Five Personal Lessons From the 2026 Fantasy Baseball Season
I’ve written a couple of late-season articles on overperformers and underperformers based on projected versus earned value. As someone who spends plenty of time examining pitchers, my fantasy teams admittedly struggled in pitching points. My team’s pitching ratios exploded due to blowup outings from Jack Flaherty, Luis Castillo, Logan Webb, and others.
On the hitter side, I rostered plenty of veteran players that might be seen as boring ones. Common hitters on my roster included Trea Turner, Jose Ramirez, Dansby Swanson, Ian Happ, Bryan Reynolds, and Seiya Suzuki. In one 12-team league, I started with Ronald Acuña Jr., Garrett Crochet, Manny Machado, Bryce Harper, and Geraldo Perdomo.
On another 12-teamer, I went with Shohei Ohtani, Treat Turner, Ketel Marte, William Contreras, Hunter Brown, Suzuki, Carlos Estevez, Corey Seager, Alex Bregman, and Spencer Strider with my first 10 picks. Unsurprisingly, that team struggled across the board.
I’ll walk through a few lessons from my draft and in-season strategy from the 2026 fantasy baseball season.
Lesson 1: Invest in Pitching Earlier
As someone who invests plenty of time in starting pitchers, I may have been overconfident in my middle- to late-round sleepers hitting at a high rate. In several deeper leagues, I drafted two starting pitchers through the first 10 rounds with one closer, so three pitchers and seven hitters. Unfortunately, it led to chasing pitching stats in some leagues, and streaming options can blowup in your face.
In one 15-team league, I drafted one starting pitcher (Freddy Peralta) and one closer (Cade Smith) within the first 10 rounds. You can guess how that team fared in pitching stats. I had plenty of points for strikeouts with a high volume of innings. However, several blowup outings caused me to chase pitching ratios. This season was a reminder to invest in pitching earlier in drafts, especially in deeper leagues.
Lesson 2: Don’t Wait on Outfield in Deeper Leagues
I’m talking about leagues where we need to start five outfielders. In several leagues, Seiya Suzuki, Brandon Nimmo, Ian Happ, Teoscar Hernandez, and Bryan Reynolds were key parts of my lineup. They tend to be consistent, boring options, but several underperformed for most of the season. That’s especially true when we’re chasing and whiffing on outfielders No. 4 and No. 5 like Lars Nootbaar, Jorge Soler, Adolis Garcia, Sal Frelick, and Jung Hoo Lee 이정후.
Waiting on OF meant I was shopping for outfielders around pick 100 and beyond, and there were some hits in that range, with Suzuki, Andy Pages, Jac Caglianone, Alec Burleson, Reynolds, and Daylen Lile earning $15 or more from picks 100 to 250 this season. Caglianone started cold and struggled early. Unfortunately, even if I drafted Burleson, Suzuki, and Reynolds, it didn’t make up for the whiffs on other positions.
Lesson 3: Finding a More Reliable No. 2 Closer
Since relief pitchers aren’t my strength, I tend to invest in one strong, high-end closer. I was typically shopping in the Cade Smith and Andres Muñoz range, while hitting on Bryan Baker’s 41 saves in one league as an RP2. For transparency, Ryan Walker, Dennis Santana, Bryan Abreu, and Pete Fairbanks were common second closers. Walker, Santana, and Abreu totaled 15 saves, with Fairbanks logging 19. However, some saves likely weren’t in fantasy lineups from the first trio.
Lesson 4: Chasing Power and Batting Average
In most leagues, I had three hitters with 20+ home runs. Some leagues reached five hitters with 20+, including a couple of 25-30 or more. In leagues with few hitters getting to 20+, I was stuck chasing homers. I got there by chasing barrel rates, but barrel rates were down league-wide (7.7% this year after being 8.6% last year). Despite this, increases in fly ball rate and pull rate resulted in more home runs. But I missed out, perhaps chasing the wrong stat.
Interestingly, my teams averaged 3.6 home runs per 100 at-bats, similar to the league average (3.4).
Chasing power can coincide with a lower batting average. On the flip side, hitters who hit the ball hard can have higher expected batting averages, which include exit velocity data in the formula. I need to dig into this more this off-season before diving back into draft season.
Lesson 5: Draft-and-Hold Struggles
Though draft-and-hold leagues are newer to me, they tend to be one of my worst formats. In the few draft-and-hold leagues over the past two seasons, I ended up in the bottom half or third of the league for the season-long standings. Maybe this wasn’t the year to lean heavily on hitters in draft-and-hold leagues. My draft strategy was to invest heavily in hitters early, hoping to hit on pitchers in the middle- to late-rounds.
