⚾ MLB 2026

Each club's rating starts from its run differential per game across the last two seasons (2025 and 2024), shrunk toward the league average (×0.62) because rosters turn over. This season's real run differential folds in at a weight that climbs with games played and dominates by midsummer - baseball gives you 162 games of evidence, and by August the standings have earned the right to outvote history. Run differential becomes a true-talent win percentage through the classic ten-runs-per-win rule, so a club outscoring opponents by a run a game reads as a .600 team. Those percentages are held as log-odds, which makes every head-to-head exactly the log5 formula plus a home-field term (53.5%, the long-run MLB home win rate).

Every one of the 172 games left on the actual schedule is then simulated 20,000times, with each simulated season drawing every club's rating afresh from a distribution (σ 0.07in log-odds) so the output carries the model's own uncertainty rather than pretending to none. The bracket is the real one: byes for the top two seeds, a best-of-three Wild Card round played entirely at the higher seed, a 2-2-1 Division Series and 2-3-2 Championship Series and World Series, with home games where they actually fall rather than a coin flip. Division ties are broken on record then head-to-head, an approximation of the full ladder. The market gets a say too: the World Series futures ESPN carries are de-vigged, mapped onto the rating scale through the model's own rating-to-title-odds curve, and blended in at weight 0.025 - a weight that scales with how much season is left, so the market speaks loudest in March and is nearly silent by September.

Uncertainty shrinks as the season does - the spread of outcomes each simulated season draws from narrows week by week as fewer games remain, and widens back out for a club the stats and the market disagree about most. Each simulated season also draws one correlated error for the whole league, one for each division, and one for each club, rather than treating every game as its own coin flip - real seasons run hot or cold together, not independently.

What this hub does not have, yet. There are no game-by-game picks and no graded ledger here, unlike the NFL hub. That is a deliberate gap rather than an oversight: the NFL plays sixteen games a week and each one is an event worth calling in advance, while baseball plays fifteen a day and almost none of them decide anything. The honest unit of prediction in this sport is the season, so that is what is published.