The 2026 Rebuild Rankings
Which MLB also-rans should feel best about their seasons?
Success, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. And sometimes the beholder has beheld a dozen or a hundred baseball games knowing “making the playoffs” wasn’t a realistic goal. Definitions of a good season have to adjust for a club’s position in the competitive cycle.
So, this annual assessment asks you to disregard the winning and losing of this season, as much as you possibly can, and think about the future. Did the team find reasons to be optimistic for 2027? For beyond?
Obviously, a great many of these teams wouldn’t have called 2026 a rebuilding year, but let’s be honest. Every year that isn’t headed for October in this era of wide open playoffs is, by necessity, at least a short-term rebuild.
Let’s get to the rankings.
Progress!
Nationals
No front office has produced a bigger glow-up in 2026 than the Nationals. Under Paul Toboni, the 36-year-old president of baseball operations, the Nats have leapfrogged from behind-the-times to thoroughly with it. Every other beat writer feature about the Nationals seems to herald a “revival” or a “rejuvenated” player. For a while, it looked like the major-league team might bolt straight into contention.
via Baseball Savant
Alas, every beat writer story that didn’t include those words included the phrase “blown save.” Despite the apocalyptically bad bullpen, Nationals fans should be doing backflips about the improvements made this year. James Wood, CJ Abrams and Cade Cavalli all look like stars for a potentially imminent contender. Toboni and company appear to have made out well in the MacKenzie Gore trade over the winter, then parlayed low-cost finds like Curtis Mead and Foster Griffin into more young talent at the deadline. Perhaps most importantly, the club implemented a modern plan for getting the most out of that talent.
This week, The Athletic’s Spencer Nusbaum wrote about the makeover of Washington’s player development system:
No farm system in baseball has seen a bigger year-over-year jump in pitchers’ fastball velocity and strikeout rate or hitters’ home run rate. No farm system in baseball, relatedly, has a more improved offense (by wRC+) or better pitching staff (by ERA).
Will a contending team come together next year? You can never know, but more than at any point since their 2019 World Series triumph, it feels like the Nationals have the instruction manual for putting it together.
Cardinals
