Hi there friends, and Happy Almost-All Star Break. I’ve been talking a lot of stepping back and re-evaluating my teams over the last few weeks, but obviously four-plus days without a single fantasy stat is the classic time to do some more serious evaluating. I’ve found 2026 to be a particularly frustrating year from a fantasy perspective, due in large part to (what else?) injuries, but also just to stuff out of our control that makes me feel like my teams are heading in the wrong direction. Stuff like Tyler Tolbert tying the all time major league record for consecutive at bats with a hit, and being the first player since Roberto Clemente to have back-to-back five hit games. Roberto Clemente!! Stuff like Ryan O’Hearn being the first Pittsburgh Pirate in history with a 10 RBI game. When players you don’t roster anywhere deliver that kind of production, while you are sitting back wondering if your first and second round pick will crack double digit homers by the end of September, it can feel a little soul crushing. So, maybe the break is coming at a pretty good time.
Instead of our usual scouring the waiver wire for deep league desperation plays, we’ll take a week or two to do a little reflecting. I hope this will also lead to some re-grouping, for me at least. This week it’s time to just look at some surprising and interesting stats, and then take a step back to try to figure out what it all means. You never know what piece of information might trigger a thought that leads to us fantasy owners making a more informed choice that could help our teams in the second half of the season and beyond.
Based on Razzball’s own player rater, through Wednesday’s games:
James Wood is the number one most valuable fantasy baseball hitter. I was all in on Wood last year and was clearly a year too early. I faded him completely this year, including giving up on him in my NL-only league. Obviously this was by definition the biggest fantasy mistake I could have made in 2026, given his number one ranking and all. I knew he was having a monster year, but honestly didn’t realize he’d be at the top of the charts. I ignored more of his profile than I should have, and I was influenced too much by his at bats towards the end of last year when he was struggling; based on what my eyes were seeing, I couldn’t believe he could turn it around this emphatically. He looked so, so lost. Sometimes those observations will prove helpful to avoid players who disappoint. This, though, was a good lesson in trusting my eyes a little too much and naively discounting an uber-talented player’s ability to make adjustments. I’m already worried I’ll buy back in next year or the year after and be disappointed, but either way this one’s gonna sting for a while.
Let’s stay up in rarified air, and talk for a moment about Pete Crow-Armstrong. Wow, I’m starting to feel like I have the golden touch here, as both PCA and the next blurb’s Luis Garcia had two-homer games on Wednesday after I started writing these blurbs. That performance boosted PCA from the #4 spot on the hitter rankings, right up to #2. I have him rostered in one of my RCL leagues that I check daily, and after his slow start, I really was not aware that the player rater would spit out the numbers and tell me he’s the second most valuable hitter in fantasy so far this year. Whether he finishes with MVP numbers or has another late season collapse, I’m already intrigued by how the conversation about where he should be drafted in 2027 will take shape.
Luis Garcia Jr. was the 25th most valuable hitter when I ran the numbers on Wednesday, and after his two-homer game, he shows up as the 16th most valuable hitter as of Thursday. Is this guy really going to continue to be platooned? Since I don’t know the answer to that, I’m also going to personally anoint him as one of the most frustrating players to roster, especially in daily or bi-weekly change leagues. Even if one accepts the fact that he’s relegated to a platoon situation, he’ll drive you mad because I swear the guy has more production on days he doesn’t start than days he does. I know that’s an exaggeration, but I’m not getting fooled here any longer. Even in my 15-team mixed leagues, I’m just leaving the guy in my lineup without checking matchups and not benching him even if he’s facing a couple lefties in a half-week period, and moving on with my life.
