A first-time champ, a massive trade and more bold predictions for '26

Everywhere I go, people stop me on the street and say: “Big AC [that’s what they call me on the street], how can you be so wrong so often and still keep making baseball predictions?”

What can I say? Consistency and durability are essential in the grueling world of MLB, and so my consistency (in wrongness) and durability (in accepting the online vitriol that comes with said wrongness) are skills.

Want some erroneous award predictions? I already knocked those out back in early January. Somehow none of the players I picked have been abducted by aliens yet, but give it time.

This time around, let’s focus on 10 other stories that I think will emerge in 2026. You never know how wrong you can be until you try!

1) The Pirates will win the NL Central.

In my award predictions, I chose Don Kelly for NL Manager of the Year and suggested that, while the Buccos would challenge for a Wild Card spot, the division would probably be a step too far. But to be honest, I thought the NL Central’s 2025 playoff entries would do more to separate themselves from the Pirates between then and now.

As it stands, if there’s any division in which conditions might be ripe for a team to go worst to first in 2026 (the way the Blue Jays did in the AL East last year), it’s probably the NL Central. The defending division champion Brewers traded away their ace. The Cubs brought in Alex Bregman but lost Kyle Tucker. The Reds are uber-reliant on their strong starting staff, and that staff will be without Hunter Greene for at least half a season. The Cardinals traded many of the best players from a not-very-good team.

So yeah, why not the Buccos? They’ve got the best young pitcher in the sport in Paul Skenes. They’ve got pitching aplenty behind him, with breakout candidates like Bubba Chandler and Braxton Ashcraft. They’ve got baseball’s No. 1 prospect in five-tool shortstop Konnor Griffin. They added a lot of power to their offense, albeit at the expense of their defense. Their farm system is strong enough to make them frisky at the Trade Deadline if need be.

And the thought of an actual Yinzer in Kelly leading this club to October for the first time in a long time is as perfect as fries on a sandwich.

2) The Royals will win the AL Central.

Not to be outdone by their Senior Circuit Central counterparts, the AL Central squads are going to make things goofy. Maybe a team won’t overcome a 15 1/2-game deficit, a la the Guardians last year, but there will be a Central shakeup.

For one, the Royals are going to win the division. They’re going to do it with an un-Royals-like, power-packed home performance in the new-look Kauffman Stadium, with Bobby Witt Jr., Vinnie Pasquantino and breakout star Jac Caglianone all bashing north of 30 home runs. (Salvador Perez’s home run total won’t reach his age of 36 by season’s end, but he’ll be in the 20s somewhere.)

Cole Ragans’ health is, ultimately, the key to this prediction actually coming true. And if it does, that’s a significant shakeup right there.

But it gets goofier!

3) Tarik Skubal will be traded to the Mets ... and the Tigers will reach October, anyway.

Did I predict Skubal would be traded to the Mets during the Hot Stove season? I did.

Did it happen? It did not.

Will I keep predicting it until it happens? Apparently.

Anyway, I could see the Tigers running into issues. Not because they’re not talented. They’re very talented, and they have a lot of talent coming from their system. But I worry about Framber Valdez’s volume history and command vagaries catching up to him after signing that big contract and the entire team feeling the weight of Skubal’s future on their shoulders.

Here’s what will happen: The aforementioned Royals, a Guardians team that keeps winning more games than the Pythagorean math tells you they should and a wily White Sox team that won’t contend but won’t be a gimme any longer will help keep the Tigers tamed for the first half of the season. Detroit will be mired in mediocrity and unclear on its course. A Mets team highly, highly motivated to make the most of its lavish but flawed roster will give up, say, Jonah Tong to get him and be in a great position to be the team that perhaps takes down the Dodgers in the NL field.

And then a funny thing will happen: Relieved of the weight of the Skubal situation, the Tigers will kick into gear and grab an AL Wild Card spot, sans Skubal.

4) The Phillies will miss the playoffs.

Maybe this is semiquincentennial sacrilege, as the Phillies are hosting the All-Star Game this summer in recognition of the United States’ 250th birthday.

But have you noticed Midsummer Classic hosts have been kinda cursed in recent years? The 2023 Mariners had a 90% chance of reaching the playoffs and were in first place in the AL West on Sept. 2 but finished out of the running. The 2024 Rangers were the defending champs and finished with a losing record. The 2025 Braves were out of it long before the All-Star break arrived.

Maybe the Phils can break that troubling trend, but their average age -- while not quite 250, like the U.S. -- is certainly getting up there, and it remains to be seen how much youngsters Justin Crawford and Andrew Painter can move the needle for them in meaningful roles.

I’ve got the Mets winning the East. And Phillies fans, if you don’t like that, don’t worry. I wrongly (naturally) picked your Phils to win it all last year, so you don’t want me siding with them, anyway.

5) The Marlins will make the playoffs.

If I’ve got the Phillies falling back, that opens up opportunity for other teams to pick up some Ws in the NL East. The Braves would benefit in that scenario, but there is so much injury risk baked into their pitching equation, and they already got a lot of bad news this spring.

