Recently, fellow PSA writer Jeff Middleton wrote an appealing article covering the Hope-O-Meter poll that The Athletic conducted and how it showed a particularly pessimistic outlook regarding the Yankees in 2026—check that out over here. It sort of goes without saying that each outlook is assessed while keeping the expectations for that specific team in mind, and the reality is that any Yankee fan—rightfully so—has a threshold of expectations matched by fewer than a handful of teams.
Ahead of the 2024 campaign, Yankee fans came in with a Hope-O-Meter of 80.1%, a number that dropped down to 67.1% ahead of last season. For all of the issues that they’ve worked through in recent campaigns, including losing out on Juan Soto and seeing Gerrit Cole miss all of 2025, the Yankees have done a fairly decent job at retaining their place as a top contender. One could be forgiven for a decent level of skepticism in how the club replaced Soto, but even after seeing those moves pay off, the level of optimism significantly trails that of the 2024 campaign.
If we look at all 30 teams on that poll, the Yankees are not the only regular contender sitting in the bottom half. There they’re joined by the Philadelphia Phillies, ranked 18th, with an optimism percentage of slightly over 70 percent. In many ways the Yankees of the National League, the Phillies were also unceremoniously bounced out in four games in the LDS, showing vulnerabilities against a team that would represent their league in the Fall Classic.
Similarly, a regular contender over the past five years with one World Series trip that ended in heartbreak, the Phillies, much like the Yankees, retain a competitive core. They do a good job of supplementing it both from within and outside the organization and face the threat of fresher, more exciting adversaries inside their respective divisions. The trendy pick is to go with the Blue Jays as the strongest team in the AL East and the Mets in the NL East—have the Yankees and Phillies really done enough negatively to no longer truly excite their respective fans about the prospects of these two teams?
It would be more reasonable if the Yankees had been content in not bringing back the likes of Cody Bellinger and Trent Grisham, looking for cheaper ways to complement this lineup around Aaron Judge. They even had the in-house options to reasonably justify this approach. The same could be said had the Phillies not ponied up for Kyle Schwarber coming off an outstanding campaign. The pitching parallels are also quite clear. While one could be skeptical of what Gerrit Cole and Zack Wheeler might still be able to deliver, the success of these two pitching staffs is not entirely contingent upon them returning to their peak form, even if that’d provide a massive boost.
While the recent World Series winners have suggested that either a team that’s been there, done that (the Dodgers), or a fresh out-of-nowhere contender (Rangers) is better positioned to win it all, that’s not necessarily the case. It’s all a matter of perspective. Maybe the team that has been knocking on the door for a long period is actually close to breaking through and not just repeatedly showing what they’re missing. Maybe, just maybe, we could have a Yankees vs. Phillies World Series in 2026.
