the 115-win year everyone’s been expecting … just in time to get bounced in the NLDS by the Marlins or Reds or someone. Baseball always baseballs.

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Tier 2: World Series ring or bust.

These teams all made the playoffs last year. It’s not enough.

Toronto had a magical run to Game 7 of the World Series, then had an active offseason that saw it land Dylan Cease, Tyler Rogers, Cody Ponce, Kazuma Okamoto and Jesús Sánchez, plus bring back Max Scherzer. (And, yes, lose Chris Bassitt and Bo Bichette.) The defense ought to still be excellent, and perhaps even better than it was. Do we have lots of questions about how George Springer, at 36, can follow up what he just did, and whether Trey Yesavage can do that over a full season? Sure do. But to say that expectations are a little higher north of the border this year is a bit of an understatement. The element of surprise is gone. The Jays run with the predators now.

Of course, Toronto is one of just three AL East teams here, because as always, this looks like it’s going to be a really brutal division, particularly now that Boston has added Ranger Suárez and Sonny Gray to a rotation that already featured Garrett Crochet. It’s mildly entertaining to think that the Yankees and Blue Jays tied atop the East with 94 wins, and yet New York fans look back upon 2025 with disdain while Toronto fans will never, ever forget that run. Such is the nature of expectations. Yankees fans may dislike “running it back,” but “94 wins without Gerrit Cole or a functional shortstop” is hardly a bad outcome, and the early returns on Cole’s recovery from elbow surgery have been positive.

Speaking of “being mad about running it back,” the Phillies! Somewhat like the Yankees, you understand why you’d want to keep a 96-win team together, and surely few Philadelphia fans are bemoaning the return of Kyle Schwarber or J.T. Realmuto. They’re more reasonably worrying about the lack of a replacement for Suárez or the very questionable outfield. They’ll still probably be pretty good – as will the 92-win Cubs, who swapped out Kyle Tucker for Alex Bregman, traded for Edward Cabrera, and get to look forward to a full season of Cade Horton.

This all applies in Detroit, too, because the Tigers signed a big-ticket, free-agent starter in Framber Valdez and welcomed back franchise legend Justin Verlander while preparing for the arrival of their top prospect, shortstop Kevin McGonigle. While the impending free agency of ace Tarik Skubal will dominate the season's conversation, it also adds a bit of a not tomorrow, today feel to this season. Getting to the ALDS, as they did last season before falling to Seattle, won't be enough.

Finally, is it reasonable to say that the Mariners go into 2026 with their highest expectations in a quarter-century? This team has won between 85 and 90 games for five consecutive years, and took the Blue Jays all the way to Game 7 of the ALCS. They then added valuable utilityman Brendan Donovan and under-the-radar reliever Jose A. Ferrer to what was already a good unit. It’s not often the Mariners go into a season saying we think we are capable of winning the entire thing. This is one of those years.

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Tier 3: Non-playoff teams most likely to get there in 2026.

Three teams with playoff odds north of 50% at FanGraphs.

The Braves and Orioles, coming off similarly disappointing seasons, are the most obvious choices to continue one of baseball’s longest-running and most-guaranteed fun facts, which is this: At least one losing team from the previous season will make the playoffs. To say that happens every year is more than an understatement, as it’s happened 34 times in the last 36 seasons, and every year consecutively since 2005. (You might remember that the 94-68 Game 7 Blue Jays were previously the 74-88 Blue Jays.) It always happens, and these two are best-positioned to do so.

They’re also in somewhat similar situations. While both teams are looking forward to full seasons of star-level bats (the Orioles added Pete Alonso, while the Braves are expecting six great months of Ronald Acuña Jr., who missed the first part of 2025 after knee surgery), there are a lot of questions about the depth and quality of their rotations. To make matters worse, both teams have already dealt with some frustrating injury news this spring. In Atlanta, that’s mostly about an already-thin starting group losing options quickly; for Baltimore, it’s infielders Jordan Westburg and Jackson Holliday going down with aches of varying severity.

Let’s put the Mets here, too, because while going 83-79 isn't technically "below .500," it sure felt that way. This team essentially blew it all up around Juan Soto and Francisco Lindor, hoping a host of new additions (and the ascension of Nolan McLean) help them improve upon last year’s sputtering finish. Will it be better? Probably. Different. Assuredly.

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Tier 4: The “we always underrate you and always look bad” duo.

Every single year. Every. Single. Year.

Hey, last year this was Tier 6. After yet another season where they won their respective Central divisions, at least we’re moving them on up a little this time. There’s a Guardians fan named Hiram who asks us about the lack of respect in his team’s placement every single year, and has for years. This one’s for you, Hiram.

