Even after five 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.
Even after five 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 Kyle Tucker (.313/.421/.938 with three home runs in the last week) and negative regression for Matt Olson (.200/.259/.280 with zero home runs in the last week). Small samples are often not enough to show regression, but in baseball, things can change quickly. Regression, whether positive or negative, doesn’t always occur quickly, but the signs are often clear.
With the first 21 weeks of the Major League Baseball season behind us and about 30 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 August 25th.)
Player Due for Positive Regression
Rafael Devers certainly has had a roller coaster season at the plate (not to mention off the field). He started the year going 0-for-24. Deverse then hit .318/.435/.572 over the next two months, followed by a .196/.333/.392 stretch over 27 games, bookending his trade from Boston to San Francisco. Then came another hot streak, and now he is hitting .205/286/.364 in his last 12 games. And just like he has done all season, the numbers show another hot streak is just around the corner.
In the last seven days, Devers has a batting average on balls in play (BABIP) of .077, the sixth-worst mark in baseball. But surrounding that awful number, there is a batting profile that shows he should be hitting much better. Devers is striking out fewer than 20% of the time, and he is walking at an 18.2% rate in those seven days. The terrible luck with balls in play has him at just a .111 average in the last seven games, but that should change soon.
Hopefully, Devers can turn this slump around and finish the last month of the season on a high note. But these past five months have shown us that Devers is not immune to wild swings this season.
Since Teoscar Hernandez returned from the injured list (IL) on May 19th, it has not been pretty for the Los Angeles Dodgers right fielder. Since that time, he has been hitting .216/.255/.394 with just 12 home runs and one stolen base. It’s absolutely possible that his groin injury is lingering and Hernandez is not fully healthy, but he has only had a few games since he returned, so we have to assume the team thinks he is good to go. The bat just hasn’t been there, and some bad fortune may be to blame.
Over the last week, Hernandez has been hitting just .174/.200/.348 with one home run, three runs and zero stolen bases. But he is still playing every day and has played six games in the last seven days. His BABIP is at .174 in that time, which is way below league average, and the bad luck is dragging down all power and counting stats with it.
On the season, Hernandez has lowered his strikeout rate from over 28% in 2024 to just 25% this season. His fly ball rate is almost identical to last year, and his line drive rate is up over 2024. Assuming he is healthy, this is bad luck so far. Based on Hernandez’s track record, he should improve as he gets further and further away from his groin injury.
Players Due for Negative Regression
Even though he is hitting .302 for the season, it’s hard not to call Freddie Freeman’s fantasy baseball season a disappointment. He has just 18 home runs in 120 games (for comparison, he has five seasons with at least 28 home runs in his career), and just 75 RBI in what was supposed to be the best offense in baseball. He has four steals and is not on pace to even reach 85 runs this season. However, things have been looking up for Freeman in the past couple of weeks. Whether or not the power and the run production is sustainable is a whole other question.
In his last 31 plate appearances, Freeman is hitting .321/.387/.714 with three home runs, seven runs and six RBI. One-sixth of his total home runs have come in the last seven days. He does have an average walk rate of 6.5% in that time, but the power and the batting average are being driven by something. Some might call it luck or good fortune, and there is a strong chance things will come back to earth soon. Freeman’s .393 ISO over the last week is in the top 20 in all of baseball. On the season as a whole, that number is only .199
That’s not a good match for a power surge to continue. Freeman has proven he can get a .300 batting average in his sleep, but a streak with this kind of elite power is likely to come to an end before too much longer.
After a long stretch of poor hitting, James Wood has had a resurgence over the last week and is hitting .276/.323/.448 with one home run, three RBI and a 6.5% walk rate. He is creeping back up to the elite levels we saw early in the season, which brought Wood back to the top-25 hitter level he was at for much of the year.
However, a closer look at this strong stretch shows it is completely built on a house of cards. Wood has a .636 BABIP over the last week, which is the highest in baseball. In addition, his strikeout rate is an unbelievable 54.8%. With those two things combined, there may be no other player who is due for a crash in the days and weeks to come.
Wood’s downside has always been some swing-and-miss in his game, but he has taken that to another level over the last week or two. The fact that he is hitting well is a flashing red light that it will likely come to an end soon.
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