Ryan Kirksey | Wed, May 13th 2026, 7:11am EDT

4 Fantasy Baseball Regression Candidates (2026)

After a couple of months of the fantasy baseball season, it becomes relatively easy to spot outliers and candidates for positive and negative regression. With so few games and plate appearances, we will see wild swings in production, and the tendency is to overreact.

What if a player performs as poorly as Cal Raleigh (.157/.238/.320) to start the year? Bench him or drop him to the waiver wire? I can’t endorse dropping him in 12-team leagues. Munetaka Murakami has 15 home runs but a 35% strikeout rate, and one other extra-base hit. He also sports a .265 batting average on balls in play (BABIP). Can that pace continue? He’s now universally rostered.

The decisions will get tougher as the season goes on. For now, a few weeks of games are the only sample size we have to go by.

Fantasy Baseball Regression Candidates

This series highlights players due for positive or negative regression relative to their recent performance each week to help fantasy managers view each player properly. Digging beneath the surface stats, we will examine some hitting and pitching metrics to determine whether a given player is overperforming or underperforming expectations.

With the first seven weeks of the Major League Baseball season behind us and still at least 120 games to go for every team, there will be a lot of positive and negative regression moving forward. Let’s take a look at some of the weekend’s largest outliers and see what their futures might look like.

Stats up to date through May 11th.

Players Due for Positive Regression

Manny Machado (3B – SDP)

Manny Machado has a history of starting slowly in many of his 14 seasons. But he always turns it around. Machado has not had a batting average lower than .275 or a slugging rate below .450 since 2019.

The fact that he has started his first 38 games with a .191/.294/.353 slash line is nothing really to worry about. Machado is still only 33 years old and has plenty of track record to prove his ratios and power (two home runs) will come back.

Machado’s batting average on balls in play is one of the lowest in the league at .206. For his career, he is above the Major League average at .298 and has never been below .265 for a season. You have to assume that, with such a low number in his first two months, his last four months will be at or above his career average of .298.

If Machado gets some better fortune on batted balls, the power and run production should also return. With a 13% walk rate and a 22% strikeout rate, it’s clear Machado is seeing the ball fine at the plate. Better days are certainly ahead.

Taylor Ward (OF – BAL)

Believe it or not, one of the most disciplined hitters this season has been Taylor Ward. His 21.9% walk rate is the highest in baseball, and he is striking out just 17% of the time, one of the 50 best marks among hitters. His BABIP is .324, which is mildly high, but not atrocious.

Ward’s batting average is a modest .257, while he has a .422 on-base percentage (OBP). Why does he have only one home run and a meager .368 slugging rate? The answer lies halfway between bad luck and an old-fashioned power outage.

Ward has a 2.4% HR/FB rate, despite hitting 38% of his balls in play as a fly ball. That 2.4% is lower than Jeff McNeil and Masyn Winn — hitters with zero power. Ward is at almost 14% for his career. When that turns around, so will his fantasy production.

Players Due for Negative Regression

Mickey Moniak (OF – COL)

Overall, Mickey Moniak is slashing .303/.349/.655 with 11 home runs, 21 RBI and 20 runs in just 33 games. There are only five National League hitters who have at least 11 home runs, 20 RBI and 20 runs. Moniak is the only one hitting above .300. He has the National League lead in slugging rate over Matt Olson by .001.

But under the hood, things don’t look as nice. Sure, Moniak and the other Rockies have Coors Field for half of their games, but if you look at the splits for players like Moniak, it tells the real story. He is slashing just .231/.298/.385 away from home. Overall, he has a .338 BABIP, about 40 points over the league average.

Moniak is hitting more fly balls than he ever has, but he’s also getting really lucky with them. His 23.9% HR/FB rate is more than eight percentage points higher than his career average. Play Moniak at home, but sit him on the road.

Hunter Goodman (C – COL)

There are three catchers with at least 10 home runs so far in the 2026 season — Hunter Goodman, Shea Langeliers and Drake Baldwin. Only Goodman has the stats that say he might start to see his numbers decline soon.

First, Goodman’s BABIP is high at .333. It will always stay somewhat inflated because of Coors Field, but his career number is .298. Second, Goodman’s strikeout rate is 36.5%, the highest in the National League and second-highest in all of baseball. A 7.6% walk rate accompanies that, so his discipline at the plate has been nonexistent this year.

Still, Goodman has 11 home runs and a .507 slugging rate. Will he remain fantasy-relevant because he plays half of his games in Colorado? Absolutely. But I do not expect him to keep pace with the likes of Langeliers and Baldwin based on what I am seeing from Goodman through the first seven weeks.

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