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.
In this weekend’s chat, I was asked the following question, shared below with my response:
7:37 Beano: So many call ups this week! Can you help with a bid pecking order? Alcantara, Torrens, Garcia, Valdez, Ramirez, Troy …
7:38 Jeff Zimmerman: I’m not really high on any of them. I’m sure one will be useful, but they seem like fill-ins.
I looked through the players and wasn’t interested for various reasons. But valuing recently promoted hitters is a challenge for everyone, so today I want to expand on that short answer by sharing a bit of my process. In addition to the five players above, I included two other recent call-ups: Sterlin Thompson and Colt Emerson. This year’s edition of The Process includes my work on this topic.
Below is our weekly chart of significant rest-of-season playing time changes for hitters, led by a lot of shuffling of the Rockies’ outfield playing time due to injury:
Significant Projected Playing Time Changes, 5/19 to 5/26
If you want to get a hit, trying to square up the ball is a great place to start. But not all squared up hits are created equal. Squaring up your grounders and line drives will likely help your batting average, but won’t do much in the home run department. Squaring up your flyballs, especially at the ideal launch angle, should help get the ball out of the yard.
If you look at the surface level Savant lollipops, you will see a “Squared-Up%” metric, which is represented on FanGraphs by “SqUpCon%”. This describes a batted ball event where at least 80% of the possible exit velocity on a pitch was obtained, given the swing and pitch characteristics, which typically means a ball that was hit on the sweet spot of the bat, according to Statcast.
As explored by Fangraphs’ Davy Andrews, even before we look at the launch angle of a squared up ball, we should acknowledge that not all of these swings result in a ball that’s hit even remotely hard, because a ridiculously slow swing that hits the ball on the barrel can still technically be squared up by the Statcast definition. But for the most part, hitters are swinging relatively hard. And we have ways to see just how fast they swing and how often they unleash their fast swings now, thanks again to Statcast.
With all of this in mind, check out the Fangraphs Squared-Up Explorer. This tool helps you see how often a hitter is squaring up the ball at different launch angles, highlighting the ideal launch angle for home runs and visualizing a given hitter’s profile compared to league average.
Using this tool, you can compare a given hitter’s profile against other hitters and during different periods of time. You can compare Gunnar Henderson’s hot start in 2024 to his 2025 and to his start to this season, as I did last week.
Today, I’ll run through a few examples that demonstrate the possible ways to use the Squared-Up Explorer and try to show you that you can and should use this tool yourself as a starting point for analyzing hitters, whether it be struggling bats you may want to cut or hot streak hitters you’re looking for an excuse to believe in. For the hitters I look into, I’ll provide some recommendations, but really want to invite you to use this exceptionally user-friendly tool yourself.
Every single year, there are hitters that seemingly come out of nowhere to post fantasy seasons worthy of shallow mixed league starting rosters. Whether it’s driven by more playing time than expected or a surprise skills surge, these are the types of players that win leagues. The challenge is determining which hitters are for real and will continue delivering positive value the rest of the season, and which are merely on hot streaks that will end soon, at which point they’ll be dropped in the majority of leagues. Let’s discuss 10 such names.
Last week, we looked at five of the top rookie hitters to examine their major league path, performance, skills, and how to value them moving forward. There have been many rookie hitters who have been providing value in redraft, keeper, and dynasty leagues of various sizes, so we wanted to cover five more. It’s helpful to digest their prospect grades and reports to see how they align with the underlying metrics. Should we buy, sell, or hold these five rookie hitters? We plan to cover pitchers in a future article if you’re wondering what’s next.
Before I get into analyzing what I think may be a relatively broken hitter, I have something to admit. This admission may sound familiar to you. Especially if you are at all impulsive. Or love to trade.
A few weeks back, after trading Corey Seager for Dylan Cease in what felt like an absolute coup, I got a bit ahead of my skis. Without looking at a single Fangraphs or Baseball Savant page, I fired an offer into the ether. I dealt away Michael King, Cade Cavalli, and Bo Bichette for Gunnar Henderson, in what felt like a classic buy low-sell high, where Henderson represented the low and King the high.
The point of this article is not to discuss King’s less than rosy peripherals. Nor is it to shame me for dealing Bichette before he seemingly started heating up. It is, at least in part, a cautionary tale, though I’d say it’s a hopeful one.
I’ve played fantasy baseball for almost 30 years now. The older I get, the more I am comfortable leaning into building fantasy teams around higher-floor players, aka the Steady Eddies. You know who they are: someone consistent, reliable, and dependable. Though it isn’t known where the term originated, most baseball fans remember it as the nickname of the steady Hall of Fame hitter, Eddie Murray. There’s also the Australian comedian Steady Eddy from the 1990’s, though his act was hectic and chaotic, hence the irony of his moniker.
Steady Eddies are hard to find in baseball since no one can maintain consistent, dominant production over a 162-game season. We’re mostly talking about durable players who stay healthy and away from the IL, hitters with above-average plate discipline who don’t fall into prolonged funks, and pitchers who rarely get bombed for five or more earned runs in a start.
