September Dynasty Rankings: Biggest Fallers

Earlier in the week I covered some of the Dynasty Model’s biggest risers. Here, I’ll move on to presenting some of the model’s spicier takes. As if I were serving up wings in Hot Ones, I’ll go in order from least to most spicy. Hopefully by the end you aren’t left in tears like many of the guests on that show.

But first, a bit of housekeeping. In Monday’s article, a commenter noticed that James Wood’s ranking seemed lower than it should be. In a sense, they were right – Wood is clearly more valuable in dynasty leagues than Drew Rasmussen, Garrett Crochet, or even Roman Anthony. But the model was doing what I told it to do. Wood just made the cut in the “revert” injury flag, but instead of helping him, as it does for most players, it hurt him because his rest-of-season projection was being contaminated by some small uncertainty about when he would fully return from the injured list (the data pull for these rankings was the morning of September 12). At $13, it was more than half of his pre-season projection (~$20) and therefore the model disregarded his superb year-to-date stats and primarily used his rest-of-season projection. The fix here seems straightforward – add a check to make sure year-to-date performance is actually bad before discarding it – but I’ll leave that for the offseason rather than make further tweaks. Had the model not flagged him for reversion, the blending algorithm would set him at 18th on the rankings. With an uncontaminated projection, he’s probably closer to 10th.

Second, I’ve kept the structure broadly similar as the risers article (complete with the full list at the end for reference), but made sure to add a personal recommendation with respect to each player for whether or not I agree with the modeling results. This is for a few reasons: one, it gives you, dear reader, more bang for your buck. Who doesn’t love a buy/sell/hold-style article? Who doesn’t love a list? Well, here you get both. Second, I think now that I have a reasonably public platform for my fantasy analysis, it’s important to put out falsifiable predictions, because that’s how you learn (and create fodder for future content).

Biggest Outright Fallers

Here is the list of the largest fallers by rank, anywhere in the list. One bit of context I’ll note – these are huge numerical swings but do not represent large practical changes to the outlook of the player. In a league with 23-man rosters (the setting to which these dollar values apply), 276 players will be on teams at any given time. This means that these guys were, at best, a bench bat or the first guy you’d cut for a stream. A fall to the bottom or off the ranks reflects a drop in value such that they probably aren’t worth rostering anymore. The difference between these two categories of player is not immense.

With that out of the way, on to the actual commentary:

Trent Grisham

Grisham’s case for falling is straightforward, he’s hurt and has been worse this season than in last year’s mini breakout. Since the last rankings he’s gone from a slightly positive contributor ($7) to a net negative one (-$5) and given the hamstring injury, will most likely not have a chance to recover any value. It’s been a disappointing, if not altogether unexpected, follow-up to his resurgent 2025. There are some encouraging signs – he ran below his expected stats and added a smattering of steals to his ledger this year – but he’s entering his age-30 season and saw some of his plate discipline metrics decline this year. All this points to a player you should most likely avoid but for the deepest of leagues in 2027. There will be other bench bats worth a gamble in shallower formats.

Verdict: Agree with the model.

Michael Soroka

Still a heartwarming tale of real-life perseverance, Soroka is nevertheless revealing himself to be a bit of a liability on your fantasy squads. After 14 quite good starts, he has pitched sparingly since June and is correspondingly tumbling down the fantasy ranks. There’s not really that much else to say; sometimes it just be like that, and here it do. If you want to take a deep league flier then go for it but I wouldn’t expect more than 100 innings in 2027.

Verdict: Agree directionally, but think Soroka should be off the list.

Kyle Bradish

Following a dominant 2025 cameo after returning from Tommy John surgery, Bradish went into the season with somewhat high expectations ($11 preseason projection) but has been roundly disappointing. The model is fully bought-out; the August 20 run still saw a $7 rest-of-season projection but here he rated at -$6 and there simply isn’t enough time to rebound. More homers, more walks, fewer Ks – it’s clear why he was worse in 2026 but the more interesting question going into the offseason will be whether there’s something he can do to return to previous form. For now, his best fit is on rebuilding rosters that can afford to give him some run next year to figure it out.

