For the 2026 fantasy baseball season, every team has about 70 games down and almost 90 games still to go after the first twelve weeks of the season. Since even 70 games aren’t nearly enough to draw any conclusions, we will spend these posts in the middle of the season looking at the risers and fallers in fantasy baseball from an under-the-hood stats perspective.
Even over a long Spring Training and twelve weeks of meaningful games, this amount of production is not actually a lot of information to use when evaluating players for the rest of the season. That’s why it’s also important to look at usage, lineup placement, platoon splits, and other factors when trying to determine what to do with tough player choices.
This piece will look at some MLB fantasy assets that have seen their fantasy value rise and fall over the last few weeks. This will hopefully give us an idea of what to do with these players moving forward.
Fantasy Baseball Risers
Bo Bichette (SS/3B), New York Mets
Over the last two weeks, Bo Bichette is fourth among all players with at least 40 plate appearances with a .413 batting average. In fact, Bichette (.413, three home runs, 13 RBI) has been every bit of Yordan Alvarez’s equal (.420, three home runs, 12 RBI) in that span. And, this was all before he went 3-for-4 with three runs and an RBI in a 9-1 win over Cincinnati on Wednesday.
Bichette had a .570 OPS at the beginning of June, but now sits at .677 after raising that number over 100 points in two weeks. With 20 extra base hits on the season, the power stroke is starting to come back for Bichette, and he has truly been one of fantasy baseball’s best hitters in the last 14 days.
Jake Bauers (1B/OF), Milwaukee Brewers
Jake Bauers has quietly become one of the biggest fantasy baseball values of the 2026 season because he has transformed into a legitimate middle-of-the-order power contributor. So far in the 2026 season, Bauers has posted a .276/.374/.519 slash line with 13 home runs, 46 RBI, 40 runs scored, and five stolen bases. That gives him an impressive .894 OPS and a 148 wRC+, all numbers that are the best of his career. He has bounced around a lot in his career, but he’s found a place to hit in Milwaukee.
The reason fantasy managers have overlooked him is that Bauers entered the year with a career .672 OPS and never fully developed into the power hitter he was expected to be. However, his 2026 production has shown a completely different hitter. He is getting on base, driving the ball hard, and contributing across multiple categories. His combination of power, patience, and just enough speed has made him far more valuable than his spring draft slot suggested.
Dillon Dingler (C), Detroit Tigers
Coming into the Tigers’ game on Tuesday night against the Astros, Dingler led the Tigers in home runs, RBI, slugging rate and xwOBA. He was also in the top seven in the league in WAR and RBI. Dingler has 16 home runs and 50 RBI in just 270 plate appearances, despite being taken well after the first 250 hitters in spring drafts.
But Dingler does have a .272 BABIP, about 20 points below league average. According to Statcast, his expected batting average (.293) and expected slugging rate (.558) are both higher than his actual numbers (.256 and .529 right now).
Dingler’s average exit velocity, max exit velocity, barrel rate and hard-hit rate are all slightly up compared to his numbers from last year and in the minors. Where he is outpacing his past numbers is in the contact department, with an elite mark. Dingler is now at 91% in zone contact rate, almost four percentage points higher than his career mark
Fantasy Baseball Fallers
Manny Machado (3B), San Diego Padres
Let’s talk about Manny Machado, because it’s bad. He has had a history of starting slow in a number 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. So the fact that he has started his first 69 games with a .177/.255/.358 slash line is concerning, but should we have some hope? We are almost halfway through the season, after all, and his numbers have gotten worse over the last four weeks.
According to Statcast, the only metric where Machado is above the 60th percentile among batters is his walk rate. In terms of batted ball metrics, he is only in the 50s in barrel rate, hard-hit rate, and exit velocity. At age 33, could this just be the cliff? I assume it could, but this would be an outlier to see an elite hitter drop off this hard and this fast.
Josh Naylor (1B), Seattle Mariners
I’m on record several places as being extremely confident that Josh Naylor will not have another 20-home run, 20-steal season as he did in 2025. And while I am still sweating that prediction (eight home runs and 13 steals so far), it’s literally everything else that has seen a nose-dive from his career season last year. Naylor is batting only .253 with just 27 runs and 32 RBI. After .295 with 81 runs and 92 RBI in 2025, it’s clear something is way off.
Some of it has to do with injuries. Naylor is battling shin and wrist injuries right now and sat out Tuesday with those ailments. But really, the power and the speed haven’t been consistent all year. Naylor has one steal since May 18. He has just two home runs since June 1. For fantasy managers hoping for another all-around, five-category season this year, he has left a lot of people wanting.
Ketel Marte (2B), Arizona Diamondbacks
There’s something going on in the desert with Ketel Marte and the Arizona Diamondbacks. After back-to-back seasons hitting at least .283 with at least 28 home runs and scoring 87 runs, Marte is finding it very hard to get on base. He is hitting just .255 with 11 home runs this season, but his OBP is just .307, more than 40 points below his career average. His walk rate is the lowest it’s been since the COVID season, and his hard-hit rate is down eight points from two years ago.
Nothing seems out of sync with his plate discipline. Those numbers are largely in line with career norms. It just looks like he has gotten into a terrible habit of hitting the ball on the ground (43.3%) and not in the air (34.6% fly balls, his lowest since 2021). Marte is 32 and has 1,300 regular-season games on his ledger, so this could be close to a cliff. However, there are more and more reports surfacing about how Marte is not happy with some of his injury treatments, and the club isn’t happy with the games he is sitting out.
It’s something to watch to see if it lingers in the second half.
I thought I was going crazy or the matrix had me with Déjà vu… but you must also write articles for the Fantrax fantasy advice, off to the side of my team roster page. The Marte, Naylor, and Bauers blurbs are what I read earlier today. Good writing, no wonder it seemed really useful for Fantrax…it’s cuz it’s Razzball quality.
The Thumbnail – too cool, loved the old uniforms and the Ryan Express!!
So awesome!!
Thank you!!