Thinking about the 2026 Braves from a predictive perspective is a pretty fraught exercise. You might say, “Wasn’t it a fraught exercise overall?” But honestly, not really!
The 2018 Braves were predicted to be largely irrelevant. They surprised everyone and created a once-in-a-lifetime turnaround for the franchise. Has that been extended to 2019? Well, not really: the team was expected to be better than average, but more of a fringe contender. Inertia is one thing. It wasn’t until 2021 that the team found itself in “solid contender” territory, with any bad seasons firmly in the rearview mirror. And then we got to 2022-2023, where the team was projected to be one of the top teams in baseball, and was one of the top teams in baseball. Anyway, you know where this is going. 2024-2025 was kind of the flip side of 2018 and 2019. It’s all very palindromic: big reversal, smaller reversal, as expected, smaller reversal, bigger reversal. The capper was a miserable 2025 season in which the Braves reversed their 2018 windfall, going from projected top team to distilled sadness.
All in all, that leaves the 2026 Braves in a weird spot. By design, much of this roster is locked up, and again, inertia is a thing. So because of the things in the previous sentence, the 2026 team’s projections by default can’t deviate too much from the 2025 team’s projections, which can’t deviate too much from the 2024 team’s projections. Dan Szymborski summarizes it this wayand it’s honestly hard to argue with:
If you just look at our depth chart, you’d feel pretty good about the Braves, except for a few things: They look a little worse at (almost) every position than they did this time last year, and we’re getting those WAR numbers with quite a few of the starters projected for at least 600 plate appearances. The first is a problem because a team with slightly better projections just won 76 games, and the second is worrisome because ZiPS is quite aware of Atlanta’s offensive talent once you get past the team’s impressive front-line players.
On the one hand, talent is talent and projections are projections. On the other hand, no one feels good about 2025 as it happened. Combine that with Szymborski’s conclusion: “If you assume there will inevitably be a lot of injuries, the Braves look like an 84-88 winning team (or somewhere around that), depending on who the healthy guys are. That’s better than last year’s finish, but still a bit of a disappointment.” – and you end up with the Braves being in some sort of uncharted territory, at least as far as recent years are concerned: They may be back in the meaty part of the profit curve, the one where they should do things to feel good about their upcoming season.
Ultimately, the point estimate numbers in the above-linked post from your old ZiPS computer largely confirm something I asked as a daily question months ago: that the problem isn’t selection per se. As a reminder, I essentially asked if getting back into “good season” territory for the Braves was a roster issue, or how they were using the roster, and as I recall, not a single person said the roster was lacking in talent. Nothing in the ZiPS images, tables, etc. indicates that there is a shortage of grids; Aside from ZiPS, the Steamer-based FanGraphs Depth Charts now once again have the Braves as a top=five team (although they are almost passed over by a few other squads if a difference in even minor additions occurs). But if the roster isn’t the problem, it’s also hard to be super-duper optimistic that “roster usage” will suddenly improve, given the terrible unforced errors the Braves blundered into last year.
So I don’t know, you’re probably looking at a two-pronged approach here: make some smart moves to improve the quality of the roster, and at the same time make some smart decisions to make some more gains at the margin. It’s basically what every team should do. Unless the Braves beat everyone health-wise this year, both will be pretty important to them in 2026.
I’m pretty far removed from ZiPS itself at this point, but fundamentally there isn’t much in this year’s ZiPS release that you couldn’t already suspect. Drake Baldwin has a very sexy central estimate of 3.7 WAR-in-485 PAs, which is A) much higher than Steamer, but also B) better than what he did last year. Due to the aforementioned slowness, Michael Harris II still has the second-highest point estimate for WAR on the position player side. The downside is Jurickson Profar and his central estimate of 1ish-WAR-in-500 PAs, which oof. It’s basically a prediction of six good producers, two bad producers, and Ozzie Albies will be basically generic. The rotation has high production in relatively low innings from Chris Sale, the Spencers (yes, Strider too – slowness!), and Reynaldo Lopez, and decent options beyond that. The bullpen is neither dominant nor top-heavy, with Raisel Iglesias and Dylan Lee looking like 1A and 1B, Grant Holmes offering good value when used in relief, some solid prospects for Aaron Bummer and Joel Payamps, and then your usual morass of deep relief options.
Bottom line: It still doesn’t seem like a roster issue, but the Braves also can’t pretend there’s nothing left to do, either on the roster side or the non-roster side. Anyway, go read after instead of my blather, if you haven’t already.
#major #surprises #ZiPSs #outlook #Braves