Verdict: Agree with the model. Bradish should be rostered somewhere but not as a priority.

Dylan Lee

Another case that is straightforward: after placing in the last ranks due to his performance as one of the top non-saves relievers in 2026, he’s run a few clunkers and likewise worsened his year-to-date and projected values. I think he’s basically the same pitcher he was three weeks ago and generally has been for the last three years. If you’re in holds leagues, he is a clear, um, hold, but in a saves-only league you shouldn’t have reservations about letting him go if it means picking up a hot bat or a stream to bolster a playoff matchup.

Verdict: Agree with the model.

Joe Musgrove

I had no idea why Musgrove showed up on the previous list at all and assumed that it was some kind of error causing him to fall through the cracks and get a ranking. It turns out that he was being treated with roughly $1-2 of projected rest-of-season value throughout the season despite not pitching yet. This resulted in a modest value projection. Fair enough; there are worse injury stashes than a pitcher whom we knew otherwise to be pretty good. But his rest-of-season projections are still the same as they were then, so why did he drop off? After a good bit of digging, I realized it’s because he’s tagged in ROS projections as a reliever. This is causing the same effect that I highlighted in my second rankings post that I manually added to Cole Ragans and Brandon Woodruff. Since he’s tagged as a reliever, his discounting scheme is much more aggressive and therefore does not make the cut. Philosophically, I don’t have a problem with Musgrove falling completely out of the rankings. He hasn’t pitched since partway through 2024 and shouldn’t be on any fantasy roster until he has clear line of sight to doing so again. As it stands, my young nephew may turn three before ever knowing what it is to see Joe Musgrove pitch in MLB. Que horrible. But for consistency sake, I probably want to at least add some checks to see whether position changes throughout the season are common enough to cause a bigger problem.

Verdict: Agree with the model, but for different reasons.

Biggest Fallers within or out of the Top 100

And now we move to the “bummer” section of today’s piece.

Going in order:

Byron Buxton

The model is actually being pretty forgiving here; Buxton has missed enough time for the revert flag to fire and is therefore being treated primarily by his pre-season projections which are comparatively strong. But you know the drill here. Roster Buxton and you will be treated to ~100 awesome games and have to find a replacement for the rest. With his latest malady requiring arthroscopic hip surgery at age 32, it’s fair to wonder whether next season will look more like a pumpkin than a gilded, if fragile, carriage. I’m probably avoiding everywhere but on win-now rosters in roto leagues where you can afford an injury-prone player as a luxury without worrying about week-to-week variance.

Verdict: Agree with the model.

Logan Webb

Here again I think we understand pretty quickly what’s going on. There just isn’t enough time for Webb to recover sufficient value to recoup what has been a disappointing year. While his peripherals aren’t as good as they were last season, they aren’t meaningfully outside his career norms. To me, this smells like fatigue. After throwing nearly 1000 innings in the previous five seasons, he suffered the first meaningful IL stint of his career and has floundered down the stretch. For a pitcher whose primary fantasy value has been pitching 200 pretty good, occasionally great innings, struggling to toss 170 without fatigue or injury setting in poses meaningful risk to his value. As such, his ranking feels well calibrated to me. I’ll be knocking my expectations down a peg going into next year but he’s pretty obviously a player who should be rostered in even the shallowest of leagues, at least to start.

Verdict: Agree with the model.

Jackson Holliday

Does anyone know what to do with this guy? He’s probably a dynasty hold, at least in medium-deep leagues, but when should your patience run out? Your guess is as good as mine. I’ll be curious to see what the projections make of him in 2027. On the one hand, he’s treading water in the major leagues at the same age as most of the 2025 draft’s top college picks are in AA or AAA. On the other hand, “treading water” is a generous way to phrase a career 86 wRC+. I clocked him all the way back in June as someone to be wary of based on how unlikely it is for players who debut with serious strikeout problems to ever return meaningful fantasy value. Next year, I’m probably letting him go if I don’t see a wRC+ north of 110 by June.

