If you were to focus your attention on teams that fared better than generally expected during the 2026 Major League Baseball season, you'd likely land on the St. Louis Cardinals and Washington Nationals. Both clubs were recently eliminated from playoff contention and are below .500.
However, coming into the year, most observers likely would've pegged the Cards and Nats for perhaps 100 losses each in 2026. As such, both teams qualify as pleasant surprises to an extent. The Cardinals still have an outside shot at a .500 or winning record this season, and the Nats at this writing have a positive run differential.
That's notable in light of what was expected from these teams. Will either of these surprisingly respectable teams take the next step and contend in the season ahead? That's entirely possible given that both organizations are young and on the upswing, and the prospects of such a leap forward for St.
Louis and D.C. merit further explanation now that they've been bounced from contention in 2026. Teams that don't expect to contend, as was very much the case with the Cards and Nats, tend not to put much thought or effort into constructing the bullpen. It's simply not a priority for most rebuilding teams.
That was generally true for both these teams, and suffice it to say the results back that up. Consider how they fare in various bullpen measures relative to their MLB peers (MLB rank in parentheses): The above should be familiar, except possibly meltdowns. That's a FanGraphs reliever metric, and a reliever earns a meltdown when he worsens his team's odds of winning a given game by 6% or more during a given appearance.
As you can see, the Cardinals and Nationals are at or near the top when it comes to their frequencies of blown saves and meltdowns. Otherwise, the corps of note are inept at both run prevention and at underlying performance as indicated by K% and FIP. These are bad bullpens, gallingly bad in the case of Washington's.
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