At this stage of the season, the impact of luck, or lack thereof, starts to take form and become a meaningful predictor for the rest of the year.

But BABIP can be a noisy stat in isolation. I wanted to identify which hitters were getting lucky when putting balls in play, but also wanted to add a layer that allows us to assess that luck relative to fantasy value and overall offensive production.

The idea for this piece actually came from a curiosity around one specific hitter, which I will come to later, but it is a useful exercise to get a broader sense of the BABIP landscape as we enter the summer months.

So which hitters are potentially providing an unsustainable output, and which could be worth buying low on or holding onto?

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Some teams would call it an embarrassment of riches, but the rise of Emerson Hancock in the absence of Bryce Miller early in the season has left the Mariners in a bit of a bind from a roster construction point of view.

With not enough starts to go around for six starters, Jerry Dipoto, Dan Wilson, and company opted to piggyback Bryce Miller and Luis Castillo. While the results spoke for themselves, it certainly did not look great off the field.

Whether that be Castillo launching his glove and jacket into the benches of Sutter Health Stadium, or Miller himself, very uncharacteristically for a starting pitcher, giving his thoughts rather candidly on the situation.

“This setup is not very comfortable.”

He stated awkwardly, in his post-game interview in Sacramento, before reverting to the usual newspeak we have come to expect from MLB players.

For both Castillo and Miller, there is only one way to remove yourself from any ideas of future piggybacking: pitch so well they don’t remove you.

That is exactly what Miller (and Castillo to a lesser extent, to his credit) has done, so far, since Operation Piggyback began.

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Now that the foundations have been laid and the methodology explained in Part 1 of this series, we can dive deeper into some of these pitchers.

As noted in the previous piece, Corbin Young wrote two breakdowns of individual rookie starters that I will link below:

The first covering Nolan McLean, Bubba Chandler, and Parker Messick. Link here.

The second covering Payton Tolle, Connelly Early, Brandon Sproat, and Trey Yesavage. Link here.

So this will be more of a collective analysis of the rough groupings and what stands out from the composite rating, and whether any deeper stats can further support or provide additional context for fantasy purposes.

The composite z-score rating has provided a solid framework for assessing this group of rookies, and most have now logged enough innings to draw early conclusions from the metrics. It is these pitchers who will receive the bulk of the analysis in this piece, while Gage Jump has looked enticing in his two starts — 12 innings is not quite enough for meaningful metric analysis just yet, but well worth keeping a close eye on.

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This crop of rookies has now had some time to get adjusted to the big leagues, and this piece will look to check in on how they have measured up so far through the season. Less of a prediction of things to come, but more so of how much we can rely on them at this stage of their young careers. But of course, this is fantasy. So there will be a natural eye on what could be… are some guys getting the rough end of the stick, and are some getting away with it a little?

Corbin Young recently wrote a fantastic check-in piece that went into depth on some rookie pitchers, Nolan McLean, Parker Messick, and Bubba Chandler. While this won’t go into as much of the nitty-gritty, it is a more macro exercise analysing how they stack up against each other as a whole.

I wanted to establish a composite rating that accounted for metrics that provided a balanced view of their profile as a pitcher, balanced against their xERA. These metrics were then weighted to favor those I felt were more important and those I want to see in a pitcher. This will be split into two pieces: this one sets up the methodology, so to speak, and the reasoning behind the metrics used for the ranking. The next piece will dive into more of the nuances and any interesting cases the data throws up.

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Since 2021, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. has been one of the best hitters in the league. As we enter June, he has just three home runs and his worst power numbers for several years. At this pace, he will finish with nine homers — the same as he managed in the shortened 60-game season in 2020. His top-20 average ADP has resulted in returns that barely put him in the top 20 at first base, and that poses the question: Can this regression be explained?

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With a third of the season in the books, the sample size for certain data and metrics has grown from too small to large enough that it must be taken seriously. The New York Yankees post a wRC+ of 123 against left-handed pitching — the best mark in baseball. The Mariners, another pre-season World Series contender, sit at 75. That 48-point gap between the two elite lineups on paper, against southpaws, is no longer such a small sample that we need to ignore it. Leveraging platoons has long been an important strategic lever for lineups looking to gain an advantage. Using wRC+ through the first stretch of the 2026 season, we can see every team’s offensive production against left- and right-handed pitching to find where the real discrepancies lie, and how we can target these matchups on both sides of the ball as we move deeper into the season, and what trends we should be watching.

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Beyond the Obvious Multi-Fastball Breakouts

Building on the chart we used last week to identify multi-fastball starters, some interesting names did not receive the analysis they perhaps deserved. This second piece seeks to address that, diving deeper into the names that did not fit the profiles identified in the initial piece but deserve coverage nonetheless, both from a pure baseball and fantasy perspective. Of the 38 qualified starters using a multi-fastball approach, 24 utilize a true multi-variant arsenal. The majority of these pitchers are already well known. Deep dives on Bryan Woo or Max Fried are not necessary at this point, but having covered some of the more obvious fantasy adds in part one, there was still plenty more to explore. The updated chart below reflects the latest qualified starter data, including some new names worth keeping an eye on.

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Once considered anomalies, cutters and sinkers have moved to the forefront of pitchers’ arsenals in 2026. As pitchers develop and pitching staffs look to push the boundaries, increased horizontal and vertical movement on fastball variants has given pitchers yet another edge over hitters. While these pitches have always existed, rather than being utilized as a primary pitch in isolation they are now being used more and more often in relationship to one another. This juxtaposition is what makes them such a challenge for hitters and increasingly popular as an arsenal tool.

So the real question for hitters has become: which fastball is coming? They are being used increasingly interchangeably, thrown from similar release points, with almost identical velocities, which compounds the challenge with each at-bat. From a fantasy perspective, this trend toward a certain profile or archetype of multi-fastball pitcher is one worth monitoring as we consider draft strategy — particularly in the later rounds — or waiver additions, as the never-ending search for value continues.

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