For most of us, April results are not that much more meaningful than the results we get from our teams during the rest of the season. For those of you who play in Cutline leagues, all the power to ‘ya. 

But in practice, April results can have a bit of an outsized impact on fantasy teams. For one, early season-ending injuries are of course more impactful than similar injuries that happen later, since you have more output to backfill. 

And April hot starts can sometimes be parlayed into months of strong performance. That Week 1 streamer who turns into one of the stalwarts of your otherwise lackluster rotation or the top prospect who earned a last minute spot in the starting lineup out of Spring Training. 

We all know these feel good stories. We all know the other side of that coin, too. The early draft pick who limps through April with an inflated ERA. Or who Tatis’s their way through the first nine weeks of the season without a home run. 

In this article, I’ll look at the starting pitchers who have seen the biggest improvements between April and May, keeping things simple by sorting by ERA and K-BB% to trim the fat before getting into meatier analysis on some of the more intriguing arms.

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Every Monday, this column will break down the most popular waiver wire and free agent acquisitions of the weekend.

Fantasy baseball managers know that our game is the ultimate test of grit, grind, tenacity, and patience. Unlike fantasy football, where league titles can be won with minimal in-season activity, fantasy baseball leagues require incessant attention and activity. Particularly when it comes to free agent adds and drops. Real-life baseball managers are constantly adjusting batting orders, players are frequently optioned to and promoted from the Minor Leagues, and injuries occur almost daily. There’s no resting on our laurels. We must always stay vigilant with league news and notes and remain active on the waiver wire if we want to win our leagues.

Every week, I’ll dig into the top adds on the ever-popular Fantrax and in the NFBC Online Championship (OC), a national mid-stakes contest with 240 total leagues of 12 and a six-figure grand prize. Reviewing player adds between the two should provide us with a well-rounded perspective and barometer of the fantasy baseball marketplace.

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Kevin Sousa-Imagn Images

My son competed in the State Track Meet this weekend, so I’ll only had time to cover the pitchers while Jack Dorfman covered the hitters.

In this article, I cover the players using CBS’s and Yahoo’s ADD/DROP rates. Both sites have the option for daily and weekly waiver wire adds. CBS uses a weekly change while Yahoo looks at the last 24 hours. Yahoo is a great snapshot of right now, while CBS ensures hot targets from early in the week aren’t missed. I start players being added at CBS who started the week on less than 40% of rosters.

The players are ordered for redraft leagues by my rest-of-season preference, grouped by hitters, starters, and relievers. Read the rest of this entry »

We have covered several hitters for our rookie check-ins. Though we will cover more in the future, we wanted to shift our attention to three starting pitchers worth highlighting that were rookie-eligible heading into the 2026 fantasy baseball season. Several rookies have been performing well, with some struggles. We’ll continue examining rookies throughout the season, including some advice on whether to buy, sell, or hold in keeper and dynasty formats.

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Welcome back to the Ottoneu Starting Pitching Planner. Based on the Roster Resource Probables Grid, I’ve organized every starter slated to start next week into four categories: start, maybe, risky, and sit for Ottoneu points leagues. The first and last category are pretty self-explanatory. Starters who fall into the “maybe” category are guys you could start if you need to keep up with the innings pitched pace in points leagues or need to hit your games started cap in head-to-head leagues; they’re good bets to turn in a decent start, but you shouldn’t automatically insert them into your lineup. If you’ve fallen behind on the innings pitched pace or you’re really starving for starts in a head-to-head matchup, you could turn to a “risky” starter or two.

I’ve also calculated a “Matchup Score” for each series using a straight combination of opponent’s home/away wOBA, opponent wOBA over the last 14 days, and the park factor for the ballpark the teams are playing in. It’s indexed so that 100 is average and anything above that is a favorable matchup and anything below is unfavorable. That matchup rating informs some of the sit/start recommendations I’m making, though the quality of the pitcher definitely takes precedence.

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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.

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I’ll often wonder and speculate on what’s happening and why, without researching the idea. Somehow, most of my interesting ideas tend to happen when I’m driving or doing something where I can’t stop and research the data. One of those ideas was to examine which starting pitchers have lost stuff and command in 2026. compared to 2025. That said, here’s a look at the starting pitchers who threw 20 innings with a three-point decline (we rounded, so you’ll see a difference of 2.5 or more) in their Stuff+ and Location+ in 2026.

Though these pitchers have lower Stuff+ and Location+ grades, they might not remain that way for the rest of the season. Several of these pitchers make sense since they often relied upon command. We can toss out Cole Ragans and Garrett Crochet (injuries). Meanwhile, Freddy Peralta, Parker Messick, and Ranger Suarez have been showing above-average command numbers in both seasons.

Whenever a starting pitcher is struggling or succeeding, we want to understand the why and try to determine whether the results have been sustainable. This is a beefy one, with a deep look into three starting pitchers who lost significant stuff and command in 2026. 

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Every Monday, this column will break down the most popular waiver wire and free agent acquisitions of the weekend.

Fantasy baseball managers know that our game is the ultimate test of grit, grind, tenacity, and patience. Unlike fantasy football, where league titles can be won with minimal in-season activity, fantasy baseball leagues require incessant attention and activity. Particularly when it comes to free agent adds and drops. Real-life baseball managers are constantly adjusting batting orders, players are frequently optioned to and promoted from the Minor Leagues, and injuries occur almost daily. There’s no resting on our laurels. We must always stay vigilant with league news and notes and remain active on the waiver wire if we want to win our leagues.

Every week, I’ll dig into the top adds on the ever-popular Fantrax and in the NFBC Online Championship (OC), a national mid-stakes contest with 240 total leagues of 12 and a six-figure grand prize. Reviewing player adds between the two should provide us with a well-rounded perspective and barometer of the fantasy baseball marketplace.

Read the rest of this entry »

Beyond the Obvious Multi-Fastball Breakouts

Building on the chart we used last week to identify multi-fastball starters, some interesting names did not receive the analysis they perhaps deserved. This second piece seeks to address that, diving deeper into the names that did not fit the profiles identified in the initial piece but deserve coverage nonetheless, both from a pure baseball and fantasy perspective. Of the 38 qualified starters using a multi-fastball approach, 24 utilize a true multi-variant arsenal. The majority of these pitchers are already well known. Deep dives on Bryan Woo or Max Fried are not necessary at this point, but having covered some of the more obvious fantasy adds in part one, there was still plenty more to explore. The updated chart below reflects the latest qualified starter data, including some new names worth keeping an eye on.

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Below are the most significant changes in projected playing time for starting pitchers and relief pitchers from the last four days, after taking last week off due to a lack of important moves. Unfortunately, there were plenty of injuries in the past week to make up for a slow prior seven days.