September Dynasty Rankings: Biggest Risers

With the number 1 pick in the 2026 fantasy draft, the Phlavertown Phantatics select…

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Jahmyr Gibbs!

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Wait, sorry, last week I said I was messing with the draft but that’s not what I meant. You could be forgiven though, for having your head turned by the novelty of the recently commenced NFL season. If you’re sitting here reading this though I assume you are a dynasty/keeper sicko and if that’s the case you’re in luck because I’ve got the September 2026 RotoGraphs Dynasty Rankings hot off the press.

Housekeeping:

As has been typical in these articles, I have provided the full list of rankings at the end. One thing I want to note for this edition is that I made a slight tweak to handle late-season injuries a little better. I was finding that players who are projected to be down for part or all of the remaining year were being systematically under-ranked due to their injury’s outsize performance on their rest-of-season projections, which still do receive a good bit of weight in the model. I wrote a simple rule to state that for players who are impacted by an injury and are not expected to exceed the threshold to revert to pre-season rankings (as discussed in my initial ranking explainer), if their rest-of-season projections are not at least half of their year-to-date dollar value, the model should simply ignore the rest-of-season projection:

There might be a few guys who fell through the cracks despite this filter, which is something I will prioritize fixing in the off-season. But after a look through the rankings, it seemed to do a reasonable enough job at fixing what I needed it to. Without further ado, here’s a look at some of the most noteworthy risers in this month’s rankings.

Top Outright Risers

Going player-by-player:

Tatsuya Imai

This one was a puzzler, because someone with a 5.20 ERA and 6.19 BB/9 is not your typical dynasty stalwart. While Imai has shown flashes throughout the season, he’s been a disappointment overall and is most likely not rostered in very many leagues. After digging a little deeper, I realized that his ranking is owed to an unusually strong $8 rest-of-season projection. The ATC DC projections have him for 10 more innings, 10 strikeouts (against four walks, a ratio significantly better than what he’s done year-to-date), a 4.10 ERA and 1.32 WHIP. These aren’t great stats, but when there is so little season left, a half-decent bet at wins and strikeouts without catastrophic ratios does have value. Just not quite enough to justify his ranking. So maybe consider him as a last-ditch stream but not a top-150 dynasty player. I’ll chalk this up to a quirk in the model setup and add it to the list of off-season fixes.

Ketel Marte

My last rankings were published at perhaps the peak of the recent drama surrounding the Diamondback’s mercurial franchise cornerstone. He had recently been placed on the injured list and did not have a rest-of-season projection given the uncertainty around whether or not he would return to play this year. This meant that the model defaulted to relying heavily on his year-to-date statistics, which have been his worst in a half-decade. Take his star power out of it and look at him through the model’s eyes (er, screen, maybe?) and you’d see a struggling player at a precarious place on the aging curve whose season was maybe set to end with fewer than 120 games played. Is a rank in the bottom of the top 500 all that unjustified?

Fast forward to now. Marte has returned and hit pretty well causing his rest-of-season projection and year-to-date production to rebound enough to again rate as a valuable dynasty commodity. That said, his ranking is still 20 spots lower than where he was in our initial ranks. There are enough red flags remaining – given his age and apparently precarious social situation within the Arizona clubhouse – that I would treat him with serious dynasty caution.

Mason Montgomery

My colleague Jordan Rosenblum recently detailed Montgomery in his latest Dynasty Due Diligence, so I won’t step on his toes. Besides, there’s not much I could say that he didn’t – Montgomery has been dynamite; if projected for a full season of saves next season, he should be one of the first half-dozen relievers off the board next spring. This ranking might even be a touch low, and now might be your best and last opportunity to buy in for cheap.

Moises Ballesteros

Another interesting shift. This one comes down to a much rosier rest-of-season projection than he had the last time around. After spending time in AAA prior to the deadline deal that landed him in SoCal, his first two or so weeks of play for the Angels prior to the latest rankings were atrocious: .120/.200/.120 with one run in 55 plate appearances. Accordingly, his rest-of-season projection at the time was terrible: -$19. Since then, he’s rebounded to hit .261/.292/.406 with decent counting stats (two home runs, 14 runs+RBI) in 72 plate appearances. Apparently, it’s been enough for his projections to sufficiently improve such that they think he’ll be the replacement-value catcher in 12-team leagues with $1 of rest-of-season value. This results in a jump-off point that is twice as good and when combined with his youth, is enough to place back on your radars.

Edgardo Henriquez

Candidly, here is a player of whom I had never previously heard, but those who have him on their squads are probably thankful. He’s leveraged triple-digit heat to rise to LA’s lieutenant role in the bullpen, and has been about as helpful as a reliever can be in a saves league. This ranking seems well calibrated to me; while he’s stuck behind an already established closer in the pecking order, the other stuff here is good enough to warrant rostering as your 22nd or 23rd man. If Scott were to suffer an injury, Henriquez would instantly become a top-15 or so bullpen option.

