There was no joy in Gutville as my 2026 bold preseason predictions proved fruitless. I intentionally focused on early-round hitters, so later-round targets like Jordan Walker, Alec Burleson, Logan Henderson, and Drew Rasmussen had no chance of making the cut. Read and laugh at my preseason bold predictions by position among the top 100 ADP.
Today we’re looking at hitters who earned $10 in value that broke out in 12-team leagues. A breakout is a player who drastically outperformed their projected value, with some being drafted in the final round of 12-team leagues or going undrafted. We’re using those arbitrary cutoffs to find players who provided solid fantasy value but somewhat came out of nowhere. I imagine if we filtered by dates, some of these draft prices would change, so take that with a grain of salt.
Draft price aside, are those breakouts legitimate? Should we buy or sell those performances as an early look toward 2027? Is there something that could have predicted those breakouts to help us in the future? We hope to answer those questions when analyzing these players. Given the large sample, we’ll break this up into multiple articles.
We won’t discuss Jake Bauers, Jake McCarthy, and Jordan Walker, because we covered them in an earlier article on hitters who drastically outperformed their projected value this season. That said, Kazuma Okamoto, Munetaka Murakami, and Kevin McGonigle were highly sought-after hitters, but they don’t have an ADP listed on the Player Rater. In most 12-team leagues, Okamoto, Murakami, and McGonigle had an ADP around pick 200 or earlier.
On the third Saturday of March, as has been customary for many of the past 15 years, I joined friends and colleagues in Las Vegas to draft live in the NFBC. Their Main Event is the largest national high-stakes contest – a 15-team standard 5×5 roto format with an $1,800 entry fee and a $200,000 grand prize for the overall champion. This season, I reduced my FAAB leagues from 10+ to five to focus on content and time management/family balance. Before having kids, spending most of my Sunday updating FAAB content and working through my own bids was no sweat. Now, with two youngens, ages five and seven, and a robust youth travel hockey schedule, limited weekend time during the MLB season is mostly spent on producing content. For that weekend in Vegas, the Saturday NFBC Main Event was my only live draft in the Year of Brad Lord, 2026.
A few days before the draft, I set pick 14 as my sixth draft preference (KDS) after picks 1-5 and earned the 14th pick. I would have been thrilled to earn pick one or two to start with Shohei Ohtani and Aaron Judge. Sadly for many, those early first-round picks were anything but a gift this year. At pick 14 and pick 17 in the second round, I knew I would have the option to select two players I’d be happy with — Kyle Tucker, Gunnar Henderson, Fernando Tatis Jr., Junior Caminero, and/or Cristopher Sánchez. Since Sánchez was my only SP target in Round 2, I mapped out two contingency-based draft roadmaps: one with Sánchez, and one that started with two hitters. I also had a few precepts for this draft I wanted to stick by:
Lon Horwedel-Imagn Images
With the dust finally settling, I ended the 2026 season with $3K in profit over 12 leagues. Here are my league results and some of overarching thoughts on the season and some leagues. Read the rest of this entry »
The so-called “back of the baseball card” numbers still matter to us. No matter how many new-fangled metrics are concocted, we can’t keep our eye from straying towards the .300 AVG/30 HR/100 RBI hitter. That’s the ideal. It’s how we were trained to think about players.
In this article series, I’ll point out two two starting pitchers and two hitters who I think could fall victim to a bias away from low volume players, depressing their draft day costs for 2027.
While it’s still too early to tell what their cost will be, I’d argue that given their numbers, paced out to 162 games, make them some of the best players in fantasy, and they’re unlikely to cost what they’re worth.
Last week, I covered Logan Henderson, who was the second-ranked pitcher on a per-162 basis via the Fangraphs Player Rater this season, slotting in right behind Jacob Misiorowski.
This week, I’ll cover Jeremy Peña. The franchise shortstop for the Houston Astros is still just 28 years old and I think he’s quietly been starting to make good on the first impression he made during the 2022 playoffs.
Smooth moves, kid
George Lombard Jr. also drove in the winning run for the Yankees with this two-run blast in the bottom of the eighth.
On the Agenda:
Welcome back, Ceddanne Rafaela!
My bad. Rafaela left in the third inning of Wednesday’s contest with a strained right hamstring.
On the Agenda:
Dan Hamilton-Imagn Images
Before the fantasy baseball season finishes and all the managers disappear for a few months, it’s time to collect some information. Every season, I report on the batters who played through a known injury (2025 Edition). I have collected a few players throughout the season, but I am asking if anyone knows of any more hitters with a link to the source. No gut feels here. Once I get the complete list, I’ll create the full report.
Thanks again for your time.
The final week is tough for fantasy owners, as veterans on teams knocked out of the playoff hunt might be benched in favor of younger players, while starting rotations are up in the air. Any starter could be shut down and just not make a start this week, and you might not know until the day of. Anyway, let’s talk about the hitters on teams currently projected to face the most number of left-handed starters this week. This could give players on the short-side of platoons (right-handed hitters who generally only start against lefties) an opportunity for increased playing time this week. The caveat here is that the probables grid is the most unpredictable it’s been all year, so ensure your short-side platoon pickup actually ends up facing the lefty he was originally forecasted to oppose.
Using Statcast data, we can track which of the four aspects of a hitter’s batting stance moved and by how much across each month of the season. In this piece, I wanted to go a step further with some of the names from part one and layer in bat tracking data and batted ball tendencies to see whether the stance changes translated into a measurable swing change.