The Launch Angle's 2026 Houston Astros Predictions!

I wrote up my predictions for the Astros in 2026 as part of The Launch Angle's Season Preview. I'm adding my part here for posterity, but definitely go check the full thing at to see where the group consensus lands! This season's predictions are definitely the most polarizing one in at least a decade, so there's a lot to cover. And if you're an Astros fan, definitely check out The Launch Angle this year!


I feel like I’ve seen a lot of doom and gloom around predictions for the Astros in 2026. And I don’t know that I can blame it all; the 2025 team missed the postseason for the first time since 2016, suffered from a rash of bad luck along the way, and in the offseason lost long-time ace Framber Valdez, continuing a multi-year run of high-profile free agency departures.

And yet… I feel like it’s important to remember that somehow, the 2025 team wasn’t nearly as much of a disaster as it felt like at times. In last year’s preseason predictions, I guessed that the squad would finish with an 88-74 record, good for second place in the AL West and a Wild Card spot. The end result was instead 77-75, good for second place in the AL West and missing out on the last Wild Card spot by a tiebreaker. That one game difference was incredibly consequential, but this team was more or less where I expected.

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Of course, how the 2025 team got to that end point was extremely unusual. If I had known going into the year that Yordan Alvarez would miss over 110 games (not to mention his as poorly as he did in the first few weeks of the season), that Yainer Diaz would be a below-average hitter, that Jose Altuve would struggle in the outfield, that Christian Walker would take several months to heat up, that Chas McCormick would play so poorly that he would get demoted, that Framber would somehow go on a protracted meltdown to close out the season, that Josh Hader would go down at a critical point, that Lance McCullers Jr. would return from injury looking totally spent but still rack up substantial innings anyway, that the rest of the rotation as a whole would continue to get generally bad luck on the injury front… Frankly, that all sounds like a disaster scenario taken together. I think if you had just told me the Yordan tidbit prior to my 2025 prediction, I would have knocked a full 5 wins off my estimate, let alone any of the other news.

And I think that’s why I… actually feel somewhat optimistic about 2026? Don’t get me wrong, this version of the team is still a far cry from the 2022 Championship team. But taking a team that missed something like 18 Wins Above Replacement due to injuries* (far ahead of anyone else) all the way to the brink of the playoffs feels like a big deal, and it provides a very obvious answer to the question “where will your potential improvement in 2026 come from?” Even mediocre injury luck in 2026 would be a huge step up over what the team got in 2025, and hopefully the new medical team can manage that.

Predicting Today's Future Hall of Fame Starting Pitchers, 2026 Edition (Part 1)

Feature photo by Johnmaxmena2. Wikimedia Creative Commons License.

Just like last time, this article wound up getting pretty long, and will be split into two halves. If you’d like an email when Part 2 goes up, you can join the Hot Corner Harbor mailing list here:

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If you missed the first part of my annual Future Hall of Fame series focusing on the Hitters, you can read Part 1 here and Part 2 here. I think they turned out pretty well, in part because I’m in a rhythm at this point after years of doing it. I know what to cover, what particularly stands out more than usual, the recent history of major players, what worked in the past, all of that.

In contrast, the process of predicting which starting pitchers will get into Cooperstown one day feels increasingly like a mess. I’ve bemoaned it in the past, but this year especially, it feels like multiple trends are accelerating in a bunch of different and sometimes even opposing directions, which pushes the question into incredibly unclear territory.

The core issue comes down to a simple question, “What is a Hall of Famer?” Despite its simplicity, it’s a fairly complex topic, and the easiest answer is unfortunately “a Hall of Famer is whoever voters decide to induct into Cooperstown”. You could take that in a very nebulous, vibe-based way, and decide whether you personally think each candidate “feels like a Hall of Famer”, but that has the obvious issue: that every person is going to feel their own way about that, and sometimes there just isn’t a way to bridge the gap of “I feel like he is” versus “Well, I don’t”.

