Bradford DoolittleMar 27, 2026, 07:00 AM ETCloseMLB writer and analyst for ESPN.com Former NBA writer and analyst for ESPN.com Been with ESPN since 2013Multiple Authors
Passan: Expect more dominance from the Dodgers this season (2:09)Jeff Passan joins “The Pat McAfee Show” to discuss why the Dodgers are such clear favorites to win their third straight World Series. (2:09)
We begin the 2026 season exactly like we did in 2025: Twenty-nine teams are still chasing the defending champion Dodgers and, once again, Los Angeles profiles as the clear front-runner.
One thing last season reminded us: Even if the apparently inevitable comes to pass, it can still be exhilarating. Yes, the Dodgers were heavy favorites to win it all. Yes, they did win it all. But to fulfill that destiny, the Dodgers had to survive a World Series for the ages. They did so even as the outcome would have been different if any of a number of plays had gone against them.
Even for the Dodgers, winning a World Series is hard. As much as they hover above everyone else on paper, they still have less than a one-in-three chance to win a third straight crown. That’s just baseball.
In what has become an annual project, we’ve structured our last Stock Watch of the offseason as a glance at the championship landscape, placing teams on different tiers based on their chances to win it all.
To have a surprise pennant winner coming from outside the top couple of tiers is barely a surprise, as last season it happened again. The Blue Jays started from a Tier 3 slotting in 2025. The rating was reasonable. Toronto was coming off a 74-win season, and the chatter around the Jays was whether a failure to reach an extension agreement with Vladimir Guerrero Jr. might lead to a reset. Things look a lot different now.
Typically, teams in Tier 1 are the front-runners to land the top seed in their league and should be all-in trying to win the World Series. This year, we’ve reserved the tier for one team.
Pivotal number: 112⅔. This is Clayton Kershaw’s innings count from his final season, which happened to rank second on the Dodgers. Only Yoshinobu Yamamoto had anything resembling a normal, full-time rotation workload. Eleven pitchers made five or more starts. This turned out to be a boon during the playoffs, as the Dodgers leaned hard on their most talented starters, who carried them to another title. Will the Dodgers’ innings distribution look any more normal in 2026? Does it matter?
Franchise temperature: 116 degrees. The Braves’ cooling period since their 2021 title accelerated last season, with Atlanta’s first losing campaign since 2017. Injuries were a key factor in that, but this is now a multiple-season trend. After that championship, Atlanta seemed poised to raise its temperature to the level of the 1990s/2000s Braves, which set the franchise standard at 174 degrees in 1999. This is a pivotal season in determining if the Braves are still on that kind of run.
Franchise temperature: 47 degrees. The Mariners peaked as a franchise way back in 2003, when a non-playoff, 93-win season got them to 52 degrees. If Seattle meets its lofty preseason forecasts over the months to come, it would mark the Mariners’ sixth straight winning season and push the organization to its peak. If Seattle parlays that into a World Series debut, you won’t need franchise temperature to tell you that this is the high point of Mariners history, so far.
Franchise temperature: 77 degrees. Toronto’s first pennant since 1993 warmed things up for a franchise that has wallowed in lukewarm waters for a couple of decades. A championship this season would put the Blue Jays’ apex (162 degrees, after the 1992-93 championship seasons) on the radar. Given the overwhelming response of the Toronto fan base last season, if that happens, Canada might be the place to be in the baseball world in a few months.
Franchise temperature: 119 degrees. Increasingly tepid. The Red Sox are still pretty warm but nevertheless are at their lowest level in 20 years. Last year’s 89-73 regular season marked progress from three straight seasons of utter mediocrity, but Boston was unable to parlay that into a postseason series win. In a division with four of our top 11 teams, tepid isn’t going to get it done.
Pivotal number: 71. That’s the number of games Anthony played as a rookie. To be fair, he didn’t make his MLB debut until June, but he subsequently missed 26 days with an oblique strain. All signs are that Anthony is ready to explode on the American League. The Red Sox really need that number to double, at least. The forecasts like Boston’s position entering the season. If the Rex Sox win their way into a playoff slot, they need Anthony to be healthy then, too.
Franchise temperature: 87 degrees. A string of middling seasons hasn’t led to a “Day After Tomorrow” kind of plummet, but the Giants have lost nearly 100 degrees since 2014, their third title season in a five-year period. That was the franchise’s high point since the days of John McGraw, the Polo Grounds and Coogan’s Bluff. The Giants are once again middling, as if they are relentlessly drawn to average.