It’s easy to forget that it was the Brewers, not the Dodgers, who won the most games in the Majors in 2025 and secured the No. 1 overall seed in the playoffs. (Possibly because the Dodgers blew their doors off in the NLCS, sweeping the Brewers and holding them to a .118/.191/.193 line in four games.) After another winter doing “Brewers stuff,” which is to say “trading their top starter and starting third baseman while adding little in the way of notable veteran names,” the temptation is going to be there to underrate them again. We’ve learned our lesson. Milwaukee hasn’t had a full-season losing record since 2016. Only the Dodgers, Astros, and Yankees can say the same. The car wash keeps running.

We’ll admit we feel a little different about Cleveland, simply because it took an historic collapse by Detroit for the Central to be a race, and then it required a furious run by the Guardians just to get to a mere 88 wins. Impressive though that may be, this is an offense that finished 28th in runs scored and didn’t do a whole lot to improve upon that. Sorry, Hiram – though we look forward to the Joey Cantillo and/or Bo Naylor breakouts that we’re pretty confident are coming and will make us regret this relatively dour outlook. Again.

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Tier 5: The .500 zone

If you have a really strong feeling on how good these teams will be, you’re ahead of us.

Let’s get the elephant in the room right out of the way here: You’re shocked that the Astros, a team that hasn’t had a losing record since 2014, are merely in the “.500 zone” tier.

But remember what we wrote in this space last year, worrying that the decade of dominance was starting to show some cracks: “They also just posted their lowest full-season winning percentage since 2016 … and this might be impending free agent Framber Valdez’s last year in town, too.” So what happened? It says a ton about their success that by winning 87 games, they recorded their lowest winning percentage since 2016, but after winning the 2022 World Series, they’ve taken a step back each year. Valdez did indeed depart. There’s considerable worry about Josh Hader’s arm, and there might be too many infielders, yet not enough outfielders. This is part of why they’re projected for an 81-81 record.

We also hear you, Padres fans, because your team did win 90 and 93 games the last two seasons, reaching the playoffs each time. But we’re looking at the roster you carry into 2026, and subtracting Robert Suarez, Dylan Cease, Ryan O’Hearn, and Luis Arraez, while taking interesting low-risk gambles on Nick Castellanos, Germán Márquez, Sung-Mun Song, and Miguel Andujar does not a great offseason make -- though a full season of Mason Miller is a big deal. Baseball Prospectus and FanGraphs each see a roughly .500 projection here.

As for everyone else: This is the squishy middle class of the game, with winning percentages between .485 and .522 over the last two seasons. All five of these other clubs – Arizona, Cincinnati, San Francisco, Tampa Bay, and Texas – are currently showing playoff odds between 20% and 35%, or 79-82 wins, and that’s about right to us. It’s really, really not that hard to see one of these teams taking off and having one of those seasons where it all goes right and they end up with a 92-70 season; it’s not hard to see one having a bad roll of the dice and losing 92, either. One of them is going to do something really impressive, we’re quite sure. You tell us which one.

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Tier 6: The “what if you have a top-5 pitcher and hitter” zone?

The rosters have questions, but having a pair of superstars would sure paper over a lot of issues.

It’s now been more than a decade since either of these teams did anything of note; the 2015 season where the Pirates won 98 games and the Royals won 95 and a ring seems like it came a century ago. But nor are we in the darkest days of 100-loss rebuild seasons, either, and a big part of that is simple: Superstars.

You know all about Paul Skenes; we hardly need to tell his story here. You’ve certainly heard about Konnor Griffin, too, even if it’s almost entirely unreasonable to place these kinds of expectations upon a 19-year-old. It’s all well and good that the Pirates added competent veteran bats O’Hearn, Brandon Lowe, and Marcell Ozuna to an extremely punchless offense, and there’s a lot to like about the rotation arms behind Skenes, too. But the fastest way for this team to get back into actual contention is if it has a batting superstar to go with a pitching star – much like those 2015 Pirates had with Andrew McCutchen and Cole. It is, again, so unfair to a 19-year-old. It’s also what they need.

The Royals already have the hitting superstar in Bobby Witt Jr., potentially a second in Jac Caglianone, who is impressing this spring, and possibly even a third, depending on how strongly you feel about Maikel Garcia’s breakout. What they’re missing is a true ace to lead a rotation that has pretty good depth, but no one you ideally want starting Game 1 of a playoff series. Unless, of course, they do. Two seasons ago, Cole Ragans looked like that ace. Last year, he missed time with a shoulder issue, but also seemingly took a big step back with a 4.67 ERA. But he also increased his strikeout rate by a lot, and the underlying metrics were excellent (2.67 xERA), and so far as the health goes – so far, so good this spring. A healthy, productive Ragans changes everything.

