NL Central 2026 Futures Picks: Brewers, Pirates and Cardinals Bets

Sleep on the NL Central no more!

The Cubs are the betting favorite and I don’t totally disagree, but I believe the betting markets like them a shade too much.

I am not fading them though per se, rather I’m backing a couple of the others at price.

There are our best National League Central future betting picks and predictions for how it’ll shake out in 2026.

Brewers to Win Division (+275 BetRivers)

OK I get it, on paper this looks like an incredibly underwhelming team. It's a pretty thin lineup after the top four and the pitching staff is filled with question marks after trading away Freddy Peralta.

But the cupboard hardly remains bare. That aforementioned top of order looks potentially outstanding. Jackson Chourio had a modestly disappointing 2025 and still slashed .270/.308/.463 with 21 homers and 21 steals in 131 games. And he’s still just 21, the sky is the limit. Behind him Brice Turang broke out with .288 Avg and 18 homers, followed by William Contreras who looks fully healthy after playing most of 2025 with a broken bone in his hand. Then there’s Christian Yelich, who at 34 might regress a bit from his 29 homer revival in 2025.

The rotation still looks strong, albeit with question marks. Is Brandon Woodruff healthy? Can Jacob Misiorowski throw enough strikes? 

Should we believe in what we saw from Quinn Priester (3.22 ERA) and Chad Patrick (3.53 ERA). And so on. But if any team deserves the benefit of the doubt it's the Brewers. They lose a premium guy or three every off season and yet they always win this division. They have an amazing knack of developing guys few have heard of. Patrick was on no one’s radar and Priester was buried on the Red Sox pitching depth chart this time last year. I am giving them the benefit of doubt and at nice plus odds to boot.

Pirates ½ unit to make the Playoff (+425 DraftKings), ½ unit to win Division (+900 bet365)

The Pirates have pretty much the opposite recent history of the Brewers. But perhaps the tide is about to turn? 

They did something radical this offseason and actually attempted to make their team better. Crazy I know. But they traded for Brandon Lowe and signed Ryan O’Hearn and Marcel Ozuna and suddenly their lineup looks semi decent. It will look even better if uber prospect Konnor Griffin is ready to take over at shortstop. The pitching was already there, led by Cy Young award winner Paul Skenes. They played service time games with Bubba Chandler last year, but when he finally made it to the big club he showed some real promising signs. Take away a 2.1 IP, 9 ER disaster vs. Milwaukee and he had 28 K’s vs just 1 BB in 28.2 innings.

Fangraphs is buying all this as they project the Pirates for 83.1 wins and give them a 24.2% chance to win the division and 43.1% shot at the playoffs. That seems overly optimistic, but the betting markets aren’t buying this much at all so I like the prices here.

Cardinals Under 70.5 wins (-120 Caesars)

Sports teams generally pick a lane nowadays, but the Cardinals were a bit late to this party. They clung a bit to a mediocre corps these last couple years, partly because their best players all seemed to have no-trade clauses. Well, that finally resolved this offseason as they said goodbye to Sonny Gray, Willson Contreras and Nolan Arenado in return for very little behind salary relief. So long also to their best remaining player, Brendan Donovan.

This all clears the deck for younger guys that were somewhat blocked like OF Jordan Walker and 3B Nolan Gorman, as well as top prospect JJ Wetherholt. 

This makes all the sense in the world organizationally, but at least in the case of the first two, they’ve shown very little at the major league level. Gorman has 2.5 WAR in 426 major league games with a ghastly 34% K% and .218 career Avg. That’s better than Walker who has -0.9 WAR mostly thanks to his brutal OF glove, but his 240/.302/.378 career line is pretty bad as well. There are some better hitters here still like Alec Burleson and Ivan Herrera, and Masyn Winn is an elite fielding SS, but it's a pretty uninspiring group now.

The lineup looks stellar compared to how this rotation shapes up. I like the Dustin May signing. Why not take a shot at turning around the one time phenom? Unfortunately neither the Dodgers or Red Sox could do it last year as he had a 4.96 ERA and 1.42 WHIP in a career high 132.1 IP. Even if this does work, the Cards will flip him at the deadline. The rest of the rotation consists of converted reliever Kyle Leahy and a bunch of guys that profile as 5th starters or worse. Yeah it's tough taking unders on low totals. but the rest of the division is actually pretty good this year and the Cards are dreadful.