The Marlins, meanwhile, have the ingredients of a surprise October entry in today’s increasingly youth-oriented game. They’ve traded their way to a pretty interesting lineup. They’ve got a lot of projection on their pitching staff, with Eury Pérez an oft-predicted breakout candidate. They’ve got a more respectable bullpen concoction with Pete Fairbanks aboard. They’ve got a strong farm system, with five players within the top 62 of MLB Pipeline’s Top 100 list, and four of those five projected to impact the 2026 team.

Of course, if you pick the Marlins to win a Wild Card spot, that necessarily opens the door to do what two previous Marlins Wild Card teams did and win the World Series.

Alas, I only have so much boldness within me.

6) Junior Caminero will be an AL MVP finalist.

OK, maybe not that bold. The Rays’ young third baseman hit 45 homers last year and finished ninth in the MVP race. Not too shabby. Especially for a 22-year-old.

But then again, the Rays have NEVER had a player finish top three in MVP. So there’s that. Though playing his home games in a Spring Training ballpark last season undoubtedly helped, there’s also a lot more to Caminero’s potential than what we saw last season, and we got a taste of it in his performance for the Dominican Republic in the World Baseball Classic. He has incredible bat speed. But the swing is smooth, not reckless, and that 19.1% strikeout rate from 2025 could fall and send him ascending further.

I am legally forbidden from picking Caminero to win MVP, having already jinxed ... err, selected the Mariners’ Julio Rodriguez. But Caminero’s going to be right there.

Did I mention he’s 22? Because he is!

7) You will leave the season with more respect for home-plate umps.

We’ve all been angry with umps. OK, so we don’t all chew them out at T-ball games when it’s a bunch of 5-year-olds on the field. But we all get angry with umps when they blow a call, and of course the egregious ones take on a life of their own on social media (just like everything else).

But watch how the ABS Challenge System powered by T-Mobile unfolds this season, and I have a statistically backed hunch you’ll say, “You know what? The home-plate umps are pretty good at their job.” It’s a job that’s never been harder, what with velocity and spin having taken pitching to an absurdly intricate level ... not to mention having to police the pitch clock while you’re at it.

The Triple-A data tells us that only about 0.5% of total pitches get overturned. That’s less than two per game, on average. The pitches challenged are conceivably the closest and most controversial pitches of all, and the overturn rate on them is roughly 50-50. The umps are generally really good at this.

8) The Blue Jays will miss the playoffs.

Please don’t accuse me of being anti-Canada. I happen to love Canada, actually. I live in northeast Ohio. That’s basically Canada. We share a lake. A great one, some would say.

I’m not anti-Blue Jays, either. That’s not only a talented team but a fun one.

But look: It’s unfortunately not only common for a pennant winner one year to miss the playoffs the next; it’s happened 15 times in the Wild Card era. And this is a bold predictions piece, so I have to be bold. But I’m not so bold as to pick the Dodgers to miss the playoffs, because then I’ll just be accused to saying inflammatory stuff for the sake of saying inflammatory stuff.

So, apologies, Toronto, but you’re out. It’s nothing personal. And it’s not an unreasonable take, either.

The Blue Jays basically traded one of the best pure hitters in the sport in Bo Bichette for a much iffier commodity in Kazuma Okamoto. They’ve assembled terrific depth on the pitching side, but if young Trey Yesavage's shoulder impingement lingers and Dylan Cease does not return to elite form and Kevin Gausman shows his age and Jeff Hoffman doesn’t have it in the ninth, the AL East could be really unforgiving.

9) The Mets will beat the Dodgers in the NLCS.

It’s a stat that sounds fake: Since 2001, we've had only three World Series -- in 2018, 2020 and 2021 -- that did not feature at least one team that failed to reach the playoffs the previous year. Of the 50 available World Series spots in that span, 27 have been filled by teams that had been absent the previous October.

Now, you would assume that, for 2026 to follow the trend, the surprise squad would emerge from the AL. Especially since I just told you the Blue Jays are going to miss the playoffs.

Well, surprise again! OK, I did already predict the Mets to trade for Skubal, so I guess this pick isn’t shocking. But picking anybody to beat the Dodgers at any point qualifies as bold, doesn’t it?

The Mets’ roster is constructed in such a way that they will either be a juggernaut or an injury-prone mess. I don’t see much in-between. Nor do I want to.

10) The Mariners will win the World Series.

It’s time. It’s time for Seattle to experience the glory of last-week-of-October baseball, and, heck, time for baseball to experience late October in Seattle. Pack a sweater and enjoy the foliage.

The Mariners are taking what I believe to be the AL’s most well-rounded team into this season. What they do with it remains to be seen. But their lineup has the potential to be as deep and potent as any in the game when you adjust for the park effects. Their pitching staff is projected by FanGraphs to be top 10 in WAR in both the rotation and bullpen. They’ve got a top-10 farm system, per MLB Pipeline, which can matter big-time come the Trade Deadline. And they’ve got that bittersweet taste in their mouths from last year’s deep but ultimately unfulfilling run.

My predictions tend to stink. And so I apologize to everyone in the Emerald City if I have just jinxed the M’s. But it’s their own fault for putting together a team that really does have the potential to be the franchise’s first to not only reach the Series but wear the crown.

Enjoy the season. And as it unfolds, please, please forget everything I have written here.