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.
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 negative regression for Matt Olson (.174/.345/.304 with one home run the past seven days) and negative regression for Pavin Smith (.143/.400/.429 with one home run and a 25% strikeout rate over the last week). Regression, whether positive or negative, doesn’t always happen that fast, but the signs are often clear.
With the first five weeks of the Major League Baseball season behind us and still 130+ 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 28th)
Players Due for Positive Regression
Kyle Schwarber (DH – PHI)
Overall, Kyle Schwarber’s season appears to be right in line with his production from 2024. Currently, he is hitting .242/.400/.495 after slashing .248/.366/.485 last season. He has cut down his strikeouts and the walks are up to an elite 18.4% level. As strong as this all seems, though, some horrible luck over the last week or two has kept Schwarber from being in the elite tier of fantasy hitters in 2025.
Over the last seven days, Schwarber is hitting just .118/.318/.176 with zero home runs and only two RBI. The walk rate is still strong, but he has been hindered by a very low .200 batting average on balls in play (BABIP) despite a barrel rate over 10% and a hard-hit rate over 40%.
All other indicators of potential power and average are strong. He has a max exit velocity of 112 miles per hour (MPH). He has a 22% launch angle on his balls in play. And he is hitting 50% fly balls in that timeframe. All of the under-the-hood metrics are where you want them to be, so Schwarber has just run into a bad luck streak. One that should end soon.
Mookie Betts (SS – LAD)
Mookie Betts has too strong a pedigree and too large a sample size to continue to struggle for much longer. If he bats .230 and slugs .380 all season, it will be one of the most inexplicable dropoffs in baseball history. Betts is the type of player we would never truly give up on in a fantasy season unless there was a long-term injury, but the slow start is beginning to become a bit of a problem through five full weeks.
Perhaps he is still recovering from the mysterious food poisoning that caused him to miss the MLB Tokyo Series and caused his weight to drop over 15 pounds. There doesn’t seem to be any other lingering injury concerns, but Betts is hitting .230/.328/.380 over his first 116 plate appearances. It’s been even worse over the last seven days.
In that span, Betts is slugging just .231 with zero home runs or stolen bases. He also has three RBI in that span as his offense has completely tanked. However, there are signs a turnaround could be just ahead of us.
First, in the whole season and over the last seven days, Betts has an identical walk rate to strikeout rate. That tells me he is still seeing the ball very well and not reaching out of the zone for pitches. Second, he has a .200 BABIP over the last week (.303 career), so he has been very unlucky as well.
Betts is too good, and this offense is too potent, for him to stay down for too much longer.
Players Due for Negative Regression
Andy Pages (OF – LAD)
Andy Pages was one of the National League Players of the Week last week, during a stretch where he killed the ball seemingly every time he was at the plate. Over the last seven days, Pages is hitting .583/.600/1.083 with three home runs, two stolen bases and seven runs. He has been a top-five fantasy hitter in that time.
However, his BABIP is an unsustainably high .500 during that span, and he is only walking 4% of the time. Apart from this last week, Pages has just two home runs and zero steals on the season, as he only recently became a mostly full-time player. His hard-hit rate and barrel rate have all dropped precipitously compared to last season, meaning the success over the last week is just a BABIP-driven fluke.
Projection systems are all in sync, that this is a player who is likely to end up around .250/.320/.440 with a handful of homers and steals. Expecting anything like what we have seen over the last 7-10 days is shortsighted. We shouldn’t buy high on a player who will be platooned from time to time and who hasn’t seen many tangible improvements in skills to justify the hot streak.
Byron Buxton (OF – MIN)
First of all, kudos to Byron Buxton for staying healthy for the first month of the season. He has played in 26 of the Minnesota Twins’ first 29 games and is having a very strong season, especially in the fantasy counting stats. He enters April 29th with six home runs, six steals, 23 runs and 17 RBI. His .245 average leaves a lot to be desired, but that could improve overall if he cuts down on his 34% strikeout rate.
However, Buxton’s past week has been quite Babe Ruth-ian and seems completely unsustainable. He is hitting .326 with a .630 slugging percentage, including three homers, three steals and 10 RBI. Seemingly every pitch he makes contact with is being driven hard and barreled — a 22% barrel rate in that span.
The problem is that contact is happening with less frequency. Buxton has a 33% strikeout rate in that span and just a 2% walk rate. Overall, his contact rate has dropped two percentage points from last season, and that’s punctuated by a 12% drop in outside-the-zone contact rate.
Of course, with Buxton, health is always a factor. There are multiple paths to negative regression here, and I think we will see one of them soon.
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