This series aims to help readers conduct their routine due diligence in their dynasty leagues. It makes use of up-to-date OOPSY Peak projections and my own arbitrary whims to suggest free agent adds and drops as well as trade candidates and targets. Each entry will highlight a handful of players, both prospects and major leaguers, who have seen their perceived value shift recently. For each player I will offer a “verdict,” an open-ended recommendation on how I would value the player moving forward. Forgive me as these suggestions may sometimes enter the realm of “hot takes.” Most of my dynasty leagues are 14 to 20-team 5×5 roto leagues, but this series aims to be broadly relevant for all keeper and dynasty formats. Any reference to how a player projects using the FanGraphs auction calculator uses these settings with OOPSY DC (ROS) unless I say otherwise (15-team 5×5 SV 2 C). When referencing an OOPSY Peak WAR projection, I am referencing their up-to-date peak WAR projection assuming a full season of playing time, 600 PA for hitters and 198 innings pitched for arms.
This series aims to help readers do their routine due diligence in their dynasty leagues. It makes use of up-to-date OOPSY Peak projections and my own arbitrary whims to suggest free agent adds and drops as well as trade candidates and targets. Each entry will highlight a handful of players, both prospects and major leaguers, who have seen their perceived value shift recently. For each player I will offer a “verdict,” an open-ended recommendation on how I would value the player moving forward. Forgive me as these suggestions may sometimes enter the realm of “hot takes.” Most of my dynasty leagues are 14 to 20-team 5×5 roto leagues, but this series aims to be broadly relevant for all keeper and dynasty formats. I’m planning to publish one of these every few weeks. Let me know in the comments if there’s anyone in particular you’d like me to weigh in on.
Trades are the lifeblood of fantasy baseball home leagues. The conversations around them help keep us connected and engaged, and make our league more fun. Striking deals isn’t always easy. There are often hurt feelings around lopsided proposals, league-mates who value players differently, and that one guy who wants to veto everything. We can improve our fantasy squads with the waiver wire, but our collective hit rates are low. Quite often, those pickups backfire in the form of a hitter’s cold streak or a pitcher’s blowup, which inevitably leads to dropping the player. The one facet we have control of in home leagues is trading.
Managers are often emotionally tied to certain players – specifically, missed draft targets or players from their favorite baseball team. Also, we’re not all great at zooming out for a long-term view and not being stuck in the moment. Good analysis can be washed away by recency bias and small sample sizes. No one can force us to make a deal, so it’s the one element of the game we have some control over and can use proper value assessment and negotiation techniques to our advantage.
This column will recommend hitters and pitchers to attempt to sell-high or buy-low, and touch on trade strategies. No two leagues or two managers are the same. You know your league-mates best: what kind of deal they’ll scoff at, which player type they’re willing to deal or acquire, and how good their player and market valuation skills are. I’ll do my best to dig deep and present realistic opportunities.
April is a good time to capitalize on the overreaction and panic of our league-mates.
Here is a trade scenario to consider that could perhaps spawn ideas about similar players:
Now is a good time to explore offers for Liberatore and E-Rod. Both are lefties on below-average teams. Both are off to good starts. It is unlikely that either will have a higher market value this season than they do now.
Liberatore is a fine pitcher. He’s a former first-round draft pick of the Rays (2018) who spent time as both a reliever and starter until the Cardinals stretched him out last spring so that he could be part of their rotation. Liberatore had an excellent stretch over the first two months of the season. In his first 11 starts, Liberatore produced a 3.08 ERA, a 1.06 WHIP, and an impressive 3.5% walk rate, and his strikeout rate hovered at 21.4%. His walk rate normalized closer to league average (8%) over the final four months, but Liberatore had several blow-up starts and those last 18 starts didn’t go as well — a 5.05 ERA, 1.49 WHIP, as well as a K-rate dip to 17%.
Through his first two games this season, the ace of the Cards rotation has allowed two runs (both solo homers), with three walks and four punchouts in 11 innings. We shouldn’t fall victim to small sampleitis, but it’s worth noting that the damage could have been worse in those starts when we consider his strand rate (100%), BABIP (.216), and differential in ERA (1.64) and xFIP (5.28). The big question: does someone in our league like him and consider him “safe”? The one way to find out is by trade-fishing.
