Even after two full months of the Major League Baseball and fantasy baseball seasons, it’s important to look for players who could experience positive and negative regression. With so few games and plate appearances for each player through eight weeks, we will see wild swings away from normal production, and the tendency is to overreact. Sometimes we think a player is what he has been after eight weeks, but that is far from the truth.
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.
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Fantasy Baseball Regression Candidates
Last week, this piece correctly predicted positive regression for Jose Altuve (.417/.444/.667 with two home runs and a steal over the last week) and negative regression for Riley Greene (.217/.333/.391 with a 33% strikeout rate in the past seven days). Regression, whether positive or negative, doesn’t always occur quickly, but the signs are often clear.
With the first nine weeks of the Major League Baseball season behind us and still 100+ 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 May 26th)
Players Due for Positive Regression
If you look at just Wyatt Langford’s counting stats, you would think everything is going exactly as planned for the uber-talented MLB sophomore. He has 10 home runs, 10 stolen bases, 23 runs and 21 RBI. However, he is somehow batting only .244 this year and just .222 in the last seven days.
Essentially, Langford is excelling despite some bad luck this season. His offense could be even better going forward. His batting average on balls in play (BABIP) is just .272 on the season, almost 20 points below the Major League average. Even though he has seen terrible luck, he is still contributing to fantasy rosters with all of the stats he is compiling, but his under-the-hood metrics say better days may be ahead in the summer.
Langford’s slugging percentage on the year is a solid .464, but his expected slugging (xSLG) is up to .518. He has a 48.4% hard-hit rate and almost a 14.5% barrel rate. Langford is on the verge of truly breaking out, and maybe his home run on Monday is the first step to getting there. Once he does, watch out. Langford could be a first-round player heading into 2026.
Do we need a couple of paragraphs to explain why perennial All-Star Mookie Betts will positively regress? Perhaps. Betts is the type of player we would never truly give up on unless there was a long-term injury, but the slow start has continued to be a problem through nine 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, but something hasn’t been right for much of the season. There doesn’t seem to be any other lingering injury concerns, but Betts is hitting .258 with a .414 slugging percentage over his first 225 plate appearances. It’s been worse over the last seven days.
In that span, Betts is hitting .222/.250/.222 with zero home runs and zero stolen bases. He also has only one RBI in that span, as his offense has come to a complete stop. However, there are signs a turnaround could be just ahead of us. First, Betts has a minuscule 7% strikeout rate over the last seven days. That tells me he is still seeing the ball very well and not reaching out of the zone for pitches. Second, he has a .240 BABIP over the last week (.302 for his career), so he has been very unlucky as well.
Betts is too good, and this offense is too potent, for him to stay at this level too much longer.
Players Due for Negative Regression
There is no debate about whether or not the last 14 days have been the best of Kody Clemens’ young career. But there can be a healthy debate about whether or not Clemens is going to be able to keep up this level of production for the Minnesota Twins. Over the last two weeks, Clemens is hitting .406/.486/.844 with three home runs and nine RBI. He is also walking 13.6% of the time in that span, so this is not just a power binge, but more of a complete offensive onslaught from a mediocre hitter.
What I see, however, are tremendous warning signs that one of this week’s popular waiver wire pickups won’t continue this pace. First, he is striking out almost 32% of the time over the last two weeks. That level of swing and miss doesn’t usually translate to a high average and elite power. In addition, Clemens’ BABIP in that time is an insane .588, the highest in the league during that span. On the season, that number is .353, which is over 100 points higher than his entire career.
For the last three seasons, Clemens has shown he is a Quad-A player capable as a fill-in piece. But I don’t think he has turned some offensive corner at age 29 with only 177 total MLB games on his resume.
Rhys Hoskins had an amazing March and April to start his 2025 season. Through those two months, he was hitting .282/.404/.412 with three home runs and 13 RBI. He had a 19.5% strikeout rate and a 15% walk rate, both borderline elite numbers. But then May came around, and he has been even better, hitting .293 with a .524 slugging percentage and four home runs. In the past two weeks, those numbers have increased to .318/.396/.591. He has simply been phenomenal.
But something strange has happened this month that doesn’t coincide with his improved offense. Those strikeout rates and walk rates started heading sharply in the wrong direction. In May, Hoskins is striking out over 30% of the time, and his walk rate plummeted by four percentage points. He also has a .392 BABIP this month, a full 120 points above his career average.
Overall, his barrel rate is down compared to last year, so much of his power could be attributed to some lucky breaks instead of batted-ball skills. There is a good chance that luck runs out soon if the contact rates and walk rates don’t improve.
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