The managerial carousel started spinning before the season even ended. Word came down this morning that six jobs are being flagged as the most volatile in baseball: the Chicago Cubs, Kansas City Royals, San Diego Padres, the Athletics, Detroit Tigers and Colorado Rockies. With eleven days left on the regular season calendar, that is less a prediction than a weather report. October is when the men in the dugout find out whether the season they survived was the season they get judged on.
Five of those six make sense on the back of a napkin. One of them I need somebody to walk me through.
Which MLB managers are on the hot seat in 2026?
The Cubs and Royals both land on the list sitting under .500 with fanbases that have run out of patience, and that is the oldest arithmetic in the sport. A big-market club that misses is a club that needs a story to sell in February, and the cheapest story to sell is a new voice. Kansas City is the one that stings a little, because that clubhouse has spent the last few years being told it was ahead of schedule.
San Diego is the payroll problem. The case being made against the Padres is that the money has gone out the door faster than the October results have come back in. That is a front office question dressed up as a manager question, which is how most of these go. Somebody spends, somebody else gets fired.
The Athletics are the Athletics. This is a team still playing its home games in a minor league park in West Sacramento while it waits on Las Vegas, which is the kind of situation no lineup card fixes. Putting that manager on a hot seat feels a little like blaming the bus driver for the road.
Colorado is Colorado, and if you want to know what the toughest job in the sport is, it is the one where every pitching staff you assemble gets graded at altitude and every fix you try has been tried before.
Then there is Detroit. The Tigers are on the list and I have not seen the case laid out, and I am not going to invent one for them. That is the name I would want explained before I nodded along. Detroit plays at the White Sox on Thursday night, and a team in that position usually does not have a manager reading his own name in a hot seat column. Call that one unresolved.
Why the Nationals farm system turned around
The other piece of news is the one I actually enjoyed reading. Washington's minor league system, by the reporting, went from the worst in baseball to its most improved inside of twelve months. The draft class is being graded as the deepest in franchise history, led by an 18-year-old shortstop. A new hitting lab has strikeout rates down meaningfully across every level of the organization. And the return from the Juan Soto trade, that ancient history from 2022, is finally showing up in box scores, with one right-hander putting up a sub-2.00 ERA and better than a strikeout per inning at Double-A.
That is the part people forget about tearing it down. It takes so long that by the time it works, everybody who was mad about it has moved on. Washington won a World Series in 2019 and then handed the sport the modern lesson in what the bill looks like. Four years of noise, and now there is something on the other side of it.
What comes next for Pete Alonso after his 300th home run
Pete Alonso hit his 300th career home run and Citi Field came apart for him, which is a lovely thing and apparently not a universally popular one inside the building. His contract runs out after this season. Whether the Mets intend to bring him back is rumor and I am treating it as rumor.
But I will say this as a fan of the game and nothing else. Alonso set the rookie home run record with 53 in 2019, and he has spent every year since being the guy who shows up. Three hundred homers in a Mets uniform is a franchise-defining number. When a crowd stands that long for a player, it is usually telling the front office something the front office already knows.
The Mets host Philadelphia on Thursday night. I would not be shocked if that crowd does it again.
What I am watching next is Detroit, because that hot seat listing either has a real story behind it or it does not, and by this time next week somebody will have said so out loud.