As we close the book on 2025 and celebrate the teams that enjoyed a great year, the teams that didn’t should keep this in mind: One year can make a huge difference.
Just ask the Blue Jays. In 2025, they reached a World Series that they came this close to winning (several times). But in 2024? They finished the year in last place after enduring months of speculation that they might just trade Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and start over.
It can turn around for you fast. In both directions.
So with 2026 just days away, we look today at six teams that aren’t exactly doing backflips about how 2025 turned out but have all sorts of reasons to be optimistic about the new year. Even after a season in which things didn’t go too well, the seeds may have been planted for a better tomorrow.
Athletics
2025: 76-86 (4th in AL West)
The team’s first year in West Sacramento did not go all that well, which probably should have been expected; it was, after all, the first year of a rather unconventional arrangement. But if you’re going to have a year in which you lose 86 games and are never really in the playoff chase, you’d like it to be one in which you emerge as the team with the most exciting batch of young hitters in the entire sport.
Tyler Soderstrom, Jacob Wilson, Lawrence Butler, Max Muncy, Denzel Clarke and, of course, Nick Kurtz (the AL Rookie of the Year who basically hit like Aaron Judge upon being called up) are all 25 years old or younger, with each guy under team control for years to come. Add to that Brent Rooker (31, and signed to a long-term deal) and the newly acquired Jeff McNeil, and you’ve got one of the more interesting, high-ceiling lineups in baseball.
Obviously, the A’s still need pitching help, something they’ve yet to address this offseason, save the small addition of veteran reliever Mark Leiter Jr. But with an offense like this, you only need to make the pitching adequate. This looks like a .500 team at the very least, with the upside to do a lot more.
Braves
2025: 76-86 (4th in NL East)
After a 2024 that felt mostly snakebit, thanks to a seemingly endless number of injuries, the Braves were hopeful that ’25 would be a return to normal, the comeback of a team that won the World Series in ’21 and won 101-plus games each of the two years afterward. It did not turn out that way.
Injuries were a problem again, but they were hardly the only issue; the Braves started 0-7 and just were never able to really get their season on track. Still, pitching injuries were the story of 2025, and all those pitchers, save for AJ Smith-Shawver, should be back and ready to go by Opening Day. The real question is whether the offensive declines we saw from some major players are permanent or temporary. The stats for Matt Olson, Michael Harris II, Austin Riley and Ozzie Albies were way down in 2025, and the Braves are counting on them to bounce back in ’26.
Nationals
2025: 66-96 (5th in NL East)
When you haven’t had a winning season since before the pandemic — even if that 2019 season ended in a World Series title — it’s probably a sign that you need some fresh eyes leading your organization. The Nationals certainly have that, with a 33-year-old manager, a 35-year-old president of baseball operations and a 31-year-old general manager. Crusty old salts, they’re not.
But it makes sense to put youth in charge of this franchise, because the whole foundation of the Nats is youthful: Only one player in their projected starting lineup is older than 25, and that’s Keibert Ruiz, who is only 27. The next step is for those young players to make leaps forward, and there’s every reason to think that James Wood, Dylan Crews and even Daylen Lile may be ready to do just that.
Nats fans have been waiting for all that youth — on the field, and now in dugout and the front office — to translate into on-field success. This may well be that year.
Orioles
2025: 75-87 (5th in AL East)
No team has been more aggressive than the Orioles this offseason, and for good reason: After a pair of disappointing postseasons and a truly miserable 2025, that Team Of The Future label everybody put on the Orioles was starting to gather a little mold.
Thus, here are Pete Alonso and Ryan Helsley and Taylor Ward and Shane Baz, with surely more additions yet to be made. The Orioles, like the Nats, need some of their young hitters to start playing like the stars they’ve been grooming them to be, but the front office, sensing the urgency here, has at last given them more support.
If another big-time starting pitcher ends up signing in Baltimore, there’s every reason to believe the Orioles’ consolidation season, the one when it all comes together, could be 2026.
Pirates
2025: 71-91 (5th in NL Central)
What do you do when you have perhaps the best pitcher in baseball, Paul Skenes, and he’s not even eligible for salary arbitration yet? You have to, finally, after 10 straight seasons of missing the playoffs, build around him aggressively.
The Pirates still have more to do, but their recent activity (trading for Brandon Lowe and Jake Mangum and signing Ryan O’Hearn) has been an encouraging start. O’Hearn (125 OPS+) and Lowe (116) both have track records as well-above-average hitters, and that’s a huge upgrade for a Pirates offense that in 2025 had exactly one player (Spencer Horwitz) hit at better than league average in any number of plate appearances. And there is still room to add another power bat here, to be sure. The Pirates might not end up with the top-dollar guys, but when you’ve got Skenes, not to mention a whole rotation of promising young pitchers, you might not need them.
White Sox
2025: 60-102 (5th in AL Central)
The signing of Munetaka Murakami surprised many around the baseball industry, but it probably shouldn’t have. The White Sox have the look of a team on the come-up right now. Sure, they lost 102 games last year, but remember, that’s a 19-game improvement from 2024 and, more to the point, they were a respectable nine games under .500 after the All-Star break and played competitively throughout September.
Are they a World Series contender yet? No. But they’re not going to lose 100 games again for quite some time. And in the AL Central … they may be fighting for a division title sooner than you think.
