Ryan Kirksey | Wed, May 27th 2026, 7:08am 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 Manny Machado (.170/.265/.330) to start the year? Bench him or drop him to the waiver wire? I can’t endorse dropping him in 10- or 12-team leagues. James Wood has 14 home runs but a 30% strikeout rate. He also sports a .350 batting average on balls in play (BABIP). Can that pace continue, or will he regress?

The decisions will get tougher as the season goes on. For now, eight 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 nine weeks of the Major League Baseball season behind us and still at least 100 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 25th.

Players Due for Positive Regression

Brent Rooker (OF – ATH)

If Brent Rooker wants to hit 30 home runs in four straight seasons, he has a lot of work to do from now until the end of September. He also might miss out on extending a streak of seasons with at least 89 RBI. Injuries have cost him a couple of weeks of games, and it seems he has been trying to claw back his production ever since.

Those nagging problems, plus some terrible bad luck, have also made his performance crater at the start of the season. But there are clear signs that Rooker could be just around the corner from returning to normal offensively. Especially in this potent Athletics lineup.

Rooker is currently hitting just .193/.277/.357 with seven home runs and 25 RBI. But those numbers are pulled down by a BABIP of just .238 on the season. If Rooker had enough plate appearances to qualify, that number would be one of the 20 worst marks in the league.

The league average this season is about .291, so Rooker is about 60 points away from even being average in that category. For his career, Rooker is at .314. That will start turning around as health improves. He has the right park and right lineup protection to turn this around.

Jose Ramirez (3B – CLE)

An almost identical BABIP as Brent Rooker is hurting Jose Ramirez’s season, but is it really that bad? Is it possible that a player with eight home runs, 20 steals and a .347 on-base percentage (OBP) could be even better? I think so, and Ramriez could see his already-great numbers go into the stratosphere in the weeks to come.

Already the top third base option every fantasy baseball season, Ramirez has proven time and time again that we can expect a high average to go along with 30 home runs and 30 steals. His rate stats have lagged behind this season (.228/.347/.398), but there is reason to believe it won’t be that way much longer.

First, at .236, Ramirez has one of the 20 lowest BABIP marks on the season. It’s even more striking when you consider that he has a higher walk rate (15.1%) than strikeout rate (13.9%) and a wRC+ that is almost 11% above league average.

In terms of expected batting average, expected slugging rate and expected wOBA, Ramirez has one of the widest gaps among all three and his actual statistics, according to Statcast.

Ramirez’s expected batting average as of May 26th is .285, almost 60 points above his real number. Imagine the player we have now, but with a batting average 60 points higher. Ramirez would be in the running for best offensive player of the season.

Players Due for Negative Regression

Riley Greene (OF – DET)

If you are a power-hitting outfielder with just four home runs, shouldn’t you be in line for positive regression and not negative regression? Well, the discouraging fact about Riley Greene is that he has struggled with power this season despite some exceptional luck and success in all other aspects of his hitting.

Greene is hitting .311/.404/.451 this season, but has the highest BABIP in the league at .438. He is more than 20 points higher than the next-closest batter (Nick Kurtz). Greene is also 85 points above his career average in that department. Because of the high number, he is racking up runs (30) and RBI (24), but something has to give.

Greene also strikes out over 27% of the time and has a barrel rate that has dropped by over four percentage points since 2025. If you were hoping for a home run surge from Greene soon, that could still come, but the numbers suggest his average and OBP should drop soon.

Teoscar Hernandez (OF – LAD)

Teoscar Hernandez is hitting .277/.350/.441 through 49 games, which is a good bit higher than his career .261 average and .317 OBP line. This is certainly a small sample size, but it’s still enough to show these numbers will not last forever, especially when you compare them to his career and the context of his hitting profile so far in 2026.

Hernandez owns a .356 BABIP (13th-highest in the league). It’s inflating the power and the on-base ability, but it’s also propping up what should be a much lower average thanks to a high 27% strikeout rate through almost 50 games.

Add in the fact that Hernandez has walked in 9% of his plate appearances, and you have what appears to be a house of cards in his hitting profile. Both Hernandez’s average exit velocity, bat speed and expected batting average are below the 55th percentile among hitters this season.

Hernandez won’t be a bad hitter this season (xwOBA of .337, per Baseball Savant), but this kind of production can’t be maintained. He will maintain his counting stats as a Dodger, but his efficiency should suffer.

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