Five Hot MLB Starts to Believe in for 2026

Separating the noise from the real deal can be challenging in the first few weeks of a baseball season, but these players seem to have turned over a new leaf.

Taj Bradley has a sparkling 1.08 ERA and a 1.63 FIP to go along with it. | Jordan Johnson-Imagn Images

All offseason long, baseball fans scribble down hypothetical lineup cards and depth charts, imagining which players will star for their favorite teams. Once you get past the household names, the exercise inevitably gets to players whose time, these hypothetical fans assure, is about to come. This is the year, it just has to be.

Two weeks into April does not a season make, but with actual games in the ledger now (each club has played at least 12 at time of publication), we can finally take our amateur assessments out of the realm of the imaginary and into the observable world. We have real games with real data to pore over now, and it’s our job to separate the stats that will inform the rest of the season from the noise.

To that end, there are plenty of players who have started 2026 off on ludicrously hot runs (looking at you, Joey Wiemer). But which of these scalding beginnings have the best chance at having real staying power? Let’s take a look at the leading candidates to be this season’s breakout stars.

Taj Bradley, SP, Minnesota Twins

Bradley seemed poised for stardom after tearing up the minor leagues with the Rays, but while his first two big-league seasons showed promise, they were plagued with inconsistency, particularly with his command. After again looking shaky in the first half of 2025, the Rays shipped Bradley to Minnesota at the trade deadline, where he was immediately optioned to Triple A. He was eventually called back up, and in six starts for the Twins down the stretch, he gave up 23 runs in 31 1/3 innings.

A promising spring enabled Bradley to make the Opening Day roster, and through three starts, he’s looked like a new pitcher. The 25-year-old finally has a firm grip on his command, putting up a 5.7% walk rate compared to a career mark of 8.6% prior to this season. Combine that with a 31.4% strikeout rate that’s easily a career best, and Bradley has been among the most dominant pitchers in baseball, with a 25.7% K-BB% that ranks as the seventh-highest among qualified pitchers. The splitter has been a big weapon, with Bradley upping his usage of the pitch to 21.6% and generating a ridiculous 56.3% whiff rate with it. Statcast grades it as the most effective splitter in baseball on a per-pitch basis. Add it together, and the righthander is 2–0 with a 1.08 ERA through three starts.

Command can be fickle, and for the good times to keep rolling, Bradley will need to maintain his newfound feel of the strike zone. Last season, Bradley ranked 126th out of 127 pitchers with at least 100 innings in FanGraphs’s Location+ metric (93). He’s up to 97 so far this year, so just below average (100). With stuff this lethal, he doesn’t need to be Greg Maddux with his control to be an All-Star caliber pitcher.

Joey Cantillo, SP, Cleveland Guardians

The left-handed Cantillo looks to be the latest success story from the Guardians’ pitching development factory. A swingman in 2025 when he put up a 3.21 ERA in 34 games (13 starts), Cantillo broke camp in the rotation this year and has immediately rewarded the organization’s faith in him. He’s put up a 2.45 ERA with a 33.3% strikeout rate through his first three starts, capped by a season-best nine strikeouts in 5 2/3 innings against the Royals on Wednesday.

The key for Cantillo has been his slider, which he succinctly described as “dog water” last season. A reworked grip has added more than 11 inches of induced vertical drop, resulting in a 37.5% whiff rate. His changeup is also a bat-missing weapon, generating seven whiffs on 11 swings against Kansas City Wednesday.

The biggest obstacle for Cantillo to clear will be durability. He’s never thrown 120 innings in a season as a professional, and he’s had issues with walks throughout his MLB career. If he can become more efficient with his pitches and get deeper into games, he’ll continue his development into a legitimate staff mainstay.