One thing to worry about here? Both defenses look like they’re going to be troublesome, particularly Pittsburgh’s. For teams that may lack enough firepower and would need to excel doing "the little things" right, a few gloves that don’t catch enough balls could mean the difference between the playoffs and staying home.

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Tier 7: On the right track, and should be a lot of fun to watch.

A pair of teams with recent 100-loss seasons who are probably a year too early to make some real noise.

The A’s aren’t in the tier above because while they do have Nick Kurtz and a pretty interesting lineup that outscored both the Dodgers and the Mariners in the second half, they don’t have anything like an ace starting pitcher, or potentially even an average starting pitcher. By the math of one projection system, their top starter is projected to be the 118th-best starter in the game. (It’s Jacob Lopez.) They might have to go full-late-'90s Rockies if they’re going to bash their way into contention this year; they might be playing in the right ballpark to pull that off, actually.

The Marlins are a better-rounded team, if sorely lacking a Kurtz-level bat, and given all the pitching risk of the Phillies, Braves, and Mets in the NL East ahead of them, there’s a very narrow opening for them to make some noise this year. As we wrote last weekend, Miami has been willing to push the envelope on the next wave of baseball experimentation, and there’s a lot more than you’d think that resembles the way the 2024 Blue Jays became the 2025 Blue Jays. It’s probably not going to be quite enough this year, though we’ll remind you they did just win three more games than Atlanta did.

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Tier 8: Lots of losses ahead, but finally headed in the right direction.

This isn’t the year. Neither is next year. But it might be the year you look back upon where good things got moving.

Here we have the three teams that lost more than 95 games last year, and one, the Rockies, that posted a wild 43-119 mark and was outscored by more runs than any team in modern history. And yet, we’re moving them up a tier from last year's Tier 9! It’s still going to be a long season, full of a lot more losses than victories. But for some of these clubs, for the first time in a very long time, you can see the future plan starting to move along.

Within this group, there are probably two sub-tiers, in that both the Nationals and Rockies have finally turned over baseball operations to external hires after decades of being run more or less the same way, falling behind the rest of the sport. Even that didn’t play out exactly the same – Washington has gone for the youngest front office staff in the game, while Colorado went for more of a blast from the past, Paul DePodesta, to return to baseball after years in football – but the point is the same, which is that both teams will have some badly-needed new ideas from new faces. That’s likely to still be a pair of last-place finishes, but at least it’ll be last place in service of something.

It’s a little different in St. Louis and Chicago. Like the Rockies and Nationals, the Cardinals are looking to the future with a new lead executive hoping to modernize after years of stasis – but the lows haven’t been nearly as low here, and probably still won’t be. Like the Rockies and Nationals, the White Sox have had some truly dreadful on-field results, but they did improve by 19 wins last season, basically being one year ahead of the Rockies' path. It’d be nice not to lose 100 games again this year, but more importantly, they’ll look to see improvement from a talented quartet of young pitchers, as well as seeing what Munetaka Murakami can offer in his first year in the bigs.

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Tier 9: What’s the path forward?

A pair of 90-loss teams with a lot of questions about how the next playoff run happens.

Let’s be straight-up clear about this: We do not expect these two teams to have the most losses in baseball. That’s not how the tier system works, really. There’s talent to like on both rosters; it would be absolutely stunning if either of them finished behind all of the clubs mentioned above. At FanGraphs, these two teams are projected for the 23rd-most (Twins) and 27th-most (Angels) wins – which, notably, is not 29th and 30th.

So what are we doing here? To some extent, this is about "vibes," for lack of a better term. The quartet of clubs above may all be worse by 2026 wins and losses than these two, yet also you can see the plan coming together there.

It’s not quite the same here, not yet. The Angels have had 10 consecutive losing seasons, yet seem to be keeping the same strategy as every year. The 70-92 Twins won five fewer games in 2024 than they did ‘23, and 12 fewer games in 2025 than they did ‘24, and have already suffered the indignity of taking a hit to the obvious strength of their team, the rotation, when Pablo López underwent Tommy John surgery last month and David Festa was shut down with a shoulder injury.

Again: we’re still talking about teams with Mike Trout and Byron Buxton, among other notables. It’s just more of a “what’s the plan here?” question.

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