Orrico’s Observations: Be Patient, It’s A Long Season!

As the years go by, it seems like our attention spans continue to get worse and worse. We want instant gratification from everything, and it’s changed the way people go about their lives.

We don’t wait for letters to arrive, we send messages that arrive instantly. We don’t go to the library and do research, we Google a question and have the answer in two seconds. We don’t watch as many long videos as we used to, instead we are drawn to the 10 second shorts.

This is also true in fantasy baseball, and 2026 might be the worst I’ve ever seen it. We sign up for a six month exercise, and immediately people want to turn over their entire rosters after a weekend of games. The sample sizes are just way too small to be making as many moves as I’m seeing people make this season.

Yes, you should always be aware of the available players in your league and be willing to take chances to upgrade your roster, but the season is barely a week old and there has already been a massive amount of turnover on shallow league rosters. Fringe players that have had one or maybe two good games are being universally added in 10 and 12 team leagues, and I’m struggling to make sense of why fantasy players this year are so impatient.

This happens to a certain extent every season. You’ll get an “Is Aaron Judge washed” question here and there that will make you laugh, but this problem seems worse than ever before in 2026. I got a message this week from someone playing in a standard sized, 12-team league. He has already dropped eight of his originally drafted 22 players, and the players he added are (among others) Joey Wiemer, Kyle Isbel, Jake Bauers, and Luke Raley. His season isn’t necessarily over, but now he has a massive uphill battle to climb in order to put a serviceable roster back together.

Will any of those guys be on his team in a month’s time? I would guess the answer is likely no, and that is the problem. Many don’t seem to have the patience for a six month long grind like fantasy baseball. Perhaps some of these people are new to fantasy baseball and have come over from football, where the fantasy game is much more of a sprint as opposed to the marathon that our game is.

Today is April 3rd, 2026. Here are some of the top performing players last season through ~one week of play

Kristian Campbell: 2 HRs, 259 wRC+

Keibert Ruiz: 2 HRs, 218 wRC+

Andrés Giménez: 3 HRs, 208 wRC+

Wilmer Flores: 4 HRs, 186 wRC+

Anthony Volpe: 4 HRs, 162 wRC+

I could keep going but I think you get where I am heading with this. Making massively impactful fantasy decisions after we only have one week of data is a fools errand most of the time. We need a much larger sample size than one week to properly evaluate the player pool and see what changes have staying power.

To be clear, I’m not saying don’t make any moves this time of year. There will absolutely be breakouts that won’t be available in a few weeks time, and identifying them is important. However, that doesn’t mean that you add any player who has had a good first week. See if there are tangible changes to batted ball data, plate discipline skills, velocity, stuff grades, pitch mixes, etc. My observations so far have been that people are jumping on anything, and to some extent I understand it. We’ve gone so long without games and now we have a ton of them on everyday, and people are overly excited because their favorite sport and fantasy game is back.

If you want to have different players in your lineup everyday, give DFS a try! You get to draft an entirely different lineup every day and potentially multiple times in a day if you are playing different slates. This will allow you to scratch that itch of having different players to cheer for without having to sacrifice a year long investment into a fantasy team because you got antsy after a week.

Patience is a virtue, and that may be more true in fantasy baseball than any other game out there.If you liked a player when you drafted him in March, there is nothing (barring an injury) that should have already swayed your opinion on them.