This next thought is a reminder to myself that when I’m drafting early and still learning how the rest of the fantasy community perceives player value, I have to be a little more aggressive and stop worrying about “missing out on a bargain.” I call the following players my queue-sitters: Jordan Walker (ADP 361, #5 on the hitter rankings so far), Miguel Vargas (ADP 279, hitter #18), and Sal Stewart (ADP 186, hitter #19). It is a painful list for me indeed, because all of these are guys that I not only thought I’d draft multiple times, I actually came out of draft season thinking I had drafted each of them. This is because they were all at least soft targets for me, and were all in my draft queue for multiple rounds in just about every draft I did. I don’t want to think about how long some of them sat there, or which stiffs I thought it was wise to draft ahead of them, thinking I could wait one more round and still grab them with my next pick. The sad reality is that I do not roster a single one of these guys in any of my leagues, which is an epic fail regardless of how productive they are for the remainder of the season. I couldn’t have predicted that all these guys would be good enough that I should have drafted all of them in every league, but it’s unforgivable that I didn’t take more (and by more I mean any) shots on any of them.
Otto Lopez (ADP #215) gets his own little paragraph here, checking in as the eighth most valuable fantasy hitter so far this year. That’s a first rounder in even the shallowest ten team league! Lopez was one guy who I bought into this year, and it paid off, and it’s been fun seeing him as both a wonderful real life and fantasy success story. Who doesn’t want to root for a guy who was DFA’d twice and ended up at All Star just two years later? A lot of this lofty ranking comes from Lopez’s .345 batting average, so the predictive math tells us there may be less sunny skies ahead in the second half and beyond. Still, even with a prolonged slump or two, Lopez should head into next season viewed as a legit five-category fantasy contributor (though we’ll need to consider that unless something changes in the next few months, he’ll enter 2027 eligible only at shortstop).
Now, a thought about how in deeper leagues, sometimes not having options can actually be a good thing. My somewhat random examples here are Kody Clemens and Josh Bell, two players I had high hopes for that felt like they were scuffling week after week, and who I’d have replaced early on if I could have. There were no replacements to be had, though, since I roster these guys in draft and hold and/or deeper leagues with thoroughly picked-over free agent pools. Cut to now, and they check in at #66 and #67 on the hitter rater. That may not be dominant compared to the other players we’ve been talking about, but it is still way better than I realized they’d both been hitting. It’s also probably better than I would have ended up with if I’d had the opportunity to mess around and replace them.
I’m now going to point out what I think is my favorite run of three hitters in a row when it comes to something I didn’t expect to see: #77 Nick Gonzales, #78 Munetaka Murakami, #79 Aaron Judge. Now obviously Murakami and Judge got hurt, and that tanked their value. But to see Gonzales, who I honestly didn’t even realize was playing that regularly, this high on the list threw me a curveball, to keep the metaphors baseball-related. Gonzales has all of four homers and four steals, so much of what’s driving his value is his .314 average. He also has 49 runs scored and a surprising 41 RBI. Again, just thought this was kind of interesting, especially as a reminder that even a guy who isn’t big on the eye-catching power OR speed numbers can still be sneaky useful in the right league, even those of the 5×5 variety.
I’m closing with what I think might be the most stunning fact of all for me: there are five catchers in the top 20 hitters on the player rater. Pause and reflect. They are: Ben Rice, Hunter Goodman, Liam Hicks, Dillon Dingler, and Shea Langeliers. Okay, Langeliers slipped from #19 to #21 from Wednesday to Thursday, but you get the point. Or maybe you don’t get the point, because I’m not sure I get the point, in that I’m really not sure what to do with this information going forward. I didn’t realize just how spectacular a season Ben Rice was having, but that’s a whole ‘nother post. I have each of the other four catchers on at least one roster, including Dingler (whose 2026 NFBC ADP was 225) and Hicks (470), who both perhaps also warrant extended conversation at another time in another place. Goodman and Langeliers were expected to be great and have been. Does this information mean we should draft a stud catcher early, and hope we pick the right one? Or does it suggest that we should wait, and hope we pick the right one? Something I’ll probably be pondering more than I care to admit this offseason.
I don’t have a question. Just a really good column, and I want to call it out.