Welcome back to Position Player Playing Time Changes! Now that the season has started, I’m shifting the weekly table from displaying plate appearance changes to displaying the change in the percent of remaining playing time allocated to each player. All changes are over the past seven days, as they will be from here on out.
After Wednesday’s introduction to this year’s Position Player Playing Time Changes, it’s time for pitchers! Every Friday, these roundups will work much the same as the position player ones, except I’ll split out starters and relievers. As with position players, this week’s compares changes since March 1, and next week I’ll transition to looking at week-to-week changes. Away we go:
Welcome to the first Position Player Playing Time Changes roundup of 2026! Normally, you can expect this to hit RotoGraphs on Tuesday afternoons, but we’re publishing here on Wednesday since there’s much more clarity with Opening Day rosters now than there was 24 hours ago. As a reminder for how this works, I use our database of playing time projections, managed by RosterResource wizard Jason Martin 마틴ez, to query significant changes over a certain period of time. Mostly, that’ll be over a weeklong period — between roundups — but I’m using March 1 as the cutoff for this first one. As for what qualifies as significant, this is every change of at least 10% (70 plate appearances) in either direction in that time period. So this’ll be a longer list than usual, chock-full of info:
The Starting Pitcher episode of the Beat the Shift Podcast – a baseball podcast for fantasy baseball players.
Guest: Nick Pollack
Strategy Section
Injury Guru’s Trivia of the Week
ATC Undervalued Starting Pitchers
Deep league starting pitchers
Injury Update
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For the first time, we can now compare THE BAT X ERA forecasts to other projection systems. That’s because Christmas just arrived early — the pitcher version of THE BAT X has finally been released and is now available on our player pages. A shoutout goes to my friend Derek Carty for what I presume was a massive undertaking in developing the pitching side of his Statcast-driven THE BAT X model. Let’s all be selfishly thankful that he hasn’t been scooped up by a Major League team yet, allowing his analysis and projections to remain accessible.
The Outfield episode of the Beat the Shift Podcast – a baseball podcast for fantasy baseball players.
Guest: Justin Mason
Strategy Section
ATC Undervalued Outfielders
Injury Update
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In a just released study, THE BAT X and Steamer were the two best original projection systems last year that were reviewed by FantasyPros and available on this very site. So let’s compare their individual hitter wOBA forecasts and discuss the hitters each is most optimistic on versus the other. Since most projection systems tend to produce similar results, especially the aggregates, it’s always fun to learn about the outliers in the original systems, as they could be the product of factors missed by the other systems or overvalued that leads to inaccurate forecasts.
The Middle Infield episode of the Beat the Shift Podcast – a baseball podcast for fantasy baseball players.
Guest: Chris Towers
Strategy Section
ATC Undervalued Middle Infielders
Injury Update
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The Corner Infield episode of the Beat the Shift Podcast – a baseball podcast for fantasy baseball players.
Guest: Mike Gianella
Strategy Section
ATC Undervalued Corner Infielders
Injury Update
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The Player Analysis episode of the Beat the Shift Podcast – a baseball podcast for fantasy baseball players.
Guest: Lance Brozdowski
Personal History
Recent News
ATC Projections
Player Analysis
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