4 Fantasy Baseball Regression Candidates (2025)

Even after almost three 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, 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 up to this point, 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.

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 (.474/.524/.789 with two homers and five RBI over the last week) and for Randy Arozarena (.375/.423/.583 with six runs in the past seven days). Regression, whether positive or negative, doesn’t always occur quickly, but the signs are often clear.

With the first 13 weeks of the Major League Baseball season behind us and about 100 games still 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 June 23rd)

Players Due for Positive Regression

Fernando Tatis Jr. (OF – SD)

For a player who started the season looking like he was about to deliver one of the all-time great fantasy baseball performances, things have certainly cooled off for Fernando Tatis Jr. in a big way. In March/April, Tatis hit .345/.409/.602 with eight home runs and seven steals. Now, he is stuck at a .267/.356/.466 line with 15 home runs and 15 steals. Those numbers for just about any player in this stage of the season would be amazing. But when you consider what Tatis had in his ledger when May 1st rolled around, it doesn’t look as good.

The hot streak, I believe, is coming. Tatis is hitting just .125/.344/.375 over the last week, but it comes with a minuscule.059 batting average on balls in play (BABIP), which is almost 300 points lower than his career average. Tatis does have two home runs in the last week, so it looks like the power might be showing back up as well. If Tatis can just have some more batted ball luck, his hard-hit rate and barrel rate are all consistent with his best seasons. This is a player who looks primed to take over in the hot California summer months.

Gavin Lux (2B, OF – CIN)

Gavin Lux hit a massive home run against the New York Yankees on Monday night as part of a big win against them in Cincinnati. For Lux, it represents why he is one of a handful of players due for massive positive regression in the days and weeks to come. Somehow, Gavin Lux has a .000 BABIP over the last seven days, even though he had two home runs. Home runs do not count towards BABIP, so they are not reflected there. He also has only a .091/231/.364 line during that time. When you see that kind of discrepancy between batting average, on-base percentage (OBP) and slugging rate, it’s an easy sign that something is misaligned.

In addition to his pair of home runs and five RBI, Lux also has a 15.4% walk rate and is striking out fewer than 30% of the time in this week-long sample. He is perhaps the poster boy for batting average bad luck right now, and should see that start to improve, considering the underlying metrics. Lux’s exit velocity and launch angle are both improved from 2024, so some more power numbers might be in store in the weeks ahead.

Players Due for Negative Regression

Christian Yelich (OF – MIL)

Unless you’ve been under a rock lately, you’ve seen that Christian Yelich turned into Barry Bonds over the last week or so. In that time, despite just one home run, Yelich has a .500/.536/.769 slash line with 13 RBI and two steals. Yelich is the second-ranked fantasy hitter over the last seven days, and the Brewers have moved him up to third in the batting order as a result.

However, this production is supported on a house of cards that relies on an oversized BABIP (.667 this week) and a contact rate that is out of whack with what he has done the rest of the season. Yelich has been hitting almost everything thrown his way over the last week, but his season-long contact rate tells a different story.

On the year, Yelich is at a 72% contact rate, which is over seven percentage points lower than in 2024. His chase rate is up, and it’s led to just a .263 batting average this season. As much as we may want Christian Yelich to revert to his MVP form again, this looks like something that might last days, but certainly not for three more months.

Andy Pages (OF – LAD)

Andy Pages was one of the National League Players of the Week earlier in the season, during a stretch where he killed the ball seemingly every time he was at the plate. Over the last seven days, he has been back at it again. Pages is hitting .409/.417/.864 with three home runs, six RBI and four runs. He has been a top-25 fantasy hitter in that time.

However, his BABIP is an unsustainably high .429 during that span, and he is only walking exactly 0% of the time. Apart from this last week, Pages has just 13 home runs and six steals on the season, as he only recently became a mostly full-time player. His hard-hit rate and barrel rate have all dropped compared to last season, meaning the major 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 .260/.320/.450 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 quite enough tangible improvements in skills to justify this hot streak.