Franchise temperature: 87 degrees. A pair of mediocre seasons has kept the Rangers’ temperature in the hot range after their 100-degree record high, achieved by winning the 2023 World Series. But the trend has been in the wrong direction for two straight seasons. Texas has a nice mix of veterans and young players, a new manager and a new offensive philosophy. Still, it feels like the general direction of this temperature could go either way. It’s a big season for the Rangers.
Franchise temperature: 57 degrees. This feels like a good temperature for the Royals, who went into a period of rapid cooling after their contending rosters from the mid-2010s broke up. To the credit of J.J. Picollo and his staff, the Royals have curbed that decline and managed to settle in tepid waters. With a contention-worthy 26-man roster heading into 2026, they hope to wade a little closer to the warm sands of the shoreline ahead.
Pivotal number: .844. That nice-looking OPS is the figure posted by Diamondbacks first basemen from 2012 (when Paul Goldschmidt took over) through last season (when Josh Naylor served as Christian Walker’s successor before being dealt to the Mariners). The Braves are the only team with a better first base OPS during that span. This season, Arizona appears to be going with Carlos Santana, who turns 40 on April 8, at the position. His 2025 OPS was .633.
Franchise temperature: 75 degrees. The past two seasons have seen a steep drop from the franchise-best 91 degrees the Rays were at after their 99-win 2023 season. The trip back into mediocrity hasn’t pushed the Rays to reform their processes, at least the ones we can see. The past decade-plus suggests we should trust them on this. But after the past two seasons, it’s on the Rays to demonstrate that their emphasis on micro-advantages still works.
Pivotal number: 100. That’s a stolen base target for Chandler Simpson. He hit that mark in the minors in 2024 in just 110 games, so the skills are there. More important than the round number, though, is what it would mean for 2026: Simpson becoming entrenched as an everyday, top-of-the-order hitter who is manifesting his on-base skills at the big league level. With Junior Caminero looming behind a constantly on-base Simpson, the Rays would have quite a jump-start on a resurgent offense.
Franchise temperature: 75 degrees. The Guardians have hovered between 69 and 82 degrees after each season since 2016, when a pennant lifted them up from a chilly 50 degrees. That describes the post-pennant version of this franchise well. Nice and cozy. Not too hot, not too cold. This season looks like more of the same.
Franchise temperature: 29 degrees. This is it. The low point. The nadir. Rock bottom. Freezing temperatures in South Florida. That the Marlins have been middling in two of the past three seasons hardly matters in stemming this tide. Yes, there have been a couple of wild-card berths and winning records peppered in, but the Marlins have not outscored their opponents over a full season since 2010. It’s time for this latest rebuild to start warming things up.
Franchise temperature: 28 degrees. The Angels aren’t at an all-time low point, but they can get there from here with another couple of lackluster seasons. In other words, just wait. The Halos have now spent a full decade under .500, a period that encompasses the last chunk of Mike Trout’s peak and the entirety of Shohei Ohtani’s time with the club. This is Shakespearean-level tragedy.
Pivotal number: Minus-0.3. There is much to be done with this Nationals re-rebuild, but helping Brady House and Dylan Crews become productive big leaguers would be a good head start. This figure represents their combined bWAR from last season. That’s clearly not what the Nationals had in mind when they promoted them from the minors. House had a good spring, but Crews … did not. He’ll try to get it together in Triple-A to begin this season.
Franchise temperature: 21 degrees. The Rockies’ new brain trust takes over the baseball operations with nowhere to go but up. Last season’s club didn’t just lose a historic 119 games, but it also plunged the Rockies franchise to its nadir. The new group deserves time to do its thing, so, in the meantime, you might want to grab those skis.
Pivotal number: 34.1. This is the average age of the five pitchers projected to comprise the Rockies’ Opening Day starting rotation. The Rockies lost 119 games last season, after all, so apparently this is no time for a youth movement. (We kid.) This would be an example of giving Paul DePodesta and his crew time to try some things out. When it comes to the Rockies, anything is worth a try.
Franchise temperature: 251.4 degrees. After consecutive titles, the Dodgers have not only reached a high point in their history but actually are hotter than any franchise has been outside of a few editions of the Yankees. The record high is 399.2 degrees, set when the 1962 Yankees beat the Giants to win their 20th World Series in 40 seasons. (Yes: From 1923 to 1962, the Yankees won exactly half of all World Series played.) The game has changed so much that you wouldn’t expect the feats of the old Yankees to ever be matched, but with the run the Dodgers are on, it’s hard to put a cap on where this might go.