In one draft that stings, I took Garrett Crochet, Max Fried, Raisel Iglesias, Spencer Strider, Blake Snell, and Abner Uribe as my six pitchers within the top 15 picks. In a 15-team draft-and-hold league, I totally whiffed on Peralta, Brandon Woodruff, and Ranger Suárez as my only pitchers through 15 rounds. Throughout the offseason, I’ll need to re-examine my draft strategy in draft-and-hold leagues compared to those with free-agent pickups.
Corbin writes for RotoGraphs, focusing on deep dives into baseball advanced metrics. He won two Fantasy Sports Writers Association awards in 2022 and 2023. Corbin also contributes to Yahoo Fantasy. You can find him on X @corbin_young21
Thanks. All good points to consider for all of us next season
What I love is that a few of your lessons are the opposite of most. I hear a lot of standard “Wait on pitching,” and “Don’t draft closers early,” but you’ve found the opposite. And it really hits on the main point I think:
Know your league and your own strengths.
You mention you’re not great at finding closers. That self-awareness is important. I am in a 5 OF league and ignore all the talk to wait on OF. It just isn’t the case in my league.
The most successful drafters aren’t drafting off a list they printed. They’re factoring all of these things in.
Rebuttals:
Lesson 1 is really a matter of resource management and scarcity. It’s not that you need to draft more early pitching, it’s that you need to be mindful of how you deploy your resources. If you pick more early pitching, you’re liable to “learn the lesson” of “draft more hitters” or “more closers” or something else. The real lesson is “my resources are scarce, I must use them to full effect.” Of course, baseball’s vast fog of war (especially during Spring Training) makes that a difficult exercise–hence why we play fantasy.
Lessons 2-4 are effectively the same lesson. The market conditions of 2026 and your own valuations left you shorthanded. You could have picked Jordan Walker or Jake McCarthy or Jake Bauers–I’m a naysayer of all three and still ended up with a share of each. Or Randy Arozarena a hair in front of pick 100. And that Burleson you mentioned was OF6, so investing earlier than him wasn’t the problem. You could have learned Lesson #2, grabbed Soto or JRod (both $11), and skipped Burleson ($33).
My go-to strategy in the Tout D&H (in which I was quite good) was to (almost always) alternate hitter/pitcher at each turn. I had a couple advantages there–draft order was “drafted” based on previous finish, so I usually got my preferred spots in the 3-4 or 12-13 region. I like turns. I wouldn’t strictly alternate hitter/pitcher–I’d judge if my hitting or pitching target was likelier to get back to me. Sometimes I’d commit to doubling up later. I usually finished with 26 hitters and 24 pitchers.
D&H is hard. You have to expect to run out of players. That might be in April if you draft young. It’s truly a test of preparation–albeit with so many ways to go wrong. It’s the format that hates you.
Despite making a concerted effort to draft more pitching this year, I butchered my D&H by taking the wrong mid-tier guys. That, and brutally stacked season-ending injuries to my starting OF (Rooker, Barger). My strategy was to balance reliable vets with more dynamic youths, but one really couldn’t do much worse than Ragans, Framber, Morales, Keller, Ryne Nelson, Shane Smith, Palencia, and Seranthony (despite the White Sox being WINNERS, of all improbabilities). Late flyers like River Ryan, Waldrep, Whisenhunt and Kolek/Bergert also failed to pay dividends.
I haven’t figured out what the lesson is, besides don’t pick those crappy guys pick those other guys who were good … and that maybe Shohei is no longer a no-doubter 1.1 pick. As Brad conveys, while I can certainly target higher-end pitching next year, doing so is just as likely to severely undercut my hitting. And who’s to say the aces I pop early won’t be the ones who get hurt.
While I have always tried to avoid overrating spring training performance and “news,” maybe my real lesson from 2026 is to steer clear of any and all players reporting any sort of physical boo boo in March.
I’m team never invest in pitching early and I have been in the top three with one ship ever since I made that change. Injuries and volatility make early investing in pitching a roulette spin.
You’re always going to be gambling on something when it comes to playing fantasy baseball. Avoiding those pitching investments does tend to be more reliable, but there are seasons where the rewards are just too tempting.
My biggest rule of thumb: if there’s a draft meta, do not follow it. I’m thinking of the pocket aces meta from a few years back, third-round closer runs, double-dipping catchers, anything the touts are touting that isn’t straightforward value-drafting (because that always plays). That doesn’t mean you can’t pocket ace or something, just do it when nobody is talking about it.
I am strongly in the camp of Draft OFers Early. My league has 13 teams and we all roster 5 starting OFers plus 2 Utility players, so the demand is going to be high. With the increase in platoons, if you wait too long here you can quickly find yourself struggling to find true regulars.
would be interesting to extrapolate these findings to -only leagues. For example, there are no reliable #2 closers. Maybe searching for a Plan B might work.