For a franchise built on helping the game's top prospects prepare to make an impact at the major league level, the 2026 Fresno Grizzlies roster was filled with highly anticipated prospects and historic performances. Fittingly, the Grizzlies spent the entire year celebrating 25 years of professional baseball in Downtown Fresno, adding to a historic year on the field, in the stands, and in the community.
Fresno never fell more than a single game below .500 all year, an early scare on Opening Night at Visalia the only time the club dipped under the break-even mark. From there, the Grizzlies climbed into a first-place tie by mid-April and briefly took sole possession of first place in mid-May, capped by a 23-15 start that had them two games clear of the field.
The 2026 Grizzlies started with a lineup that came out of the gate homering at a historic pace, and a rotation ace who wrote his name into the record book for good, performing in front of some of the largest crowds in the history of Single-A Baseball.
Roldy Brito, Derek Bernard, and Tanner Thach set the tone at the top of the order, and Bernard strung together a 35-game on-base streak from Opening Day through May 20 that anchored the lineup through the season's first six weeks.
The power showed up in the season's first week and never really let up. Fresno hit 30 home runs in April alone, its heaviest month of the year, punctuated by a five-homer night against Stockton on April 11 — the most recent time in franchise history the Grizzlies have gone deep five times in a single game.
On the mound, Brady Parker turned in the signature individual season for the club — and one of the best in the California League, period. Parker led the league outright in ERA (3.61), strikeouts (152), opponents' batting average (.219), and winning percentage (.727), and finished second in the circuit in both innings pitched (112.1) and WHIP (1.33). He got there the hard way: Parker went 1-3 with a 13.15 ERA in April while working in and out of the bullpen, then settled into the rotation for good and went 5-0 with a 2.28 ERA across 13 consecutive starts in the second half — the rare bright spot in a rotation that finished 18-38 overall — a stretch that included a seven-decision winning streak from May 10 through August 11 and pushed his 152 strikeouts to fourth all-time in a single Grizzlies season, passing Aaron Fultz's 151 from 1999.
Growlifornia saw Ethan Holliday's professional debut in 2025, and the Rockies' top prospect carried that momentum into a sensational start to 2026, hitting .262 with nine home runs and a .952 OPS across his first 33 games in a Grizzlies uniform. An injury in late May paused his rapid ascent, a stint that kept him off the field for the remainder of the year.
Fresno's returning core carried the offense in the meantime, none more than Thach, who strung together a 24-game hitting streak from the first week of May through the beginning of June. From there, Wilder Dalis's power kept the Grizzlies in the thick of a crowded North Division race after returning from injury.
Fresno's best stretch came in the season's second half. The Grizzlies won five straight from July 22-26, capped by a 19-6 rout of Rancho Cucamonga that produced the club's highest run total of the year, then kept rolling into Ontario, where back-to-back blowout wins on July 30-31 pushed them within a game of first. Wilder Dalis and Landyn Vidourek punctuated that Ontario series with multi-homer games on consecutive days, and by August 6 the Grizzlies had climbed 13 games over .500, matching their high-water mark from the spring. First place was retaken on August 1, with Fresno a game clear atop the division.
August proved to be the pivot the other direction. A five-game losing streak from in the middle of August knocked the Grizzlies out of first for good, and despite one of the season's signature wins — an August 23rd comeback from seven runs down against Stockton, finished off by a Cort MacDonald walk-off single — Fresno could not sustain the pace down the stretch.
A rough September closed out a 69-63 finish as Fresno grabbed just one win in the final series against San Jose, placing with the second-best overall record in the North Division.
Still the year would not finish before the Grizzlies authored more pieces of franchise history nearly every week: Cameron Nelson's walk-off homer on June 3 against Lancaster, Roldy Brito's steal of home during a four-stolen-base game on June 25 at Lake Elsinore, and Kyle Fossum's grand slam on July 28 at Ontario all now sit in the club's record book.