If you actually want to discuss these things in a productive way, you kind of need some solid criteria to work off of, and the only real hard-and-fast standard we can go off of is “How does a candidate compare to the people who have already been inducted?” That’s part of what this series is about, really. Comparing batters from the 1800s to batters from today is difficult, but there are enough similarities there for it to work as at least some level of precedence.

Sure, strategies have changed, defense has improved, the equipment has gone from a dead ball to a livelier one (and then back and forth again a few times), home run totals have steadily risen the entire way, but the broad outlines have stayed consistent enough, and the things that have changed can at least be accounted for and normalized to one extent or another. For example, 400 home runs was once rarefied air that guaranteed induction, it became a little more common as home run totals continued to creep upwards, voters adjusted. Guys were still trying to reach base and drive in runs, though.

But that hasn’t really been the case for pitchers? Or at least, the shift hasn’t been quite as clean. We went from pitchers who threw complete games every day, to rotations, to bigger rotations, to relievers finishing off games, to bigger and bigger bullpens picking up more of the load as starting pitchers were driven from the game earlier and earlier. And the strategy for individual pitchers changed as the rosters shifted, going from “your five best arms need to pace themselves to cover every inning in a season” to “they’ll have a handful of guys to spell them at the end of games, so they can afford to exert themselves a little more at times”, to eventually “each pitcher can exert themselves as much as possible with no concern to pacing themselves, as teams will readily cycle through dozens of arms to fill an entire season”. 

Predicting Today's Future Hall of Fame Hitters, 2026 Edition (Part 2)

Feature photo by Jeffrey Hayes. Wikimedia Creative Commons License.

We’re back with the second half of this year’s Future Hall of Fame Hitters breakdown, picking up right where we left off last time. If you missed that one (or need a refresher on the methodology), covering younger players up through age 31, you can catch up on it here! Today, we’re looking at the much more established players.

The first part of the starting pitcher piece should hopefully be coming out by the end of this week as well; once again, if you’d like to be notified right when it happens, you can subscribe to the Hot Corner Harbor email list below! The only emails I send on it are when a new article gets published, so it’s a minimal load on your inbox (and if you are subscribed but aren’t seeing them in your inbox, make sure to check your spam folder).

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Age 32: 48.7 WAR Median; 79.46% of all players at this mark elected
Active Players: Mookie Betts (75.2 Wins Above Replacement)
Manny Machado (61.7 WAR)
José Ramírez (57.6 WAR)
Bryce Harper (54.0 WAR)

To kick things off, we finally have our first players above the overall Hall of Fame median. Mookie Betts has been here for a couple of years now, and I think that he’s far enough over the line now that even if he has a sudden and sharp, Andruw Jones-style drop-off in his play, I think he still makes it into the Hall. Well… technically, I guess that kind of collapse didn’t even stop Jones himself, given that he was finally elected to Cooperstown this year, but I think this hypothetical Collapse-Betts would make it in much more quickly than Jones, possibly even first ballot. Most of it is that he’s better overall than Jones. But I also think there’s a certain level of narrative building that needs to happen once a player hits the statistical profile of a Hall of Fame, a sort of mythologizing that helps to win over the stingier voters, and that can take a little bit of time. But I think once you reach the point where even the less plugged-into-Hall-history voters start describing a guy as “Future Hall of Famer”, it’s basically the end result of that process. I think we’re about at that point with Mookie now.

In contrast, Manny Machado might need a couple more seasons, since he just passed the median career WAR for Hall of Fame position players last year. If he had that sudden collapse in 2026, I think he’d probably have to settle for an Andruw-like crawl to the Hall. But I don’t think it will take too much longer to reach the next stage of the narrative-building. He’s already starting to reach some big milestone numbers, like passing 2000 hits and 350 home runs this past season. A couple more big seasons will speed things up even more, but even a normal drop-off and a few seasons of stat-padding at the end will probably be more than enough to solidify his first-ballot status.