3 Bold Predictions for the Cubs in 2026

The Cubs begin their 150th season as a franchise this afternoon — and the 10th anniversary of the 2016 World Series championship. Matthew Boyd takes the ball against the Nationals at Wrigley. The roster is the best it's been since that 2016 core. The division is there for the taking. And with Nico Hoerner, Ian Happ, Seiya Suzuki, Shota Imanaga, and Jameson Taillon all hitting free agency after the season, there's an urgency baked into this year that hasn't existed on the North Side in a long time.

In yesterday's NL Central preview, I had the Cubs at 91 wins and a division title. Today I'm going further. Here are three bold predictions for the 2026 Cubs.

1. The Cubs Win 95+ Games and the NL Central

I know — I just wrote 91 wins yesterday. But the more I sat with the numbers overnight, the more I think I was being conservative.

Start here: the 2025 Cubs scored 793 runs and allowed 649. That's a +144 run differential, which translates to a Pythagorean record of 96-66. They underperformed their run differential by four wins. This wasn't a team that got lucky to win 92 games — it was a team that should've won more. And then the front office went out and added Alex Bregman, Edward Cabrera, and an entirely new bullpen.

The Brewers, meanwhile, traded Freddy Peralta — one of the five best pitchers in the NL — and replaced him with a rotation of promising arms who have combined for roughly 20 career MLB starts. Milwaukee has outperformed its projections every year, and they might do it again. But the gap between these two rosters is wider than it's been at any point in the last five years, and the Cubs' path to a division title is the clearest it's been since 2020.

FanGraphs has the Cubs at 85 wins. PECOTA says 89. ZiPS says the low 90s. Box-Toppers has them at 94 with an NL pennant. I'm going over on all of them. This team's underlying numbers already supported 95 wins last year before the upgrades. With Bregman in the lineup, Steele returning mid-season, and Palencia closing games, I think they get there — and that it's their most wins since the 103-win championship season a decade ago.

2. The Rotation Depth Will Be Their Greatest Weapon

Most teams view using eight-plus starters in a season as a sign that something went wrong. For the 2026 Cubs, it's the plan.

Count the arms. Boyd, Horton, Imanaga, Cabrera, and Taillon are the Opening Day five. Colin Rea — who was second on the team in innings last year and who Counsell called the "glue" during the postseason — slots in as a swingman who can go multiple innings or spot-start. Ben Brown and Javier Assad are both stretched out as starters in Triple-A Iowa. Justin Steele is targeting a return around May or June after Tommy John surgery, and when he comes back, he's essentially a trade-deadline acquisition the Cubs didn't have to give up any prospects for — ZiPS projects him for a 3.52 ERA, the lowest of any Cubs starter.

That's nine arms. Jed Hoyer has said openly that building this depth was the direct result of watching his rotation run out of gas last October. The NLDS loss to Milwaukee wasn't about talent — it was about not having enough healthy, fresh arms to survive a seven-game series if they'd gotten past the Brewers.

This year is different. Craig Counsell doesn't need five guys to throw 200 innings. He needs eight or nine guys to throw 130, stay fresh, and still be sharp in October. Horton was on a 75-pitch count for most of his breakout second half last year — he went 8-1 with a 1.03 ERA and 0.78 WHIP while being held back. Imagine what a full workload looks like. By September, when other rotations are gassed, the Cubs will have Steele fully ramped up, Horton managed into peak form, and Brown and Assad available as high-leverage options. That depth is by design, and it's going to be the reason they're still standing in October.

3. The Cubs Will Be the Best Defensive Team in Baseball

The 2025 Cubs led the NL with 84 Defensive Runs Saved — 17 more than the next-closest team. They led all of MLB with 36 Outs Above Average. They won the NL Team Gold Glove Award and the Fielding Bible's Defensive Team of the Year. They were the only team in baseball with positive runs saved at eight of nine positions. Three players won Gold Gloves — Nico Hoerner, Ian Happ (his fourth straight), and Pete Crow-Armstrong, whose 24 Outs Above Average tied Bobby Witt Jr. for the most in baseball and whose 19 five-star catches set a Statcast-era record.

And then they added Alex Bregman at third base.

Bregman is a Gold Glove winner himself. He replaces Matt Shaw — who was a Gold Glove finalist as a rookie — with a proven, elite defender at the hot corner. The infield now features Bregman, Hoerner (17 DRS, 98th percentile in Outs Above Average), Dansby Swanson (two-time Gold Glove winner), and Michael Busch (top-six among first basemen in DRS last year). Behind them, Crow-Armstrong and Happ form arguably the best defensive center-left combination in the sport. Carson Kelly is rated elite at blocking and throwing out baserunners.

Ian Happ put it perfectly last fall: "Pitchers who come in from other organizations would say, 'this is the best defensive team I've ever seen play behind me.'" Craig Counsell's framing was more clinical: "When you have a team with that caliber of defense, it can be really suffocating. They hit balls hard, they think they have extra-base hits, and they get taken away consistently."

This matters for the other two predictions, too. Elite defense is what makes the rotation depth work. When you're running out your sixth or seventh starter in a spot start, having the best gloves in baseball behind him turns would-be hits into outs and keeps innings from unraveling. It's also why the ERA-FIP gap from 2025 isn't purely a regression flag — some of that overperformance was the defense being genuinely, historically good. If the defense stays at this level, the pitching staff has a floor that most teams can't match.

The Bottom Line

These three predictions aren't independent — they reinforce each other. The defense protects the pitchers. The pitching depth keeps arms fresh all year. And both combine to produce a team that doesn't have extended losing stretches, can absorb injuries without missing a beat, and arrives in October with more options than anyone else in the National League. The 2025 Cubs won 92 games while underperforming their run differential and running out of arms in the postseason. The 2026 version is built to fix both of those problems.

First pitch at Wrigley is at 1:20 CT. Baseball season is officially here.