Let’s jump right into our 2026 MLB Beat the Streak picks:

If you’re interested in how the picks have performed historically, I’ve added a new table below. Occasionally lineups differ from morning projections, so those cases are noted in grey in the Outcome column.

Anyone who’s played Beat the Streak knows the goal of the game: give you just enough hope for a miracle run once per season, then spend the rest of the year brutally crushing your dreams. I expect this year to be no different, and you should too.

However, if someone does manage to push the streak over the line, let the record show I’ve always believed in strength in numbers—and that 2026 will be our year.

Update 9/28/25: The 2025 MLB regular season has come to a close. To answer the question in the header, we did not beat the streak in 2025. The updates will resume on opening day 2026, but I’ll leave the page as is so the concept is still clear. I hope the frequent viewers out there found this useful. The plan is to release the final calibration numbers so we can judge how well this model worked. See you next year!

Let’s just start with today’s picks, I’ve put the boring stuff below.

Okay, I promised you the boring stuff so here goes:

A little bit of background

Beat the Streak is a competition launched by the MLB in 2001. The premise is simple: pick 57 batters in a row to record a hit, surpassing Joe DiMaggio’s 56 game hit streak, and win 5.6 million dollars. If you aren’t familiar with this nearly quarter-century-old challenge, you can learn more about it here. And while the premise is simple, the execution is nearly impossible.

It’s not hard to see why, either. Even if you select only the best batters with a .300 average and assume they’ll get around 4 at-bats per game, the odds of that batter recording at least one hit in a game are:

A 76% chance is a solid bet, but even the best bets turn astronomical when you need them to hit 57 times in a row.

The odds of this happening are roughly 1 in 6,300,000. To put this number in perspective, you’re about 400 times more likely to be struck by lightning in your lifetime than to beat the streak.

But…

As with all statistical problems, there’s power in numbers.

How the streak could be broken

For simplicity’s sake, let’s say our odds for each pick are 75%.

If you do the math, the odds of getting a 57-game streak in this case would be 1 in 13,228,420. That means for every 13,228,420 attempts to beat the streak, we would expect one success. And because there are 162 games in the MLB season, and Beat the Streak allows you to pick two players per day, that means 324 picks can be made in a season.

We can also figure in that every team gets days off, and they’re staggered, so there are more like 180 MLB game days in a season. We also need to note that once there are only 28 game days left, and you don’t have an active streak, you would no longer be able to reach 57, even if you played perfectly for the remainder of the season. 28 days × 2 picks per day = 56, which falls just short of the 57 needed. That means only the first 152 game days are viable for a full run.

If we take our odds of 75% per pick, we would expect 1 in every 4 picks to miss, leaving us with an average streak of only 3 (sad). But the good news is that every two days we can start our streak anew, giving us:

152 game days ÷ 2-day streak = 76 total attempts to Beat the Streak per season.

If we also factor in that some people have lives and don’t want to make picks for 152 days straight, or that they may want to take things slow and lower their pick frequency when they have a strong streak going, then it’s more realistic to expect they’ll make around 38 attempts per season.

So…

If we need 13,228,420 attempts at the streak, and each person makes 38 attempts, then we would only need:

13,228,420 ÷ 38 = 348,116

Just 348,116 people playing Beat the Streak this year would give us a reasonable expectation that someone finally pulls it off.

Is it realistic?

According to MLB, more than 5 million unique users have participated in Beat the Streak, and two users have achieved streaks above 50. So from an intuitive standpoint, I do believe it’s realistic. Even I had a pretty good streak going at 29 back in the 2019 season (I’ll never forgive Charlie Blackmon).

If there were renewed interest in Beat the Streak, and a sense of hope to keep players engaged, I think we could get someone over the finish line.
Perhaps all we need is for my massive following here on Substack to mobilize and greatly increase the number of consistent streakers we have (interesting word choice) and we could accomplish what many thought impossible.

FINAL UPDATE: Tuesday, 11/5/24 at 7:00am PT

Note 11/5/24: The “tossup” category has been removed for the final state-level predictions.

Let’s start with a look at the 2024 Electoral College Map. Because what’s a good election forecast without an electoral college map?

The electoral college map reflects the current state of the race. The model establishes a baseline margin for each state by using economic indicators and past voting patterns. It then adjusts this baseline with up-to-date state polling and betting market data to capture current trends in the political environment.

Now let’s take a look at an alternative depiction of the electoral college map. Because two electoral college maps are better than one.

This map scales each state according to its electoral college share. Each tile represents 1 electoral vote.

What goes into these predictions?

Great question, the following table gives some insight into the metrics used to predict the final margin of the national popular vote and 16 most competitive state contests.

So what does all this mean? Who is going to win?

That really is the 3,267,039,019 dollar question1. And I don’t have the answer. What I do have, however, is another chart. Below is the outcome of 44,000 simulations of the 2024 election and the results summarized in the final 2024 election top line:

If you’re interested in how the horse race has changed over time, I have one final visualization showing the trend lines for each candidate since I published the forecast:

My understanding of this race, after spending hours poring over data, preparing thousands of lines of code, and staying up until 3 a.m. because I “just can’t get this thing to work,” is fundamentally unchanged from where I started. I think this race is a toss-up2, and I wouldn’t be surprised if either candidate walked away with over 300 electoral votes. The only thing that would surprise me is if the election comes and goes without controversy.