​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!​
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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.
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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.
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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.
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