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.

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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. 

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The Prospects Part I episode of the Beat the Shift Podcast – a baseball podcast for fantasy baseball players.

Guest: Chris Welsh

Strategy Section

• Prospects
  • What is the difference between early season prospects vs. later season prospects?
  • Return on Investment for prospects
  • How to know when to draft a prospect pre-season ?
  • How to know when to pick up a prosect in-season?
    • Before they come up?
    • After they come up?
  • How much FAAB should you spend on prospects?
    • Keep honest bids

Buy/Sell/Hold/Drop

• Hot Players
  • JJ Bleday
  • Luke Raley
  • Carson Benge
  • David Martin
  • Kyle Harrison
  • Michael McGreevy
• Injury Guru’s Trivia of the Week
• Cold Players
  • Fernando Tatis Jr.
  • Mike Trout
  • Aaron Nola

Injury Update

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Among the top 100 hitters on the Fantasy Player Rater, several hitters are highly touted rookies or players who entered the season rookie-eligible. We’ll examine five rookie hitters. The goal is to provide redraft, keeper, and dynasty thoughts on these rookie-eligible hitters to figure out whether fantasy managers should consider holding, selling high, or buying in various formats. Though keeper and dynasty formats can have different rules and scoring, we’ll do our best to consider these differences. 

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Prospects have become increasingly important to winning re-draft fantasy leagues. Of course, they have always been major in-season acquisitions, but now they’re making their presence felt at the draft table, too. With more fantasy managers aware of the prospects who are likely to have an impact in a given season, the battle for their services has become much more fevered, leading some managers to stash desirable prospects for a month or two rather than try to pluck them off the wire once they are called up and risk missing out.

These guys aren’t draftable in every format, but I cast a wide net so that the list has utility across many formats and can be revisited when those players who don’t break camp on a big league roster are called up. All of them should be in the majors for a substantial portion of the 2026 season. It is worth familiarizing yourself with them now so that you’re ready to bid on the ones who aren’t draftable in your particular league.

You can find these players ranked on the 2026 Fantasy Rankings tab of The Board, along with my Top 200 Dynasty Rankings! Read the rest of this entry »

Rich Storry-Imagn Images

In my latest Mining the News, I referenced MLB.com’s Rookie of the Year Poll. MLB.com polled team executives to find who they think will win each league’s Rookie of the Year award. I figured it would be a prospect list for fantasy managers to become familiar with. The narrative would be that these inside sources would know the players who would be productive and play enough to win the award. Production and playing time are the two traits needed to be a solid fantasy option. Since this is the poll’s fourth year, I examined previous editions to determine how these executives performed.

The information in the polls is scarce, so all the small sample caveats apply. The results have been collected over the past three seasons (2023, 2024, 2025). In each one, a percentage of executive votes is included. The full list of previous players is at the end of the article.

To each player, I included our Fantasy Player Rater 12-team end-of-season dollar value. Then, I began grouping away. First, here is a plot of all the values.

Besides the four players polled at 50% or higher, the values seem to be fairly random. I grouped the values into four groups based on their polled percentage. Also, I combined the three low-polled groups.

That top group (n=4) seems to be productive, with the rest of the values being a complete crap shoot. The final line is the most useful. There is a 25% chance of these players contributing more than $5 and a 40% chance of being positive.

With the historical results, here are this year’s lists.

None of the players meet the 50% threshold, so no one is on the must-target list.

Fantasy managers should spend a few minutes on each of those players and track their results. Who knows which one will stand out? Nick Kurtz received just one vote last year and was a league winner.

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.

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The Mid-Season Prospect episode of the Beat the Shift Podcast – a baseball podcast for fantasy baseball players.

Guest: Tim McLeod

First Pitch Arizona

• XFL Auction

Strategy Section

• Prospects
  • When do you activate prospects on your roster?
    • Hitter vs. Pitcher prospects
  • What do you do with prospects on your roster that are not performing (redraft leagues)?
  • When should you pick up prospects off of the waiver wire?
    • What statistics shluld you look at for minor league player prospects?
    • Do you construct your roster differently if you are often picking up prospect speculations?

Injury Guru’s Trivia of the Week

Buy/Sell/Hold

• Hitter Prospects
  • Agustín Ramírez
  • Chase Meidroth
  • Roman Anthony
  • Jac Caglianone
• Pitcher Prospects
  • Andrew Painter
  • Joe Boyle
  • Brandon Sproat
  • Jonah Tong
  • Michael McGreevy

Board Bet !

Prospects

• Prospects for rest of season 2025
• Prospects for 2026 fantasy drafts

Waiver Wire / Pitcher Preview

Injury Update

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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.

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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.

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