Jordan Walker, OF, St. Louis Cardinals

Jordan Walker entered Thursday tied for the major league lead in home runs with five. | Rick Osentoski-Imagn Images

Walker seemed destined for stardom after his 16-homer, 116 wRC+ debut as a 21-year-old rookie in 2023. But the former first-round pick’s production fell off a cliff over the ensuing two seasons as he flailed at pitches in and out of the strike zone. From ‘24 to ‘25, Walker’s 15.9% swinging strike rate was the 20th-highest out of 319 batters with at least 500 plate appearances. All that whiffing predictably cratered his production, as he put up a 68 wRC+ during that span.

Throughout his struggles, Walker’s tools never lost their shine: he still had elite bat speed, still ran fast and still had one of the strongest arms in baseball. With the Cardinals fully leaning into their rebuild, the 2026 season was always going to be about figuring out which of their young players could develop into foundational pieces. So it makes sense that Walker earned the start in right field on Opening Day, and his production so far has been nothing short of transformational.

Wednesday saw Walker homer for his third straight game and fourth time in five days, giving him a .295/.367/.682 slash line in 12 games. The changes are exactly the ones you want to see: his chase rate has gone down, his zone swing rate has gone up and he’s subsequently crushing the baseball when he makes contact, posting the highest average exit velocity and third-highest barrel rate among qualified hitters. 

Walker’s ceiling has always been high, but his skill set had lagged behind his tools for the past couple of years. If he can keep up something resembling this newfound approach for a full season, St. Louis will have a new franchise player to build around for years to come.

Kyle Harrison, SP, Milwaukee Brewers

Harrison was a third-round pick by the Giants in 2020 who signed for nearly $2.5 million to forgo his college commitment to UCLA. The lefty debuted with San Francisco in ‘23 but was shipped to Boston last season as part of the Rafael Devers trade, but he made just three appearances with the Red Sox, who traded him to Milwaukee in February.

It’s early, but it seems the Brewers have once again churned out another developmental pitching win. Harrison looks like a completely different pitcher than the one who put up a 4.39 ERA and 22.9% strikeout rate across his first three big league seasons. He’s added two ticks to his fastball since 2024 (the year that encompasses the bulk of his MLB experience) and generated a 34.6% whiff rate with it through his first two starts. Hitters are chasing Harrison’s pitches that miss the strike zone at a 36% clip, which ranks in the 83rd percentile of all pitchers.

With substantially improved velocity, Harrison has unlocked his ability to miss bats. That much added gas can bring an elevated injury risk, so expect Milwaukee to monitor his workload throughout the season. But as long as the lefty is on the mound, he has the look of a real difference-maker.

Jose Soriano, SP, Los Angeles Angels

Entering Thursday, Jose Soriano led the American League with 20 innings pitched, 1.2 WAR and a 0.45 ERA. | Jayne Kamin-Oncea-Imagn Images

Soriano was a two-time Tommy John surgery patient who was left taken in the Rule 5 draft and returned to his original team (the Angels) before he made his MLB debut in 2023. He converted to a starter in ‘24, and while he showed promise over the past two seasons (a 3.93 ERA across 282 innings), he lacked ace-worthy results, with a 10.6 K-BB% that ranked 98th out of 114 pitchers with at least 200 frames during that span.

Soriano’s stuff always seemed louder than that, though, with a four-seam fastball that touched triple digits and a sinker that averaged 97 mph. Last season, he only threw the former 8.6% of the time, while he went with the sinker at a 49.1% clip. Through three starts this year, he’s diversified his arsenal more, leaning on a three-pitch mix between the two fastballs and a devastating knuckle curve, and the results have been electric. He’s generating a 33.8% whiff rate, his best since becoming a starter, and a 38.8% chase rate, all while remaining the best pitcher in baseball at keeping the ball on the ground (he leads the league with a 63.2% ground ball rate over the past three years).

With a more varied approach to attacking hitters, all of Soriano’s high-octane offerings are playing off each other much more effectively. There haven’t been a lot of reasons for optimism in Anaheim lately, but the Angels’ new flame-throwing ace certainly counts as one of them.

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