Verdict: Disagree with the model; Holliday is still ranked too high.

Trea Turner

As someone who is of an age with Mr. Turner, this one hurt because I think that’s related to what we’re seeing. His value in 2026 has been good enough: a $16 year-to-date value against a pre-season projection of $27 is disappointing but not catastrophic. But the rest-of-season projections keep overestimating what he’ll do for the remainder of the year and he’s at an age where incremental dollars of projected value matter tremendously. The aging curve is steep and a $16 player has a much shorter path to lack of viability than does a $27 player. His plate discipline and contact quality are down across the board, and if he weren’t making $27 million in salary with high clubhouse standing I’m not sure he’d get sufficient playing time to accrue useful counting stats. I think he’ll still be worth rostering next year, and probably the year after, but I also think that we’ve seen the last of Turner as a top-flight fantasy player.

Verdict: Agree with the model.

Ronald Acuña Jr.

If this article were a Hot Ones episode, we’re at the point where I’d be starting to sweat and have trouble articulating my thoughts. As it were, I don’t think this ranking is misplaced. Acuña’s most critical fantasy numbers are not 40-70, but 82, 119, 159, 49, 95, and 98. These are his games played totals dating back to 2021. He’s averaging a Buxtonian 100 games per season. And he’s not really young anymore, though admittedly age 28 is still mid-peak. Eventually, these injuries are going to take a sufficient toll to meaningfully sap his athleticism, if they haven’t already.

But I get it. His two full seasons have been transcendent fantasy turns. I look at him as the Rolls Royce to – here’s one for the oldheads – Eric Davis’s BMW. I feel somewhat certain that he will turn in at least one more cuckoo-bananas season, but when will it be? 2027? 2028? 2029? It’s impossible to know. If I am rostering Acuña in dynasty leagues, I am probably hopping off the roller coaster while he still has sufficient brand value to garner a good trade return. Yes you might have to take $0.70 on the dollar compared to what you might have gotten this preseason. And yes, it will be sad to see him turn in one of those crazy years on someone else’s roster. But you get to a certain age where roller coasters make you more ill than they are fun, and we may have reached that point with Ronald.

Verdict: Agree with the model.

Other Noteworthy Fallers

Here, I’ll go into more detail than I did for this section earlier in the week because I think these players deserve a closer look. These are some of the spiciest entries on this list.

I’ll go again from least to most-spicy:

Zack Wheeler

Wheeler’s case is that of flagging production since the last rankings were published. After a six-start swoon where he gave up 23 earned runs in 24.1 innings, his year-to-date production and rest-of-season projetion took a hit. To Wheeler’s credit though, he has rebounded and pitched fabulously in his last three starts. Overall, the ranking feels correct to me. He’s been stellar in 2026 and is clearly still a top arm, albeit one worthy of slightly more reservation than someone higher on the list. Zooming out, his season has been nothing short of flabbergasting to this author. I was selling everywhere. Thoracic outlet syndrome is more damning than even a second Tommy John. Unlike the case with Fernando Tatis Jr., I was able to put this summarily incorrect opinion on the record (at least within my Ottoneu league) which led to me being flamed in the group chat:

Now you might look at his ranking and say, “wait, didn’t he say he’s going to retire after the 2027 season? Wouldn’t he rank lower as a result?” To this, I’d respond: I’ll believe it when I see it. Wheeler will most likely have many millions of reasons to continue pitching after next year, and has already begun planting the seeds of a course reversal. If you want to fade him because of this it would be hard to fault you but my operating opinion is that he will be pitching in 2028 and beyond.

Verdict: Agree with the model.