Eduardo Rodriguez has had two noteworthy seasons — with the Red Sox in 2019 (203.1 IP, 25% K, 3.81 ERA) and in 2023 with the Tigers (152.2 IP, 23% K, 3.30 ERA). The rest of his career has been mostly unremarkable and his WHIP (career 1.33) is usually detrimental to fantasy teams. In deeper leagues (15-teamers and above), where starting pitching options are thin, E-Rod might have slight appeal to someone in your league (perhaps a Red Sox fan) on name recognition alone. He looked great in his season debut where he threw five scoreless innings with five punchouts and two walks against a stacked Dodgers offense. Five days later, he followed up with seven strong innings with no runs allowed against the Braves. Most notable in those first two starts was his pitch mix. Typically a 44-47% four-seam guy, Rodriguez threw his fastball just 28% of the time in those first two starts, while significantly increasing his changeup usage (from 21% since 2024 to 35% in 2026). Rodriguez’s changeup was an effective pitch in his two best seasons, but it’s been an inconsistent offering of his over the course of his career. His sinkers and cutters pop from time to time, but overall, E-Rod’s pitch mix and effectiveness has been all over the map — simply too much tinkering.
Your league-mates are probably too smart to buy high on an inconsistent pitcher on a bad team just because he has a 0.00 ERA through two starts, but it sure is worth exploring. His next four starts are against the Mets (road), Orioles (home), White Sox (home), Brewers (road). Since the Diamondbacks play six, five and six games the next three weeks, there are no two-start weeks on the horizon for him unless there’s a rotation shift or some rainouts.
The biggest reasons to shop Liberatore and Rodriguez is because their ratios are currently far below where they’ll end up at and because we want as few of the below-average swing-and-miss arms on our roster as possible. Liberatore’s career swinging-strike rate is 9.2% (8.9% last season) and Rodriguez’s is 10.4% (under nine percent since 2024).
It’s unlikely that another manager will give up Nathan Eovaldi or Max Meyer in a 1-for-1 deal for Liberatore or Rodriguez, but it’s not a far-fetched starting point. Most of our friends can read through attempts of fantasy baseball trade subterfuge. We’re not going to start the conversation with “let me take Eovaldi off your hands and I’ll give you E-Rod, who hasn’t given up a run all season.” But we should take any opportunity to subtly point things out that accentuate the player you’re offering or criticizes the player you’re targeting. In fact, it doesn’t hurt do the opposite, perhaps with a little bit of BYAF (But You Are Free), a persuasion technique that reinforces a person’s autonomy:
“Eovaldi never plays a full season and is getting old, but I’m willing to take on the risk. It’s up to you, of course.”
It’s undoubtedly been a rough start for Eovaldi. In his first outing, he gave up a two-run shot to Kyle Schwarber in the first inning and a three-run bomb to Alec Bohm in the fifth before getting pulled with two outs in the fifth. He struck out seven and didn’t walk a batter. His second start, against the Orioles, went poorly — 4 IP – 8 H – 6 ER – 3 BB – 5 K. There are no issues with his velocity — he’s still hitting 94-95 mph with his four-seamer. In fact, he threw it less than 14% of the time while raising his split-finger usage from 31% to 37%. His four-seamer is the pitch most of the damage has come on, and it’s likely he will continue relying primarily on his split-finger, curveball and cutter. He has a .481 BABIP and 54.1% strand rate in those two starts — definitely a touch unlucky.
Let’s not forget that the man maintained a 1.73 ERA (3.02 SIERA) and 0.85 WHIP over 22 starts last season. He hasn’t exactly been the bastion of health, but Ol’ Nate has averaged nearly 27 starts over his last five seasons. Moreover, he is typically an elite control guy, boasting a 6.5% career walk rate (since 2011!) and sported a 4.2% mark last season. A low-walk veteran with a 11+ ERA and 2+ WHIP is the exact type of pitcher we target in trades now.
