The beginning of the fantasy baseball season is an easy time to spot outliers and candidates for 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. A player is performing as poorly as Rafael Devers? Bench him or drop him to the waiver wire. Wilmer Flores has three home runs? He’s now an everyday first baseman.
Most of the time, things aren’t that simple.
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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 try to determine if a given player is overperforming or underperforming what should be expected.
With the first weekend of the Major League baseball season behind us and still over 155 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 March 31st)
Players Due for Positive Regression
Despite teams like the Milwaukee Brewers and Atlanta Braves getting the headlines for slow offensive starts (more on the Braves below), the Astros have had a very slow start with the bats, despite a 2-2 record. On the season, their team slugging percentage is .200, which ranks last in all of baseball through five days.
How many HR’s is Yordan Alvarez hitting if he switches to the “torpedo” bat? pic.twitter.com/L4wXd4YQo9
– User Not Found (@astros_dude) March 30, 2025
The poster child so far is Yordan Alvarez. He is hitting .083/.250/.167 through 16 plate appearances with zero home runs and two RBI. There is no reason to panic about Alvarez, however, as this can be attributed to bad luck. Alvarez’s batting average on balls in play (BABIP) is a comically low .111 right now. He is still walking 18% of the time and has an 11% barrel rate with a 27.8-degree launch angle.
With those kinds of numbers, the power and home runs will be coming very soon. The new-look Astros’ lineup has a lot to work through as they sort out new players and their place in the lineup, but Alvarez is a constant and should get back on track sooner rather than later.
Through the Braves’ miserable first five games, they have scored a total of eight runs, and just one run in the last three games. It’s a sluggish start for a powerful offense, but the lineup is full of players who are likely to see their batting production and luck turn around soon. No player resembles that more than first baseman Matt Olson.
Through five games, Olson ranks in the top 20 hitters in hard-hit rate, barrel rate and exit velocity, and he is 27th in expected slugging percentage (.645). Despite swinging the bat well and making very solid contact, he is stuck at a .143/.400/.214 line with zero home runs, RBI or runs. He is walking 30% of the time and only striking out in 15% of his plate appearances, so it’s clear he is doing everything right at the plate. The results just have not come so far.
They will come soon, though, not just for Olson, but for the rest of the Braves’ offense. Collectively, the team is slugging just .235 (28th in MLB) after slugging .415 last season (ninth-best) and .501 in 2023 (first overall). This is just a bad streak to start the year, but if anyone is selling players like Matt Olson for anything less than their full value, jump on board.
Players Due for Negative Regression
It’s quite an interesting position to be in when you are leading Major League Baseball in home runs, but also have a .000 BABIP on the season. That’s right, Arizona third baseman Eugenio Suarez has four hits this season — all home runs. Since home runs do not count against balls in play for BABIP (there is no “play” made on the ball), Suarez is stuck on .000 despite a 1.143 slugging percentage.
This is, of course, the easiest case of negative regression to nail down. I’m willing to put a lot of money on the fact that Suarez will not have 162 hits and they will all be home runs this season. He has some pretty clear outlier statistics through his first 17 plate appearances that should scream red flag beyond just the massive power to start the season.
Aaron Judge: 6-for-11, 4 HR, 11 RBI, 2.461 OPS
Eugenio Suarez: 4 HR, 7 RBI, 1.555 OPSYour first AL and NL @Chevrolet Players of the Week of 2025! pic.twitter.com/yK1ZGU06mD
– MLB (@MLB) March 31, 2025
First, he is striking out just 17% of the time, which is 10 percentage points below his career average. Perhaps he will make some strides there at age 33, but to drop six percentage points below your best MLB season is unlikely. In addition, he is walking almost 12% of the time despite a 9.8% mark for his career. Suarez, moving from Seattle to Arizona, was underrated in draft season, but this kind of power display should subside before too long.
Someone who I felt was also undervalued during spring training was new Nationals first baseman Nathaniel Lowe. After the Texas Rangers decided to move on, Washington signed him to a one-year, $10 million deal to slot in at first base and designated hitter, and he has not disappointed through four games. Lowe is hitting .375/.412/.813 with two home runs and five RBI. But like many players early in the season, his under-the-hood stats don’t predict this will continue.
First, his BABIP is a striking .667 through 17 plate appearances. He is also having that tremendous batted ball luck despite striking out 47% of the time in the first weekend. I would argue that it is more predictive of future performance than some luck on balls he has made contact with so far. He also isn’t walking (5% walk rate), so the evidence that he isn’t being patient at the plate is there.
Lowe projects to be almost a 20-home-run player by most systems, but he should settle in around a .250-.260 batting average along the way.
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