The beginning of the fantasy baseball season is an easy time to spot outliers and candidates for positive and negative regression. With so few games and plate appearances for each player, we will see wild swings away from normal production, and the tendency is to overreact.
Worried about that massively slow start from Rafael Devers? He is now hitting .313/.404/.479 over the last 14 days after going hitless in five straight games to open the season. What about Aaron Judge? After a barrage of six home runs in 10 days, he has hit zero over the last week. We aren’t ever dropping any of these guys, but it shows how fast things can change.
Regression often comes at players quickly. When we see a player on an extreme hot or cold streak, things are likely to course correct. That’s what we will try to predict here, with some advice on how to handle these moments.
The beginning of the fantasy baseball season is an easy time to spot outliers and candidates for positive and negative regression. With so few games and plate appearances for each player, we will see wild swings away from normal production, and the tendency is to overreact.
Worried about that massively slow start from Rafael Devers? He is now hitting .313/.404/.479 over the last 14 days after going hitless in five straight games to open the season. What about Aaron Judge? After a barrage of six home runs in 10 days, he has hit zero over the last week. We aren’t ever dropping any of these guys, but it shows how fast things can change.
Regression often comes at players quickly. When we see a player on an extreme hot or cold streak, things are likely to course correct. That’s what we will try to predict here, with some advice on how to handle these moments.
Fantasy Baseball Regression Candidates
This series highlights players due for positive or negative regression compared to their recent performance each week to assist fantasy managers in viewing each one properly. Digging underneath the surface stats, we will examine some hitting and pitching metrics to determine if a given player is overperforming or underperforming what should be expected.
Last week, this piece correctly predicted positive regression for Junior Caminero (four home runs in the last seven days) and negative regression for Logan O’Hoppe (zero home runs and zero RBI over the last week). Regression, whether positive or negative, doesn’t always happen that fast, but the signs are often clear.
With the first three weeks of the Major League Baseball season behind us and still over 140 games to go for almost every team, there will be a lot of positive and negative regression moving forward. Let’s take a look at some of the past week’s largest outliers and see what their futures might look like.
(Stats up to date through April 14th)
Players Due for Positive Regression
Jazz Chisholm Jr. (2B – NYY)
It’s been a very weird week for Jazz Chisholm Jr., continuing his up-and-down start to the 2025 fantasy baseball season. Over the last seven days, he is hitting .095/.174/.381 with only two hits in 23 plate appearances. Strangely, both of those hits have been home runs. To some, it may show the streakiness that has always defined Chisholm, even back to his days with the Marlins, but there is much to like under the hood of Chisholm’s performance at the plate lately.
First, he only strikes out 21% of the time, compared to a 9% walk rate. For his career, Chisholm has a 28% strikeout rate, and he is at 34% overall for 2025, so the last seven days show significant growth. His .000 batting average on balls in play (BABIP) — and home runs don’t count in BABIP — can’t possibly get any lower, meaning his luck on balls in play is bound to regress positively as well.
In addition, his ISO is a very strong .286 in this span. When he makes contact, it leads to extra-base hits. On the season, Chisholm’s BABIP is .152 while his career number is .304. Once that begins to course-correct, expect Chisholm to start putting together some big weeks.
Gunnar Henderson (SS – BAL)
Gunnar Henderson’s season started late thanks to a spring training oblique injury that caused him to miss almost the first two weeks of the season. Because of that, Henderson is still in ramp-up mode and has not performed to the level everyone who spent a first-round pick on him expected (.206/.229/.294 so far this season). While he doesn’t have any home runs in his ledger yet this year, the signs are present that a power surge might be just around the corner.
To start, Henderson has the third-highest average exit velocity of any player over the last seven days. His 99.2 miles per hour (MPH) exit velocity is ahead of mashers like Fernando Tatis Jr., Aaron Judge and Bryce Harper, who have been blistering the ball in the early going. However, Henderson only has an 8.3% barrel rate to show for it. That number is where Nathaniel Lowe is, for some comparison.
Henderson has been hitting way too many balls on the ground this season, which might be an overcompensation for the oblique issue. Once his swing comes back and he starts getting loft on the ball, the underlying numbers are there for a full rebound.
Players Due for Negative Regression
Taylor Ward (OF – LAA)
Taylor Ward’s five home runs over his last 29 plate appearances (six games) have led to a .556 ISO and .815 slugging percentage in that span. While we know Taylor Ward has some pop (25 home runs in 2024), this kind of production is unlike anything we have ever seen from him, and is likely to regress soon.
Ward’s barrel rate over the last seven days is an astonishing 21%, the 15th-best number in baseball. For context, that is the same as players like Mike Trout and Junior Caminero. For his career, Ward has a 10.8% barrel rate over more than 1,400 batted balls, so it’s much more likely that his barrel rate is cut in half going forward than continuing at more than 20%.
Like many other Angels, Taylor Ward is hitting way over his head right now, so if you’ve got an offer on the table for someone looking to take him off your hands, this is the time to do it. Cash out before this player’s stock starts heading south.
Trevor Story (SS – BOS)
The mini Trevor Story renaissance over the last week or two has been a fun thing to watch. He has a .379 batting average and a .517 slugging percentage, including a home run and four steals over his last 29 plate appearances. The problem is, everything in his batting profile says the fun times could come crashing to a stop at any moment.
Over the last week, Story has the fifth-highest BABIP in all of baseball (.556). Also, he is somehow doing that despite striking out 34.5% of the time, and not drawing a single walk over those last seven games. Every ball he hits seemingly finds a spot on the grass or crashes up against the Green Monster right now. That’s great for fantasy managers but remains completely unsustainable.
On the season, Story has the lowest walk rate of his career and one of his highest strikeout rates. That’s a bad combination for someone to make good contact and continue this hot hitting from last week.
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