The 2026 Major League Baseball season gets underway on Wednesday night. While traditional Opening Day is Thursday, when most teams will play their first game of the season, Wednesday night occasions a single contest between the New York Yankees and San Francisco Giants that launches the 2026 regular season.
Here are the essentials …
How to watch and pitching match-ups
- Time: 8:05 p.m. ET |Â Date: Wednesday, March 25
- Location: Oracle Park, San Francisco
- TV channel/live stream: Netflix
- Starting pitchers: LHP Max Fried (NYY) vs. RHP Logan Webb (SF)
- Odds (via FanDuel): NYY -122, SF +104, O/U: 7
Starting lineups
|
1. |
Trent Grisham, CF |
Luis Arraez, 2B |
|
2. |
Aaron Judge, RF |
Matt Chapman, 3B |
|
3. |
Cody Bellinger, LF |
Rafael Devers, DH |
|
4. |
Ben Rice, 1B |
Willy Adames, SS |
|
5. |
Giancarlo Stanton, DH |
Jung Hoo Lee, RF |
|
6. |
Jazz Chisholm Jr., 2B |
Heliot Ramos, LF |
|
7. |
José Caballero, SS |
Casey Schmitt, 1B |
|
8. |
Ryan McMahon, 3B |
Patrick Bailey, C |
|
9. |
Tyler Wells, C |
Harrison Bader, CF |
The Yankees last season, fronted by Aaron Judge and his back-to-back AL MVP awards, led the majors in runs scored, home runs, and OPS. The 2025 Giants, meantime, ranked 17th, 19th, and 22nd, respectively, in those same categories.Â
And now for some things to know about the first game of the 2026 season.
It’s a battle of aces
That’s how it typically goes in the season opener, of course, but this duel between ground-ball specialists Fried and Webb is a fetching match-up even by Opening Day standards. Fried last season — the first season of his eight-year, $218 million free agent pact with the Yanks, went 19-5 with a 2.86 ERA and a 4.5 WAR. For his efforts, Fried earned his third career All-Star selection and finished fourth in the AL Cy Young vote. As for Webb, he led the majors in innings (the third straight season in which he’s topped 200 innings) and paced the NL with 224 strikeouts en route to putting a 4.0 WAR and a 2.60 FIP. Like Fried, Webb finished fourth in his league’s Cy Young balloting. Overall, we ranked this as the second-best pitching matchup of Opening Day 2026.Â
Normally this honor would belong to Gerrit Cole on the Yankee side, but he’s continuing his recovery from Tommy John surgery, which he underwent last March. While Cole saw game action during spring training, he’s not expected to rejoin the Yankee rotation until May or June. So Fried it is, and he’s of course an eminently worthy replacement for Cole on Opening Day.Â
Vitello makes his MLB debut
The Giants pulled off one of the surprise additions of the winter, when they hired Tony Vitiello to be their next manager. Vitiello is making the unprecedented leap from college head coach (the University of Tennesse, where he won a national title in 2024) to big-league manager. While the specifics of his journey to the major-league dugout are novel, plenty of managers have skippered in the bigs and succeeded despite never before having managed a pro team at any level. That list includes Vitello’s counterpart in this one, Aaron Boone of the Yanks.Â
Both teams are aiming to contend in 2026
The Yankees are perpetually in win-now mode, and 2026 will be no exception. They carry into this campaign a streak of 33 straight winning seasons (!), and they’ve made the playoffs in seven Boone’s eight years at the switch. That includes an American League pennant in 2024. The AL East this season figures to be hotly competitive, and there’s of course pressure on Boone and the Yanks to make a deep playoff run and hoist the trophy for the first time since 2009. The Giants, meanwhile, haven’t made the playoffs or even notched a winning season since 2021. Overall, they’ve missed the postseason in eight of the last nine years. Lead exec Buster Posey badly wants to end that drought, but it’ll be tough in a division that also includes the mighty Dodgers in addition to the Padres and Diamondbacks.Â
Prediction
As noted above, the Yankees figure have a big edge on offense, and we’ll say that makes the difference in this one. It’s a Fried-Webb duel for the first five or six frames, but the Yanks break through against the San Fran bullpen. Prediction: Yankees 4, Giants 3
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