Julio Rodriguez

Speaking of takes that aged like milk, remember when some clown on RotoGraphs said that Rodriguez was the least streaky of all hitters in 2025? Me neither. Jokes aside, I’m not sure that there is any otherwise valuable player whom managers are more tired of rostering. To be sure, the results are probably worse than they deserve to be: his BABIP is 40 points below his career rate, his discipline and batted ball metrics are all basically in line with his career norms, and his expected stats are within a reasonable bound of the same. But he seems like a guy whom pitchers have maybe figured out. Over his entire career, he’s generally been quite bad against at least one type of non-four-seamer. In his rookie year, it was splitters. The next, sinkers. In 2024 and 2025 it was change-ups and cutters, respectively. This year, it has been sliders. Across it all, he’s always been able to recoup value by crushing fastballs but hasn’t been able to do the same in 2026. Such a stable pattern of performance suddenly turned on its head speaks to a general notion of bamboozlement such that I suspect he’s being pitched in a novel way and hasn’t been able to adjust. Looking ahead, I think he figures it out enough to still be a perfectly fine bet for roto leagues where you can weather peaks and troughs a bit more easily and as such, I wouldn’t downwardly adjust my expectations beyond what the model has already done. But in head-to-head formats where a high pick going AWOL for a week or two can really hurt you, I am probably looking elsewhere.

Verdict: Agree with the model, basically.

Paul Skenes

My approach to how to handle Skenes’ struggles this year is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Jordan Rosenblum touched on him a couple weeks back, and there isn’t too much else to say other than that I might throw Yoshinobu Yamamoto’s hat into the ring as a pitcher to potentially consider more valuable than the Steel City ace. To Skenes’ credit, his real life production and peripherals are solid; in fact, if you swap wins and ERA for quality starts and FIP in the Auction Calculator, his year-to-date value doubles from $7 to $15. But even that mark is low compared to what we expected from him this year. Sometimes guys are just weirdly worse for a season – Pedro Martinez’s first turn in Boston in 1998 was his worst healthy year of the Y2K era by a good margin – and I think that’s what you have to chalk this up to. To recycle the vehicular metaphor: maybe Skenes will go back to being a McLaren next year. Maybe he will stay Camaro. Either is still pretty good compared to a Kia.

Verdict: Agree with the model.

CJ Abrams

Abrams’ case is another one that doesn’t require detailed sleuthing: he’s been sufficiently bad following an August ankle sprain that he’s shaved $10 off of his baseline value between his remaining projection and year-to-date stats. It’s hard for me to hold this one against him. While he was struggling prior to the injury, it wasn’t to quite to the same extent. I wouldn’t call this a flaw in the model per se but it is a reason that it’s important to know the context surrounding a player’s performance. If I had fewer scruples about direct manual tweaks to the model, I might add $5 of value back to his baseline, which would likely rank him in the teens. If I could get Abrams where the model values him I’d probably take that bet.

Verdict: Disagree with the model. It’s missing context around his recent poor performance.

Shohei Ohtani

This is probably the saddest turn of events, because I love Ohtani but I’m in full agreement with where the model has him. If anything, I think it’s being a bit generous because now that he doesn’t have a meaningful rest-of-season projection, the it’s primarily using his year-to-date production as his baseline value. His pitching stats still rate well ($20 as of the model run) while his bat has been relatively disappointing by his recent standards ($30). Add the two together, which the model does, and it thinks of him as a $50 player as a baseline. That’s a high platform from which to fall, which is why he’s still rated in the top 20, but in my opinion he’s getting credit as a pitcher that I don’t think we can confidently give him. I wouldn’t write him off as a useful fantasy arm in a non-starting role; $40 hitter / $10 pitcher Ohtani would still deliver the $50 of value that the model thinks he’s worth. A 40/20 threat that’s also a lockdown closer is almost as fun as peak hitter/ace Ohtani – but it’s fair to wonder whether that will be feasible and what impact that will have on his hitting. Right now, the evidence isn’t great. So for now, I think the move is to treat him as a $35-40 hitter and count any pitching stats as a bonus.

Verdict: Agree with the model. :'(