Freelance Baseball

My first assignment for Action Network was to make some 2026 predictions. Just straight picks without support. Which is great because I did virtually no futures prep this pre-season. Keeping that in mind, I'm still going to do my best to explain those picks below. 

Geometry was probably my second worst subject in school, next to science. I may not be able to create interesting, meaningful baseball stats, but I can usually interpret most baseball numbers and what they're supposed to mean. 

The goal of this article is discuss some of the bigger changes to the league in 2026. The major factors this year include a rule change and one park alteration. We'll also touch on the future of FreelanceBaseball.com at the end. 

With the new MLB season upon us in just a few weeks, there's no better time to review 2025 and talk about our 2026 ambitions. Well, actually, November may have been a better time and I've had this post lying here for about a month, but there is NOW no better time than NOW. 

This is it! We’re down to the final four to seven games of the season and if the market is right, it’ll be closer to the former than latter. The Dodgers are heavy favorites in this series and for good reason, most of which we’ll cover below.

With Toronto’s win on Wednesday, we were guaranteed two more days of multiple baseball games, potentially ending on Friday. In fact, depending on what happens Thursday night, this could still be the final game of both series or just the middle.

There’s a reasonable chance that Thursday could be the last time we see more than one MLB game in a single day for the rest of the year. If not, it’s tough to imagine Friday won’t be, unless the Blue Jays and Brewers make miraculous come backs.

We are now in an era where if most teams don’t have a top 15-20% of the league starter available, they’d much rather hit the opposing team with their entire staff/bullpen in an elimination game. Fortunately, we are just begging the LCS, so we’ll still have starting pitchers for the next couple of days (for the most part). And on days with multiple games, I’ll bring the content whenever we know those pitchers. I’ll probably finish up with a World Series preview. Any other interesting takes will be posted via Action Network (follow Rocky Jade).

We’re covering both NLDS Game Fours later today plus ALDS Game Five in Seattle on Friday below. Because I’m running late (we didn’t know who was playing or pitching until late last night), I’ll post as I go today.

This is the last day of the baseball post-season where we’re assured of at least three games. The problem being, we won’t know if there’s going to be a fourth until later on tonight. I’ll proceed as if there will be four, unless it becomes more than apparent there won’t be before completion.

Today, we cover the two ALCS Game Threes in Detroit (early) and New York (late). It’s an earlier weekday start than Monday by two hours, a 4pm ET start in Detroit with the game in New York four hours later.

We cover a pair of NLDS games on Monday. The Brewers, after a week off, going with a bullpen game. It sounds sketchy. Opening with a lefty (Ashby), sounds like a vehicle to either clear the LHBs or produce a better lineup for someone like Priester to follow, but we’ll cover that more below.