Individually, the lineup was as deep as it's been in years. Tanner Thach hit .339 with 11 home runs and 70 RBI in 73 games, and Wilder Dalis paired 16 homers and 23 stolen bases with a .983 OPS across two stints between Fresno and Spokane. Roldy Brito's .327 average and 18 steals made him a nightly threat at the top of the order — and his eight triples tied for eighth all-time in a single Grizzlies season, joining Ben Copeland (2010) and Andrew Stevenson (2019) — while Derek Bernard's on-base ability and five outfield assists made him one of the club's most complete players.
Cam Nelson quietly put together one of the most productive seasons on the roster, reaching base at a .408 clip, stealing 21 bags, and leading all Grizzlies outfielders with 11 assists from center field. Fossum's nine home runs came with a flair for the dramatic — four of them grand slams, tied for the most productive bases-loaded season in club history. It added up to a franchise-record 664 walks drawn as a team, well past the old mark of 606.
Once the team hit the field to defend, it was the bullpen that carried the staff. Fresno's relievers combined to go 51-25 with a 4.98 ERA on the year and the Grizzlies had three different arms capable of closing the door.
Seth Clausen, Manuel Olivares, and Dylan Crooks combined for 21 saves, a big reason Fresno converted 35 save opportunities on the year.
Clausen and Crooks, in particular, put together the kind of seasons that get pitchers a look at the next level. Clausen held hitters to a .118 average and a 0.90 WHIP over 45.2 innings, and he only got better as the year wore on — a 1.74 ERA over the season's first half gave way to a 0.61 ERA in the second, and he was nearly unhittable at night, striking out 71 of the 175 batters he faced overall while limiting opponents to a .076 average under the lights.
Crooks was just as tough to square up, posting a 0.00 ERA in both May and July — 20.2 combined innings without allowing an earned run — sandwiched around a rocky June that stood as the only real blemish on his season. Between them, the two combined for 16 saves, a 1.67 ERA, and 116 strikeouts in 80.2 innings.
That bullpen shouldered an even bigger workload because the rest of the staff didn't stay healthy. Grizzlies pitchers combined to miss 336 team games to the injured list this season — more than two and a half seasons' worth of absences — and Fresno leaned on its pipeline with Spokane to plug the gaps, with arms like Grif Hughes and Bryson Van Sickle shuttling between the two clubs in the season's final weeks.
Riley Kelly's 11-strikeout outing on July 19 at Visalia stands as the franchise's most recent double-digit strikeout game, one highlight in a season that saw the pitching staff strike out 1,320 batters as a club, before a midseason injury limited Kelly's second half.
The staff ERA still crept from 5.26 in the first half to 5.48 in the second while persevering against a rash of injuries and a litany of miscues behind them. Still, a well-worked bullpen kept the Grizzlies competitive deep into August all the same. The defense committed a franchise-record 176 errors which in turn caused pitchers to labor for extra pitches and often cut outings prematurely. That in turn caused challenges as the pitching staff issued a franchise-record 597 walks and uncorked a franchise-record 139 wild pitches, and the club didn't turn in a single complete game all season, tying the mark first set in 2021 and matched again in 2022 and 2023.
Attendance again reflected the city's appetite for Grizzlies baseball. The season-high crowd of 13,317 packed Chukchansi Park for the Fourth of July fireworks night against Ontario, and three other dates topped 10,000: 10,189 for an April 24 game against Rancho Cucamonga, 10,813 on May 15 against Visalia, and 12,372 on May 29 against San Jose.
More than a third of Fresno's home dates drew at least 5,000 fans over the course of the season, a steady drumbeat that carried through the club's 25th-anniversary campaign and kept the Grizzlies among the highest-drawing clubs in all Minor League Baseball.
ABOUT THE FRESNO GRIZZLIES
The Fresno Grizzlies are a proud affiliate of the Colorado Rockies organization. The club advanced to the California League playoffs in 2025 and continues to post some of Minor League Baseball's highest attended games. The 2026 season marks the Grizzlies' 25th year in Downtown Fresno.