Top Risers into the Top 100

You may have noticed the first list is still pretty fringy, so I also wanted to look at the biggest risers into the top 100 to zoom in on higher impact players.

Luis García Jr.

Here we have another player who has yo-yoed, though to a lesser extent. This one is primarily driven by fluctuation in his rest-of-season projections – $1 in the first model run, -$5 in the last, and $5 now. It seems like the projections are finally buying into his stellar year-to-date numbers ($27). Add it to his age (26) and you have a recipe for a jump in the rankings. While it’s hard to have a tremendous amount of confidence in a platoon bat (even a really really good one), if you wanted to treat García like a $15 player going into next year, as the model does, I don’t think I would fault you.

Luke Keaschall

Keaschall was recently detailed by my colleague Jack Dorfman, so as with Montgomery, I’ll only discuss what I think is incremental to that analysis. His ranking seems high to my eye, but here we have a player at a great spot on the aging curve, playing to positive value this season. So maybe it’s not quite as far-fetched as it might seem. His rest-of-season projection looks to be running a tad hot ($12) so I suspect that he’s benefiting from some rounding in his remaining projected counting stats – two steals, five RBI, and one home run in 56 remaining plate appearances are all a fraction better than his full-season pace. With so few games remaining, such low volumes can swing dollar rankings in the single digits. That said, as Jack noted, he’s been tremendous of late. So perhaps the projections are seeing something brewing.

Hunter Goodman

Goodman’s rise is straightforward: he was injured at the time of the last ranking and saw his rest-of-season projection suffer sufficiently to knock him down 85 spots. Back healthy – though not quite hitting to the extent he was before – his projection has likewise rebounded. There’s much else to say here other than proceed with caution; as awesome as he’s been, with a k-rate north of 30% and expected stats which are worse than his real life production, don’t be surprised if can’t repeat in 2027. It’s not like we’ve seen other middling-average, high-power catchers struggle to do the same.

Manny Machado

Here, like Keaschall, we have a player who seems to be benefitting a bit from his rest-of-season stats rounding up, because I don’t think Machado is a true-talent $35 dollar player for the rest of the season like the ATC DC projection does. That said, Machado’s performance in the last few weeks has been sufficiently impressive to double his year-to-date dollar value from $5 in the most recent model run to $10 now. Add that to a future outlook that seems to have healed a bit and you have a guy who has defensibly snuck back into the top 100. While he might be over-ranked, if you’re a win-now team, I think you might have a chance to acquire Machado for a pittance in the off-season. If you do, despite this season’s roller coaster, I think it will have been worth the shot.

Jake McCarthy

Fool me once, strike one. But fool me twice… strike three.

It seems like we’re in this spot every other year with McCarthy. I see what the model likes. After moving to Coors, he’s running career highs across the board and looks poised to finish with something like a 18/80/80/30 line and a .300ish batting average. He’s in his age-28 season, so he’s not in a terrible place on the aging curve. There doesn’t seem to be a platoon issue, as he’s actually hit same-sided pitching to the tune of a 129 wRC+, compared to just 104 against right-handers. But since his first breakout in 2022, his ADPs have been 116, 470, 243, and 441 in subsequent years dotted with several multi-week stints at AAA. Perhaps another famous Michael Scott quote might be just as appropriate.

Other Noteworthy Risers

This will be a bit of a rapid-fire round:

On the positive side, Griffin is activated from the I.L., hitting, and projected for $14 rest of season, which we’d be thrilled about for just about anyone let alone a player in his age-20 season. After a bearish first two runs of the Dynasty model, he may just be reaching escape velocity. I have unfortunately not been able to put any Tatis takes on the public record, but at least in my own head, I’ve been a truther the whole year. So please pardon a brief, if weird, victory lap. His early season struggles reminded me so clearly of Jose Ramirez’s back in 2019, I thought that once he made some arcane tweak, surely, he’d bounce back. Lo and behold, since his first bomb in May, he’s been exactly the player – if not better – than we thought he’d be going into the year. Greene is back, healthy, and hitting. He’s only 25 still and has seemed to rectify his strange plate discipline woes from last year. After missing a stretch of time, it’s easy to forget about him mired on a moribund Tigers team but keep him in mind for 2027.

Pessimistically, Tong seems to be benefiting from the same thing driving Imai’s ranking; proceed with extreme caution. Likewise with Simpson. He is a blind spot for the model because it doesn’t know the shape of his production, just that he has been (and is projected to remain) worth $10-ish dollars so far. For a player in his age 25 season, that would normally be a boon. But his specific profile is a house of cards; remove the steals, and he washes out of the league. Remove the batting average and he’s Nasim Nuñez, maybe. Neither outcome is good for your fantasy team.

Conclusion

This has been a helpful exercise for me by highlighting a couple model weaknesses, but I hope it’s also been good for you readers as well to understand better how the model works and to highlight a few guys worth putting (or removing) from your radars. Later in the week, I’ll do the same, instead highlighting some noteworthy fallers in the latest model run.