The person with Max Meyer might currently be experiencing a case of “man, I fell for the hype; this guy stinks.” Meyer has allowed five runs and has walked five batters through his first two starts. On the flip side, he has 11 strikeouts (9.2 innings) with a 14.1% SwStr, his velocity is intact, and he continues to throw his patented slider at an average of one out of every three pitches. He calls a pitchers’ park home and is talented enough to beat out his ratio projections, which peg him in the 4.20-4.40 (ERA) and 1.30-1.35 (WHIP) range. Could you pull off Meyer for Liberatore or Rodriguez straight up? Probably not, but we don’t get what we want in life without asking.
The managers who win pitcher trades are the ones digging in the trenches. The ones who do a deep dive into peripherals, underlying metrics, velocity changes, pitch mix adjustments and play logs of past outings. Remember that a 1-for-1 offer out of the blue will usually give away your intent, so try to hide your true goal in a smaller, multi-player deal. It’s easier to trade with friends or league-mates you already have baseball or trade conversations with, and you can play a bit of the long-game by planting seeds in conversations that could help you get the deal you’d like to get done.
This article highlights my bold predictions for the 2026 fantasy baseball season. Like last year, I’ll set the over/under at three of these being right, but my goal is more to give the reader ideas than to maximize acccuracy. As the creator of OOPSY, my bold predictions often lean on OOPSY outlier projections, although I will often cite other projection systems as well. I have listed my bold predictions in approximate order of least to most bold.
With the season nearly complete, this article takes a final look at OOPSY’s projections-based top 60 prospects in an effort to give readers a jump start on the offseason.
When setting expectations for pitchers for a given week, it can admittedly be hard to trust the projections and ignore recent performance–whether ‘recent’ includes the last month, or the full 2025 season. Generally speaking, should you trust a typicalweeklyprojection that accounts for the true talent level of the pitcher and the context of the matchup when setting your lineups for the upcoming week? Or is it better to focus on a pitcher’s performance from the last month or from the current season and ride the hot hand? Put differently, do typical projections place enough weight on recency?
This article takes a look at baseball’s top 30 pitching prospects from a projections-based perspective now that half of the 2025 season is in the books. Jump to the bottom for the updated list!
The projections capture prospect performance across the minor and major leagues in recent years, making use of aging curves, major league equivalencies, league environment adjustments, park factors, and regression to project peak (late-20s) prospect performance. They also capture Stuff+ courtesy of Eno Sarris (only for arms with MLB experience), and, starting this season, velocity (for all minor and major leaguers). They do not capture scouting or amateur performance. For comparison and more methodological detail, you can find the preseason list here, last year’s midseason list here, and an introduction to the projections here.
Now that almost 50% of the season is in the books, it’s a good time to check in on baseball’s top hitting prospects from a projections-based perspective. You can see the preseason list here and last year’s midseason list here. Those articles also feature more methodological detail if you want to read more about the projections process. Briefly, the projections capture prospect performance across the (non-DSL) minor and major leagues in recent years, making use of aging curves, major league equivalencies, league environment adjustments, park factors, regression, and more, to project peak (late-20s) prospect performance in the majors. They do not capture scouting, defense, or amateur performance. Starting this offseason, they also capture bat speed, which was made available for a decent handful of prospects this spring training.
With about 20% of the season in the books, I wanted to see which arms have altered their projections the most relative to the preseason, like I did a few weeks back for bats. To do this, I’ll refer to OOPSY rest of season (ROS) projections, a system I introduced at FanGraphs this offseason. So far this year, OOPSY has held its own with other top projection systems featured at FanGraphs. I have a great respect for each of those systems, and would be happy enough to not embarrass myself in comparison. For each player, I’ll also offer my best guess on where I’d draft them in a standard 15-team Main Event league that was starting today, informed by a healthy mix of the FanGraphs auction calculator using OOPSY ROS and vibes.
Bear in mind that, across all projection systems, pre-2025 data still weighs much more heavily than 2025 data as pre-2025 covers a much larger sample of data. Like for bats, a single season typically never comprises more than half of the weight in a projection for arms, as projection systems usually weigh at least three years of historical data. The quickest ways for a pitcher to improve their projections are to improve their stuff, rack up strikeouts and limit walks, and keep the ball on the ground. These are reliable indicators of pitching talent that weigh heavily in all projection systems, not just OOPSY. In contrast, BABIP, home run per fly ball rate, and left-on-base percentage are less reliable metrics that typically require a large sample of data to significantly alter projections. The numbers referenced in this piece were collected on May 6th.
