Aug 5, 2026; Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA; Credit: Jeff Hanisch-Imagn Images
Earlier this week, some of you joined me on a jaunty little trip down through Fantasy Seasons Past, stopping to admire some of the plucky league winners that never seemed to amount to much afterwards.
From Nolan Jones who burned you the next year to Shed Long who you can only remember fondly, there have been league winning hot hands for as long as there has been fantasy baseball.
This year, shouldn’t you be the one to add the league winning Joe Schmo? Or should I say, “Schwindel”?
Every year it seems a handful of players go on a September heater and change the destiny of their fantasy teams. Some of those players are flashes-in-the-pan, but some have staying power. Last year’s class of league winners did produce some solid breakouts, with Ben Rice leading the charge, and Iván Herrera and Daylen Lile not far behind. For players like Michael Busch and Jo Adell, strong seasons were capped off by big power outputs to end the year, helping us believe in their power carrying over to this season.
Our Lesser-Known (at the time) September Heroes, 2025
A little over a month ago, I wrote up a handful of hitters that were underperforming their draft cost, were readily available to pick up in most 12-teamers, and why they were primed to break through.
Looking at underlying numbers from this season and comparing them to last season for struggling players can help identify when a player may be on the cusp of coming on strong after a weak stretch.
Kyle Stowers was one such player. Coming back from injury, Stowers scuffled through mid-June, with an OPS below .700 and a K% near 30%. But from June 12 on, when I published the piece, he has slashed .261/.341/.521 with seven homers and 23 RBI. He had been squaring up the ball in the weeks leading up to this breakthrough. But without the results.
Of course, the same process told me to consider Alec Bohm, who is himself rocking on OPS below .700 since I shouted out his hot run at the end of May and into June. I’m no wizard.
But late in the year, hot stretches are incredibly valuable. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that, but it bears repeating. Whether it be in head-to-head leagues, where a hot stretch in the late summer can lift you over opponents, or in season long roto leagues where you find yourself lagging in homers, the hot stretch is like a hot pastrami. Undeniably savory. Perfect.
Now let’s look at some hitters, focusing on a selection of players rostered at different rates between CBS and Yahoo. Consider these hitters, particularly those in the top tier, options to replace struggling veteranslike those that Mike Podhorzer wrote up a few days back. And if you are in a shallower league where these hitters are rostered, consider the art of the deal!
With all of the preparation that goes into draft season, it’s easy to throw that all out of the window when you come into June and a guy is hitting .180 and has fallen far outside of the top-ranked players in the majors.
This is especially true for managers in 10- and 12-team leagues. In these formats, the quality and depth of the waiver wire is never better than it is in April and into early May.
Contrast that with the struggles and small sample size bloated ERAs and miniscule counting stats, and it is easy to see why so many of us contemplate dropping players we considered ourselves excited to draft just a few weeks before the season.
In this article, I’ll look back at some of the hitters the industry liked heading into this season, noting their current roster rates and player rater values, and why you should consider buying back in while you still can. I’ll start with players who have already demonstrated some value of late and wrap up with blurbs on some names who could be next.
Streaming pitchers is a much cleaner exercise than streaming hitters. And oftentimes, the expected production is relatively more guaranteed. But in an offensive environment where hitting seems to be increasingly hard to find on the wire, then playing hot hands, and even better, trying to predict hot hands, becomes worthwhile.
That’s what I’ll try and do in this article. At the team level, I’ll point you to the teams who are playing the most games this week, the teams playing in the friendliest hitter’s parks. Then, I’ll look more into platoon splits, playing time, and how hot they are heading into the week to try and identify a crop of hitters you should consider streaming. To limit the player pool to hitters who are likely to be available, I’ll only use hitters who are around 50% rostered or less in either Yahoo or CBS leagues.
This is my first attempt at this exercise. I’ll try and provide plenty of information to help you make decisions that apply to your league and team context, from position eligibility to rostership rates.
Please let me know in the comments if there’s other information that’d be helpful, format changes, or any other potential changes!
Some like it hot. And the A’s are certainly some. Since their move to West Sacramento, A’s hitters have finally been treated to a friendly home park. But that park is much friendlier when the weather warms up.
Mapping the A’s Bats by Month at Home (2025)
Month
HR
FB%
HR/FB
ISO
wRC+
Mar/April
16
36.7%
11.0%
.159
96
May
15
35.7%
11.5%
.151
118
June
14
35.5%
11.6%
.147
99
July
23
39.3%
20.2%
.241
116
August
20
36.0%
14.2%
.183
107
Sept/Oct
17
36.1%
16.2%
191
108
In this case, timing is a proxy for expected weather. Put simply, since we expect it to be hotter in the summer, especially in Sacramento, we expect offense to increase as the hitting environment becomes more favorable.
They make us feel like gods. Those pitchers who begin the season on the fringe of being rostered who you stream against a weak offense to begin the season, who then go on to give you five innings with a handful of strikeouts and a win.
In this throw away culture where newer is always better, it’s easy to lose sight of the essentials. And that’s especially true when “newer” means throwing three different fastballs over 97 mph or uncorking splitters that are hurled so fast they necessitate a new name.
That presents an opportunity. To zig where the market is zagging today is to not cast aside the command artists as flukes, but instead to let results come before the flashiest of underlying numbers. If the K-BB% isn’t convincing and the Stuff+ is lacking, there is still a path to success, and to surplus value via waiver wire adds and trades.
This weekend is the last weekend before Opening Day on March 25 which means it’s the biggest weekend for fantasy baseball drafting of the year. If you’ve got an Ottoneu auction draft coming up, you’ve probably already done the work to identify your team’s needs and the biggest targets in the draft. But what happens at the end of the draft when you’ve spent almost all of your salary cap and you’re looking for high-upside players to fill out your roster? That $1 zone is one of my favorite phases of the auction — diving for gold amidst a sea of all the leftover players. To help identify some of those late auction targets, here are 10 players — two from each position group (C, CI, MI, OF, SP) — whose current average auction price is less than $2. And if you’ve already completed your draft this year, you can treat this article as a list of interesting early waiver wire adds before the season gets underway.
• Jack Kochanowicz made the Angels rotation, and the only place he’s rosterable right now is probably in AL-only leagues. There will be times he’ll be streamable, but for now, he’s a poor man’s Marcus Stroman. Both create a decent number of ground balls but can’t strike anyone out. At least Stroman had a 6.6 K/9 last season, while Kochanowicz’s was half that (3.4 K/9). Read the rest of this entry »
One day this flu will fully go away. One day. At least I’m no longer sleeping 20 of 24 hours every day and can actually do things, but my goodness this cough is something else. Anyway, let’s finish off our Gold Digging team by heading to the mound with five notable starting pitchers I’m drafting and monitoring this spring in hopes of seeing the signs that they are ready for a breakthrough. If you missed either part on hitters, you can check those out here:
Herz impressed in a 19-start debut, highlighted by a fantastic 28% K rate in 89 innings. He had some classic rookie issues with a 9% BB rate and 1.1 HR9, but the walk rate was actually the best we’ve seen from Herz at any stop in his career (15% BB in 321 MiLB IP). He has a legit 3-pitch mix, all of which can miss bats, and the young lefty was so adept at handling righties that he actually posted a better OPS against them (.651, 43 pts clear of his work vL). He will need to iron out some of his volatility to have a major breakout, but I’ll take the shot at this price point.
