Major League Baseball has officially released the regular season schedule for 2026 and while the interest concerning particular opponents has waned a bit since everybody plays everybody nowadays (the American League and National League are more like conferences now than actual separate leagues), it’s still fun to look right at Opening Day to see whether or not it’ll be a home game for our beloved Atlanta Braves.
As fate would have it, the Braves will be hosting the Kansas City Royals on Opening Day
next year on Thursday, March 26. This’ll be Atlanta’s first time playing host to Opening Day since they essentially earned the right after winning the 2021 World Series. Outside of that, this is actually the first time since 2018 that they’ll be hosting Opening Day without being the defending World Series champions — which is wild considering that the weather in Atlanta is usually very nice around late-March and especially compared to other cities that we’ve seen host Opening Day on a near-regular basis over the years.
Following the usual scheduled off day on Friday and the initial series against the Royals, the Braves will play host to the Sacramento Athletics, so again there’s a case of everybody playing everybody since Atlanta won’t be facing a team from the NL until traveling to the desert to face the Diamondbacks starting on April 2.
In fact, that trip to Arizona will be part of Atlanta’s first extended West Coast swing of the season, as they’ll swing by Anaheim the red side of Los Angeles to play the Angels for a three-game series after they get done with the Diamondbacks. Hopefully that early-season West Coast swing goes a LOT better than this past season’s early-season West Coast swing went. Goodness gracious.
Anyways, it’s hard to get creative with the schedule release in Major League Baseball, but bless the Braves for at least trying. Here’s what they did for next year’s schedule rollout, which includes a shout-out to ol’ Uncle Jesse Chavez and his impressive and eclectic hat collection.
In addition to Opening Day, Atlanta’s May 15-17 series against the Boston Red Sox will be part of MLB’s Rivalry Weekend so if you have any enmity towards Red Sox fans, MLB is corporately encouraging you to ratchet it up a bit during that particular weekend. Additionally, the Braves will be playing at home on the Fourth of July against the New York Mets, so that ought to be a really tasty way to spend the holiday — outside of the normal tasty way of eating hamburgers, hot dogs and traditional BBQ fare on that particular day.
Atlanta will have a seven-game homestand to kick off the “second half” of the season, as they’ll host the Rangers for a weekend series and then take on the Padres for four games after that. The final homestand of the season will take place from September 22-24 against the Reds and then their final series of the season will go down in Miami. Hopefully the Braves will still have something to play for by then and hopefully next season goes a whole, whole lot better than this season has gone. It’s always hard to predict what’s going to happen by this time next year but all we can do is hope that the Braves can make the best of what’s on their plate for next season.
