No huge surprises in ZiPS’ 2026 outlook for the Braves

Thinking about the 2026 Braves from a forecasting perspective is a pretty fraught exercise. You could say, “Hasn’t it generally been a fraught exercise?” But, honestly, not really!

The 2018 Braves were forecasted to be largely irrelevant. They surprised everyone and pulled off a once-in-a-generation-for-a-franchise turnaround. Did that carry over into 2019? Well, not really — the team was projected to be better than average, but more of a fringy contender. Inertia is a thing. Only by 2021 was the team in “solid contender” territory, with any foundering seasons firmly in the rear-view mirror. And then we hit 2022-2023, where the team was both 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 have been kind of the flip side of 2018 and 2019. It’s all very palindrome-tastic: big turnaround, smaller turnaround, as expected-ish, smaller turnaround, bigger turnaround. The capper was a miserable 2025 season where the Braves reversed their stroke of fortune from 2018, going from a projected top team to distilled sadness.

All in all, that leaves the 2026 Braves in a weird place. By design, a lot of this roster is locked in, and again, inertia is a thing. So, by default due to the stuff in the prior sentence, the projections of the 2026 team can’t deviate too much from the projections of the 2025 team, which can’t deviate too much from the projections of the 2024 team. Dan Szymborski summarizes it like this, and it’s honestly hard to argue with:

Just looking at our depth chart, you’d feel pretty good about the Braves, except for a couple things: They look a bit worse at (almost) every position than they did at this time last year, and we’re getting those WAR numbers with quite a lot 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 meh on Atlanta’s offensive talent once you get past the team’s impressive first-tier 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 — “When you assume that a lot of injuries will inevitably happen, the Braves look like an 84-88 win team (or somewhere thereabouts) depending on who the healthy guys are. That’s better than last year’s finish, but still kind of a disappointment.” — and you end up with the Braves being in kind of unfamiliar territory, at least as pertains to the last few years: they’re potentially back in the meaty part of the win curve, the one where they need to do stuff to feel good about their upcoming season.

In the end, the point estimate numbers in the above-linked post from ye olde ZiPS computer largely reaffirm something that I asked as a daily question post months ago: that the issue isn’t with the roster, per se. As a quick reminder, I essentially asked whether returning to “good season” territory for the Braves was a matter of roster, or how they used the roster, and if memory serves, not a single person actually said the roster was lacking in talent. Nothing in the ZiPS graphics, tables, and so on is going to suggest there’s a roster shortfall; ZiPS aside, the Steamer-only-based FanGraphs Depth Charts right now once again have the Braves as a top=five team (though they’re very close to being leapfrogged by a couple of other squads if a disparity in even minor additions occurs). But, if the roster isn’t the issue, it’s also hard to be super-duper-optimistic that “using the roster” is going to suddenly improve, given the horrendous 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 upgrade the roster quality, and at the same time, make some smart decisions to get some more winning at the margins. It’s basically what every team should be doing — it’s just that unless the Braves beat everyone health-wise this year, both are going to be pretty important for them in 2026.

I’ve gotten pretty far afield from ZiPS itself at this point, but fundamentally, there just isn’t that much to point out in this year’s ZiPS release that you couldn’t already surmise. Drake Baldwin has a very sexy 3.7 WAR-in-485 PAs central estimate, which is A) way higher than Steamer but also B) better than what he did last year. Due to aforementioned inertia, Michael Harris II still has the second-highest point estimate for WAR on the position player side of things. The flip side is Jurickson Profar and his 1ish-WAR-in-500 PAs central estimate, which, oof. It’s basically a forecast of six good producers, two poor producers, and Ozzie Albies being generic at the keystone. The rotation has high production in relatively low innings tallies from Chris Sale, the Spencers (yes, Strider too — inertia!), 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 providing good value if he’s used in relief, some solid expectations for Aaron Bummer and Joel Payamps, and then your usual morass of down-the-depth-chart relief options.

Bottom line: it still doesn’t look like a roster issue, but the Braves can’t act like there’s nothing more to do, either on the roster side or the non-roster side, either. Anyway, go read the post rather than my blather, if you haven’t already.