In the final weeks of the regular season, some teams are in the thick of the postseason chase, some teams are just trying to make sure they stay healthy before the playoffs start and some teams are just playing out the string.
But for some other teams that are building for the future, September is a chance to set a tone: It’s a chance to show what you’re going to be capable of, perhaps very soon.
The canonical example of this is the 2014 Chicago Cubs, a team that hadn’t produced a winning record since 2009 and was still trying to reconstruct itself under the front office leadership of Theo Epstein. There were even some Cubs fans at the time getting impatient, wondering when the turn was going to happen. But in the last two months of 2014, the turn started to happen.
The Cubs lost 89 games that year, but they had a winning record after Aug. 1 and already had some of pieces in place, including Anthony Rizzo, Jake Arrieta and Kyle Hendricks. The next season, the Cubs would call up Kris Bryant, win 97 games and knock out their hated rivals (the Cardinals) in the playoffs. In 2016, as you might have heard, they won the World Series. That future came quickly, and you got a glimpse of it in 2014.
Now a team doesn’t necessarily have to be terrific down the stretch, or even have a winning record post-All-Star break, to be a potential breakthrough candidate. They just need to be in that rebuilding mode and have shown something, in a particular year, that makes you think that breakthrough could be coming, maybe even imminently.
Here’s a look at five teams that are out of the playoff chase, but are building for the future and have shown real progress this year. Maybe they’re not the next 2015-16 Cubs. But … maybe they are?
Athletics
OK, so the last couple of months for the A’s have not gone great. They were 13-39 in July and August which, is, well, bad. But they’ve been better in September (8-4), and, more to the point, there was a stretch there when it felt like this pitching-starved team would be able to slug its way to the postseason. (They were in first place in the weak AL West heading into Memorial Day Weekend, after all.)
The reason it fell apart is the reason to be excited: This lineup is stacked with great young hitters. The problem is that they all got hurt. Assuming they have better luck on that front next year, that means they start with All-Stars Nick Kurtz and Shea Langeliers, the sort of foundation any team would want to build around.
Then there’s Jacob Wilson, Tyler Soderstrom and Brent Rooker, with only Rooker over 30, or even all that close to it. Add to that an excellent second half from Lawrence Butler, the No. 2 prospect in baseball in 19-year-old shortstop Leo De Vries (despite a recent injury of his own) and, presumably, some pitching help, and you do not have to squint to get excited about the A’s as they approach their move to Las Vegas.
Cardinals
The whole point of this Cardinals season was to find out which hitters were a part of their future moving forward while working on increasing the pitching depth in the farm system. It’s a little early to know about the latter -- though Liam Doyle (MLB's No. 43 prospect) leads an exciting group -- but the Cardinals got some real answers about the former.
While Nolan Gorman may have played himself out of the team’s plans moving forward and Iván Herrera idled as the year went along, of the 13 Cardinals to make their MLB debuts this year, three look like they’re going to be in the lineup for a long, long time.
At second base, JJ Wetherholt secured his spot as the leadoff man and one of the best defenders in baseball; the Cardinals have already locked him in for nearly the next decade via a contract extension. Joshua Báez had perhaps the greatest debut in MLB history, and after struggling for a bit following that huge day, he has found his footing and looks like a monster outfield bookend to Jordan Walker. (Who of course had his own breakthrough this year.)
And the final debut came from Leo Bernal, who has looked like a 10-year MLB veteran since his first game and sure looks like the catching mainstay Cardinals fans have been looking for since Yadier Molina left. And don’t forget Rainel Rodriguez (MLB's No. 17 prospect) and one of the most impressive power prospects in the Minors. The Cardinals are coming fast.
Marlins
From the very beginning of the season, the Marlins announced that they’d be doing things a little bit differently in 2026, from the whole calling-pitches-from-the-dugout thing to a total upheaval of how they were thinking about even the most basic practices. They have seen results, particularly in the first half of the season, when they were seven games over .500 at the break. A 12-game losing streak erased that and more, but there was plenty of positive movement here.
You had the emergence of Otto Lopez; they’ve got a solid rotation foundation in Sandy Alcantara, Eury Pérez, Max Meyer and Tyler Phillips (as well as Ryan Gusto and Janson Junk); and no one in their lineup is over 28 years old. The NL East is always a challenge -- as we will see with all the final three selections here -- but the Marlins’ mindset change looks like it’s working.
Mets
Yeah, so, obviously, this season did not go the way the Mets wanted it to go. But while you weren’t paying attention -- reasonably so, as they’ve been out of the postseason chase for months -- the Mets have been one of the better teams in the National League since the Trade Deadline, going 22-14 since Aug. 4.
While it’s hard to call a team with all of these expensive veterans “rebuilding” in the same way as others on the list, it is true that the key for the Mets of late has been their focus on young players. This team has had three outstanding rookies: outfielders Carson Benge and A.J. Ewing and pitcher Nolan McLean, all of whom are NL Rookie of the Year Award candidates. They have been three of the best four Mets (alongside Juan Soto) and look like fixtures in the team’s plans for years to come.
The Mets also added Jefferson Rojas, the No. 75 prospect in baseball, at the Deadline and, of course, will have money to spend to fill in the holes. Perhaps the Mets had to take the huge step back to take their next smaller, but more sustainable, step forward.
Nationals
Three of the four teams who have scored the most runs in baseball are the ones you would expect: the Cubs, Brewers and Dodgers. But the other team, the team that has scored the third-most runs in baseball, is the Nationals, and, most exciting of all, just about everyone who has been a part of that is young and a key piece to everything they have going.
They’re led by James Wood, of course, who is only 23 and has a .918 OPS, but they’ve also seen some better signs from Keibert Ruiz, Daylen Lile and Dylan Crews. That they kept the fully-broken-through CJ Abrams at the Deadline -- after trading Luis Garcia Jr. and Curtis Mead for pitching -- speaks to either him sticking around for the next run or being part of an offseason plan to acquire much-needed pitching help.
The Nationals have a lot of stuff left to fix, especially on the pitching side, despite a breakout season from Cade Cavalli. But there are good things happening here. Not only are Wood and Abrams now established stars, but MLB’s No. 4 prospect, shortstop Eli Willits, recently reached Double-A as an 18-year-old to cap off a superb first full season in pro ball.